The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard

by Geoff St. Reynard

  “Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly, her great eyes going wide again. “I had forgotten to tell you. I was asleep when you returned last night.”

  “I trailed a wounded deer far down the Blue Brook, and caught him late. What had you forgotten, sleek Lora?”

  “The guardian Laq asked me to be his mate. It was in the afternoon, and he asked me in the presence of my father. When I reminded him that you were to be my mate, he asked my father for me.”

  * * * *

  I was shocked, then angered above any anger I had ever known. “He asked you, and then your father!” I roared. “What had your father to do with it?”

  “Laq says that in the far olden times it was the custom to ask a woman’s parents. My father was enraged and told him that we were not living in the far olden times. Laq said it was a pity we were not, as then the people had respect for their guardians. And my father, fuming and rumbling until I thought he would begin to give off sparks like Ruddy Mountain, told Laq that even a guardian had no right to ask for the promised mate of another man. Laq then departed, saying he would ask me again after Halfspoor had killed you, dear Bear-throat. Halfspoor again! His cruel words had slipped my mind until I spoke them now. Must you go looking for Halfspoor?”

  “I must.” Taking my bow from my shoulder, I tested it from habit, and counted the arrows in my quiver to ascertain that there were fourteen of them, for fourteen arrows are accounted lucky for a day’s hunt. “I do not understand Laq,” I told her. “He has broken two of the strongest customs. To ask you when you are promised ... and then to ask your father for you, as though you were a bone hammer or a sleeping fur! Laq must be losing his wits.”

  “Perhaps he was drunk on tree fern juice.” She dismissed Laq and all his works with a shrug. “The sun has lifted over the hills, Bear-throat. If Halfspoor is so much more attractive than I am, why then go to him, young hunter with blind eyes.”

  I patted her smooth cheek. “Young, but not blind. Did I not choose the prettiest girl of all our folk, when we two were scarcely older than sucklings?” And with this compliment, which made her preen, I left her and walked swiftly down the glen toward Sunset Fields.

  * * * *

  By the time I had crossed Sunset Fields and come to the Gray Brook, I had forgotten Laq and pushed Lora to the back of my mind. The day was perfect. Every bird in the world was making merry on his twig, every small animal had left his burrow to romp drunkenly through the underbrush, intoxicated with the bright keen air of morning. I passed a doe with her fawn, trotting happily toward the water; and I did not bring her down, though she would have been easy prey and good eating, for we shared a joy that made us sib to one another.

  Still, for me the pleasure of autumn was now only a background against which my thoughts of Halfspoor the bear marched in orderly fashion while I reviewed them one by one. I recalled his slayings of men, his occasional and very skillful stalking of the night watchers in their trees at either end of our valley. I remembered how on this morning he would be found asleep in his old lair under the two fallen petrified tree ferns downstream near the Blue Brook, while on that morning he would be gnawing the bones of bison or cave cat or perhaps even of jackal-rat (for he was a dirty feeder, was Halfspoor), far up the Crimson. I visualized his footprint, unique among knifetooth bears, measuring as long as my arm from wrist to shoulder, and with three outer toes gone from the right hind pug. As I waded through the Gray Brook’s chilled waters I could almost imagine that I saw the maimed sign of his pad on the silver strand before me. “How well I know that track!” I exclaimed to myself, with an egotistic pride in my craft; and then I came out of the waters to find that, far from so clearly imagining it in all its enormous crippled particulars, I had actually been looking at the veritable track of Halfspoor himself. I was exultant and humiliated at the same time.

  Halting above it, I tested my bow once more, and counted the fourteen bone-pointed arrows in their quiver that I had made from the paw and forearm pelt of another knifetooth bear, my lucky quiver with the claws still hanging from its tip. The metal knife was in its sheath at my hip, the bone hatchet dangled from a sling handy to my left hand. I took a deep breath and began to follow the great mutilated prints overland toward the second of the three streams.

