Sterling E. Lanier - Hieros 01 - Hiero's Journey

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The Forest of the Taig
THE SIGN OF THE FISHHOOK
COMPUTER MAN. THOUGHT HIERO. THAT SOUNDS CRISP,
efficient, and what's more, important. Also, his negative side added, mainly
meaningless as yet.
Under his calloused buttocks, the bull morse, whose name was Klootz, ambled
slowly along the dirt track, trying to snatch a mouthful of browse from
neighboring trees whenever possible. His protruding blubber lips were as good
as a hand for this purpose.
Per Hiero Desteen, Secondary Priest-Exorcist, Primary Rover, and Senior
Killman, abandoned his brooding and straightened in the high-cantled saddle.
The morse also stopped his leaf-snatching and came alert, rack of
forward-pointing, palmate antlers lifting. Although the wide-spread beams were
in the velvet and soft now, the great black beast, larger than any
long-extinct draft horse, was an even more murderous fighter with his sharp,
splayed hooves.
Hiero listened intently and reined Klootz to a halt. A dim uproar was growing
increasingly louder ahead, a swell of bawling and aaahing noises, and the
ground began to tremble. Hiero knew the sound well and so did the morse.
Although it was late August here in the far North, the buffer were already
moving south in their autumn migration, as they had for uncounted thousands of
years.
Morse and rider tried to peer through the road's border of larch or aider. The
deeper gloom of the big pines and scrub
2HIERO'S JOURNEY
palmetto beyond prevented any sight going further, but the noise was getting
steadily louder.
Hiero tried a mind probe on Klootz, to see if he was getting a fix on the
herd's position. The greatest danger lay in being trapped in front of a
wide-ranging herd, with the concomitant inability to get away to either side.
The buffer were not particularly mean, but they weren't especially bright
either, and they slowed down for almost nothing except fire.
The morse's mind conveyed uneasiness. He felt that they were in the wrong
place at the wrong time. Hiero decided not to delay any longer and turned
south off the trail, allowing Klootz to pick a way, and hopefully letting them
get off at an angle to the oncoming buffer.
Just as they left the last sight of the road, Hiero looked back. A line of
great, brown, rounded heads, some of them carrying six-foot, polished, yellow
horns, broke through the undergrowth onto the road as he watched. The grunting
and bawling was now very loud indeed. An apparently endless supply of buffer
followed the huge herd bulls.
Hiero kicked the morse hard and also applied the goad of his mind.
Come on, stupid, he urged. Find a place where they'll have to split, or we've
had it.
Klootz broke into a shambling trot, which moved the great body along at a
surprising rate. Avoiding trees and crushing bushes aside, the huge animal
paced along through the forest, looking deceptively slow. Hiero rode easily,
watching for overhanging branches, even though the morse was trained to avoid
them.
The man's leather boots, deer-hide breeches, and jacket gave him a good deal
of protection from the smaller branches which whipped him as they tore along.
He wore nothing on his head but a leather skull cap, his copper helmet being
kept in one of the saddlebags. He kept one hand raised to guard his face and
mentally flogged the morse again. The big beast responded with increased speed
and also rising irritation, which Hiero felt as a wave of mental heat.
Sorry, I'll let you do your own job, he sent, and tried to relax. No one was
exactly sure just how intelligent a morse really was. Bred from the mutated
giant moose many generations before, although well after The Death, they were
mar-
ine SIGN OF THE FISHHOOK
velous draft and riding animals. The Abbeys protected their herds carefully
and sold their prized breeding stock with great reluctance. But there was a
stubborn core of independence which no one had been able to breed out, and
allied to it, an uncertain but high degree of intelligence. The Abbey psykes
were still testing their morses and would continue to do so.
Hiero swore suddenly and slapped at his forehead. The mosquitoes and black
flies were attacking, and the splash of water below indicated Klootz was
aiming for a swamp. Behind them, the uproar of the herd was growing muted. The
buffer did not like swamps, although quite capable of swimming for miles at
need.
Hiero did not like swamps either. He signaled "halt" with his legs and body,
and Klootz stopped. The bull broke wind explosively. "Naughty," Hiero said,
looking carefully about.
Pools of dark water lay about them. Just ahead, the water broadened into a
still pond of considerable size. They had stopped on an island of rock,
liberally piled with broken logs, no doubt by the past season's flood waters.
