With morning they circled down to the lake where Sander filled their water bottle while Fanyi and the fishers kept watch. Here the water had an odd, metallic taste. But Fanyi pronounced it harmless, saying that the minerals in it might well be beneficial, for she brewed such for healing. There was no sign of the amphibians. However, Sander noticed on one of the rocky islands, well out from the shore, a mound of set stones in which a dark entrance hole opened directly on the lake. He believed that this might mark a home of the creatures.
They turned away again from the easier surface of the wagon road, to scramble along at the edges of the hills. The open space was slowly narrowing again, sooner or later they would be forced back closer to that rutted track. Sander kept listening. Their own feet, muffled by the hare pelts, and the pads of the animals woke little or no sound. But even the slip of a stone seemed to echo far too loudly!
Once more the road began to climb. Here some of the ruts had been filled with stones, and the debris had once more been cut back on either side. They must now return to that cut, for to climb jagged rocks on either side offered a risk Sander did not want to contemplate. There was too much danger of a fall.
He forced the pace, wanting to be quickly out of this gap where they were so clearly visible. Somewhere in the battered heights above, that light he had sighted in the night must mark a sentinel's post. He had no doubt that they had already been noted and spied upon. Yet the challenge Sander continued to expect did not come.
Beyond this second narrowing of the level land, the heights sloped once again. And from the peak the road cut, they caught a good view of what lay ahead. There were some rises, but none as tall as those behind, and far less of the battered wrack of the waves had been planted here.
Instead, below was a growth of grass, scattered trees wearing scarlet and gold, some stands of pines showing dark green. And—Sander paused, in startlement.
It looked like a cross between the village of Padford, with its wooden and stone walls, and the mobile tents-on-wheels used by the Mob. A deep ditch had been dug, into which some water from a river feeding the lake had been diverted. Beyond that ditch, earthen walls mounted high, crowned with a wall of tree trunks. The tops of these were hewn into points like a defensive stake barrier, save these trunks were larger and more firmly set than any such wall he had ever seen before.
Clustered within were tents-on-wagons—much larger than those the Mob hauled to form their own temporary clan-towns up and down the plains. The tents-on-wagons circled an open space wherein stone had been used to construct a rough tower, standing perhaps twice the height of the tents about it. From cooking places before each tent rose trails of smoke. People stirred about, coming and going. A band of loose animals, herded by one mounted man, trotted out of the enclosure, across a bridge which could be lowered or raised to span the ditch.
Hounds! Then this must be a Trader stronghold. Unlike the people of the Mobs, the Traders bred different animals. The hounds, as they were called, were akin to Rhin, yet different, in that their ears did not stand erect, but flopped on either side of their heads. And instead of uniform coloring, they were splotched, spotted, marked with white and red-brown patches or feet. No two ever looked alike. The Traders seldom rode on their long treks, but used these beasts to carry their stock. But Sander had never seen them in such number before.
Surrounded by the trotting hounds was an inner core of deer-like creatures, larger than those Sander had long hunted. Having left the village, the hounds were spreading out, still guarding the deer, their noses close to the ground, coursing off in different directions much as a koyot would do when released to hunt. Their herder kept on, riding alone straight after the deer in the general direction of the gap.
The fishers, reared on either side of Fanyi, began to sound their hissing battle cry. But she instantly had a hand on each. It was plainly her will, not her light hold that restrained them. Rhin watched with interest but did not growl. He knew Traders of old and had fraternized with the hound pack-hounds they had brought with them.
The hound that bore the rider suddenly gave tongue and began to run. And behind Sander came a voice, sharp and clear:
"Stand! Or do you want your throats torn out, fools?"
That question was asked in such a tone that Sander did not doubt the questioner was quite ready to enforce his command. He allowed his hands to drop into full sight, his weapons still in belt and shoulder strap. Inwardly, he was deeply ashamed to be thus easily taken by a hidden sentry.
The rider arrived swiftly, for the hound ran at top speed, while the fishers snarled in open rage. Still Fanyi kept them under control. Rhin yelped, the hound answered with a deep bay.
Sander longed to turn and see who kept watch behind, but he knew the folly of making any move, which might bring instant hostile reprisal.
The rider pulled to a halt before them. He wore the leather breeches and furred overjacket of a plainsman. But his face was half-hidden by a black beard trimmed to a point, and his ear length hair was mostly covered by a cap of yellow-white fur. His hands held a thrower ready, dart in the slot, and there was no welcome to be read in his expression.
"Who are you?" His demand was abrupt, as he eyed first Fanyi and then Sander, though, Sander noted, he kept shooting wary glances at the fishers.
"I am Sander, smith. And this is Fanyi, Shaman of Padford—" Sander answered with an outward show of confidence, which he hoped he could continue to assume.