  Soon I had crossed the Blue and was approaching the Crimson Brook. Halfspoor was perhaps two hours ahead of me. Where he had trodden in sand, the water had filled his track, and where he had ambled heavily across grassy spaces, the blades had sprung nearly to uprightness again. He was traveling slowly, inspecting logs and coverts, probably talking to himself in the gruff complaining whine of his breed. Here and there he had lingered a moment or two, and in these places I could often catch a whiff of his rank ursine odor.

  * * * *

  At first I had no desire to catch up with Halfspoor. Almost would I rather have come face to face with one of The Nameless! No hunter is a match for a full-grown knifetooth bear, standing as he does more than twice as tall as a man, with an unbelievable bulk that must outweigh twenty-five humans, every ounce of which is full of fight and choler and wickedness. His twin saber-tusks jut down in great deadly arcs, yellow and sharp and long as a hunting arrow. His head is larger than that of any animal, even than that of the cave cat who lives to the north and can be heard yowling a full day’s journey away. When a knifetooth bear opens his maw it is like staring into a huge fang-rimmed scarlet well. His paws are swift gargantuan weapons that can enfold and crush the largest stag. Oh, a terrible beast is old knifetooth! And Halfspoor was the biggest, the angriest, the wisest and most hateful of his tribe.

  I tracked him but did not hurry overmuch; when I had decided where he would spend the night, I would return to the glen, and persuade a dozen of our hunters to accompany me to find him. If he lay over a kill, stupid and drowsy with eating, we would attack him. Some of us might die, but Halfspoor also would die ... if we were lucky. By right of my trailing I would then lay claim to his pelt, and from it make a mating fur for Lora. And the watchers would feel happier as they sat the nights through in their trees at the ends of the valley, because Halfspoor would never trouble them again.

  On this I thought as I crossed the Crimson Brook, and saw the first line of trees rising from gray tangled thickets that marked the beginning of the Fearful Forest. Halfspoor’s pugmarks went straight toward them. And it was then that I began to form my daring plan. The bear was obviously going to go to ground somewhere in the woodland, and no hunter would follow me into that dreadful place after sundown.

  Why not follow him and kill him myself?

  Of all the folk, I alone had killed a knifetooth bear. Truly he had been but partially grown, and I had not deliberately stalked him to kill; no, I had blundered on him and it had been slay or be slain. But in that fight I had learnt much of a knifetooth’s tactics, blind spots and weaknesses. His arm was now my quiver, his hide my sleeping rug. Halfspoor was only twice his size, at most, and surely the best hunter of the glen was a match for him? I who could loose four arrows and notch a fifth before the first struck its mark a hundred paces off—why should old tribal fears and the experiences of lesser men keep me from trying my hand at conquering this maimed brute?

  I went into the dank dimness of the Fearful Forest.

  * * * *

  There is something I do not like about a deep tangled forest, and that is the lack of sunshine. The light is green and cool, and at intervals you will see a thin beautiful shaft of yellow spearing down from an opening far above; but unless you come to a glade there is no chance of catching a glimpse of the sun in its glory riding the blue fleece-clouded sky, and without the sun I feel lonely and somehow half-lost. It is why I would make an indifferent watcher, for they must wake by night and sleep by day. I am a sun-worshipper of the first order. I need its blazing all about me in order to be wholly myself.

  Of all woodlands, the least lovely is the Fearful Forest. As I have said, its trees are spaced evenly as though they had been planted by someone in
the far olden times. Their wide leaves are dark blue-green with emerald veins running beneath the surface. Their boles are thick and have rough hard bark, unlike the smooth-skinned tree ferns of Sunset Fields. Between their roots orange and black mushrooms and strange pale sick-looking fungi lurk, and crawling upward toward the invisible sun go lichens of every hue from mauve to sanguine. Where the branches begin there is a riot of parasitical growths, thick vines and murderous mistletoe, climbing plants that bear huge trumpets of orchids, every sort of disagreeable creeper that lives on the energy of its stronger brethren. All this vile vegetation makes an almost impenetrable roof over the whole Fearful Forest. On the ground between the trees lie heaps of long-decayed touchwood, squat thickets of brier, lightning-blasted limbs only beginning to crumble, and a deep soft carpet of dead things, from the half-dissolved flora of which peer white rib cases and gleaming, grinning skulls. The Fearful Forest reeks of death, of murdered animals and plants, of life that is not healthy nor productive of anything save more death.