It was very silent here, with the roar and grumble of the buffer only a
distant background noise now, behind them and to the east. A small, dark bird
ran down a lichened tree trunk and twittered faintly. Dark pines and pale
cypress rose directly from the water, cutting off sunlight and giving the
place a gloomy aspect. The flies and mosquitoes were bad, their humming attack
causing Hiero to pull up the hood of his jacket. The morse stamped and blew
out his great lips in a snort.
The ripple on the black surface was what saved them. Hiero ,$vas too well
trained to abandon all caution, even when slapping faigs, and the oily "V" of
something moving just under the ^tirface toward the island from farther out in
the open water Caught his eye as he looked about.
"Come on up," he shouted, and reined the big beast back on its haunches, so
that they were at least ten feet from the edge when the snapper emerged.
There was ho question of fighting, Even the holstered thrower at Micro's side,
and certainly his spear and knife, were almost useless against a full-grown
snapper. Nor did Klootz feel any differently, in spite of all his bulk and
fighting ability.
The snapper's hideous beaked head was four feet long and wide. The giant
turtle squattered out of the water in one
4HIERO'S JOURNEY
explosive rush, clawed feet scrabbling for a hold on the rock, the high, gray,
serrated shell spraying foul water as it came, yellow eyes gleaming. Overall,
it must have weighed over three tons, but it moved very fast just the same.
From a sixty-five-pound maximum weight before The Death, the snappers had
grown heroically, and they made many bodies of water impassable except by an
army. Even the Dam People had to take precautions.
Still, fast as it was, it was no match for the frightened morse. The big
animal could turn on half his own length and now did so. Even as the snapper's
beaked gape appeared over the little islet's peak, the morse and his rider
were a hundred feet off and going strong through the shallow marsh, back the
way they had come, spraying water in sheets. Stupid as it was, the snapper
could see no point in following further, and shut its hooked jaws with a
reluctant snap as the galloping figure of the morse disappeared around the
pile of windfalls.
As soon as they had reached dry ground, Hiero reined in the morse and both
listened again. The roar of the buffer's passage was steadily dying away to
the south and east. Since this was the direction he wanted to go anyway, Hiero
urged Klootz forward on the track of the migrating herd. Once more both man
and beast were relaxed, without losing any watchfulness in the process. In the
Year of Our Lord, seven thousand, four hundred, and seventy-six, constant
vigilance paid off.
Moving cautiously, since he did not wish to come upon a buffer cow with a calf
or an old outcast bull lagging behind the herd, Hiero steered the morse slowly
back to the road he had left earlier. There were no buffer in sight, but a
haze hung on the windless air, fine dust kicked up by hundreds of hoofed feet,
and piles of steaming dung lay everywhere. The stable reek of the herd blanked
out all other scents, something that made both man and morse uncomfortable,
for they relied on their excellent noses, as well as eyes and ears.
Hiero decided, nonetheless, to follow the herd. It was not a large one, he
estimated, no more than two thousand head at most, and in its immediate wake
lay a considerable amount of safety from the various dangers of the Taig.
There were perils too, of course, there were perils everywhere, but a wise man
tried to balance the lesser against the greater. Among the lesser were the
commensal vermin, which followed a buffer herd.
THE SIGN OF THE FISHHOOK 5
preying on the injured, the aged, and the juveniles. As Hiero urged the morse
forward, a pair of big, gray wolves loped across the track ahead of them,
snarling as they did. Wolves had not changed much, despite the vast changes
around them and the mutated life of the world in general. Certain creatures
and plants seemed to reject spontaneous genetic alteration, and wolves, whose
plasticity of gene had enabled thousands of dog breeds to appear in the
ancient world, had reverted to type and stayed there. They were cleverer,
though, and avoided confrontation with humans if possible. Also, they killed
any domestic dog they could find, patiently stalking it if necessary, so that
the people of the Taig kept their dogs close at hand and shut them up at
night.
Hiero, being an Exorcist and thus a scientist, knew this, of course, and also
knew the wolves would give him no trouble if he gave them none. He could
"hear" their defiance in his mind and so could his huge mount, but both could
also assess the danger involved, which was almost nonexistent in this case.
Reverting to his leaf-snatching amble, the morse followed the track of the
herd, which in turn was roughly following the road. Two cartloads wide, this
particular dirt road was hardly an important artery of commerce between the
East of Kanda and the West, out of which Hiero was now riding. The Metz
Republic, which claimed him as a citizen, was a sprawling area of indefinite
boundaries, roughly comprising ancient Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta, as
well as parts of the old Northwest Territories. There were so few people in
comparison to the land area that territorial boundaries were somewhat
meaningless in the old sense of the word. They tended to be ethnic or even
religious, rather than national.
