The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

raiding Hordes. There was only one nation on Terra which could have picked such colonists.
    “You are Russian.” He studied her carefully, intent on noting the effect of his words.
    But she did not lose that lost look. “Russian…Russian…” she repeated, as if the very word was strange.
    Travis was alarmed. Any Russian colony planted here could well possess technicians with machines capable of tracking a fugitive, and if mountain heights were protection against such a hunt, he intended to gain them, even by night traveling. He said this to Tsoay, and the other emphatically agreed.
    “The horse is too lame to go on,” the younger man reported.
    Travis hesitated for a long second. Since the time they had stolen their first mounts from the encroaching Spanish, horses had always been wealth to his people. To leave an animal which could well serve the clan was not right. But they dared not waste time with a lame beast.
    “Leave it here, free,” he ordered.
    “And the woman?”
    “She goes with us. We must learn all we can of these people and what they do here. Listen, Wolf Daughter,” again Travis leaned close to make sure she was listening to him as he spoke with emphasis—“you will travel with us into these high places, and there will be no trouble from you.” He drew his knife and held the blade warningly before her eyes.
    “It was already in my mind to go to the mountains,” she told him evenly. “Untie my hands, brave warrior, you have surely nothing to fear from a woman.”
    His hand made a swift sweep and plucked a knife as long and keen as his from the folds of the sash beneath her loose outer garment.
    “Not now, Wolf Daughter, since I have drawn your fangs.”
    He helped her to her feet and slashed the cord about her wrists with her knife, which he then fastened to his own belt. Alerting the coyotes, he dispatched them ahead; and the three started on, the Mongol girl between the two Apaches. The abandoned horse nickered lonesomely and then began to graze on tufts of grass, moving slowly to favor his foot.
    The two moons rode the sky as the hours advanced, their beams fighting the shadows. Travis felt reasonably safe from any attack at ground level, depending upon the coyotes for warning. But he held them all to a steady pace. And he did not question the girl again until all three of them hunkered down at a small mountain spring, to dash icy water over their faces and drink from cupped hands.
    “Why do you flee your own people, Wolf Daughter?”
    “My name is Kaydessa,” she corrected him.
    He chuckled with laughter at the prim tone of her voice. “And you see here Tsoay of the People—the Apaches—while I am Fox.” He was giving her the English equivalent of his tribal name.
    “Apaches.” She tried to repeat the word with the same accent he had used. “And what are Apaches?”
    “Indians—Amerindians,” he explained. “But you have not answered my question, Kaydessa. Why do you run from your own people?”
    “Not from my people,” she said, shaking her head determinedly. “From those others. It is like this—Oh, how can I make you understand rightly?” She spread her wet hands out before her in the moonlight, the damp patches on her sleeves clinging to her arms. “There are my people of the Golden Horde, though once we were different and we can remember bits of that previous life. Then there are also the men who live in the sky ship and use the machine so that we think only the thoughts they would have us think. Now why,” she looked at Travis intently—“do I wish to tell you all this? It is strange. You say you are Indian—American—are we then enemies? There is a part memory which says that we are…were.…”
    “Let us rather say,” he corrected her, “that the Apaches and the Horde are not enemies here and now, no matter what was before.” That was the truth, Travis recognized. By all accounts his people had come out of Asia in the very dim beginnings of migrating peoples. For all her dark-red hair and gray eyes, this girl who had been arbitrarily returned to a past just as they had been by Redax, could well be a distant clan-cousin.
    “You—” Kaydessa’s fingers rested for a moment on his wrist—“you, too, were sent here from across the stars. Is this not so?”
    “It is so.”
    “And there are those here who govern you now?”
    “No. We are free.”
    “How did you become free?” she demanded fiercely.
    Travis hesitated. He did not want to