And the despair in that thought suddenly overwhelmed Larry; Kennard was thinking,
If he gives out now, I’ll be alone . . . and it will all be for nothing. . . .
Larry wondered suddenly if he were imagining all this, if the height and the hardship were affecting his own mind. This sort of mental eavesdropping didn’t make sense. Also, it embarrassed him. He tried, desperately, to close his mind against it, but Kennard’s misgivings were leaking through all barriers:
Can Larry hold out? Can he make it? Have I got strength enough for both of us?
Silently, grimly, Larry resolved that if one of them gave out, it would not be himself. He was cold, hungry and wet, but by damn, he’d show this arrogant Darkovan aristocrat something.
Damn it! He was sick of being helped along and treated like the burden and the weaker one!
Terrans weak? Hadn’t the Terrans been the first to cross space! Hadn’t they taken the blind leap in the dark, before the stardrives, traveling years and years between the stars, ships disappearing and never being heard of again, and yet the race from Terra had spread through all inhabited worlds! Kennard could be proud of his Darkovan heritage and bravery. But there was something to be proud of in the Terrans, too! They had, in a way, their own arrogance, and it was just as reasonable as the Darkovan arrogance.
Here he had assumed, all along, that he was somehow inferior because, on a Darkovan world and in a Darkovan society, he was a burden to Kennard. Suppose it was reversed? Kennard did not understand the workings of a compass. He would be utterly baffled at the drives of a spaceship or a surface-car.
But even if he died here in the mountain passes, he was going to show Kennard that where a Darkovan could lead a Terran could follow! And then, damn it, when they got back to
his
world, he’d challenge Kennard to try following
him
a while in the world of the Terrans—and see if a Darkovan could follow where a Terran led!
He got up, grinned wryly, turned his pockets inside out in the hope of a stray crumb of food—there wasn’t one—and said, “The sooner the better.”
The grade was steeper now, and there began to be snow underfoot; they went very carefully, guarding against a sideslip that could have meant a ghastly fall. His injured arm felt numbed and twice it slipped on handholds, but he proudly refused Kennard’s offers of help.
“I’ll manage,” he said, tight-mouthed.
They came to one dreadful stretch where frost-sheathed stones littered a high ledge without a sign of a track; Kennard, who was leading, set his foot tentatively on the ledge, and it crumbled beneath him, sending pebbles crashing down in a miniature rockslide whitened with powdery snow. He staggered and reeled at the edge of the abyss, but even before he swayed Larry had moved, catching the flash of fear at the touch, and grabbed and held him, hard—the older boy’s weight jerking his hurt arm almost from the socket—until Kennard could recover his balance. They clung together, gasping, Kennard with fear and relief and Larry with mingled fright and pain; something had snapped in the injured shoulder and his arm hung stiff and immovable at his side, sending shudders of agony down his side when he as much as moved a finger.
Kennard finally wiped his brow. “Zandru’s hells, I thought I was gone,” he muttered. “Thanks, Lerrys. I’m all right now. You—” He noted Larry’s immobility. “What’s the trouble?”
“My arm,” Larry managed to get out, shakily.
Kennard touched it with careful fingers, drew a deep whistle. He moved his fingertips over it, his face intent and concentrated. Larry felt a most strange, burning itch deep in his bones under the touch; then Kennard, without a word of warning, suddenly seized the shoulder and gave it a violent, agonizing twist. Larry yelled in pain; he couldn’t help it. But as the pain subsided, he realized what Kennard had done.
Kennard nodded. “I had to slip the damned thing back into the socket before it froze the muscles around it. Or it would have taken three men to hold you down while they worked it back into place,” he said.
“How did you know—?”
“Deep-probed,” Kennard said briefly. “I can’t do it often, or very long. But I—” he hesitated, did not finish his sentence. Larry heard it anyhow:
I owed you that much. But damn it, now we’re both exhausted!
“And we’ve still got that devilish ledge to cross,” he said aloud. He began unfastening his belt; tugged briefly at Larry’s. Larry, curiously, watched him buckle them together and slip the ends around their waists.