The Taig, the vast boreal forest of conifers which had spread across the
northern world at least a million years before The Death, still dominated the
North. It was changed, however, with many species of warm country plants
intermingled-with the great pines. Some plant species had died, vanished
entirely, as had some animals also, but most had survived, and adapted to the
warmer clirsate. Winters were now fairly mild in the West of Kanda, with the
temperature seldom ever getting below five degrees centigrade. The polar caps
had shrunk and the earth was once again in another deep interglacial period.
What had caused the change to be so drastic, man or nature, was a
6HIERO'S JOURNEY
debated point in the Abbey classrooms. The Greenhouse Effect and its results
were still preserved in the old records, but too much empiric data was lacking
to be certain. Scientists, both Abbey and laymen, however, never stopped
searching for more data on the lost ages in an effort to help shape the
future. The terror of the ancient past was one thing which had never been
lost, despite almost five thousand years. That The Death must never be allowed
to come again was the basic reason for all scientific training. On this,
except for outlaws and the Unclean, all men were agreed. As a good scientist
and Abbey scholar, Hiero continually reflected on the problems of the past,
even as now, while seeming to daydream in the saddle.
He made an effective picture as he slowly rode along, and not being without
vanity, was aware of it. He was a stocky young man, clean-shaven but for a
mustache, with the straight black hair, copper skin, and hooked nose of a good
Metz. He was moderately proud of his pure descent, for he could tell off
thirty generations of his family without a break. It had come as a profound
shock in the Abbey school when the Father Abbot had gently pointed out that he
and all other true Metz, including the abbot himself, were descended from the
Metis, The French Canadian-Indian half-breeds of the remote past, a
poverty-stricken minority whose remoteness and isolation from city life had
helped save a disproportionate number of them from The Death. Once this had
been made clear to him, Hiero and his classmates never again boasted of their
birth. The egalitarian rule of the Abbeys, based solely on merit, became a new
source of pride instead.
On Hiero's back was strapped his great knife, a thing like a short, massive
sword, with a straight, heavy back, a sharp point, a fourteen-inch rounded
blade, and only one edge. It was very old, this object from before The Death,
and a prize won by Hiero for scholastic excellence. On its blade were incised,
in worn letters and numbers, "U.S." and "1917" and ''Plumb. Phila.," with a
picture of a thing like an onion with leaves attached. Hiero knew it was
incredibly ancient and that it had once belonged to men of the United States,
which had long ago been a great empire of the South. Th$ was all he or perhaps
anyone could know of the old Marine Corps bolo, made for a long-lost campaign
in Central America, forgotten
THE SIGN OF THE FISHHOOK 7
five millennia and more. But it was a good weapon and he loved its weight.
He also carried a short, heavy spear, a weapon with a hickory shaft and
ten-inch, leaf-shaped steel blade. A crossbar of steel went through the base
of the blade at right angles, creating what any ancient student of weaponry
would have recognized at once as a boar spear. The cross guard was designed to
prevent any animal (or human) from forcing its way up the spear shaft, even
when impaled by the spear's point. This was not an old weapon, but had been
made by the Abbey armory for Hiero when he had completed his Man Tests. At his
saddlebow was holstered a third weapon, wooden stock forward. This was a
thrower, a muzzle-loading, smooth-bore carbine, whose inch-and-a-half bore
fired six-inch-long explosive rockets. The weapon was hideously expensive, the
barrel being made of beryllium copper, and its small projectiles had to be
hand-loaded by the small, private factory which produced them. It was a
graduation present from his father and had cost twenty robes of prime marten
fur. When his stock of projectiles was exhausted, the thrower was useless, but
he carried fifty of them in his pack; few creatures alive could take a rocket
shell and still keep coming. A six-inch, two-edged knife, bone-handled, hung
in his belt scabbard:
His clothes were leather, beautifully dressed tan deerskin, very
close-fitting, almost as soft as cloth and far more durable, In his leather
saddlebags were packed a fur jacket, gloves, and folding snowshoes, as well as
food, some small pieces of copper and silver for trading, and his Exorcist's
gear. On his feet were knee boots of brown deerskin, with triple-strength
heels and soles of hardened, layered leather for walking. The circled cross
and sword of the Abbeys gleamed in silver on his breast, a heavy thong
supporting the medallion. And on his bronzed, square face were painted the
marks of his rank in the Abbey service, a yellow maple leaf on the forehead
and, under it, two snakes coiled about a spear shaft, done in green. These
marks were very ancient indeed and were always put on first by the head of the
Abbey, the Father Superior himself, when the rank was first achieved. Each
morning, Hiero renewed them from tiny jars carried in his saddlebags.