  There are trails through the depths of this dismal woodland, paths made by bears or stags or the giant dogwolves that range in packs of a hundred. Smaller aisles are made by jackal-rats and the other lesser animals. Halfspoor was following a deep trench of a trail that ran almost straight toward the opposite side of the forest.

  * * * *

  For a long while I followed this pathway, glancing at the ground now and again to be sure the knifetooth bear had not turned off; and my mind was oppressed against my will by thoughts of horror, generated, doubtless, in the dreary sunless vistas about me. Indeed, I would have gone back had it not been for the bold and idiotic plan I had conceived, of slaying Halfspoor single-handed. Several times a jackal-rat crossed my road, snarling at me, its scurfy brown hackles lifted. The third such loathsome beast I skewered with an arrow out of sheer dislike, retrieving my shaft before I passed on.

  Suddenly I halted. Before me on a patch of mold lay the print of the bear, and within its great outline was a second track, that of a man. Another human was following Halfspoor! I was astonished. I knew where every hunter of the glen-folk ranged today, and none should be near the Fearful Forest. Kneeling, I stared closely at the footmark. I knew it well, as I knew the spoor of every man in this region. Laq the guardian was before me in the woodland.

  Laq! He who had so oddly broken two of the oldest customs—say rather immutable laws—of humanity. We are supposed to love one another equally, and for the most part we do; reserving, as I have said, a special love for our mates and a heightened reverence for our guardians. But I could not feel any very powerful affection for the guardian Laq that day. I was disgruntled and wrathful to find that he was somewhere ahead.

  Certainly he had a perfect right to be in the Fearful Forest. The guardians passed this way with some frequency, and no hunter or singer or watcher of the night envied them their solitary journeys ... nor their mysterious and appalling duties at their destination!

  For the guardians were the only barrier, as we all had been told from childhood, that stood between mankind and The Nameless. The calling was hereditary, limited to certain families. Dedicated at birth to their lifelong task, the guardians learned their secrets from their fathers, and imparted not a syllable of them to anyone outside the craft so long as they lived. It was thought that perhaps only those of select blood lines had minds capable of holding these secrets without going insane; it was thought—oh, many many things were thought of the guardians! Generally aloof, wrapped in the cloak of esoteric knowledge, they lived among us as superior beings, complex where we were simple, sober where we were light-hearted, supremely important where any one of us could be replaced by a score of others.

  Over The Nameless the guardians had power, and kept them confined to their stark and blighted-seeming country beyond the Fearful Forest. I never knew a man so daring or so rash as to ask any sort of impertinent question of a guardian, whether about his work or his cabalistic secrets or his terrible charges. The less said or even thought of The Nameless, the better.

  So the guardians moved between the glens and the jagged cliffs, revered by men and shunned by beasts of prey, accepting food and comforts and at times a mate from our ranks; the sole protection of humanity from their age-old enemies....

  The Nameless!

  * * * *

  Suddenly I realized I was approaching the limits of the Fearful Forest. I peered keenly at the great mutilated tracks in the mold. Yes, it was still Halfspoor I followed, and here was Laq’s mark too.

  I think it was then that I began to feel fear, when I knew that I should have to skirt the country of The Nameless. It never entered my head that Halfspoor would go straight on across the blackened plain; surely not even a bear would pass too near the forbidden lands. But he was evidently going to have a distant look at them, and so perforce I must have one likewise.

  Soon the trees thinned a little, and daylight crept toward me from between their boles. Then in a few moments I stood on the edge of the woodland. I began to sing to myself in a tuneless mumble. There was very little joy in me, and I felt I would be happier with some man-made noise, even such noises as came from my unskilled throat.

  One sweeping glance I gave the plain before me. There were the slimy pools with their odious tufts of weeds and strings of water vines emerging like sentient things of evil. There were the undulating bare stretches of black dead soil from which nothing sprouted. And beyond, strange cragged rocks and cairns upreared haphazardly in profusion for many thousands of paces, until at last the raw red cliffs leaped up to cry a halt to them and all this barren, frightful country ... beyond the cliffs, what man knew what might be?

