The Chantry Guild

CHAPTER 21

Yes, thought Hal, Bleys would indeed come. The Other had his own, personal version of intuitional logic, as he had told Hal when the two had talked together briefly in the cold and misty tunnel through the phase-shield, soon after the shield had gone up. Intuitional logic, or its counterpart, would not tell Bleys where Hal was, but he would be able to read from the general situation that Hal was up to something and probably not on Earth. Undoubtedly, on all the Younger Worlds, right now, the police, the military and all other paramilitary under the control of the Others, were looking into formerly closed files and commencing to examine groups and areas left unexamined for some time.

Particularly on these two Exotic worlds. A little serious thought, let alone an intuitional logic, would rule out one by one the other worlds beyond Old Earth. Hal would not return to either of the Friendly worlds, where he was too well known. There would be no reason that was likely to take him to the mining world of Coby or the older worlds of Mars and Venus, which had been settled early and never fully developed. Newton, the scientists' world, almost alone among the Younger Worlds, held no groups actively resisting the Others, from which Hal could get aid and protection. Also, Newton and its counterpart, Cassida, were sterile for the purposes of Hal's aims, at this time in history. There were no strong historical forces among the populations of Ceta, St.Marie, New Earth and Freiland, and there was no point in Hal's returning to the all but empty world of Dorsai. By default, therefore, there were left only Mara and Kultis, either one.

There would have been a command, originating with Bleys, himself, and filtering down through the hierarchy of political and military authorities the Others controlled. It would have started the military and paramilitary forces on the two Exotic worlds searching for any group or people who could give shelter or assistance to someone like Hal. The important thing to Bleys would be not so much to find Hal as to find what it was that could have brought him out from behind the shelter of the phase-shield. Whatever Hal was after, by definition it would be something which Bleys would prefer he did not have. So the order would have gone out.

And the military in Porphyry, like such organizations everywhere, would have begun by first searching what was easy to find and close at hand, going farther and farther afield as they found nothing, until their inquisitions brought them, finally, once more to this part of the valley, and possibly to the very foot of these cliffs.

Hal did not think they would find the hidden entrance to the ledge. They would pass by, and retire at last, empty-handed, to their garrison again. But meanwhile, anyone like Cee would definitely be in danger. What he must do now was find some evidence of how far out they had gotten in their searching and their planning to search...

As he had been thinking these thoughts, he had been carrying on a casual conversation with Onete, and now they had come at last to the soft, vine-covered hummock of decayed wood which served as Onete's chair during the time she sat and waited for Cee, who was possibly watching them at this very moment. Hal closed his eyes briefly and tried to feel if there were eyes watching Onete and himself at the present moment. But he felt nothing and opened his eyes again quickly enough so that Onete did not remark on his having closed them. "Well," said Onete. "You'll be on your way, I suppose. I'll settle down here the way I always do. If you come back this way, you might be quiet and cautious approaching this spot, just in case Cee is being unusually daring or extending herself in some new way. We don't want to frighten her off."

"I'll be careful," said Hal.

So they parted and Hal took off through the forest, still in the direction of Porphyry, but now alone. As soon as he was well out of sight of Onete, he took off his sandals and hung them on a handy bush, leaving himself barefoot. Earlier, he had accommodated his pace to that of the foragers and Onete while he was with them, but now he would need to cover ground if he hoped to see as much of the local territory as he had planned, this day. He broke into an easy lope.

Like most of the other Guild members, he had fallen into the habit of walking the circle barefoot, and the soles of his feet were hardened to travel without footwear. Just as the weeks of work and walking up on the ledge had put him back into shape, physically. The best of the gym equipment for exercise seemed never to give the results that actual walking, running and hard hand-labor did.

He smiled to himself as he loped along, feeling the enjoyment of stretching his legs after... how long? He had done his running at the Encyclopedia on a hidden treadmill, with the illusion of a countryside unreeling about him at the pace he was traveling. It had been almost, but not quite the same thing. For one instance, his feet had come to know the artificial irregularities and bumps of the illusory path beneath them. Here, they were continuously new and real.