Throughout the entire North, they were recognized and honored, except by those
humans
SHIERO'S JOURNEY
beyond the law and the unnatural creatures spawned by The Death, the
Leemutes,* who were mankind's greatest enemy.
Hiero was thirty-six and unmarried, although most men his age were the heads
of large families. Yet he did not want to become abbot or other member of the
hierarchy and end up as an administrator, he was sure of that. When teased
about it, he was apt to remark, with an immobile face, that no woman, or
women, could interest him for long enough to perform the ceremony. But he was
no celibate. The celibate priesthood was a thing of the dead past. Priests
were expected to be part of the world, to struggle, to work, to share in all
worldly activities, and there was nothing worldlier than sex. The Abbeys were
not even sure if Rome, the ancient legendary seat of their faith, still
existed, somewhere far over the Eastern Ocean. But even if it did, their
long-lost traditional obedience to its Pontiff was gone forever, gone with the
knowledge of how to communicate across so vast a distance and many other
things as well.
Birds sang in massed chonises as Hiero rode along in the afternoon sunlight.
The sky was cloudless and the August heat not uncomfortable. The morse ambled
at exactly the pace he had learned brought no goad and not one instant faster.
Klootz was fond of his master and knew exactly how far Hiero could be pushed
before he lost his patience. The bull's great ears fanned the air in ceaseless
search for news, recording the movements of small creatures as much as a
quarter of a mile away in the wood. But before the long, drooping muzzle of
the steed and the rider's abstracted eye, the dusty road lay empty, spotted
with fresh dung and churned up by the buffer herd, whose passage could still
be heard ahead of them in the distance.
This was virgin timber through which the road ran. Much of the Kandan
continent was unsettled, much more utterly unknown. Settlements tended to
radiate from one of the great Abbeys, for adventurous souls had a habit of
disappearing. The pioneer settlements which were unplanned and owed their
existence to an uncontrolled desire for new land had a habit of mysteriously
falling out of communication. Then, one day,
*Leemute: corruption of ancient words, "Lethal Mutation." Now, in altered
meaning, a creature lethal to humans, rather than to itself.
THE SIGN OF THE FISHHOOK 9
some woodsman, or perhaps a priest sent by the nearest Abbey, would find a
cluster of moldering houses surrounded by overgrown fields. There was
occasional muttering that the Abbeys discouraged settlers and tried to prevent
new opening up of the woods, but no one ever dreamed that the priesthood was
in any way responsible for the vanished people. The Council of Abbots had
repeatedly warned against careless pioneering into unknown areas, but, beyond
the very inner disciplines taught to the priesthood, the Abbeys had few
secrets and never interfered in everyday affairs. They tried to build new
Abbeys as fast as possible, thus creating new enclaves of civilization around
which settlements could rally, but there were only so many people in the
world, and few of these made either good priests or soldiers. It was slow
work.
As Hiero rode, his mnemonic training helped him automatically to catalogue for
future reference everything he saw. The towering jackpines, the great
white-barked aspens, the olive palmetto heads, a glimpse of giant grouse
through the trees, all were of interest to the Abbey files. A priest learned
early that exact knowledge was the only real weapon against a savage and
uncertain world.
Morse and rider were now eight days beyond the easternmost Abbey of the Metz
Republic, and this particular road ran far to the south of the main east-west
artery to distant Otwah and was little known. Hiero had picked it after
careful thought, because he was going both south and east himself, and also
because using it would supply new data for the Abbey research centers.
His thoughts reverted to his mission. He was only one of the six Abbey
volunteers. He had no illusions about the dangers involved in what he was
doing. The world was full of savage beasts and more savage men, those who
lived beyond any law and made pacts with darkness and the Leemutes. And the
Lee-mutes themselves, what of them? Twice he had fought for his life against
them, the last time two years back. A pack of fifty hideous, apelike
creatures, hitherto unknown, riding bareback on giant, brindled dog-things,
had attacked a convoy on the great western highway while he had commanded the
guard. Despite all his forelooking and alertness, and the fact that he had a
hundred trained Abbeyman, as well as the armed traders, all good fighters, the
attack had been beaten off only with great
10 HIERO'S JOURNEY
difficulty. Twenty dead men and several cartloads of vanished goods were the
result. And not one captive, dead or alive. If a Leemute fell, one of the
great, spotted dog-things had seized him and borne him away.
