Squatting at the stone, he ignored Bon’s renewed pleas and gazed at the newly cut edge of the stone, imagining all the things he could do now. It was in that moment that he heard a grumbling growl somewhere in the mist and turned slowly, his eyes trying to pierce the stuff.
Bon fairly leapt on him, trying to burrow into his side in her fear of whatever it was out there in the mist. He thought that the sound held some quality of the roars the long-dead tiger-ape had uttered when it attacked the giant owl. Were there any of those creatures still alive? The stone floor of that place had been heaped and covered with the bones of the tiger-apes. He still came across a few scattered bones now and then.
A giant figure loomed in the mist in front of him and he swung the Staff around to point it at the thing, ready to send it to oblivion. A grumble that was difficult to understand came to him then and he was surprised that it spoke in English.
"The Good Lord sent me to you. He said that you needed guidance in the pursuit of your goal."
Suddenly suspicious, Brian asked, "How did he speak to you? He is dead."
The creature dipped its head in acknowledgement, but said, "He still possesses some power to influence events."
Bitterly, Brian asked, "Then why doesn’t he help me find the woman I was with?"
"I encountered this woman you speak of. I scented the Good Lord on her and allowed her to escape the slaughter of the People of the Fire."
Brian couldn’t tell if he heard the beast’s stomach grumble, or if the sound came from its throat, but it sounded an awful lot like a chuckle as it said, "There were Little People with them as captives; like the one you are with. Little People are good to eat, even if they offer so little meat. Give me this one and after I have eaten, I will take you to the woman you seek."
As the creature moved toward Bon, sending her scurrying behind Brian with little shrieks, he held the Staff crosswise in front of him to block the beast’s advance.
"She is under my protection."
The tiger-ape’s mouth opened in a horrendous grin as its thin lips stretched back over the huge fangs that filled its mouth. Brian could almost hear the laughter in its voice.
"She futs. This is a part of the Little People’s curse. They are exceedingly good at fut. Do not let her beguile you with it. She will turn on you in the end. It is her nature."
"How do you know that?"
In a human gesture, the creature spread its huge hands, palms up with claws extended and said, "That is what the Little People do; they betray. Though you stand between her and certain death, she is even now thinking of ways to use you to advance her schemes. When she is finished with you, she will leave you to die." The grin that continued to split its face grew even wider. "The only time you are safe from her is when she makes fut."
"I can’t let you have her."
Giving another shrug, the beast said, "As you will. When she turns on you, pray that I am close enough to kill her before you are dead. If I am not, I will avenge you."
Turning, Brian walked back to the stone he had been sitting on and grinned tightly as Bon scurried ahead of him, hiding behind him when he sat. The tiger-ape followed and hunkered down in the globe of light, expanding its chest as it drew the warm, dry air into its lungs. Exhaling, a dreamy expression came to its tiger-striped face.
"It has been long since I breathed the air of this place before it was cursed. It is good."
Leaning forward, Brian asked, "What does the Good Lord want you to do for me?"
"Find your woman for you. She is near; but in the mist, you could pass a few paces from her and never know it. I believe that you have done that already, she is back the way you came and traveling in another direction."
Puzzled, Brian asked, "How do you know this?"
The creature’s mobile face stretched as it blew its cheeks out, ending in a huge puff of air. "I scented her as we passed."
"Why didn’t you bring her with you? That would have saved some time."
With a wave of its hand, the tiger-ape dismissed his concern.
"Time has no meaning here. There is only now. This ‘now’ is the same as the ‘now’ in which the Good Lord was killed. His curse encompasses all that is here. The deaths of my people for not being near when He needed us, the depletion of the trees that the Soos-tow used for their nests because they distracted us from our duty with an attack, the People of the fire re-living their attack on Him and the Little People forced to live each day doing that which distracted Him so that He could be poisoned. Each of these is a fulfillment of His curse. The land was cursed to never grow anything that could be of use to anybody, the homes and public buildings were cursed that they might never be used for adequate shelter, the sun itself was frozen in the sky in the position it held when He died. The air was cursed to be opaque to our vision so that we might never see that which steals upon us." His hand flipped to one side in a kind of half-shrug. "Besides, she would have run from me. Catching her would have been easy, but she could have been damaged. You would not have thanked me."
Rising from the stone, Brian said, "Then let’s go find her now."
The tiger-ape lifted a hand in a gesture meant to stay him and Bon, nervous already, shrieked and ran from the globe of light, sure that Brian was being attacked. They ignored her and Brian stood for a moment.
"There is no reason to hurry. She is resting. You are tired. Sleep. When you are rested, we will go." Turning his head toward the mist behind him, the beast continued, "Your pet is trying to find a stone that she can lift to brain me with. There are none. She won’t go far and will return while you sleep, ready for fut. Her curse rides her like a demon."
