I gave it up, and privately decided that I would make him and Dy-veece, and some of the other males, learn the rudiments of archery, whether they liked it or not.
We tramped on, and the Fearful Forest depressed us with its grim dark trees and lack of sunlight, until at last we spoke no more to each other, but traveled as silently as the two great dogwolves. And so it was that we came upon Halfspoor where he sat in a glade feeding on the body of a jackal-rat, and did not warn him of our coming until we stood face to face with him across some twenty paces of the rotting carpet of vegetation.
Halfspoor gazed at us, and we, paralyzed, gazed upon Halfspoor; and he gave a grunt and a bellow, and leaping to his hind feet he came charging down at us.
I sent one arrow into his chest before I turned to dash back down the trail. I had it in mind to get amongst the trees before I fought, for here there was nowhere to dodge, and dodging was my only defense against the giant brute. Dy-lee was fumbling at his side, and the dogwolves were leaping toward the knifetooth bear. I shouted to Dy-lee to seek cover, though I knew he would not understand the words. I saw a man in pelts of black and white moving furtively from the path some hundred feet behind us, and I knew that a guardian had been following us eastward. Then something took me across the shoulder blades with a slap like a tree falling, and I was hurled six times my own length into a patch of stabbing briers.
* * * *
Even as I hit I was scrambling sideways, intent on reaching the other side of the nearest tree; a hundred thorns were ripping my flesh, and my back felt as though it were half broken. My ears were throbbing, I supposed from the jolt of Halfspoor’s blow. I tore myself out of the briers, leaped with a pounce like a cave cat’s across an open space and took up a position of belligerent waiting behind a lichen-wrapped trunk.
Halfspoor, had he followed me up at once, could have slashed me apart before ever I got out of the clutch of the thorn bushes. He had stopped, however, on the spot where he had slapped me, and was hovering over Dy-lee making angry swipes at him. I thought for a moment that Dy-lee was dead or unconscious, for he was huddled down in a dark mass at the bear’s feet. The dogwolves were harrying Halfspoor, one snapping at his legs, the other leaping to get at his throat. I made a grab over my shoulder and discovered that the quiver was empty. My arrows had been scattered on the ground when I flew into the briers.
As the bear was not even looking my way, I ran into the open to get a shaft or two. I would have attacked him with my hatchet, but since the vital spots of his skull and neck were a good twelve feet off the ground, it would have been a futile and stupid gesture.
An arrow discovered, I drew back the cord and sank another shaft in the bear’s massive chest. Even as I shot I realized that something was singular indeed. Although Halfspoor towered over Dy-lee, who crouched unprotected on the earth, and though the bruin was cuffing in his direction, yet the blows were missing Dy-lee by several feet at the least. All that the bear need do was take one step forward on those gigantic pads and bend his back a trifle ... and there would be no more Dy-lee. But that step and that bend he did not seem able to accomplish! Like a fox caught in a trap, he swayed and screamed his fury, but did not touch my friend Dy-lee.
* * * *
It would take more than one arrow to slay the huge Knifetooth. Could he do the impossible?
* * * *
When my arrow struck, he turned toward me and gave a bawl of horrible anger. Even as I snatched up the only other arrow I could see and darted for my tree, I caught a glimpse of Dy-lee jumping to his feet, evidently unhurt. The dogwolves hampered Halfspoor, and I made the tree a second before the old devil reached it.
* * * *
He came round it after me, and I dodged about to keep it between us, taunting him loudly. This was a game at which I was past master. I could dive and scuttle all afternoon, if need be.
Then with horror I saw that Dy-lee was coming toward us. I bawled at him to go back—he would not know the words, but surely my frantic motions could not be misunderstood—and then in desperation stood my ground and shot my bolt at Halfspoor at a range of about five feet. It was the third one to flesh itself in the barrel of his chest, but I doubted that any of the three would prove mortal. Ribs and iron-hard muscles would stop them from penetrating too deeply.
Dropping like a stone, I then bounded straight between his charging legs; was struck glancingly by one hind paw and whirled over and over in the rotten humus. My hatchet found its way by old instinct into my hand as I rolled. Then I leaped to my toes and—collided with Dy-lee!
