Hunters of the Red Moon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley,;Paul Edwin Zimmer

  "Perhaps he was one of those who escaped," Rianna suggested, "and they hung the sword in the Armory to honor him."

  "Not if I know anything about samurai," Dane said quietly. "If he'd lived, he would have taken the sword with him, wherever he went afterward. 'The sword of the samurai is the soul of the samurai.' They'd have had to kill him to get it."

  He stood for a moment with the sheath in his hand. The Mataguchi sword—it would have been a priceless museum-piece on Earth, or the cherished heirloom of an old Japanese family—was a little longer and heavier than any he had ever actually practiced with. And it had been years since he had studied the Japanese style of fencing. He should probably test half a dozen swords of the same general type, until he found one of the perfect weight for his arm.

  But he felt strangely drawn to the nameless, unknown Japanese swordsman of the sixteenth century who, at some unguessable moment in history, had been kidnapped, like himself, and taken like himself halfway across the known Universe to face unbelievable opponents. "I think I've found my weapon." he said. "Maybe it's a good omen."

  He turned to Cliff-Climber and said, "Are there weapons here to suit your people?"

  He was growing used to the arrogant curl of the Mekhar's upper lip. "Weapons? I need only these," said the lion-man, flexing his great paws and flicking out long, curved claws razor-sharp and glittering as if—No; they had been artificially tipped with gleaming metal.

  Like capping a tooth, Dane thought, but a lot more dangerous.

  "I will meet any creature alive with these. It would be beneath me to use lesser weapons."

  Dane raised an eyebrow. "Your motto seems to be: be prepared. But I noticed on shipboard you carried a nerve-gun."

  "For herding animals," said the Mekhar with contempt. "But I am a member of the fighting caste and I have blooded an enemy in a hundred duels. These"—one sneering nod took in the enormous array of weapons which lined the walls—"are for races ungifted by Nature with weapons of their own. Your weak claws and teeth developed when you abandoned Nature's weapons, and see, your people are paying for it."

  Dane shrugged.

  "Each to his own weapons."

  "As a matter of history," Rianna said tartly, "proto-simians never were, as you put it, gifted with Nature's weapons. We were given brains to make up for the deficiency."

  "That, of course, is your own version," Cliff-Climber said, quite unruffled.

  "Well, it's none of my business," Dane told him seriously, "but suppose they come at you with a long spear or something of the sort?"

  Cliff-Climber thought about that for a moment. He said, "I will trust to their honor—and their wish for sport."

  "I wish I had your confidence," Dane muttered. Aratak was studying the long rows of weapons, looking dissatisfied.

  "We are a peaceful people," he said. "I know little of weapons. A knife is for peeling fruits or skinning prickle-fishes. I must think about this." He looked down the long room, where the strangers who vaguely resembled the Mekhar had hung up their long sticks and gone away. "Perhaps I will confine myself to the heaviest club I can conveniently lift. With my weight behind it, it should crush almost any attacker within reason. If not, then I suspect I have been designated by the Cosmic Egg as ripe to give up this life and join its own infinite wisdom, and it will be useless for me to struggle to master strange weapons."

  Dane suspected he was right. The thought of Aratak wending "the heaviest club he could lift" was a fearsome one indeed—he imagined the great, powerful lizard-man could crush a rhinoceros with one, if he happened to hit it foursquare between the eyebrows—and anything Aratak couldn't kill that way probably couldn't be killed.

  Cradling the samurai sword on his arm, Dane turned to the girls. He said, "It doesn't seem real. Swordplay is a sport, a game, on our world. No one expects to have to fight for his life with a sword these days."

  "I thought your world was full of wars," Rianna said.

  "There are wars enough. But most of them are fought, now, with bombs, or at least with rifles. Even bayonets have gone out of style. And policemen carry guns for when their nightsticks aren't enough to keep the peace." He frowned in dismay. "At that, I'm probably better qualified than the average Earthman, who never handled anything more lethal than the Wall Street Journal."