Though not uneasy about sleeping with the tiger-ape so close, Brian found sleep elusive and was only dozing when Bon returned, sliding against him in his bedroll, her little hands questing southward. He sighed; his mind was still filled with questions about what the depths to which he had sunk would do to his relationship with Petra. How would she take to sharing him with Bon? The little woman had her uses but he couldn’t imagine that Petra would stand idly by while he ‘made fut’ with Bon. Maybe it would just be easier to let the tiger-ape have her.
As she began moving against him, he wondered if the tiger-ape would fut with her before his meal, and smiled. It might be fun to watch; she was so afraid of the beast that each time it moved or made any noise, she almost scurried from his bedroll.
* * *
She hid in the mist. This new group of People of the Fire had no inkling she was near and more than once she had stolen into their camp for food and small pieces of gear. She had learned while a captive of the first group that it had been the color of her hair hanging from under her hat that made her stand out in the mist. With all of it tucked up under the hat, and still in the braids the woman of the Little People had put it in, she was effectively invisible to them. She had also learned that they had tracked her by the infinitesimal differences in the wetness on the stone made by the passage of her bare feet. She had made her shoes too late to prevent them following her and now, by dragging their furry side on the stone, she left the signs they associated with the Uu-mor and would not be followed. The Uu-mor had hairy feet and hands that, when they walked, dragged on the stone much as her furry shoes did.
Petra was glad they couldn’t or wouldn’t track her. Her spying on them had given her a lot of information regarding their crimes against the Good Lord. These people talked among themselves a great deal and by listening closely, she had managed to learn a bit of their language. As it turned out, their biggest crime against the Good Lord was that after the Little People had poisoned him, rendering him insane, he had attacked them and they had defended themselves a little too rigorously. In his weakened state, the Little People had fallen on him and while the men restrained him, the women had first tortured and then killed him.
One of the People of the Fire was more talkative on the subject than the others, even lecturing them on what had happened and she learned more of the
Curse that had been laid on the entire land, the air, the sun and all the people who dwelt under it. From listening to the man speak to the others; she learned that this group had been the group that had been present when the Good Lord had been poisoned. Even more than that; as she watched, they had brought in a woman of the Little People and the man had recognized her as being a member of the clan that had first poisoned, then tortured and killed Him. She knew that Time did not pass in this place but the woman seemed so young that she must have been little more than a child when they had turned on Him.
When they brought the woman in from the mist, she watched as they stripped her of her clothing, even shredding it before her, and saw their amazement that she didn’t wear the prosthetic breasts that were so prevalent among her kind. A leash was present on her neck and they made light of her that she had been captured once before and that they had managed to capture her just after she escaped from her captors.
The woman gave them lies about being captured by a God and was laughed at while being beaten for lying to them. That she enjoyed the beating meant nothing to them; they simply enjoyed doing it. Then came the almost ritual, serial and simultaneous rape and Petra was amazed at the ferocity they displayed while doing it. The People of the Fire that had captured her had done nothing this vicious to any of their captives and she supposed that since this was one of the actual perpetrators of the Original Crime against the Good Lord, they were pulling out all the stops. She had expected at first that it would go on for a couple of hours and then they would go to sleep, but the leader of this band; the man who claimed to have been present so long ago, organized them into groups so that some could sleep while the others tormented the woman. Petra slept and woke twice during the long period they worked on the woman. It was after her last sleep that she became sick at what she saw.
After seeing that their rough treatment of the woman had little effect on her, the women of the Fire began cutting the braids from her head and burning them in front of her; a thing that caused her a great deal of psychic pain. She seemed almost childishly fond of the braids and wept to see them burned. Sick at heart at the pitiful way the woman cried, Petra curled into a ball behind a standing stone but kept her eyes on the scene so that she could learn anything that any of them might say. She had no sympathy for the woman; she had betrayed the Good Lord, but it was still hard to watch her cry so piteously.
Unable to sleep because of the noise, she simply lay with her face turned toward them and was almost sickened when they began slicing strips of skin from the woman. This was worse than anything she had seen so far in this benighted place and she was about to turn away, leaving these people forever when the woman of the Little People said something that resonated within her.
The woman lifted her head from the ground and called, "Brian!", followed by gasping breaths that the People of the Fire didn’t understand but were unmistakably English. "Come to me Lord!"
In an instant, Petra was on her feet and running toward the group when a sudden breeze sprang up, blowing the mist away and letting the sun, low to the horizon, shine its weak light on the scene. She hesitated, knowing that without the cover of the mist, the element of surprise was lost, and she searched for another stone to hide behind. A roar came then and she knew that one of the Uu-mor was near. Finding a short stone, she dropped behind it and watched as the People of the Fire scurried about like a nest of upset ants.
A huge ape-cat sprang out of the shreds of the mist and slashed about him in all directions, seemingly at once, sending gouts of blood spraying everywhere. As the people tried to flee, he leapt about the camp catching them from behind or springing in front of them, and each time he leapt, one or more of them died. A dozen or so of them sought to escape toward a billowing of the mist and fell back when a man stepped from the mist. The staff he carried shot a beam of light that cut several in half before striking them individually, burning its way through them. In a matter of minutes, it was over and the man and the ape-cat stood facing each other over a small group of People of the Fire that they had spared. The people cowered on the stone, guarded by the ape-cat as the man walked toward the woman of the Little People.
