The Dancers of Noyo Read Online Free Page B

"Well—" He seemed perplexed, rubbing his bearded chin and looking at me doubtfully while the afternoon shore breeze blew around us and whipped our pants around our legs.
     
                  "Go on, go on," I said. I made a dismissing gesture with my bow. "Get going. And mind you take good care of my bike. Or I'll skin you alive after I get back."
     
                  He grinned suddenly. "OK, Bright Moon. I'll tell the Dancer that you're really going through with it. Good luck. I hope you see the Grail, unh, sunbasket." He wheeled my bike around and glided swiftly off.
     
                  I resumed my plodding—BL was right in characterizing it as flat-footed—along the highway. I was tireder than ever, and now that I had been made to notice it, I kept hearing the music . It seemed to slip in and out of my mind, beautiful and distant, not like the sound of any instruments I knew. Then suddenly it was gone, and I could never pick it up again.
     
                  I decided that if I had something to eat I might feel a little more alert. The highway at that point was close to a tiny sandy beach, lying between two rocky outcroppings. I worked my way through the white fence and clambered down to the water. It was pleasant to sit on the sand, eating pemmican and watching the sea birds. The beach looked as if it might harbor a few clams, but it was the wrong time of year for clams even if I'd wanted to dig for them.
     
                  The pemmican was strictly a synthetic product. The California Indians seem never to have had it; pemmican was a Plains Indian invention. The person who had made my batch of the stuff had mixed raisins, deer suet, dried deer meat and a good deal of ground-up pepper grass seeds. I suppose the peppergrass seeds were put in to give body. The result wasn't bad, really, but the raisins were a mistake. Either that, or the deer meat should have been dried longer. There was a mildewed taste to the stuff.
     
                  While I was eating, I got the bunch of passes out of my pants pocket and looked at it. It consisted of five or six thin slips of wood, about four inches long and less than an inch across, strung on a strip of leather through a hole bored in one end of the wood. Various notches and grooves had been cut in the flat of the wood. These marks were supposed, to indicate to the Dancers of the various tribes I would encounter during up journey that I was a genuine Pilgrim, entitled to safe conduct and even some hospitality. The whole idea of passes struck me as silly. I could simply have told the tribesmen I met who I was and what I wanted. We weren't at war with each other.
     
                  I put the passes in my pocket and stood up to go. I was beginning to feel a certain expectation, not altogether pleasant, but interested, for what lay before me. What I had told B. Love was not wholly false; I was looking forward to the journey. After all, what had happened to Julian could probably happen to me. I was on the edge of an experience.
     
                  I went back up to the road. I felt less tired than earlier. The break for food had done me good. I jogged along almost happily for a while, though I still felt that I was making remarkably poor time with my walking. I was wondering how far I was from Caspar when something made me look up. There was Brotherly, still on my motorbike, gliding slowly and silently along the height above me. There was no mistaking his jutting bushy beard.
     
                  "Come down here!" I bawled. I didn't think of my bow; I was too angry. I felt I could have climbed up the slope after him and pulled him off the bike all in one motion.
     
                  I don't know what he thought, but after a moment he came sliding down the slope with a great rattling of tawny rocks and loose shale. The slope was pretty steep, and it seemed a fifty-fifty