  Rianna shook her head in dismay. She said, "On my world women never did much fighting, even before we did away with wars for good. I used to carry a knife in case I was attacked out on an archaeological dig—thieves and rapists still turn up now and then in the wilder areas—and once or twice I've had to use it. But usually it was enough to show that I had it; your average rapist is a coward. I wonder if I can find one light enough for me."

  Dane grinned a little. "If you can't, it probably doesn't exist. They've got knives up there from six inches long to three feet, and weighing everything from two ounces to ten pounds."

  Rianna finally selected a long, thin, leaf-shaped dagger, and a small second blade which could be tucked inside her skirt pocket. She blinked as she belted the longer one around her waist, and said, "It takes some getting used to. The idea of having to use this on a—a sapient creature, or having it used on me—" She rubbed her eyes fiercely, but Dane realized that behind her hard courage she was trembling with fear.

  He said, "Let's hope it won't come to that, Rianna. I understand that what we have to do is survive—and if we can do it by running, I'm going to run, and hide, the best I can. I'm not eager to fight these Hunters, either."

  It was just as well, he thought, that they were being given some time to accustom themselves to the idea of a fight to the death. It wasn't anything a civilized person could readily assimilate. And although some people said that civilization was only a veneer, the veneer was thicker in some people than in others. He'd seen it during his brief Army service—in Vietnam. Some recruits took readily to the idea of killing. Civilization peeled off them in seconds when the drill instructor put a bayonet in their hands and told them to charge. Too many of that kind in one division, and you got a My Lai massacre, where killing erupted and couldn't be stopped until men, women, old people, and little children all lay dead. Other recruits couldn't be taught to kill, went into battle and fired into the air or squeezed their triggers at random, not wanting to die but unable to face the idea of an actual human target.

  A friend of his in the police force had told him it was the same there. Some men killed readily—maybe too readily. Others discovered the ability to kill only when their own lives hung in the balance. And some could never bring themselves to shoot at all, and unless they were lucky and got assigned to a desk job or directing traffic in a playground, they were likely to get shot on the job before they could bring themselves to draw their own guns.

  He had never knowingly killed anyone. He had studied the martial arts—kendo, karate, aikido—in the same spirit that he had climbed mountains and participated in solo sailing races; for the sport and for the sake of the skills involved. Could he kill? He wasn't sure. But I'll damn well have to make a good stab at it—no pun intended!

  He had a few days to talk himself into it, anyhow. He remembered the time when he had gone—as an alternate, who never got a chance to appear on the field—with the Olympic fencing team. He'd gotten to know one of the distance-running champions, a gold-medal winner from England, who had told him that everything—winning, losing, competing—was all in the mind. "You psych yourself into winning, or into losing," he had said, "into finishing up with the feeling that you're going to drop dead, or into actually dropping dead—some people have."

  So you could probably psych yourself into killing.

  Cliff-Climber probably didn't need it, he thought. His race seemed to be killers; he had talked about fighting duels. Aratak? A peaceful people, but when angered he could be formidable. He'd seen Aratak in action against the Mekhars. As for Rianna—well, her people were pretty civilized, but if she could use a knife against a thief or would-be rapist, probably when the crun
ch came she'd be prepared to kill an attacker.

  But Dallith?

  Her people were peaceful. She was even a vegetarian. She'd come to pieces with terror—

  And she'd been fiercer than any of us, against the Mekhars. Aratak had had to pull Dallith off one of them bodily, to prevent her from killing him then and there....

  He looked around for her, but she was examining a row of strange-looking, probably nonhuman weapons far down the room, and something in the determined way she had her back turned to him kept him from joining her.

  I want to protect her, he thought. And I can't. I'll have all I can do to keep myself alive.

  Firmly, summoning all the mental discipline he could manage, he put that right out of his mind. His fears could do nothing for Dallith except to rouse her own. Cliff-Climber had gone halfway down the long room and was doing an elaborate, solitary form of shadowboxing against the wall

  He disdains weapons. But those other Mekhars were using something like kendo sticks.