Hiero had studied the Leemute files for years and knew as much as anyone below
the rank of abbot about the various kinds. And he knew enough to know how much
he did not know, that many things existed in the wide world of which he was
totally ignorant.
The thought of forelooking made Hiero rein the morse to a halt. Using the mind
powers, with or without Lucinoge, could be very dangerous. The Unclean often
had great mental powers too, and some of them were alerted by human thoughts,
alerted and drawn to them. There was no question of what would happen if a
pack such as had struck the convoy found a lone man ready to hand.
Still, there had to he some danger any where, and forelooking often helped one
to avoid it if not used to excess. "Your wits, your training, and your senses
are your best guides," the Father Abbots taught. "Mental search, forelooking,
and cold-scanning are no replacements for these. And if overused, they are
very dangerous." That was plain enough. But Hiero Desteen was no helpless
youth, but a veteran priest-officer, and all this by now was so much reflex
action.
He urged the morse off the track, as he did so hearing the buffer herd just at
the very edge of earshot. They are traveling fast, he thought, and wondered
why.
In a little sunny glade, a hundred yards from the trail, he dismounted and
ordered Klootz to stand watch. The big morse knew the routine as well as the
man and lifted his ungainly head and shook the still-soft rack of antlers.
From the left saddlebag, Hiero took his priest's case and removed the board,
its pieces, then the crystal and the stole; draping the latter over his
shoulders, he seated himself cross-legged on the pine needles and stared into
the crystal. At the same time he positioned his left hand on the board,
lightly but firmly over the pile of markers, and with his right made the sign
of the cross on his forehead and breast.
"In the name of the Father, his murdered Son, and Spirit," he intoned, "I, a
priest of God, ask for vision ahead on my road. I, a humble servant of man,
ask for help in my journeying.
THE SIGN OF THE FISHHOOK 11
1, a creature of earth, ask for signs and portents." As he concentrated
staring into the crystal, he kept his mind fixed firmly on the road and
especially the area to the east and south, the direction in which he was
headed.
In a moment, as he watched, the clear crystal became cloudy, as if filled with
swimming wraiths of mist and fog. Thousands of years after western
anthropologists had refused to believe the evidence of their own eyes when
watching Australian aborigines communicate over hundreds of miles by staring
into two pools of water, a man of the seventy-fifth century prepared to see
what lay ahead of him in his travels.
As Hiero stared, the mist cleared and he felt drawn down into the crystal, as
if he were becoming a part of it. He shrugged this familiar feeling aside and
found himself looking down on the buffer herd and the road from hundreds of
feet up in the air. He was using the eyes of a bird, almost certainly a hawk,
he thought with a detached part of his mind. As his vision swayed to and fro
over a wide arc of country, he fixed everything he saw firmly in his memory.
Here was a lake; there, to the south, a river next to a big swamp over which a
distant road seemed to run on pilings (no mention of that in his briefings;
better look out). The bird was not conscious it was being used. Hiero was not
in any sense controlling it; that was a different business altogether and much
harder, not always possible, in fact. But his concentration on his route had
allowed the mind of the creature which saw that route most clearly somehow to
attract his, as a magnet draws a nail. Had no bird been overhead, perhaps a
squirrel in a high tree would have been his lens, or even a buffer in the
front rank of the herd, if nothing better offered. Hawks and eagles were the
best possible eyes, and there were enough of them about so that there was
usually a good chance of hitting on one. Their eyes were not exactly the same
as a man's, but at least they had a son of binocular vision. This type of
thing was easy for a man of Hiero's large experience, who could, if necessary,
utilize the widely separated eyes of a deer which saw two images.
He noted that the buffer were moving at a fast, steady trot, not panicky, but
alerted, as if some danger were coming but as yet was not too close. The two
wolves he had seen earlier were most unlikely to have caused this feeling, and
he wondered again what had. Sitting up, he broke the trance and looked
12
HIERO'S JOURNEY
down at his left hand. Clenched in his fist were two of the forty small
symbols which he had scattered about the shallow, dish-shaped board. He opened
his own hand and saw another hand in miniature, the tiny, carved Hand, which
signified "friendship." He dropped it back in the dish and looked at the other
symbol. It was the miniature wooden Fishhook. He dropped that in, too, and
emptied the pieces into their leather pouch while considering. His
subconscious precognition had found a curious combination, which needed
thought. The Fishhook had several meanings. One was "concealed danger."