"A smith and a shaman," returned the rider. "And why do you wander? Or are you outriders of some Mob?" His two questions were frankly hostile.
"You are Jon of the Red Cloak," Fanyi spoke up in return. "I have seen you in Padford. That was five seasons ago."
"I was there. But a Trader goes many places during his travels. And what does the Shaman of Padford do here? You are tied to your people by the Great Will you obey. Do the men of Padford wander, then?"
"Not so. Most lie dead, Trader Jon. How many the Sea Sharks might have taken, I cannot number."
Though he still held the dart thrower steady, now the man gazed intently at the girl.
"Sea Sharks, eh? You say they raided Padford?"
"They killed, they burned, they took," she repeated with emphasis.
"But he—" The thrower moved a fraction to indicate Sander. "This smith is not of your people. How came he, and why, to this land? No Mob favors leaving their plains, except for good reason."
"I had good reason," Sander returned. "No Mob has two smiths. Therefore I come to seek knowledge—more knowledge of metals."
The man's gaze grew fiercer. "You are bold, smith, to say thus you come to steal our secrets!"
"I care not," Sander answered, "where the metals are found. It is the working of them that means much to me."
"So," commented the Trader, "any man might say, were he found where he has no right to be."
"Do you then," Fanyi asked, "claim all this?" She indicated the land about them.
"What it contains is ours by right of discovery. You," he snapped at Sander, as if by any prolonged conversation he weakened his case, "loose your gear"—he pointed to the bundles on Rhin—"and let me see what you have stolen—"
Though he had no idea of the strength of the force that might stand behind him, Sander refused to play meek any longer. He knew enough of Trader ways to realize that if one did not stand up to them and bargain, one was completely lost. He folded his arms across his chest.
"Are you then chief here?" he asked. "You are not head of my Mob, nor even a Man of First Council, unless you so declare yourself. I do not take orders—I am a smith, one with the magic of metals. Such are not to be ordered about by any man without reason. Nor," he continued, "does one so address a Shaman."
The man made a sound that might have signified scornful amusement.
"If she was Shaman of Padford, and Padford is no more because of the Sharks, then is her claim of Power false. As for you, smith," he made a taunt of that title, "more than words have to prove your worth."
The fishers growled, Rhin echoed them, while the hound bristled and showed his fangs in turn.
"Control those beasts of yours," ordered the Trader, "or else look to see them dead. Move on, carefully. We shall see what the Planners make of you."
Fanyi glared at Sander. He read warning in her look. The fishers were still growling, but they had gone to four feet again and she walked between them, her hands resting on their backs as they moved, flanking her, down toward the town.
Sander followed. There was little else he could do. He heard a scrabbling behind him and realized that his caution had been right as three riders on hounds moved forward to box him in as he went.
Some of the loose hounds came bounding closer as the party followed the rutted road toward the ditch bridge. They bayed and growled. Rhin and the fishers, their fangs showing, made ready answer to the challenges the other beasts offered. But there was no attack, for the riders sent the hounds off with a series of cries not unlike barks.
Men issued from the village to await them. It was one of these who called to their captor:
"Ha, Jon, what have you gathered in? These are no Horde stragglers."
"They are invaders no matter what they look like," the rider returned. "But if you want to trade blows with the Horde, those also come. The signals have been seen."
Fanyi stopped short of the bridge. "Trader, my companions will not enter here. Bring out your Planners."
"Dead animals can be easily transported—"
The girl raised her hands and brought them together in a loud clap. Her eyes caught and held the eyes of the threatener. He looked as if he were struggling vainly to make some further statement or give an order, but something had locked his lips.
"I have spoken, and the Power is mine, Jon of the Red Cloak—know I not your true name? Thus, I can command you to do this thing. Get hither one of authority that we may speak together."
Sander believed the rider struggled between his own will and that of the girl. He looked furious, yet he slid down from the back of the hound and tramped heavily over the bridge, those gathered there making way for him.
Fanyi's face bore that look of concentration that Sander had seen her wear when she had sat with the pendant in her hand. Though he found it hard to believe in her reputed "power," it was plain at this moment a man, who was not even conditioned to accept her decisions as her own people had doubtless always been, was obeying her orders against his own will.
There was a closed look about the men who surrounded them. Though this was obviously a well-established town, no women or children showed in that silent crowd. Sander did not like the inferences one could draw from their quiet and from their set expressions. The jovial, open friendliness the Traders displayed when visiting the Mob was gone. All those warnings concerning their jealous guardianship of their own territory were now, to Sander's thinking, made manifest by this lack of welcome.
