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The Apache made a similar gesture, and Jil-Lee and Buck, their own weapons well in sight, came out to back him. Travis knew that the Tatar had no way of knowing that the three were alone; he well might have believed an unseen troop of Apaches were near-by and so armed. "You would talk then talk!" Menlik ordered. This time Travis outlined events with an absence of word embroidery.
"But they are not governed by a machine!" Kaydessa cut in. "They are free!" Menlik frowned at the girl. "Woman, this is a matter for warriors. Keep your tongue silent between your jaws!" She stamped one foot, standing with her fists on her hips. "I am a Daughter of the Blue Wolf. And we are all warriors men and women alike so shall we be as long as the Horde is not free to ride where we wish!
These were the men of the ships the men Menlik had dreamed of their bald white heads, their thin bodies with the skintight covering of the familiar blue-green-purple. Five of them were here, alive watching ... waiting.... Five men and six boxes. That small fact broke the spell in which those eyes held Travis. He looked again at the sixth box to his right.
Kaydessa passed the cup to Menlik. He pivoted with it in his hand, dribbling expertly over its brim a few drops at each point of the compass, chanting as he moved. Then he sucked in a mouthful of the contents before presenting the vessel to Travis. The Apache smelled the same sour scent that had clung to the emptied bag in the foothills.
Oh, I know that you question my kinship with the spirits and the powers they give. But one learns not to dispute what one feels here and here " His long, somewhat grimy fingers went to his forehead and then to the bare brown chest where his shirt fell open. "I have walked the stone path in that valley, and there have been the whispers " "Whispers?" Menlik twirled the wand.
Travis recalled it was the custom of the Horde that the women fought as warriors when necessary. Menlik there was no mistaking the flapping robe of their leader. And they were singing! The rider behind the shaman thumped with violent energy a drum fastened beside his saddle horn, its heavy boom, boom the same call the Apache had heard before.
He tossed the weapon into the air, caught it again, laughing disclaiming something in his own language. "From the serpents we take two fangs," Menlik translated. "These weapons may not be as dangerous as yours, but they can bite deeper, quicker, and with more force than our arrows."
But the shaman urged his mount into a walking pace toward the Apache until they stood only a few feet from each other the warrior of the steppes and the Horde facing the warrior of the desert and the People. "You have taken a woman from our yurts," Menlik said, but his eyes were more on the alien gun than on the man who held it. "Brave are you to come again into our land.
Menlik drew his shaman's wand, twiddled it between his fingers, and beneath his drooping lids watched the three Apaches with a new kind of measurement. "Then I say to you this: Such a guardianship must be a double charge, shared by my people as well.
Deklay's expression was closed; he had even edged a short way back, as if he had no desire to approach the strangers. And Travis read into every line of Deklay's body his distrust and antagonism. He himself began to speak, retelling his adventures since they had followed Kaydessa's trail, sketching in the situation at the Tatar-Mongol settlement as he had learned it from her and from Menlik.
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