Another was "concealed meaning," or, by extension, a puzzle. In conjunction
with the open hand, one meaning could be "a friend approaches with a riddle."
Another might well be "beware of a seeming friend who means you ill." It had,
curiously, nothing to do with either fish or fishing.
With only forty symbols, the precognition markers were often obscure. But as
was pointed put to every beginning student, if they saved your life, or
someone else's life, even once, they were certainly worth it, were they not?
And a good, sensitive man or woman could do a lot with them. Hiero regarded
his own ability in this particular area as only about average, not anywhere
near up to his ability to use animal eyes as a concealed spyglass. But he had
been helped by the markers before and he always felt better for having used
them.
As he was repacking the saddlebag, the morse, who stil! remained on guard,
snorted suddenly. Hiero turned, his heavy blade drawn out over his left
shoulder and in a ward position as if by magic. Only then he saw the small
bear.
Bears had changed over the millennia like everything else, that is, all bears
had changed in some ways. This was a black bear, and a twentieth-century
zoologist would have seen nothing odd about its body at first glance, except a
larger and more rounded forehead. If he had looked, not at, but into, the
eyes, more might have been glimpsed. Bears were never stupid; now they were,
unevenly perhaps, approaching non-animal levels. It was alone, Hiero saw, and
nothing else was around.
The bear looked about half-grown and stood on its hind legs, front paws
hanging limp in front of it. /( might weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, Hiero
thought. // might weigh somewhat more and not be half-grown af all, but a new
type altogether. His mind probed at the animal, and he kept his guard
THE SIGN OF THE FISHHOOK 13
up. The thought he got in return was strong.
Friend—human friend—food (a plea). Friend—help— danger (a feeling of heat).
Friend—bear (himself—identity feeling)—help—danger. This was surprisingly
vibrant and clear. Hiero was used to conversing with wild things, although
with an effort, but this animal had almost the power of a trained human. What
a lot there was in the world!
As the man lowered his short sword and relaxed, the bear settled on its
haunches also. Hiero sent a thought at Klootz and told him to stay on guard,
noting in passing that the big bull seemed to feel the bear was harmless.
Reaching into his saddlebags, Hiero brought out some dried, pressed pemeekan.
The ancient travel food of the North, animal fat, maple sugar, and dried
berries pressed into a cake, still kept its old name unchanged. As he broke
off a piece and threw it to the bear, Hiero sent another thought.
Who/what are you? What/who brings danger?
The bear caught the pemeekan between his paws in a very human gesture and
snapped it up in one bite. His thoughts were confused for a moment, then
cleared up.
Food (good/satisfying)— morel Bad things come—hunt-hunt humans, animals—hunt
this human—not far behind now— not far in front—death lies all around—bear
(himself) help humanl
There was a last blurred thought which the man realized was the bear giving
his own name. It was unpronounceable, but Gorm was a fairly close
approximation. Under the clear and obvious thoughts, Hiero learned more. Gorm
was a young bear, only about three years old, and relatively new to this area,
having come from the East. But the danger was real, and it was closing in on
all sides as they stood there. For a briefly glimpsed instant, through the
bear's mind, Hiero caught a flash of utter, cold malignity, an impression of
something bloated and soft in a secret place, spinning a web of terror
throughout the forest. The bear had shown him this deliberately, he now saw,
to impress upon him the danger. Leemutes, the Unclean! Nothing else caused
such horror and hatred in normal man or beast. Beside him, Klootz snorted and
stamped a great fore-hoof. He had caught a good deal of what had passed
between the two and didn't like it.
Hiero turned and finished packing, his back to Gorm. He
14 HIERO'S JOURNEY
was convinced there was no danger from the half-grown cub and that the bear
was both frightened himself and anxious to be of help. Civilized men seldom
hunted bears any longer, and the old enmity of pioneer and bruin no longer
existed.
Swinging up into his high saddle, the man sent a thought of inquiry to the
animal on the ground. Where?
Follow—safety—danger first—slow—follow, came the answer as Gorm dropped to all
fours and scuttled away from the clearing. Without even being urged, Klootz
swung in his wake, maintaining a pace which kept him about fifteen feet to the
rear. The fact that the morse trusted the young bear was a major factor in
Hiero's own decision to do so. The morse stock was bread for alertness as well
as strength and skill, and their mental watchdog capabilities were considered
quite as important as their physical qualities.