Privately, he would have liked to go down to the valley below to do distance running, but it was plain the Guild members avoided leaving traces of their presence below as much as possible, and although he was sure Amid would have given him permission to go, he did not want special consideration. The members of the Guild had gotten used to seeing him at his various exercises about the ledge, and, being Exotics, would never have dreamed of anything but accepting whatever was his personal choice of a way of life. He smiled again, thinking of the Guild members. With them, during these few weeks, he had come closer to understanding Exotics than at any other time in his lives. Like so many individuals of the other Splinter Cultures, and like nearly all of the people on Old Earth, itself, he had taken the Exotics' nature and their philosophical search for an evolved human pretty much for granted.

He had not realized what that search had meant to them in terms of an active pursuit, or how much it had altered them as a people. For the first time he saw their culture for what it was and realized the real change it had made in them. There was no doubt in him now that it was equivalent to the changes the Dorsai had made in becoming what they were, and the Friendlies in becoming what they had become.

That change was not just a matter of surface manners, politeness and consideration. These people actually saw life from the standpoint of their philosophical search for an improved human race, and strove to find the materials for that improvement in themselves. Thinking back now, he realized his first actual acceptance of that fact had been in what he had seen in those around him on the road to and in the town of Porphyry. They had been subjected, but not changed. Even oppressed, all but a very few of them had remained the Exotics they had been before the soldiers from off-world had come.

It had been a great discovery. He felt now, for the first time, that there was something to learn, something that - although it might be that in following it up he was going away from his problem - might in the long run end by bringing him back to it by a better route. The Exotics wanted an evolution in humankind, per se. What he, himself, wanted was specifically a moral, an ethical, evolution in humanity. Surely the two desires were close, if not united in purpose?

But it was his survey of the land down here he should be thinking of now. He began by swinging to his left in an arc that brought him back to a path. It was not really a path, here, but a trail which could be followed by woods-wise eyes, the trail that he had taken with Amanda when she had first led him to the ledge. He followed this barely perceptible trail backward toward Porphyry, accordingly, still at a lope, and it was not long before it grew into what was a visibly used path.

In this early stage it could even be a path worn by larger animals, who, like humans, took the easiest route on their first time through unknown territory and then tended to repeat their steps on subsequent trips. Of course, there were no such wild animals on this world. He had been thinking too much as Hal, who had seen such game trails on Old Earth. Younger World troops would not think of anything but human feet having made such a trail, when they came across it.

After a while the trail gave way, in small stages, to a regularly maintained road, even though narrow and unsurfaced.

So far he had seen no evidence of recent passage this way by soldiers, or by any group of people, organized or unorganized. There was no possible way soldiers, particularly the poorly trained troops of the Occupation, could have gone up the unsurfaced trail without leaving sign of their passage in the way of bootprints and damaged vegetation, on either side of it. No leaving sign of their passage, to Hal's eyes at any rate, in its soft surface. The early part of it he traveled, accordingly, must also be territory to which they had not penetrated for some time. It was not far down the road, however, before he rounded a curve, descended a small slope and came upon not merely sign, but a deliberate announcement of their recent visit this far from Porphyry.

He had reached the home of the madman who spent his days stripping blossoms from the rapidly growing plants he cultivated in pots around the pool before his house and in the space behind it.

But the man was not plucking blossoms now - and plainly had not been for a couple of weeks, at least. Local scavengers had been at his body. What was left of it now swung in the light breeze, suspended by the noose from which he had been hung.

Below him was a printed sign showing large block letters in red on white.

DO NOT TOUCH OR REMOVE, BY ORDER OF THE COMMANDANT OF THE GARRISON.

Hal was suddenly reminded of such executed corpses dangling from makeshift roadside gallows in Hawkwood's time, with similar notices. The idea then, of course, had been that the body of the individual who had been hung should serve as a warning and a deterrent to other criminals. Here, where deterrence was not the object, the sign was simple savagery and sadism on the part of the Occupation troops.

Hal did not touch the body. There was no use, and to do so would merely serve as an announcement to any soldiers returning this way that others besides the madman existed in this area. He turned and headed back up the road at the same pace he had used since he had parted with Onete.

Only the morning had gone by. He decided to use the rest of the day in generally surveying the terrain, not only so he would know it in the future, but so he could make some informed guesses as to how the troops would spread out and move through it, when and if they came.