  One glance, and then I flung myself into a pile of touchwood, scattering the punk in blinding, billowing clouds and bruising my shoulder on a hidden stump. As I had heard the thin twang of a bowstring, I now heard the quick heavy crump of an arrow striking a tree, just before my face was buried in the crumbling tinder. I rolled over behind a log, eyes full of the dry powdery stuff and nostrils twitching against the longing to sneeze. My own bow was in my hand and an arrow nocked before I rubbed my vision clear; then I peered cautiously over the log in the direction whence the shaft had come.

  * * * *

  Nothing moved, so presently I bounced to my feet and went over to the right to inspect the arrow, which had buried itself two finger-lengths in the bark. I broke it off and stared at the feathers and green-dyed butt. It was one I had made myself.

  Standing without movement, I listened hard, and at last heard someone’s careless foot crack a twig in the distance. Then I allowed myself the luxury of an ear-shattering sneeze.

  One of our own glen-folk had shot at me. There was no escaping that fact. It might have been anyone save a hunter, for all of us made our own weapons, giving the surplus to be divided among the less adroit men of the other callings.

  In the split second between the string’s song and the thunk of the arrow, it had flashed into my mind that one of The Nameless was shooting at me. For of course no one knew exactly what they did, just how they injured men, or even what they looked like; they might be ogres with twelve arms and seven heads, carrying half-a-dozen bows....

  But this was an arrow of my making. That meant that the shot had been a warning to return to a safer place, an admonition that I was wandering too far, sent dramatically by one of the patrolling guardians.

  Yet why had he not merely stepped up and warned me? All the guardians knew me well. They knew I would be tractable to any suggestion. Why had he shot and fled?

  So conditioned is our race to amity and all-embracing brotherly love, so incredible is the thought of violence between men, that it took quite five minutes of cogitation before the terrible idea occurred to me: that it might have been Laq, a jealous and hate-filled Laq, shooting not to warn, but to murder.

  I remembered the legend of the bones of Sunset Fields, and a sickness took me in the pit of the stomach for a while. Then I put the grotesque thought from me
, and went to look for Halfspoor’s trail once more.

  * * * *

  It ran clear and straight out across the black plain; I rubbed my chin and hesitated briefly. Then, nocking an arrow, I strode out and away from the edge of the Fearful Forest. My skin began to crawl, crawl with dread, but with scowling eyes I traced the prints before me, and there was no possibility in my mind of turning back now. Remembrance of the shaft in the tree was angering me more with every step. Warning or murder weapon, its insolent caveat was the final stimulation I had needed to force my frightened body onward.

  If you are not a hunter, perhaps you will not understand the intense and passionate ascendancy that a stalk may gain over a man’s will. He begins in a spirit of sport, it may be, thinking, “I shall pit my wits against this stag—or bison, or cave cat—and see if I can out-think him.” Then after so long he begins to feel feverish about the temples, his hands sweat, his breath comes shorter; and suddenly it is not an idle hour’s sport, but a whole life he is living in these moments, a veritable microcosm of existence, and the quarry is not simply a great dangerous animal, but all foemen, all desirable goals, everything he wants for himself and in the same moment everything he has fought and will fight forever. I cannot make it plainer. It is just this: the longer the hunting, the more acute grows the urgency to come up with and slay this fleeing creature, whether it be jackal-rat or eagle or two-ton knifetooth bear. If the hunter be a real man, he will not cease from pursuit while there is wind in his lungs and a modicum of strength in his hands.

  Even though the game lead him into such a place as the country of The Nameless, from which, as we all have been told from infancy, there is no escape, your true hunter cannot stand and let it go. I had been making pictures in my head for half a day’s spooring, of what I should do to this great ursine brute when I caught him; I was entirely incapable of returning empty-handed. I think that even without the impetus of that furtive skulker with the arrow, I would have gone on. As it was ... I quickened my pace.