They went south, back the way Klootz had come, and soon recrossed the road.
Here, the bear did something which made Hiero blink. Signaling them to stop,
Gorm recrossed the dirt track and then dragged himself back by his front legs,
his fat rear end obliterating Klootz's broad tracks! Only the passage of the
buffer herd and a smeared place now showed on the dust of the road.
Follow (Gorm)—walk hard ground {quietly)—not leave mark, came the thought.
Following it, there came one more: Not speak—watch (me) only—others listen
(for)—speak— danger.
Hiero nodded to himself. The bear was indeed ciever, very clever. There must
be a nest of Leemutes or some center or other nearby. If mind speech was used,
it might well be picked up and some terror or other be sent on their tracks.
He remembered that flash of shuddersome, gelid hatred the bear had shown him,
and a tingle ran down his spine.
For some time, Gorm moved at a steady pace which was no more than a good walk
for the~ bull morse. The warrior-priest kept a keen watch. A veteran woodsman,
he noted that he and his mount were being led over underlying granite spines
of firm ground and also that the woods were very quiet. The great forest of
Kanda, where undisturbed, was full of life, in the trees, on the ground, and
even in the air. Now the land was silent. No squirrels chattered at the
travelers, birds were few and shy, and not a trace of the larger creatures,
such as
THE SIGN OF THE FISHHOOK 15
deer, was to be seen. In the windless hush of the late summer afternoon, the
almost noiseless progress of the three yet sounded very loud in Hiero's ears.
A sense of oppression was in his mind, almost of pressure from outside, as if
the atmosphere itself had somehow grown denser.
Hiero crossed himself. This strange silence and spiritual oppression were not
normal and could only come from the forces of darkness, from the Unclean, or
some lair of theirs.
Abruptly, Gorm stopped. Through some signal that even his owner could not
catch, the giant morse was given an order. Instantly, he too stopped and just
as instantly lay down, crouching beside a great pile of deadfalls. Klootz
weighed just a trifle under a ton, but he sank to his knees with the grace of
a dancer and without a sound. Ten feet in front of the morse's moist and
pendulous nose, the bear crouched, peering around a bush. On the neck of the
morse, Hiero too lay stretched out, peering forward and trying to see what had
alarmed their guide so.
All three were looking down into a broad, shallow hollow in the land, thinly
planted with seedling alders and low brush. As they watched, from the tall
forest on the other side of the dip and well to their right, a column of a
dozen or so figures emerged.
Hiero had thought he was familiar with many types of Lee-mute, the Man-rats
and Hairy Howlers, the Were-bears (which were not bears at all), the Slimers,
and several others besides. But these were new and, like all Leemutes,
unpleasant to look at. They were short, no more than four feet tall on the
average but very broad and squat, and walked erect on their hind legs, their
bushy tails dragging behind. They were completely covered with long, dripping,
oily-looking fur of a yellow-brown hue, and their beady-eyed faces were
pointed and evil. It would have been hard to trace their ancestry back to a
genetic accident in a wolverine family after The Death, even for a
contemporary expert, and Hiero simply catalogued them as a new and dangerous
breed. For they had actual hands, and their rounded heads and gleaming eyes
indicated intelligence of a high if nasty order. They wore no clothing, but
each carried a long-handled wooden club, in the head of which was set
glittering fragments of obsidian. A wave of evil purpose went before them like
a cloud of gas as they moved one behind the other, in a curious hopping gait,
which still covered the ground at a
i6
HlERO'S lOURNEY
good speed. Every few feet, the leader stopped to sniff the air and then
dropped to all fours to check the earth, while the others peered about on
every side. The three on the knoll above them froze into immobility, trying
not to breathe. The evil Furhoppers, as Hiero promptly named them, were
perhaps two hundred yards off and, if they continued their present course,
would pass down over the shallow slope of the bowl and up the other side,
moving off to the left of the three's position. But when the line of crouching
figures reached the center of the depression, it halted. Hiero tensed, one
hand instinctively reaching for his reliquary and the poison it contained. For
another figure had appeared and was advancing on the Fur-hoppers.
