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  Hiero's Journey

  ( Hiero Desteen - 1 )

  Sterling E. Lanier

  Per Hiero Desteen was a priest, a telepath—and a highly trained killer. Together with his great riding moose and the young bear who was his friend, he was on an extraordinary mission. For this was five thousand years after the holocaust known as The Death. Now the evil Brotherhood of the Unclean was waging all-out war against the few remnants of normal humanity, determined to wipe out all traces of its emerging civilization. Hiero’s task was to bring back a lost secret of the ancients that might save the humans. But his path lay through the very heart of the territory ruled by the Unclean and their hordes of mutated, intelligent, savage beast followers. And the Unclean were waiting for him!

  Sterling E. Lanier

  Hiero’s Journey

  (a romance of the future)

  To Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey, who did all the new work.

  1. THE SIGN OF THE FISHHOOK

  The 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 alder. The deeper gloom of the big pines and scrub 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 crashing 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 marvelous 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 was too well trained to abandon all caution, even when slapping bugs, and the oily “V” of something moving just under the surface 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 no question of fighting. Even the bolstered thrower at Hiero’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 three wide. The giant turtle squattered out of the water in one 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, H
iero 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, 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 climate. 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 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 four-teen-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. This was all he or perhaps anyone could know of the old Marine Corps bolo, made for a long-lost campaign in Central America, forgotten 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 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 Leemute: corruption of ancient words, “Lethal Mutation.” Now, in altered meaning, a creature lethal to humans, rather than to itself. how to communicate across so vast a distance and many other things as well.

  Birds sang in massed choruses 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, 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.