by Robert Adams
"These men—the folk of the girl's sire, that is— have not been here long, not as we measure time. They arrived perhaps four centuries ago, maybe less. Before that, they dwelt on some island in this sea—a fairly large island, it was, though apparently not so large as is ours and differently shaped—they had dwelt there for a few centuries, too, interbreeding with the humans they had found there."
"From whence did they first arrive upon that island," asked Ehrah, "and have you discovered when, elder brother?"
He frowned. "I have no precise answers to either question, sister-mine; the sleeping minds I and Mikos have entered simply lack the training and discipline to properly chronicle racial memory. Only something less than a third of all the folk we have entered and examined have enough hybrid traits to make it worthwhile to examine them further, train their minds and allow them to breed into purer hybrid stock."
"But what, then, of Oo-roh-bah, oh wisest of brothers?" Seos demanded with something less than respect.
The red-haired man took no umbrage, just answering, "Yes, hers is a truly exceptional mind, but only two of all her siblings are so gifted and even her sire, while well worth bringing to our island, is less gifted with hybrid traits than is she. By far the most worthy we have encountered in all that settlement are a young herdsman and a middle-aged flintknapper. It has been from out their slumbrous minds that we have gleaned the most of the history of the hybrid-humans who founded this settlement and the others on this plain."
"O Mighty One," said Oo-roh-bah, with abashed hesitation, "may this insignificant female speak?"
Smiling, Gabrios beamed, "Not aloud, my child; communicate as you have been taught, with your mind as do we."
She did, beaming: "Gneeos Stone-shaper is known in every tribe and settlement. Even those in places beyond, who are not really people, send things of value with which to obtain specimens of his craftsmanship. He has fashioned cunning tools the like .of which no one had ever before seen or even imagined, and he wastes so little stone in useless chips
that he can make twice again as many useful things from a pebble of good stone as can any other man within memory. But he is a most secretive man, too. He often does his work alone, apart from even his family, hidden away in his work-hut, saying that his secrets are his and his alone. My sire does not like such behavior, but he also appreciates the value of Gneeos Stone-shaper and the things he creates, so says nothing himself and calls down any who do/'
Both Gabrios and Mikos chuckled aloud, and Gabrios beamed, "The man is canny. Seos, he has somehow self-taught his mind to shape stone as we do—with waves of varying intensities of mental force which set up vibrations within the target rock itself. Oh, yes, he is also quite adept, quite artistic in producing blades and flakes in the old-fashioned human way of painful, laborious chipping and pressure-flaking and touching up, and he does only this when under observation, that or grinding. But he uses the quicker, simpler, easier skills in private, being more of mind to be respected as an artist-craftsman than feared as a wizard, another sign of his quick hybrid mind.
"We thank you for contributing information, child," Gabrios addressed Oo-roh-bah, with sincerity, "but Mikos and I already know him better than he knows himself. The man possesses talents that he never has even suspected. Like you, yourself, what meets the eye of him does not look very much like one of us, but his mind is almost pure hybrid."
To Seos and Ehrah, Gabrios beamed, "Now, for all it's seeming size, usable land on our island is definitely finite. A sizable population of fast-breeding
humans would find it untenable for a comfortable standard of living within very few of their generations. Therefore, our father has ordered that only the very purest available hybrid stock be brought there, and Mikos and I have selected those who will be borne back westward.
"In the interests of saving both time and effort, as well as sparing the emotions of the pitiful, primitive, easily frightened humans, we are not going to make the sort of grand entrance among them of which you two are so fond: no sudden descent from the sky or the like, no riding up the river standing atop the back of water-dragon. No, you three will simply walk into the settlement with us, the girl will be reunited with her sire, and then we all will talk with him, eat, drink, demonstrate to him our common kinship with him, our shared heritage. Understood, Seos, Ehrah? It all will be done calmly, rationally, and will include no theatrics, no spurts of flames from the fingertips, no objects miraculously floating on air, no sudden transformations into bestial or half-bestial shapes, hear me and heed me, younger brother and younger sister. You must grow up, must mature, and better you do such the sooner than the later.