Accordingly, he now made side excursions to right and left out from the trail. The soldiers, under the impression that the Chantry Guild would be in the forest rather than above it, would look for evidence of signs of traffic to and from the location of its headquarters. Not even they would expect an obvious connection of trails linking that headquarters with the visible footpath he now followed. They would be likely to simply follow the footpath as far as it seemed to them to exist. Only after it had disappeared would they then probably form a skirmish line and begin to sweep through the greenery area beyond, which they would have divided on their map into blocks of territory, running right to the foot of the cliffs.

It was well that Onete had chosen a place to sit for Cee that was some distance beyond and off the line of the trail toward the cliffs. It was not so good that she had chosen a spot relatively close to the entrance under the huge boulder, leading up to the ledge.

There were advantages in such a close position, of course, She, like the foragers, could literally be watched from the ledge, using a viewscope adjusted for distance viewing, in fact, lately, Artur spent what moments he had to spare during the day doing just that, to catch what glimpses he could of Cee. Also all Guild members, when they were below, were trained to glance up at regular intervals to where they knew the ledge to be.

Although the ledge was invisible from the lower ground, to someone who knew where its outer edge should be, it was still easily locatable, and if whoever was below saw a bush growing on that edge where normally no bush grew, the warning to get immediately back up to safety was clear.

Even Hal himself had been checking the position of the ledge, hourly, without being more than barely aware he was doing so. Reminded of the warning bush now, he looked for it, even though the most recent hour was not up, but there was no bush there.

No, Onete's location was admirably suited from the standpoint of Onete's own safety. But if the soldiers had anyone among them who could read even the most obvious of sign, the marks of Onete and Cee's visits to that location would tell whoever it was that people had been there, recently. The soldiers, accordingly, would search more carefully in the region about that spot, including up to the cliffs, the boulder and the secret entrance.

Hal did not really think that even such a tracker, if they had one, would suspect that the apparently small shadowed hollow under the great boulder was anything more than that. The slope of loose rock just below that entrance did not hold the marks of the goings in and out of Guild members, who were always careful to move some distance on the rock, along the base of the cliff, before they left it individually at different points to enter the jungle.

The chances of the soldiers finding their way to the ledge, consequently, were slim. But unfortunately the evidence of Onete's meetings with Cee would still have directed attention to this area, and if there were some of the Others on the Exotic worlds they might have the imagination the soldiers lacked - to direct a search closely along the cliff-front, investigating every nook and cranny until they crept in under the boulder and found the route to the ledge. To Bleys Ahrens, himself, the evidence of Cee and Onete's meeting would simply suggest immediately the likelihood of a secret dwelling place on the cliffs above.

However, there was no quick way now to hide that evidence. There remained the business he was engaged in now, which was putting himself empathically in the boots of the soldiery, and from their point of view working out how they would go about covering the terrain he was now surveying.

He had automatically - one back to his training as the young Donal, and that of the young Hal under the tutorship of the Dorsai, Malachi Nasuno, on Old Earth. For the moment everything else had been put aside and he thought and reasoned only according to that early training. As a result something connected with that way of thinking came automatically to his mind. It was a part of the multivolume work on tactics and strategy, which had been the lifework of Cletus Grahame, Donal's great-great-grandfather. "... the importance of knowing the terrain where encounters with enemy forces are likely is impossible to underrate,'' Cletus had written in the volume titled FIELD USE OF FORCES. "The commander, whether he expects to have to operate defensively or offensively over that terrain, gains a tremendous advantage by knowing it personally and intimately. It is not merely enough to glance at a visible area and relate it to a map displayed in a viewer. Large elements, such as rivers, gullies, impenetrable undergrowth and such, are obvious features to be committed to memory - but this is only the beginning of the advantage to be derived from the Commander's going out in person to cover the area. "If this is done, then a great many smaller, but infinitely useful bits of knowledge may be acquired that may well make the difference between success and failure in any action. The quality of mud on the riverbank, the exact depth of a gully, the character of the impenetrable undergrowth - such as a tendency of part of its vegetation to stick to the clothing of enemy passing near it or a emptying to penetrate it - all these are items of information that may be turned to account, not only in helping to build a picture of how the enemy will be channeled and directed, delayed, or aided in moving through the area, but in deciding how the enemy forces may be led or forced into a situation where they must surrender, or may be easily taken prisoner, giving the bloodless victory that is the hallmark of the fully capable commander.... "

Hal frowned for a second as he loped along, his eyes noting and his memory automatically cataloging what he saw as he move back and forth through the jungle across the route the soldiers would be led, by conditions of the terrain, to come.