In a world where strangers, unless they were openly hostile like the White Ones and the Sharks, were made guests and asked for stories concerning their travels and lands farther away, this suggestion of hostility shocked Sander. However, he was a smith, no one could deny that. And in any civilization a man of such skill must be truly welcome. He glanced from face to face among that assembly, striving to see a forehead tattoo matching his own. Was there no smith here at all? As fellow members of a craft that had its own secrets, he could claim acceptance from that one man at least in this village.
But he could not sight on anyone's skin the blue hammer brand. Still he rehearsed in his mind the work-words by which he could prove his claim to the metal mysteries.
There came another parting of the crowd and Sander saw Jon again. With him was a much older man. The newcomer walked haltingly, using sticks which he dug into the ground to support his forward-leaning body on each side. He held his head at a stiff and surely painful angle. For all his crookedness of body his gait was swifter than Sander would have thought possible. He nearly matched Jon's strides in spite of his own more limited steps.
Alone among the Traders the newcomer bore a forehead marking. For a moment Sander thought that here must be the smith he had sought. Then he realized that no man so frail of body could carry out any but the easiest metal work. And his tattoo was not of a hammer, although it had a strange familiarity. At first, Sander could not remember where he had seen before the profile of that fierce-eyed bird head. Then he recalled the broken bit of stone he had found along the river, the symbol Fanyi said had once stood for a great and proud country.
The bird-marked man stopped before Sander and his group. For a long moment he studied each in turn, both people and animals. At last he spoke in a voice so deep and rich it seemed almost too powerful for his thin body.
"You"—he singled out Fanyi from the first—"are of Power. You"—now he swung his head around a little to look at Sander—"are a smith of the plains people. Yet you travel together with these who are your companions. What matter brings so strange and diverse a band together?"
"I am of Padford," Fanyi replied. "But Padford no longer is. The Sea Sharks came and—" She made a gesture of negation.
"I have heard it said," the other said, "that the Power of a true Shaman can walk in those people who believe."
"It was the time of the Great Moon," Fanyi answered steadily, though her face was bleak. "I answered the call of my need. It was at that time they struck."
The old man's lips and jaw moved a trifle as if he chewed upon words in some manner that he might thus test truth by the taste of them. He made no comment, only swung a second time to Sander.
"And you, smith, as you name yourself, what brought you out of the plains, away from your Mob and kin?"
"My father died." Sander gave him the truth, seeing no reason to disguise it. "I was young, too young, my uncle claimed, to be full smith, though my father had named me so. There is no place in any Mob for two smiths—therefore I claimed out-right."
"The impatience of the young, was that it, smith? You could not bend your pride, but rather chose to live kinless?" There was, Sander believed, a note of derision in that query. He held his temper manfully.
"There was also the wish for knowledge."
"Knowledge!" That sharp word cut him short. "Knowledge of what, smith? Of some treasure trove you could plunder to buy your way back to your kin? Was that it? Hunt metal for yourself so that Traders cannot make their living!"
A growl akin to Rhin's rose from the crowd about them. Before Sander could answer, the other continued:
"And what treasure have you looted, smith? Turn out your gear."
Sander wanted to balk, but he knew that he would thus only provoke a struggle that would do no good. Sullenly he went to Rhin, unknotted the bag holding his work tools and the small bits of metal he had pried and broken loose in the ship. As he unrolled the covering, Jon pounced on one of those lengths of battered wire.
"See, he has—" the Trader began with a kind of triumph, then he held the wire closer to his eyes. Dropping that length, he pawed over the rest of Sander's small store. "Look you, Planman!"
The Trader held a fistful of the ship's stuff closer to the old man.
"Whence had you this?" the latter demanded.
"There was a ship, one caught in the sea-desert. This came from the inside of that," Sander explained. The Planner must be half-smith, himself, or have an eye smith-trained, else he would not have seen that it was any different from what they might find in a ruined city.
"And this ship was of metal?" demanded the Planman.
"All of metal. There were dead men within its belly, and they were not bones."
To his surprise the Planman nodded. "It is then like unto the one Gaffred uncovered in the mountains last year, one made to travel under the surface of the water."
That, to Sander's incomprehension, appeared to convert the Planman from suspicion to at least the first stage of offering hospitality. Fanyi repeated that her animals would not enter the town, which for a short period raised again a chorus of doubts from the Traders. But at length it was agreed that Sander take housing with their smith (who had suffered an injury, which had left them for a time without a worker), while Fanyi would be allowed to stay without, camping in one of their trail wagons now parked for the season.
Sander did not like being separated from the girl. She had let these people assume that they had been drifting along together, two lost ones without kin, saying nothing of the strange storage place she sought. He had followed her lead, as after all hers was the claim on the site to which that finder of the Before Time served as a guide. But he thought that the Traders believed there was some deeper tie between them than just expediency and so considered him hostage to warrant Fanyi's presence.
