Free Children of the Gates by Andre Norton Page B

others running loose, herded along by the same riders. Behind them crawled an object so totally beyond his experience that he could not put name to it. On a platform to which had been hitched a massive team—if you could refer to some twenty straining animals as a “team”—was a domed construction. The vehicle was awkward, yet it did cover ground, a guard of horsemen around it reining in their restive mounts to keep pace with the lumbering wagon.
    The band had turned into the road, avoiding the walled fields which would be an obstruction it could not hope to overcome. Nick was thankful the whole caravan was heading away. He marked the bows and lances that equipped the horsemen, who presented so barbaric a sight he could not believe they would make comfortable fellow travelers.
    “Mongols.” Lady Diana lay shoulder to shoulder with him. “True Mongols—a clan or family perhaps.”
    “You mean,” Nick demanded, “the people of Genghis Khan— here? ”
    The stern wheeler had been a shock. But a Mongol party was almost as severe a dislocation of logic as the strange animals of the wood. And they had not the awesome feeling of the forest to cloak them with the air of being where they belonged.
    “That is a yurt—one of their traveling houses,” Lady Diana continued.
    He glanced around. Her weatherbeaten, strong-featured face was alive with interest.
    “Here the past comes alive.” She seemed to be talking to herself. “Perhaps those warriors down there really did ride with the Great Khan. If we could talk to them—”
    “Get a lance through us if we tried it,” Crocker replied. “If I remember rightly they had a talent as bowmen, too.”
    “They were good enough,” Lady Diana agreed, “to wipe out half the chivalry of Europe. And they could have mastered the whole continent if they had pressed on.”
    “I’d rather,” Nick commented, “see the last of them now.”
    But they had to lie in their hastily found hiding places (which perhaps would be no shelter at all should one of the horsemen choose to come scouting) for some time until the Mongols passed out of sight. How many more remnants of the past had been caught here?
    “Those fields, the road—” Nick strained to see how far he could trace that highway. “Who built those?”
    “Who knows?” Crocker answered. “There are a lot of such places. We’ve seen a complete castle. And there are the cities of the People.”
    “Cities?” Nick remembered mention of those before. “The ones the flyers bomb?”
    “Not bomb.” Crocker sounded exasperated. “They fly over and hover and shoot rays down. Not that that seems to accomplish anything. But it’s not bombing as we know it. I can testify to that.”
    “The cities,” Lady Diana mused, “they are different. Our own cities sprawl. You ride for miles through gradually thickening masses of little box houses swallowing up the country, you see less and less open. These cities are not like that at all, they have no environs, no suburbs, they are just there—in the open.”
    “All towers,” murmured Crocker, “and such colors as you wouldn’t think people could use in buildings. No smoke—all light and color. But if Hadlett’s right—they’re traps. And traps can be attractive—we’re in no mind to prove that.”
    “Traps?”
    “We believe,” Lady Diana explained, “that the Herald comes from one. And that can be the source of energy or whatever it is that draws us—all of us—from our own world. Whatever governs our coming has been going on for a long time.”
    “We saw a Roman cohort. If that wasn’t one of their dream spinnings,” Crocker said. “You can’t be sure of what is real and what isn’t, not here with the People around.”
    Stroud rose to his feet, and the rest came out of hiding. They used what cover was available to cross the road where the ruts left by the yurt and the hoofprints were deep set, coming into the fields. At the edge of a small copse they laid