Memory of that instant is muddled. I know that I almost struck my friend down before I realized who he was. I saw Halfspoor in a kind of bloody haze, seeming to fill the world above us. Then Dy-lee put a hand to his mouth and the great bear fell back a pace, snarling and swatting the air. My head rang and I realized that there was blood in my eyes. I wiped them clear and lifted the hatchet as I backed away. The hairy man gripped my wrist and would not let me leave his side. I thought that he had gone mad, and tugged at him frantically. But he stood rock-firm, with one hand holding me steady and the other at his mouth.
All this took but a second or two, and then I ceased to struggle and only stared at our terrible ursine foe. Halfspoor stood just out of reach, and his actions were brainless, idiotic. He would slash at us viciously, missing us by a foot or so; slap at the side of his head with blows that would have split open a less solid skull; then back up a little, moan, bellow, gnash his tusks, make as if to charge at us—and beat his head again!
I glanced at Dy-lee, who seemed calm and detached. The glint of the bronze tube caught my eye. It was in his mouth and he was blowing into it. I thought of the wooden whistles we make for our children; but there came no noise out of this instrument. My head was, indeed, ringing and pounding from the fight; yet I knew I was not deaf, for Halfspoor was raising the dead with his uproar and I could hear that very well.
It was hardly the time for investigation of mysteries, however. Impatiently I pulled at Dy-lee’s arm. The bear would charge. Dy-lee grinned (at least the hair on his cheeks moved as though he had grinned), and throwing back his shoulders and inflating his lungs, appeared to blow a tremendous gust of wind through the metal tube. The dogwolves, who had been snapping at Halfspoor’s toes, writhed on their bellies and screeched piteously together, as if they had been disemboweled. Magic! The poor brutes seemed in their last agony.
* * * *
The knifetooth bear gave one frightful, indignant, stentorian yell, which echoed weirdly from every tree around the glade. He administered a final pummeling to the sides of his tormented head. And he turned and made off into the forest as if all the cave cats in the world were nipping at his tail!
At the same time my eardrums were assailed by the most piercing feel of noise that they had ever experienced. And yet there was no sound from the tube in Dy-lee’s mouth.
Now he removed it, stowed it in his secret pouch, laughed quietly to himself, and walking across the mold, bent down and began to gentle the groveling dogwolves. Slowly they responded, sitting up, nuzzling his hands, and whining as if ashamed of their recent performance.
Listening with one ear while rubbing the other, I heard old Halfspoor smashing his way through the woodland, complaining bitterly to himself in a loud voice. I could not blame him. If the stalwart dogwolves were reduced to impotence by the sorcery of Dy-lee’s tube, even bruin must be pardoned for running from it.
And then I heard a cry of pain and terror, a human sound that rose and wailed and died to a hideous moaning; and without hesitation I ran off on the bear’s trail. He had found someone else in his mad career, and that one had not escaped by magic!
It was easy to see where he had passed. Thickets were crushed, even small trees shattered off, and the bark of the giants shredded by angry clawings. Perhaps I went two hundred yards. Then I found the man, where Halfspoor had found him and snatched him up and flung him aside, broken and dying, into a heap of touch
wood.
It was the guardian Laq, and he was dying if ever I saw a man die, with a broken back and a leg that bent sideways in a way no leg was ever meant to bend. I knelt beside him and he opened his eyes and recognized me, and he spat feebly, for there was still hate in the man. I could do nothing for him, could not even straighten his limbs or ease his head, for motion would have slain him.
“Lie easy, Laq,” I said. “You must rest a while, and then I will help you home.”
“When I have rested, I will slay you, Ahmusk the hunter,” said he with a curse. His hand moved feebly, and I saw he wished to pull the bow closer, the bow that he had stolen and practiced with until he thought he was skilled enough to murder me. I put it into his fingers, noticing without much surprise that it was one which I had made and believed I had lost somewhere. I gave him one of the arrows from his quiver, too, and that was a mistake, for he stared sharply at me with his filming dark eyes. “You think I am crippled,” he said huskily, “but I will show you when I have rested, Ahmusk. Lora will never come to your platform and your mating furs.”