“Shame you can’t use your left hand,” he said tersely. “Too bad they found out you were left-handed. Now we’ll start across. Let me lead. This is a hell of a place for your first lesson in climbing this kind of a rock-ledge, but here it is. Always have at least three things all together hanging on. Never move one foot without the other foot and both hands anchored. And the same with either hand.” His unfinished sentence again was perfectly clear to Larry:
Both our lives are in his hands, because he’s the weakest.
For the rest of his life, Larry remembered the agonizing hour and a half it took them to cross the twenty-foot stretch of rock-strewn ledge. There were places where the least movement started showers of rocks and snow; yet they could only cling together like limpets to their handholds and to the face of the rock. Above and below was sheer cliff; there was no help there, and if they retraced their steps, to find an easier way, they would never get across. Half a dozen times, Larry slipped and the belt jerking them back together saved him from a very long drop into what looked like nothingness and fog below. Halfway across a thin fine powdery snow began to fall, and Kennard swore in words Larry couldn’t even begin to follow.
“That was all we needed!” Suddenly he seemed to brighten up, and placed his next foot more cautiously. “Well, Larry, this is it—this has got to be the worst. Nothing worse than this could possibly happen. From now, things can only get better. Come on—left foot this time. Try that greyish hunk of rock. It looks solid enough.”
But at last they were on firm ground again, dropping down as they were in the snow, exhausted, to breathe deep and slow and gasp like runners just finished with a ten-mile race. Kennard, accustomed to the mountains, was as usual the first to recover, and stood up, his voice jubilant.
“I told you it would get better! Look, Larry!”
He pointed. Above them the pallid and snowy light showed them the pass, less than a hundred feet away, leading between rock-sheltered banks—a natural walkway, deeply banked with the falling snow, but sloping only gradually so that they could walk erect.
“And on the other side of that pass, Larry, there are people—my people—friends, who will help us. Warmth and food and fire and—” he broke off. “It seems too good to be true.”
“I’d settle for dry feet and something hot to eat,” Larry said, then froze, while Kennard still moved toward the pass. The terrible creeping tension he had felt just before their capture by the trailmen was with him again. It gripped him by the throat; forced him to run after Kennard, grabbing at him with his good arm, holding him back by main force. He couldn’t speak; he could hardly breathe with the force of it. The wave surged and crested, the precognition, the fore-knowing of terrible danger....
It broke. He could breathe again. He gasped and caught at Kennard and pointed and heard the older boy shriek aloud, but the shriek was lost in the siren screaming wail that rose and echoed in the rocky pass. Above them, a huge and ugly craning head, bare of feathers, eyeless and groping, snaked upward, followed by a huge, ungainly body, dimly shining with phosphorescent light. It bore down upon them, clumsily but with alarming speed, cutting off their approach to the pass. The siren-like wailing scream rose and rose until it seemed to fill the air and all the world.
It
had
been too good to be true.
The pass was a nest of one of the evil banshee-birds.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
For an instant, in blind panic, Larry whirled, turning to run. The speed with which the banshee caught the change in direction of movement paralyzed him again with terror; but during that split second of immobility, he felt a flash of hope. Kennard had begun to run, stumbling in helpless panic; Larry took one leap after him, wrenching him back, hard.
“
Freeze
,” he whispered, urgently. “It senses movement and warmth! Keep perfectly still!”
As Kennard struggled to free himself, he muttered swiftly, “Sorry, pal,” swung back his fist and socked Kennard, hard, on the point of the chin. The boy—exhausted, worn, defenseless—collapsed into the snowbank and lay there, motionless, too stunned to rise or to do more than stare, resentfully, at Larry. Larry flung himself down, too, and lay without moving so much as a muscle.
The bird stopped in mid-rush, turning its blind head confusedly from side to side. It blundered back and forth for a moment, its trundling walk and the trailing wings giving it the ungainly look of a huge fat cloaked man. It raised its head and gave forth that terrible, paralyzing wail again.