It was apparently a tall man, garbed in a long cloak of a dark gray, which was
closely wrapped around him and showed only his sandaled feet. His hood was
thrown back, and his naked, hairless head was revealed in the rays of the
evening sun. His skin was so pale as to appear deadwhite, and his eyes were a
shifting color, impossible to see at this distance. On the right breast of his
cloak was a spiral symbol, also difficult to see, etched in a dark scarlet, of
interwoven lines and circles. He seemed to carry no visible weapons, but an
aura of both spiritual power and cold menace radiated from him, as the chill
of a great iceberg goes out from it to warn seafarers.
This was an extraordinary chance, for good or ill, and Hiero knew it. The
Unclean had been rumored and more than rumored for centuries to have human
directors, a race of men totally given over to evil and wizardry. On several
occasions such people had been reportedly glimpsed directing attacks on Abbey
convoys or settlements, but the information was vague and contradictory. On
two occasions, however, men had been killed trying to penetrate the secret
training rooms and guarded files of Abbey Central in Sask. Each time, the
bodies of the slain had almost instantly dissolved into piles of corruption,
leaving nothing to be investigated, save for ordinary clothing, which might
have been acquired anywhere. But in each case, the Abbey guardians and priests
had been warned by mental alarms of the spirit, not of the flesh, and in each
case the man—or entity—had penetrated through many men on guard who recalled
seeing nothing. This creature before him now could only be one of these
mysterious men who were thought to rule the
THE SIGN OF THE FISHHOOK 17
Unclean. No normal man, not even an outlaw, would or could associate with a
foul pack such as this, and yet, as the man strode to them, the savage
creatures cringed aside in evident fear.
The leader of the Fur creatures, crouching low, came up to the man and the two
moved a little apart, while the others milled restlessly about, grunting and
whining in low tones. Hiero could see that man's lips move and the yellow
fangs of the Furhopper chief flash in answer. They were actually talking, not
using mind speech, one to the other! Even as he inwardly shrank in loathing
from the whole gang, the scientist in Hiero could not help applauding the
feat. With normal speech, there would be no betraying mental currents, such as
made him afraid to address Klootz more than was absolutely necessary and had
caused the bear to impress mental silence upon them.
Now, the conversation apparently over, the man seemed to dismiss the pack of
hideous creatures and, turning about, simply walked away in the direction from
which he had come. This was to the south and east. The Furhoppers surrounded
their leader, who snarled something out which silenced them. In a moment they
had formed their line again and were tramping the dead leaves back on the way
they had come, which was from the west.
As the gray-cloaked man disappeared in one direction and the Furhoppermutes in
the other, all three creatures on the edge of the bowl relaxed a little. But
no one used mind speech; they simply sat quietly and waited.
After what must have been a good half hour, Gorm the bear slowly rose and
stretched. He looked around at Klootz and his rider, sending no message, but
his meaning was plain. The big morse arose as silently as he had lain down,
and from his vantage high on the great back, Hiero surveyed the silent forest
before them.
The setting sun slanted down through the pines and maples and lit the patchy
undergrowth in flashes of vivid green, turning various piles of dead leaves
into russet and gold. Ancient logs glowed with color as green moss and gray
lichen were caught in the last patches of sunlight. How beautiful the land is,
the priest reflected, and yet how full of evil under its loveliness.
But Gorm was all business, and as he lurched down into the hollow, Klootz
followed him, his great forked hooves mak-
18
HlERO'S JOURNEY
ing no more sound in the leaves than a mouse would have.
To Micro's alarm, the small bear was headed for the exact spot on the far side
of the depression into which the sinister person in the cloak had gone. While
desperately anxious to know more about this dark being and his purposes, Hiero
did not want a direct encounter with him. His mission, far to the East, came
first above all else. He dared not send a mental message, not with the enemy
so close about them that the sense of mental oppression was still a weight on
his spirit, and he could think of no way to halt, or redirect, the bear except
by physical means.
"Pssst," he hissed, and again.
Gorm looked back and saw the man gesturing violently to stop. He halted on a
patch of leaves and let Klootz catch up.
Hiero, looking down at the bear, could think of nothing to do which would
explain what he wanted. He was keeping a rigid mindblock on, and he had a more
摘要：

TheForestoftheTaigTHESIGNOFTHEFISHHOOKCOMPUTERMAN.THOUGHTHIERO.THATSOUNDSCRISP,efficient,andwhat'smore,important.Also,hisnegativesideadded,mainlymeaninglessasyet.Underhiscallousedbuttocks,thebullmorse,whosenamewasKlootz,ambledslowlyalongthedirttrack,tryingtosnatchamouthfulofbrowsefromneighboringtree...

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