* * * *
I said nothing, for one cannot grow angry with a dying man, and there was no kind word that my tongue could lay hold on; and so presently he began to talk in a quiet, sane voice.
“Of course I cannot let you live. You braved the land of the shaggy people, and made friends with them; and you have a knowledge which must never be given to our tribes. Men must have something to fear. It keeps them decent.”
I do not know, even yet, whether he believed what he said; and I have often pondered on it. Perhaps he had made himself believe it, for the peace of his soul.
“The legend of The Nameless goes on,” he said, the bright froth dripping from his lips. “Ahmusk dies.... My father was a guardian. He preached to me that some dreadful calamity would occur if we allowed the two races to come together. All the guardians were taught that. It was dinned into them from their birth. Only the intelligent ones saw what that calamity would be. Our craft would lose its privilege, its honor, its reason for being.”
It was the same thought I had held. The guardians fattened on adulation, and if that was taken from them, there would be nothing left, for they were so accustomed to it that they could not conceive becoming as other men.
“It does no harm to tell you these things, Ahmusk, for you will shortly die. Yes ... you understand, I saw very early that the basic ideas of my craft were wrong, all wrong. There was no harm in letting you know of the shaggy people, for they are as innocent and affectionate as you; the harm lay in the breaking-up of our guild, and the....” He was silent for so long that I thought he had lapsed into insensibility, but after a while he repeated what he had said about mankind needing something to fear. He used the same words, as though it were an excuse he had learnt by rote long ago.
“That is an untruth,” I said. “Fear is evil, fear of anything is all wrong. It is wickedness, Laq.”
* * * *
He looked up at me, and I think the naked truth came to his lips then, and would not be denied; for he said, with a horrid gasp, “Ah, but the reverence given us, Bear-throat! This is not lightly to be lost. Think of it! In all the world we alone are above mankind. A hunter is the same as a singer, the night watcher gains no more thanks, no more prerogatives than the weaver of garlands. Only the guardian walks clothed in honor and mystic glory! Do you think I can let you smash us to the level of common clay, after so many generations of being exalted?”
He stopped again, and I thought of the first of his breed, those early guardians who must have arisen after the terrible slaughters, when all was hatred and terror and confusion. Did they then invent the legend of The Nameless, to capitalize on the mutual fear of the two peoples? Did they, perhaps, force the hairy folk into the wastes and caves, looking ahead to a reign of vicious knowledge over ignorance? And were all their descendants as cynical and utterly selfish as this Laq?
“What of your brothers?” I asked him. “Do they know that no true harm would come if the people knew the truth of The Nameless?”
He laughed, horribly. “My fellow guardians are in the main sublimely unaware of their futility,” he said. “The dogmatic teachings of bigoted fathers have made unthinking sons.... You understand, Ahmusk, that I will slay you when I have rested.”
“Yes, Laq,” I said, as he lay dying.
“Ah, but how I would love to see their bubble of self-importance pricked!” he muttered. Evidently he felt no kinship with them, but sneered at them and us alike. “How they would flounder if the facts were forced upon them!”
I heard Dy-lee come up behind us, and the dogwolves snuffled at my shoulders. Laq raised himself with a superhuman effort and cried, “The bear! The knifetooth bear! Ahmusk, the bear comes! My whistle ... my whistle! I cannot find my whistle ...” and so died, his fingers clutching weakly at the broken bow that he had stolen so long ago, when he first plotted to kill me for the sake of Lora.
* * * *
I took the arrows from his quiver, and covered Laq with branches and dead leaves, for I had no strength to bury him. Returning to the glade, we managed to find the three arrows I had lost in the fight; then we turned our faces eastward once more.
We crossed the Crimson Brook and the Blue, and then at last we began to talk with our signs and our halting phrases.
“What is the tube?” I asked Dy-lee. “How did it drive off Halfspoor?”