  He wondered if the Hunters were like the Mekhars. Cliff-Climber seemed to understand them pretty well.

  There were, it seemed, several groups practicing with various weapons. He wondered if it was permitted to watch others, and seeing Server—or another mechanical robot exactly like him—rolling toward their group, he put the question. He was told that the honored Sacred Prey could go wherever he chose within the confines of the Hunting Preserve (he wondered what would happen if he went outside, but he wasn't exactly eager to find out), and that if he had firmly made a choice of weapon, for the duration of the Hunt it would be reserved for him and no one else allowed to use it.

  Dane hesitated only a moment before saying that he had. It might be folly, there might be some weapon better suited to his hand, but the lure of a sword from his own world was something he could not resist. If it was pure sentiment, he was prepared to risk his life on it.

  He spent the rest of the short day accustoming himself to the feel of the hilt and sword in his hand, to the way it balanced and felt. As the sun was declining, Server came to direct them again to the baths before the evening meal.

  Still preoccupied with the discovery of the samurai sword, he separated from the others without exchanging any word, and lay neck-deep in one of the volcanic pools for about half an hour, thinking this over. From time out of mind, stories had circulated—Charles Fort had collected thousands—of mysterious disappearances. "Flying Saucer" contactees told all sorts of tales about ships from outer space. There was the old story of the Mary Celeste—the ship found floating in the Atlantic Ocean, all lifeboats intact, the ship in perfect, seaworthy condition, the men's breakfast laid ready in the galley and the coffee still warm—but without a soul on board, living or dead. Now, in his hand, Dane Marsh had held proof of where some of these mysteriously-disappeared men had gone.

  Did it matter? No one on Earth would ever know, after all. Even if he survived the Hunt, if these mysterious Hunters honored their promises that survivors would be set free, it was past all belief that he would be, or could be, returned to Earth. And if he did somehow get back, and tried to tell his story—well, no one would believe him. Maybe that chap who claimed he'd been taken to Venus aboard a spaceship hadn't been so wacky, either—and maybe it hadn't been Venus.

  Ahead of him, like a great door blocking off all view to the future, lay the Hunt. Lying submerged in the boiling hot pool, looking up at the great Red Moon that covered more than a quarter of the sky today, he realized that until this was over and done he could not begin to imagine what life would be like. And if I get killed it won't make any difference, he thought grimly. Why plan for a future which probably won't come?

  No. That way lay despair and certain death. The only way to insure that there would be any future to plan for lay across the barrier of the Hunt, and he meant to survive it if he could.

  The unknown samurai whose sword he bore had probably believed that he had been brought beyond the world's end to fight with demons. But whatever they were, the Hunters were not demons, and they would not meet him with some monstrous unknown weapon. They must be fallible. All the odds might be rigged in their favor—but so was a bullfight rigged in favor of the torero, and just the same the bull sometimes killed his man.

  The hot water had seeped into every pore of his body and he felt pliant, comfortable, and relaxed. He thumbed his nose at the Red Moon and got out of the hot pool, plunging swiftly, before the air could chill him, into the cooler swimming bath.

  He swam around for some time, until his whole body felt alive and tingling, then hauled himself out, dried himself sketchily with the terra-cotta tunic, and, naked on the rim of the pool, began to go through the kata exercises.

  "You've been doing that all day," Rianna said at his side. "It looks like a sacred dance. I thought you didn't belong to any religion with rituals."

  Dane laughed without halting his rhythm, going on with the quick, dancelike movements, which mimicked attack and defense postures; sliding rhythmically from one to the other. "Just getting limbered up," he said. "After today's workout, and a long hot bath, I could easily get stiffened up."

  He finished, stopped, bent, and drew on his tunic, aware that Rianna was watching him closely as he fastened it. She said, "You seem to have some unexpected skills you never mentioned."

  "I never thought it would do me the slightest good. I studied the martial arts the way a girl might study dancing even if she didn't intend to go on the stage."

  "It is beautiful to watch," Rianna said with a smile. "Is it an art in itself?"