"Knowing humans and their ways, on one day soon after their lost child's return to them, they will have' a feast for us and all others in their settlement. In the immediate wake of that feast, when every human is already sated and drowsy, they will fall asleep, all at once. There are enough of us here to do that by mind-power. While they are sleeping, we will float into the settlement enough of the their fishing craft to hold all those we have selected. The
craft then will be lifted and guided by us through the skies to the island/'
"And what of the others, those who will remain asleep in the settlement?" asked Ehrah. "What will they think and do, elder brother?"
Gabrios shrugged. "Oh, belike they'll think up some sort of supernatural tale to cover the incident, explain it to the coming generations. Gods stole them all away, or evil demons or some of the hairy near-humans who still live in mountains and wastes. Humans may lack our minds, but they do own vivid imaginations, some of them; they'll think up something, never you fear."
Mikos now put in his own beaming, saying, "For that very reason, brothers and sisters, we are going to have to exercise caution, practice wiles, when we explore the other settlements situated upon this plain, for can we find even half as many worthwhile minds in each of them, our sire's dream of joining and rebreeding our blessed race to true purity may even come to pass while still we five live. And can we do this, perhaps one of the Elder Ones will then come to five among us, as in times of yore they did in the Good Islands from which came our forebears."
Fitz wakened to light, a narrow shaft of bright light from the risen sun somehow filtering through all of the foliage to lance directly between some of the limbs and branches and fully bathe his face. He had but barely unzipped the bag, sat up and stretched once when he thought to hear, somewhere to the north of his aerie, faint sounds reminiscent of several men shouting; he could discern no words, only the shouts.
"Sir Gautier and his long-lost band of retainers?" he thought, then shook his head. "No, wrong direction. When they come ... if they come . . . it'll be from the southeast, not the north. Hell, it's probably not men at all, some land of monkey or other beast, most likely."
But as he went about the necessary chores—arranging his clothing, putting on his boots, rolling his bag and poncho, rinsing his mouth with night-cooled water from the canteen, drinking some of it, then rummaging into his pack for a can of something with which to start the day—the human-sounding noises continued, not constant, but growing ever closer each time they did sound again. Certain now that they definitely were the shouts of men rather than utterances of animals and that they seemed to be bearing directly toward the tree he occupied, Fitz made haste to finish his packing, forgoing breakfast. He placed die full pack in a spot he thought would be invisible from below, then took a position that, while giving him a good, little-obstructed view of the stream confluence and the mouth of the defile to the north of that confluence, afforded him the best available cover and concealment where he crouched with the drilling-gun.
He crouched even lower, sheltering all save his eyes and forehead behind the thick wood, when a crashing and crackling of brush issued from some unseen part of the narrow defile which centered the tributary stream. Abruptly, two really big cervines— large as American elk, both of a rufous hue and neither of them antlered—burst out of the br
ushy defile, followed at very short distance by another.
The third still was running well, but bore a pink froth at mouth and distended nostrils and was clearly panting with effort, pain, or both together, mouth open wide, tongue quite visible.
The two leaders were out of the defile and galloping toward the stream, the injured straggler followed in their hoofprints, when that happened which caused Fitz to start so strongly that he almost dropped the drilling-gun out of pure shock.
From somewhere it had lain or crouched completely unseen in the bushes and shrubs at the mouth of the defile for who could know just how long, a shape from out of nightmare sprang up and, moving with the speed of insanity, clamped down massive jaws crowded with more pointed, two-inch teeth than Fitz thought any one beast should have high on the straining, rear off-leg of the last big deer.
The reddish-coated herbivore shrieked a sound that was half scream, half bleat and strove mightily to pull free from the grip of those fearsome, tooth-studded jaws, but the efforts only brought more injury and certain agony, for Fitz could see that, while pointed, the teeth also were flattened and recurved, the distal areas of them apparently sharp edges, edges designed for the slicing and laceration of flesh.
