STRANGE BEASTS
The haunting memory of fantastic nightmare still oppressed Eric Nelson as he sat moodily late that night in the single drink-shop surviving in the battered village.
He was bone-weary from the long day's urgent work of rounding up pack-ponies. That and habit were why he had insisted to Li Kin that they stop at this mud-walled tavern whose fat Cantonese proprietor had somehow hoarded a few cases of imitation Scotch.
"Sloan and the others will need us to help pack," murmured Li Kin. He looked tired, his fine eyes blinking behind the thick spectacles. "We should go."
"In a little while," Nelson nodded. "They can get the stuff out of old Yu's arsenal and pack it without us anyway."
He tilted the square bottle, looking unseeingly at the wretched few tables whose grotesque shadows wavered on the crumbling mud walls as the oil-lamp flickered.
Why did that weird little experience stick in his mind like a burr? A dream of strange, coldly menacing voices in his mind, a shadow leaping across his room, a sound of great wings in the night-what was there in those to disturb him so?
"Yet it's cursed queer about Shan Kar," he muttered, half to himself.
Li Kin's head bobbed in earnest agreement. "Very queer. For today I have remembered about L'Lan."
Nelson stared at him blankly. "L'Lan? Oh, that's the name of the fellow's valley back in the mountains. I wasn't thinking of that."
"I have been thinking of it very much," the little Chinese officer affirmed. He leaned across the rough table. "You've been in China a long time, Captain Nelson. Have you never heard the name?"
"No, I never—" Nelson began, then stopped.
He did remember something.
"Magic valley of L'Lan! Long and long ago in L’Lan were born the Yang and Yin — life and death, good and evil, joy and sorrow!"
It came dimly back into Nelson's mind across seven war-crowded years, the rapt talk of that blind old seer whom he'd saved from the murderous guerrillas.
"Still, still lives L'Lan the golden, deep in the guarding mountains! Still lives in L’Lan the ancient Brotherhood, for that hidden heartland of the world was the valley of creation!"
"I remember the story now," Nelson admitted. "A sort of Central Asian Garden-of-Eden myth."
"Yes, a myth, a legend," Li Kin said earnestly. "Yet this man Shan Kar says that he comes from L'Lan!"
Eric Nelson shrugged. " 'Nature imitates Art,' said Wilde. The tribe out there in the mountains probably named their valley after the legend."
"Perhaps so," Li Kin said doubtfully. He got to his feet. "Should we not go now?"
"Go along and tell Sloan I'll be there soon," Nelson said carelessly.
Li Kin's eyes nickered to the emptied Scotch bottle, and he hesitated a moment "Remember, we have to get away by morning."
"I'll be there," snapped Nelson and the little Chinese went silently out.
Eric Nelson looked after the little man with a sympathy he felt neither for himself not his three other fellow-officers. Li Kin was a patriot, an absurdly impractical patriot whose fervent dreams had set his feet stumbling through the quagmire of China's civil wars to this blind-alley end.
The other three and he himself, Nelson thought with savage self-contempt, were not patriots, nor dreamers nor anything but soldiers of fortune.
Soldiers of fortune? The phrase lent an ironical twist to his lips. He and his fellow mercenaries were so far removed from the gay, gallant connotations of that name. Nick Sloan was a cool ruthless self-seeker, Van Voss a moronic sadist, Lefty Wister a spidery criminal.
And he, Eric Nelson? He, least of all, fitted that glamorous name. He was thirty years old, and the best years of his life had no other memorial than forgotten battles. Now he was a fugitive whose only out was to hire himself to Shan Kar's mountain people.
* * *
Nelson swept the empty Scotch bottle off the table to crash in splinters against the mud wall.
"Am I a dog to sit here untended?" he demanded of the fat Cantonese. "Bring another."
The liquor had lighted his somber mood by the time he went out into the night an hour later.
The few blinking lights along Yen Shi's wrecked and wretched streets danced in a cheerful rosy glow as he stalked along.
"I'm tired of Yen Shi anyway!" he thought as he, elbowed between shadowy, shuffling peasants. "San Kar's mountains will be new, at least."
"L’Lan, L'Lan the golden, inhere the ancient Brotherhood still lives— "
Now what was this Brotherhood that the old seer had talked of so raptly? And if it was so important, why hadn't Shan Kar mentioned it?
Eric Nelson stopped suddenly. Green eyes blazed at him from directly ahead in the gloom.
A huge tawny dog crouched there, staring at him. Only it wasn't a dog.
"A wolf," he told himself, as his hand went to the heavy pistol at his belt. "I'm not that drunk."
He was a little drunk, yes, but even so he could see that the beast was too big for a dog, its massive head too wide, its crouching tenseness too feral.
Its green eyes watched him with hypnotic intensity.