Sander knew that to be untrue. There was nothing to prevent the girl from going off by night. And if she did so disappear, his lot among the Traders was going to be anything but easy. There was also the knowledge of the White Ones heading this way. But when he mentioned them, he discovered the Traders were confident of their own means of defense.
Kaboss, the smith, greeted Sander's arrival with a hardly enthusiastic grunt. He surveyed the plainsman's kit of tools, not quite with a sniff of disparagement, but with the air of a man who had in the past discarded as unworthy very similar pieces. The bits of ship wiring, however, intrigued him. And he put Sander through a most exhaustive examination concerning everything he had observed about that stranded hulk.
One of Kaboss's own heavy hands was wrapped in bandages, and once or twice when he flexed his fingers without thought, he gave an exclamation of pain. He allowed Sander to eat—such a bowl of well-seasoned stew as the plainsman had not tasted since he left the Mob—and then bore him to the smithy where he pointed out a pile of repair work that had stacked up there because of his injury. Like any Trader he haggled over terms, but at last Sander struck a bargain that was satisfactory enough and went to work with a will.
Rhin had been quartered in a stable and given a gorge-feed of dried meat. Now after licking his paws, sore from the travel in the mountains, the koyot had gone to sleep.
Sander paid close attention to his work, though the time for it was short, since the day had been well advanced before they had reached the Traders' town. Yet also he tried to think what might come next. That Fanyi would calmly settle down as a part of this clan, even if she were granted full kin-right, he did not believe. And neither would he stay if she went.
Kaboss was full smith and would take over again entirely once his hand healed. Sander had left his own people rather than be counted apprentice for more years. He had no intention of playing that role among strangers. And in spite of what he continued to tell himself was reasonable common sense, he did believe that the Shaman knew something when she talked of a storage place of knowledge. The pendant had more than half converted him to her point of view. He had never heard or seen anything like that before.
Kaboss's household was small. His housemate was a silent woman, looking older than her chosen man, her hair streaked with gray, though she was dressed in a manner to show the importance of their household, wearing a thick necklace of much burnished copper, four silver rings, and a belt of silver links about her dull green robe. She did not speak often and then only to the serving maid, who scuttled about, an anxious frown on her face as if this were a mistress no one could hope to please.
There was no sign of an apprentice. Then Kaboss mentioned that he had such, a younger son of his brother, but he had been gone for some days now on an expedition scouting for metal to the north.
Under questioning, Sander told something of their trip, their meeting with the amphibians, and the attack of the monster upon the house on the one-time island. Kaboss was much interested in that portion of his tale.
"Such are still to be found then!" he commented. "They were once so great a danger that we could not hunt lest they corner us. Then we had a great roundup, calling in the clan of Meanings and the clan of Hart, and that day we killed full twelve of them. Since, they have troubled us no more, so we thought them all gone. Now come these you call the White Ones, also to cause danger. The stream people—they are of little account. One can handle them easily enough on land."
The woman suddenly leaned a little forward in her cushioned chair. She stared intently at Sander, as if she heard nothing Kaboss had said, or if she did, it meant but little. Now she pointed to their visitor.
"Tell me, stranger, why do you wear iron in that fashion about your head?"
He had forgotten the twisted wire he had set there in hope of not repeating that experience with what Fanyi termed the "seeking thought." Now his hand went up to touch the band in half-surprise.
The woman did not wait for his answer but continued:
"You seek the protection of the 'cold iron,' is that not the truth, stranger? There has come to you something you cannot understand, something no man seeks, is that not so?"
Kaboss stared from questioner to Sander and back again. Now he edged a little away from the younger man.
"Spirit-touched!"
The woman smiled, not pleasantly. "I wonder that you did not see it for yourself, Kaboss. Yes, he is spirit-touched. And such I will not have under this roof. For it can be he might open a door for what we cannot see or feel. Take him forth and leave him with that other, who frankly says she speaks with that which is not. Do this for the safety of not only this house, but all our clan."
"Planman Allbert sent him here," Kaboss began.
"This house is mine, not that of Planman Allbert. And I think if any discover you have sheltered such a one, you will find we have more un-friends than friends."
Reluctantly, Kaboss arose and beckoned to Sander. "The house is hers," he said heavily. "So any choice is hers. Come, stranger smith."
Thus did Sander find himself again in exile, a whispered explanation to the gate guards enough to send him and Rhin packing out into the night.
Still bemused by the rapidity of what had chanced, he started for the tent-wagon that had been assigned Fanyi. He was not in the least surprised to find it empty, even her pack gone. Slinging his own burden up on Rhin, he impressed upon the koyot a need for trailing. And mounted, his koyot's nose sniffing the trail, he rode out once more.