All its head covered over in fresh, bright blood, the attacker was pulled along by the frantic strength of the doomed deer until all its four- or five-yard length was out of the bushes and on the clearer area where one stream joined the other. There on the stream bank, unequal to more effort—what with the older injury and this newer—the deer, gasping fo breath and coughing up great, frothy masses of rec
bubbles and even some liquid blood, sank to the knees of its forelegs. The monster hung on stubbornly, silently, unremittingly, through the final spasms of the large cervine, for all that Fitz thought that at least one kick had connected somewhere on the scaly body.
At length, the beast roused itself and shook the deer savagely by the tattered and gory leg its jaws still grasped; the end result of the shaking was the separation from that leg of a huge chunk of skin-covered muscle tissue, a chunk so large that Fitz doubted if even a monster of that size could swallow it whole.
He was wrong. The monsters mouth opened to disclose an expanse of dark blue palate and what looked to the man in the tree like a second row of teeth behind the first. Regrasping the chunk of deer meat, the jaws opened farther . . . and farther . . . and still farther, the lower jaw seeming to completely separate from the upper, both upper and lower jaws of the squarish, slightly oversized head widening even more, along horizontal fines as well as vertical ones. In less time than seemed possible, most of the flesh and muscle and skin of the big deer s off-side ham and hip was out of sight down the monsters gullet and it was clamping teeth in the still-quivering carcass, shaking at it to tear off another chunk of hot, bleeding flesh.
Enthralled by the horror to which he had perforce been witness, Fitz had clean forgotten the earlier sounds in the distance. But now those sounds were no longer distant; they were coming near, very near. He was certain, now, that they were not only of
human throats, but that they were something more than simply a spate of wordless cries; they were shouts of words . . . and he was dead-sure he had heard the language or one very similar to it before. It was not English, he knew, but he could not just then say what language it was.
If the monster below heard the shouts, it did not seem to fear or even to heed them; it just kept tearing away at the carcass of its kill, forcing down gobbets of bloody meat that looked to be every bit as big as its outstretched head. Watching the predator from high in the tree, Fitz wondered if the whatever-it-was—it looked a little like the things Seos had thought of as land-dragons, save only that it was not so large as those and its head and neck were significantly different—could gobble up the whole deer and reflected to himself that it just might, for its body was a bit larger than that of the deer, though its legs did not seem as long. He breathed a silent prayer of thanks that the thing down there all covered with blood did not look to be of a build for tree-climbing, for he doubted that anything short of the Holland and Holland elephant gun far away in its case in the rock shelter could easily or quickly stop any creature that size . . . and it just might still be hungry after downing the deer, entire. Fleetingly, he entertained the notion of flying back to the rock shelter and fetching the cased weapon and ammunition, then thought better of it; it could be that he was hiking into territory that these things regularly hunted and he had less than twenty rounds for the double-rifle, so he had better just practice extreme caution and wariness from now on, until he found
out or learned a better way to fend the things off. Maybe . . . ? Yes, maybe that thing down there was one of the "tests" Puss kept mentioning. Could be.
The creature had devoured about half the soft tissue from off the deer and was crouching on a pair of thick, flexed but long-looking hind legs, while using its more slender and much shorter clawed forelegs to turn the carcass over, when the oncoming shouts began to be accompanied by sounds of brush crashing in the defile.
At this, the beast raised its large, blood-dripping head, ignoring the cloud of flies and other insects that buzzed and hovered about the feast of blood. From out that lipless mouth, a tongue that looked to be a good two feet long flickered again and again, rapidly; like the lining of the mouth, it was of a dark blue color, shading to blue-black at its two tips.
Briefly, it went back to the task of seeking to turn the carcass, but more and now louder sounds from out the twisting course of the defile again brought up its fearsome head and prompted still more tongue-flickerings.