Nelson was deliberately raising his gun when a soft voice spoke from the darkness beyond the animal.
"He will not harm you," said a girl's voice in accented Tibetan dialect. "He is — mine."
She came toward him out of the shadows, past the crouching beast.
It was hard to see her clearly because Nelson's vision was obscured by the alcohol in his brain.
But he felt that this girl was special enough to justify the effort.
The way she moved, for one thing — she was light on her feet with a sort of gliding grace that belonged to an animal rather than to a town-bred human.
Nelson had never seen a woman move that way before and he wanted to see more of it — much more of it.
She wore the conventional dark jacket and trousers and at first he took it for granted that she was Chinese. Her hair was black enough, clustered around her shoulders as though she had brought part of the night with her into the lamplight. But it was soft wavy hair and the face it framed was the wrong color, a smooth, olive tan and the wrong shape.
Vaguely Nelson had a feeling that only recently he had somewhere seen an olive face like that, finely wrought and strong and just a little arrogant — only it had been a man's face.
Her great, grave dark eyes were looking up at him provocatively. Yet there was something oddly childlike about the innocence of her red mouth, the delicate tanned planes of her face.
''I am Nsharra, white lord," she said softly, her glance tilting to meet his eyes. "I have seen you in the village before the battle."
Nelson laughed. "I haven't seen you before. Nor that wolf-dog, either. I'd remember you both."
She came a step closer.
Through the alcoholic haze that fogged his mind Nelson saw her dark eyes studying him.
"You look tired and sad, lord," Nsharra murmured. "You are — lonely?"
Nelson's first impulse was to toss her a coin and be on his way. In his ten years in China he hadn't sunk so low as to meddle with village street-girls.
But this girl was different. It might be the Scotch that made her seem so, but her smooth face and slumbrous eyes had a beauty that held him.
"My hut is very near," she was saying, looking up at him with an oddly shy little smile.
"And why not?" Nelson said suddenly in English. "What difference does it make now?"
Nsharra understood his tone if not his words.
Her small hand on his arm guided him softly through the shadows.
The mud hut was on the fringe of the village. In the starlight Nelson saw the looming bulk of a great black stallion standing outside it.
The horse was fire-eyed, its ears alertly erect, yet it stood quietly and there was neither rope nor halter upon it.
"Yours?" Nelson said to her, and then laughed. "Good thing Nick Sloan hasn't seen him. He likes fine horses."
He was not completely drunk, not drunk at all, he told himself He knew quite well the incongruity of a village singsong girl owning a wolf-dog and a stallion but in his rosy, reckless mood he didn't pause to wonder or care.
The interior of the hut was a squalid cubicle that wavered out of darkness when the girl lit a candle. As she straightened, Nelson took her into his arms.
For just a moment, Nsharra struggled, then relaxed. But her lips remained cool and unmoved under his.
"I have wine," she murmured, a little breathlessly. "Let me—"
The rice wine was a pungent fire in his throat and Nelson knew he should drink no more of it. But it was too easy to sit here on the soft mat and watch Nsharra's delicate, grave face as her slim hands refilled his cup.
"You will come again to see me, tomorrow or the next night, white lord?" she murmured, as she handed him the cup.
"The name is Eric Nelson and I won't be back tomorrow night for I won't be in Yen Shi," he laughed. "So tonight is all there is."
Her dark eyes fixed on his face, suddenly intent. "Then you and your comrades leave at once with Shan Kar?"
"Shan Kar?" The name brought a flash of memory to Nelson. "Now I remember who you remind me of! You've got the same olive complexion, the same features and the same accent—"
He broke off, staring at her. "What do you know of Shan Kar anyway?"
Nsharra shrugged slim shoulders. "All the village knows that he is a stranger from the mountains and that he seeks to hire you and your comrades to go back to his land with him."
Eric Nelson could believe that, for he had had past experience with the swiftness of gossip in an Oriental town. His fogged mind was still baffled, though, by the thing that didn't explain — the queer similarity between Shan Kar and Nsharra, as though they belonged to the same race.
All that didn't matter. What mattered was that this was the last night for him, that the girl's tapering fingers were light against his cheek, her breath warm in his ear.
Nelson gulped his wine and looked up from it to see the wolf-dog crouched in the open doorway of the hut, watching him with fixed, luminous green eyes.
And the great head and fiery eyes of the big stallion were watching too from out in the darkness. There was something perched on the stallion's back, something winged and rustling.
"Will you tell those two beasts to go away?" Nelson said thickly to the girl. "I don't like them. They look as though they were listening to every word."
The girl looked at the wolf-dog and horse. She did not speak. But wolf and stallion melted back into the darkness.
"Hatha and Tark mean no harm," Nsharra murmured soothingly. "They are my friends."