As well as he could, he showed me. It was a whistle, of a sort, and though we men could not hear its note, he explained that the animals could. A low sound, made by barely breathing into it, brought the dogwolves barking happily to our sides; but a stronger puff caused them to howl dolefully. I had seen what a really powerful blast on it could do to even a knifetooth bear.
“And the guardians have these whistles?” I asked him, and he answered, Yes, they did, though Laq must have lost his. That was why they needed no weapons when they strode the Fearful Forest. A man would not have to slay a carnivore when he could chase it away in fright, with its ears splitting.
And yet, all I sensed when Dy-lee blew the thing was a tingling of the eardrums. Strange and new! That an animal could hear a sound which a man could not!
But still I thought a bow and a few good arrows were not to be sneered at, and resolved again to teach my friends their use, in preparation for the time, even though it be hundreds of years hence, when all the whistles shall be lost.
I pictured Halfspoor in my mind, and how he had stood off from Dy-lee and swung blows at the air when the whistle blew. I saw him run again, cuffing his own ears to beat away the tearing, bone-rending sound of the to-me-silent tube. What a host of miracles I had to tell to Lora!
We crossed the Gray Brook and came to Sunset Fields, and the sun was less than an hour from its setting in the west. There was a figure running toward us, now in the waning sunlight, now in the dappling shade of the tree ferns. I cried out joyfully, for it was my Lora.
She neared us, and seeing Dy-lee and the dogwolves, cried out with horror. “Ahmusk! Fly, or they will slay you!”
“Come here, little fearful one,” I said, “and I will open your mind to a thousand new things!”
* * * *
She stood there, regarding me, and the fear went out of her eyes, to be replaced by a vast relief. “Then this creature will not harm you?”
“Nor you either. This is my friend Dy-lee,” I told her, and taking her hand, put it into his. He shook it, and she smiled uncertainly. “Ahmusk—the dogwolves?”
I patted the biggest on the head. Oh, but that was my hour! “I have made them gentle as fawns,” I said, stretching the facts somewhat.
Then she knew that all was well, and she leaped into my arms and kissed me until I thought she would never be done; and yet truly I was sorry when she stopped. “What has happened, Bear-throat? Where have you been for two days, and who is this, and how does it come that the dogwolves do not bite, and why are you all blood-smeared, and—”
&n
bsp; “Lora, Lora,” I said, “I have a thousand things to tell you, but we can never begin on them if you must chatter endlessly—”
“And Halfspoor, did you find his track, and where will he spend the night, and—”
“Lora!” I shouted, enfolding her in a fierce embrace. “Listen to me, and I shall tell you! Great Halfspoor ranges the Fearful Forest, where I will meet him again one day. This is Dy-lee—”
“And what is Dy-lee?” she asked, her voice rather muffled against my chest.
I gave up. “I will tell you one thing,” I said, “and then I will let you babble until you run out of queries. I am like a man who has feared lightning all his life, and has now been struck; and I not only survive, but have found it a pleasant experience—”
“Where were you hit by lightning? Where did you get all the thorn scratches?” she asked.
Dy-lee put his hand on my shoulder and said, pointing to Lora, “Zheena! Zheena!”
By which I think he meant to say that females are all alike, and so, patting my girl on her shining head, I grinned across at him and replied, “How right you are, Dy-lee, how very right you are!”
“What did he say?” asked Lora.
“He said that there is nothing in all the fine green world like a woman.”
“Well!” said she, “you’ve learnt a little wisdom in your traveling, I must say!”
“A little,” said I, “a little.”
And so we journeyed homeward to the glen and our people, we three good new companions, and the dogwolves went before us and gamboled with pleasure in the soft grass of the fields.
* * * *
That night Dy-lee and I sat together on my platform, in the tawny-cream light of a full autumn moon. Much had been told that evening, at a council of all our glen-folk; much had been speculated, much had been argued over. Some men had been shocked, some elated, some hurt—those last were the guardians, most of whom could not believe my tale until I showed them Dy-lee and repeated what Laq had said as he lay dying. My shaggy comrade had dyed a picture for the folk on a big rock, and astonished them all beyond measure. Our finest singers had performed for him, and now he knew that Bear-throat was not such a marvelous being after all.
The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard Page 17