  Dane shook his head. "No, the exercises are from karate—a form of unarmed combat; you saw me use it on the Mekhar ship." He came closer to her, exhilarated and excited. He was very conscious of the way she was looking up at him, flushed, her eyes dilated, her hair a frothing coppery cloud around her face, the tunic slipping from one shoulder. Without any preliminary, he reached out for her and drew her close into his arms, feeling her respond and melt against him.

  He thought, the merest glimmer of thought at the back of his mind, This isn't love, it isn't caring, it's simple rut. It's instinct, in the face of imminent death... to breed, to leave something of the self.... But at that moment Dane could not have cared less for the voice of his mind. He looked quickly around the pool (Did I notice this subconsciously, before? Was I planning this?) where small enclosed groves or thickets of trees fell nearly to the ground, screening them from view.

  "This way," he said to Rianna, his voice roughened with urgency, and pulled her into the grove. He seized her and bore her with his weight to the grass.

  It was wholly instinctive, and so was her response. Sometime, somewhere, he heard himself mutter to her, "I shouldn't—not like this—"

  She clasped him closer, murmuring against his mouth. "What does it matter? What have we to lose?"

  It seemed a long time afterward, and the light from the Red Moon had intensified considerably, so that she seemed to lie bathed in a crimson glow, that she stirred, chuckling softly deep in her throat.

  "As our dear Aratak would say, no doubt quoting his beloved Cosmic Egg—what could you expect of a couple of proto-simians, so deeply in the grip of their instinctive drives?" She bent over and kissed him quickly. "Dane, Dane, don't look so wretchedly apologetic! It's a common reaction—of course it is. Why should you and I be exempt from it?"

  He sat up and drew his tunic about him, smiling at the woman.

  "I suspect we'd better get back for our supper. Otherwise that damned robot, or one of his computerized brothers, is likely to come looking for us, and I'd hate to have to explain to some blasted servomech what kept us!"

  She said serenely, "I'm sure he's used to it."

  It was dark enough now so that lights were gleaming from inside the building which was their temporary home and, when Dane and Rianna came inside, the others were already beginning their meal. Cliff-Climber looked up, briefly, with a satirical curl of his whiskered lips, and turned to his food again
. Dallith, looking very small and fragile, was bending over her plate. As they came in, she raised her head and began to smile at Dane (relief at his return; had she missed him?), and it hit Dane like a ton of bricks.

  Dallith, oh God. She'll know. I love her, I love her and here I am fooling around in the bushes with Rianna.... Damn all proto-simian instincts—

  The smile abruptly slid off Dallith's face; she colored deeply and bent again over her plate, and Rianna's smile went taut, but she gripped Dane's hand almost painfully, and Dane, for very shame, could not draw his hand away. Instead, he put his arm around her waist and drew her reassuringly against him.

  She deserves nothing but kindness. But oh God, Dallith... have I hurt her? He looked with deep misery at the bent head.

  Aratak, sensing the tension in the room, looked up in kindly inquiry, and Rianna said harshly, defensively, "Well, has the Divine Egg no wisdom for this moment?"

  Aratak rumbled, "There are times when wisdom seems misplaced, child. The only wisdom to which I can lay my tongue at this moment is that when all else fails, it is well to give comfort to one's belly. Eat your dinner, Rianna, before it gets cold."

  "Sounds like a damn good idea," Dane said. He started to go to his usual place beside Dallith, but Rianna was still clinging to his hand and he could not bring himself to pull free. He bent and scooped up the tray and slid to the ground beside Rianna.

  As they ate he kept raising his eyes across the circle they made, trying to catch Dallith's eyes, but every time he looked at her she was bent over her tray, doggedly eating something that looked like rice with gravy or peeling a great pale yellow fruit, her face half hidden between the loose waves of her fair hair. Before Dane had half finished his meal she laid aside her tray and went off to her couch, where she turned her back to them all and lay motionless, asleep or pretending it. Once during the evening Rianna went to her side and bent over her as if to speak, but Dallith lay with her eyes closed and did not move or take any notice of her.