Deep in Nelson's mind, something in her words plucked another hidden string of memory, something that set up vaguely unpleasant vibrations in his brain.
But he couldn't think of that nor of the two queer beasts out there in the dark with his arm around Nsharra's pliant body and his lips on her soft mouth.
"Tark, do not kill! You were to watch, not to kill yet!"
The memory crashed suddenly through his mind, the memory of where he had heard that name before.
The weird dream of alien, menacing thought-voices, the flying shadow in his room and the sound of wings in the night-memory of them ripped the alcoholic fog from Eric Nelson's mind.
His hands suddenly gripped the girl's slim shoulders with bruising force. "You said 'Tark!'" he rasped. "You said it before when I thought I was dreaming. You were talking somehow to that wolf!"
The caution and suspicion that had kept him alive for ten years in China's wars were all on the alert at this moment, dominating Nelson.
He glared at the girl. "You got me here for a reason. You know Shan Kar, you're of his race. Why are you spying on him?"
Nsharra looked back into his accusing eyes, with a little hurt look on her delicate face. She spoke softly.
She said, "Kill now, Tark!"
The wolf-dog was a dark thunderbolt that leaped in from the doorway and knocked Nelson sprawling as Nsharra jerked swiftly back.
Nelson made one abortive gesture toward his gun and then knew that, before he could draw it, his throat would be cut. He wrapped his arms around his own neck as he rolled with the wolf-dog's hairy weight on top of him.
He felt needle-sharp fangs rip his forearm. The most horrible part of the moment was that the wolf-dog sought his life in complete silence, without growl or snarl.
Then the great stallion screamed outside the hut and a gun roared. Nelson heard Nsharra's flying feet and silvery cry.
"Tark! Hatha — Ei! We go!"
"Nelson!" yelled Li Kin's startled voice.
Nelson became aware that the wolf-dog was no longer atop him. He scrambled to his feet, dazed and shaken.
The hut was empty. He stumbled to the door, and caromed into Li Kin. The little Chinese officer had his automatic in his hand and wore a stunned look in his spectacled eyes.
"I followed you, Nelson!" he babbled. "I saw you come to this hut with the girl but when I came near the stallion attacked me! I shot at it and missed."
"The girl? Where's the girl now?" Nelson cried. He was cold sober now and his daze was dissolving in red anger.
"She and the wolf burst out, knocked me over and fled!" Li Kin cried. "See, there they go!"
Nelson got a shadowy glimpse of a stallion and rider and a slinking wolf-shape racing westward down the dusty road in the uncertain starlight.
Over stallion, rider and wolf, moving west with them against the stars, flew a winged black soaring thing.
"There was something on the stallion's back when I came!" Li Kin exclaimed. "An eagle or other great bird — it's queer!"
"It's more than queer," rasped Eric Nelson. He gripped the slashed forearm that was beginning to throb and burn. "Come on — I want to see this man Shan Kar!"
Li Kin kept recurring to the beasts as they slogged hastily through dark dusty streets toward the inn.
"She spoke to them, as though they were people! She was like a witch, a mistress of kuei, with her familiars!"
"Will you forget those animals?" Nelson snapped.
He was angry and he was angry because he was a little afraid. He had been afraid before, many times, but not of something as uncanny as this, not of a girl and three beasts and a dream.
* * *
The dark courtyard of the inn echoed with the stamping and trampling of scores of hoofs. Shaggy little ponies were squealing and biting in protest as Nick Sloan and Lefty and Van Voss loaded the heavy packs from the arsenal onto them.
Nelson found Shan Kar in the corner of the courtyard, a dark, tense figure impatiently watching the hurried preparations.
"Just who is Nsharra?" Nelson asked him flatly.
Shan Kar turned like a goaded leopard. The light from the inn's window showed the narrowed gleam of the man's eyes.
"What do you know of Nsharra?" asked Shan Kar.
"She's one of your own people, isn't she?" Nelson pressed. "She comes from L'Lan too?"
Shan Kar's handsome face was taut and dark. "What do you know of Nsharra?" he repeated dangerously.
Eric Nelson knew then that he had failed in his attempt to surprise full explanation from the other.
Li Kin broke in excitedly. "A girl with a stallion and a wolf and an eagle! They would have killed Nelson if I had not interrupted! But they got away!"
Shan Kar, staring beyond them, spoke softly between his teeth. "Nsharra here — and Tark and Hatha and Ei too! Then they have followed me and watched me."
"Who is she? What does it mean?" Nelson demanded.
Shan Kar answered with brooding slowness. "She is daughter of Kree, Guardian of the Brotherhood — the enemies of my people!"
He added tightly, "And it means that the Brotherhood is striking at us even before we reach L'Lan. We must go swiftly if we are ever to reach the valley!"