That’s it, Larry thought, resisting the impulse to stuff his hands over his ears. Things hear that awful noise and they run—and the thing
feels them moving
! It’s got something like the electrostatic fields of the
kyrri
—only what it senses is their movement, and their smell.
In this snowbank ...
Very slowly, moving a fraction of an inch at a time, fearing that even the slightest rapid motion might alert the banshee again, he scrabbled slowly in his pocket for his medical kit. It was almost empty, but there might just be enough of the strongly chemical-smelling antiseptic so that they would not smell like anything alive—or, he thought grimly, good to eat.
“Kennard,” he whispered, “can you hear me? Don’t move a muscle now. But when I slop this stuff around, dive into that snowbank—and burrow as if your life depended on it.”
It probably does,
he was thinking.
“
Now
!”
The smell of the chemical was pungent and sharp; the banshee, moving its phosphorescent head against the wind, made strange jolting motions of distaste. It turned and blundered away, and in that moment Larry and Kennard began to dig frantically into the snowbank, throwing up snow behind them, scrabbling it back over their bodies.
They were safe—for the moment. But how would they get across the pass?
Then he remembered Kennard’s earlier words about the banshees. They’re night-birds, torpid in the sunlight. The phosphorescence of their heads proved that they were no creatures of normal sunlight.
If they could live through the night ...
If they didn’t freeze to death ...
If some other banshee couldn’t feel their warmth through the snow around them ...
If the sun shone tomorrow, brightly enough to quiet the great birds ...
If all these things happened, then they just
might
live through their last hurdle.
If not ...
Suddenly all these
ifs
, coming at him like blasts of fear from Kennard, stirred fury in him. Damn it, there
had
to be a way through! And Kennard seemed to have given up; he was just lying there in the snow, silent, apparently ready for death.
But they hadn’t come so far together to die here, at the last. Damn it, he’d get them over that pass if he had to burrow through the damned snowbank with his bare hands....
The banshee seemed to have gone; cautiously, he lifted his head, ever so slightly, from the snowbank. Then, thinking better of it, he plastered the freezing stuff over his head before lifting it up, quickly surveying the pass above them. Less than a hundred feet. If they could somehow crawl through the snow ...
Urgently, he shook Kennard’s shoulder. The Darkovan boy did not move. This last terror had evidently finished his endurance. He muttered, “Right back where we were—when we left Cyrillon’s castle—”
Larry’s fury exploded. “So after dragging me halfway across the country, within sight of safety you’re going to lie here and die?”
“The banshees—”
“Oh, your own god Zandru take the banshees! We’ll get through them or else we won’t, but by damn we’ll
try
! You Darkovans—so proud of your courage when it’s a matter of individual bravery! As long as you could be a
hero
”—he flayed Kennard, deliberately, intently, with his words—“you were brave as could be! When you could make me look small! But now when you have to work
with
me, you konk out and lie down to die! And Valdir thinks he can do anything with your people? What the hell—his own son can’t shut up and listen and co-operate! He’s got to be a goddamn hero, or he won’t play, and just lies down to die!”
Kennard swallowed. His eyes blazed fire, and Larry braced himself for another outburst of that flaying, dreadful Alton rage, but it was checked before it began. Kennard clenched his fists, but he spoke grimly, through his teeth.
“I’ll kill you for that, some day—but right now, you’ll see whether a Terran can lead an Alton on his own world. Try it.”
“That’s the way to talk,” Larry said, deliberately jovial to infuriate Kennard’s despairing dignity. “If we’re going to die anyhow, we might as well do it while we’re
doing
something about it! To hell with dying with dignity! Make the blasted beast fight for his dinner if he wants it—kicking and scratching!”
Kennard laid his hand on his knife. He said “He’ll get a fight—”
Larry gripped his wrist, “
No
! Warmth and movement are what he senses! Damn you and your heroics! Common sense is what we need. Hell, I know you’re
brave
, but try showing some brains too!”
Kennard froze. He said through barely moving lips, “All right. I said I’d follow your lead. What do I do now?”
Larry thought fast. He had pulled Kennard out of his fit of despair, but now he had to
offer
something. If he was going to take the lead, he had to lead—and do it damned fast!