Petra recognized the ruined, white shirt, threadbare jacket and nearly shredded slacks and was about to call out to Brian, but her call was stifled in her throat as she saw him go to the woman of the Little People. Kneeling there, his posture was one of sadness and remorse and she wondered what the woman had been to him.
* * *
He knelt next to the pitiful wreck they had made of Bon and cursed himself for not calling to her to return from the mists before he slept. If Urh-mor-hrh hadn’t informed him that she had been captured, he would have decided to leave her. Now he looked at the wounds they had left on her and knew that she wouldn’t…couldn’t, survive this; at least two of the wounds were too deep and she had lost too much blood. Nevertheless, he tried to stanch the flow of blood from the wound in her chest with a woolen cloth ripped from the body of one of her attackers. She looked up at him with tears in her eyes. There was something else there that wasn’t physical and he wondered if, in her own way, she loved him.
"Lord. You come. I know you come. I yours. You keep me from anyone else. I sorry I run from Uu-mor. He your friend. Not eat Bon-tow-fut."
His hand caressed her head, shorn now of her braids and he wondered why they would do that. It didn’t make sense to him. Killing her he could understand. Raping her was something she had told him that these people did to her kind as a matter of course because of their curse, so he understood that; but cutting off her braids was something that she had never spoken of. It disturbed him so much that he asked her about it now.
"Why did they cut off your braids?"
Her eyes were glazing fast but she answered him.
"The Good Lord like our hair. Full…rich. We…cursed, but not about hair. We…braid it; know that when Good Lord come again, we loose it for him. It only hope we have."
It struck him then that the women of the Little People, having been the key to the downfall of the Good Lord, were cursed, and lived with it without letting the curse affect them; but their own guilt had made them save something for the Good Lord as a gift of welcome when He returned. Such a thing smacked of faith and remorse, and he couldn’t fault them for it.
Weakly, she took his hand and guided it to her left breast, saying, "We…keep this from everyone. Wear false ones over, never uncover. Closest to heart. You here…always."
With that, she closed her eyes and a faint smile curved her lips as she breathed her last and seemed to sag into herself. The pitiful little body, so full of life before, was nothing more than a red rag of shredded meat and Brian felt as much pain at her passing as he had felt when Lisa died. That thought made him stiffen and turn to face the tiger-ape.
"You said that Petra was here, too."
The beast nodded its head toward the sun as it burned weakly in the mist. Turning toward it, Brian saw someone moving toward them and he stood in order to see better. A figure, maybe a foot taller than Bon, walked across the stone with the sun behind its head so that it presented a silhouette. All he could tell about the figure was that it wore the usual bulky, woolen clothes, but it also wore a furry hat; none of the denizens of this place that he had seen ever wore such. The effect of the sun behind the hat, gave the figure the appearance of haivning a corona about its head. As it walked out of the sun, he was better able to see its legs at first and saw that it also wore crude shoes, the fur on them dragged across the stone and he wondered at the strange motion the figure used while walking; like it was dragging its feet.
Coming closer, blocking the sun more so that he could see, he recognized Petra’s face and he ran to her, catching her as she ran into his arms. They held each other and he swung her around in a circle out of sheer joy as tears ran from his eyes. She sobbed, smiling up into his face and dragged the furry hat from her head. Some of her hair had fallen out of the braids and hung below the hat, but the hair
on the top of her head was still braided and he felt a pang of guilt when he saw them. Putting it out of his mind, he kissed her and was pleasantly surprised as she returned it with a fervor that he hadn’t expected.
When they broke apart, she asked, "How did you know where to find me?"
He pointed back to the Uu-mor, saying, "He brought me! He also brought a message from the Good Lord!"
Dubiously, she said, "I hope he’s going to give us some help that means something. If he had helped us more, we might not have been separated and…" She stopped there, not sure how much to tell him of what had happened to her.
Brian was oblivious of her hesitation and kissed her again, smiling as he said, "Don’t worry! We’ve got the tiger-apes on our side! They can kill anything in this place! So long as one of them is with us, we’re safe from everything!"
Having seen the ape-cats, or tiger-apes as Brian called them, in action, she didn’t doubt that they would be safe from everything else, but wasn’t so sure about whether or not they were safe from the ape-cats themselves. Looking toward where the ape-cat sat, she took a step in that direction and was stopped by Brian’s hand on her arm.
"You don’t want to see any of that."
Shrugging, she replied, "I’ve seen stuff like that before. The Uu-mor attacked a group of these people once before when I was there to see it firsthand."
She noticed that he seemed almost embarrassed as he said, "Well, I know they’re pretty thorough about killing people, but I mean, you don’t want to see what that bunch did to the girl."
It Happens Every Day Page 14