Then, from out the brush, almost in the same spot whence the deer had exited to the doom of one, ran a near-naked man grasping a long, slender-hafted spear or lance. Spotting the now sibilantly hissing monster, the man halted and, leaning his weapon against one sweat-streaked, dusty-dirty, brush-scratched, yellow-brown shoulder, half-turned to shout back several sentences in that familiar but still unremembered language, using both hands for a makeshift megaphone. He was answered by first one, then another voice in the same language, whereupon he shouted a single syllable, then turned to again face the huge
predator, his lance presented, level and steady, while he stood, panting and sweating, regaining his breath.
Carefully shielding his binoculars to prevent sunlight from reflecting off the lenses and thus betraying his arboreal position to knowing eyes, Fitz studied the spearman at the mouth of the defile. He was not big, that was certain, perhaps five foot-four or -five, his weight maybe a hundred and thirty. His skin tones and the epicanthic folds of his eyes identified him as an oriental. His bare feet and his hands were proportional to his height as was his head. His visible musculature seemed well developed, and the rapidity with which he regained his breath and be-g^n to breathe normally after what had certainly been a long, hard run over rough country and through thick vegetation bespoke excellent physical condition.
The litde man's "clothing" consisted of a strip of greyish cloth that circled the slim waist, had been brought between the thighs and then knotted in place; his thick, shoulder-length, black hair was restrained by another, thinner strip of cloth that covered his forehead, was now soaked in sweat and looked to have some kind of stains in the space over his black-pupilled eyes.
His only visible weapon (and not much of one, thought Fitz, with which to face a terror the size and clear strength and savagery of that deer-killer) consisted of a haft of some hardwood, well finished, smooth, evenly polished and dead-straight, a bit over an inch wide and about seven feet long. But where one might have expected, in the hands of so primitive-appearing a man, a spear shod with stone or bone or antler, one would have been as surprised as was Fitz
to see the blade riveted to the business-end of the haft. It was slender, four to five inches in length, and shone with the silvery sheen of carefully polished steel.
Then there was another man behind the first, come from out the dense, masking brush. This
one, though clearly of the same race, clad and armed identically, was a hair taller, a little more slender in build, and sported thin moustaches and a skimpy chin-beard. Gaspingly, his prominent ribcage working like a bellows, he spoke several sentences or phrases to the first, receiving monosyllabic replies, and Fitz thought to see his face begin to darken in anger, but then two more of the short men came up from behind to begin gasping out their own words to the first.
The blood-slimed monster, meanwhile, none of the two-legged interlopers having advanced on it and tempted beyond endurance by such an abundance of fresh-killed meat, had gone back to trying to get the half-consumed carcass flipped over that the feasting might recommence until the pack of two-legs decided whether or not to try to steal away with the kill. It was long accustomed to the necessity of protecting kills, often then overstuffing itself with the flesh of those of the would-be thieves not sagacious or fast enough to escape its swift wrath, strength and insatiable hunger for flesh.
Up at the mouth of the defile, six of the oriental spearmen had debouched and were standing in the curved line, facing the gorging monster with spears levelled, when another man came out from the brush with still another on his heels. The six spearmen, though they all kept their attention on the monster
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and their spears pointed in its direction, visibly stiffened and fell silent upon the arrival of the two.
"Brass/' thought Fitz, watching warily from the tree. "Can't be anything else. One of these two must be their chief; probably the beefy, mean-looking customer."
The smaller newcomer said something in a low tone to the bigger and that man—not all that much taller, perhaps as much as five-foot-eight, but with more massive bone structure, a wider body, thick, very muscular arms and legs, bigger hands and feet, scarred face and body and a bald or shaven head, also scarred—addressed the spearmen in a growling bark. At this, they all stiffened even more than previously and the slender man, the second to arrive, said one or two words, but fell abruptly silent at a few growled syllables from the big man. Then the first man began to speak.