Something was nagging at the back of his mind. There should be something more to the passage from the text than that. Something that was of importance, not to the present moment, but to his larger, lifetime search, and yet, he had the page of the ancient text from the Graeme library on Dorsai clearly in his mind's eye and those paragraphs were the extent of what was pertinent there to what he was doing at the moment. He made a mental note to search his memory again on that subject when he had leisure and turned his whole attention back to the business of studying the ground he was covering.

He was almost to the cliffs by this time. The next pass would take him past the foot of them. He broke off his traveling to and fro to make a turn back to where he had left his sandals on the bush. Since this took him close to where Onete was sitting, he swung wide in his approach, and covered the last hundred meters or so silently and cautiously so as not to disturb Cee if she were there.

He had seen no sign of Cee, however, by the time he had retrieved the sandals. Instead of putting them on immediately, he gave in to the temptation to move with unusual care closer in to where Onete would be sitting, and after a few moments he came within sight of the spot and saw her.

Cee was indeed with her, standing directly in front of Onete, and, it looked to Hal, well within reach of Onete if the latter had wished to reach for the girt. As Onete had said, however, she plainly had no intention of doing so, and Cee apparently now trusted her in this, because she stood relaxed before the grown woman, almost as if they were in casual conversation - as perhaps they were, in one fashion or another.

It occurred to Hal suddenly that, if only there were the materials up on the ledge to fashion a quick-acting tranquilizer of the kind used to immobilize wild game, he could easily have delivered it at the point of a dart or arrow, into the little girl, from his present position or one like it. With the proper sort of tranquilizer, Cee would never know what had hit her until she woke up in the women's section of one of the dormitory buildings, with Onete still with her.

She might react strongly to finding herself enclosed, but Onete's presence would be reassuring, and if the worst came to the worst, it might be better than leaving her here for the soldiers to discover and catch.

Of course, in argument against doing such a thing there was the fact that even a large contingent of soldiers might not be able to catch her - which they would probably try to do before they tried shooting her. If she could get away from Hal and Amanda, these Occupation troops were not going to find her easy to deal with. Then, once they had shown any sign of doing such things, she would make it a point to keep out of their sight.

Hal faded back from the clearing where Onete and Cee still confronted each other. When he was a safe distance away, he put on his sandals and made his last sweep of the ground at the bottom of the cliffs. Then he returned through the entrance under the boulder, up to the ledge. Amid was at work in his office, with a tray holding some crumbs of bread and the remnants of some sort of vegetable stew in a bowl perched precariously on the corner of a table otherwise piled with papers. "I'll take that back to the kitchen when I go, shall I?" asked Hal, nodding at the tray after knocking on the office door and accepting Amid's invitation to come in. "What'? Oh, that. Yes, thank you. Sit down," said Amid, looking up from the plans for an additional log building - one which would be in between the dormitories and his reception building in size. "What did you see'? And what did you think? You're back earlier than I expected." "It didn't take as long as I'd have thought, either," said Hal, sitting down.

He told Amid about the hanged madman and about his idea for possibly tranquilizing Cee and bringing her up to the ledge that way.

Amid looked uncomfortable. "I'm sure Artur and Onete won't like the idea," he said. "Even if we could do it. Oh, I don't doubt you could creep up close enough on her to get a dart or something into her, but even I don't like to imagine how Cee'd feel, waking up locked in one of our small bedrooms, even if Onete was with her." "It's just a suggestion," said Hal. "Then there's the problem of the tranquilizer itself. We've got a number of drugs in the clinic here, of course, but..."

"I know," said Hal. "As I say, it was just a suggestion." "Well, well, I'll talk to our pharmacist and if anything like that's possible, maybe you'd be willing to make the suggestion yourself to Artur and Onete. They and we could sit down and discuss the chances of it working." "I'd be glad to," said Hal. "All right, then," said Amid, "as soon as we all have some free time at the same moment. I can call in Artur at any time, but Onete's still down below, isn't she?" "Yes," said Hal. "And you're about to take your turn at the circle?" "I could put that off." "No need to, particularly since we have to wait for Onete to get back up here."

Amid sighed, a sigh that was more than a bit weary, pushed away from him the plans he had just been examining, and sat back in his chair. "Well," he said, "now, about the matter I wanted you to look into down there. When do you think the soldiers might come out here? And what might they do when they actually come?"