Far from it. The longer we go unmolested, the more chance that they'll spot our defense formation and be prepared to meet it.
Hour after hour moved by. The sun reached its height and began to angle downward; the short day drew near its close and as yet there was no sign of Hunters or of any other Prey. In mid-afternoon they stopped near a heap of rocks, where water gushed in a spring from a split outcrop of stone, and ate the sweets and confections they had brought with them. Rianna began to step behind the rocks and Dane said. "No. We all stay together."
She lifted her brows and said, "I completely see your point, but what does one do about what one could modestly refer to as a call of nature?"
"Take Dallith with you," Dane said shortly, "and stay within earshot. Until the sun sets, and we find one of the neutral feeding areas, we don't relax—or lay our weapons down—for even five minutes."
Cliff-Climber said with a feral grin. "There's where I have the advantage over you proto-simians. My weapons are always ready to my hands." Nevertheless, as Dane walked away from the group to urinate, he noted that the great cat stayed braced and alert, and kept his eye on where Aratak awaited them with his great club.
The Hunters could be watching us, of course, even now; tracking us. Trying to get some idea of our weapons and fighting style, Dane thought.
Finishing, and fastening his clothes, he looked around and decided to scout a little farther ahead. They were in a long, steep valley, heading in a roughly northerly direction toward the long range of hills at the foot of the ruined city.
We ought to head up the slopes, he thought; they could hunt us into the tip of the valley and trap us there. Besides, we've got to locate a hilltop near sundown, and look for those areas of yellow lights. For all I know, the Hunters may treat them like salt licks, and station themselves outside to pick us off as we come out, but we can't get along for eleven days without food and sleep.
He had come a considerable way from the others, although he could still see them below; the women had rejoined Aratak, and were standing on the rock, looking warily around, and Cliff-Climber was coming up the slope to join him. Dane reached a level spot, and awaited the Mekhar, stepping out toward Cliff-Climber.
It wasn't Cliff-Climber, he realized in a split second lurch of awareness. He's got a sword!
Almost before the thought had fully reached conscious awareness, his own blade slid free of his scabbard; he stepped back automatically into fighting stance, staring at the Mekhar's throat past the tip of his own blade. The lion-man stopped, raising his weapon to a guard position.
Dane's throat was dry, and the sound of his heart was loud in his own ears. This was it!—but his training was paying off, and he could listen to the pounding of his heart with a detached calm.
But was this Hunter or Prey?
Maybe there aren't any real Hunters. Maybe they get their kicks by watching us slaughter each other....
"Who are you?" he shouted, and was surprised that his voice did not waver. "What do you want? Are you after me?"
With a feline scream of rage the Mekhar leaped, and Dane had barely time to catch a vicious cut at his head. The creature's body twisted in midair and Dane's answering cut fell short as the cat-man hit the ground, landing on his feet lightly, and bounded back out of range.
Dane held his ground, studying his opponent.
That stance is almost like a saber stance, he thought, but the Mekhar's blade was long and straight, much lighter than his own. He forced his right hand to relax, to let the left hold most of the weight. He'll have reach on me, he thought; that stance should give him the same extension as a foil-fencer. And those jumps! But of course the gravity here is lighter; the moon is only about half the size of his own world....
But there was no more time to think. The long straight blade drove in a long lunge toward Dane's chest. He parried and stepped in as the Mekhar's sword glanced harmlessly over his right shoulder, Dane's arms swinging up for the cut.
The lion-man spun away, drawing his sword back over his head, and with a ring of steel the force of Dane's blow drove the back of the straight blade into the Mekhar's scalp.
Then it was Dane's turn to jump back, away from a low sweeping cut at his leg. The Mekhar snarled, a low harsh sound, wordless.
The two faced each other at a distance of about three paces. The cat-man crouched, his blade outstretched before him. Blood was oozing from the slight scalp-wound. But Dane's blade no longer pointed at the Hunter's throat; instead it was fixed skyward, behind him, held firmly over his head with both hands. Chudan no Kamae, Jodan no Kamae; technical terms and explanations flowed through his head in a meaningless stream, but his body, unconcerned, was doing its own thing, gracefully shifting into the perfect dancelike posture, carefully turning the sword-edge to the exact angle—
The cat-man slashed at his unguarded belly.
Dane stepped forward, and the old samurai blade caught the Hunter's arm at the elbow. Hand and sword fell to the ground.
The cat-man screamed, a hideous sound neither feline nor human, that turned to a choking gurgle as Dane's point found his throat. But he bent on, down, across the point, toward the severed arm; he snatched it up, and jerked free of Dane's sword-point, and ran, scrabbling up the slope, dodging, shifting from side to side.
Surprise—dismay—prisoned Dane for a second before he could follow. From the arm wound alone, the creature should be bleeding to death! And the stab in the throat—there was no question about it. That would have finished him. That had finished him. And yet—and yet—there he was, running up the slope, not even slowed down.
The creature—the Hunter?—dodged behind a rock. Warily, sword still unsheathed in his hand, Dane followed, braced for an ambush.
But there was nothing behind the rock. Nothing. No cat-creature. No severed arm. Nothing.
No blood. Not a bloodstain on the ground. Dane walked back to the scene of the fight, his lips pursed, whistling faintly in wonder and astonishment. He'd seen the thing bleed from the scalp. Blood—blood that looked exactly like ordinary blood—had spurted from the severed hand and arm.
There was blood on the ground here, too. But not much. Less that five feet away from the spot where Dane had lopped off the thing's arm, the blood-spots dwindled to a few drops and stopped.
Thoughtfully, Dane sheathed his sword. First blood, he thought. What was that thing? It sure as hell wasn't a Mekhar. He'd seen Cliff-Climber bleed. But equally sure as hell, it had looked like a Mekhar.
A variant species of proto-feline?
Was that what the Hunters were, just variant proto-felines?
Yeah, sure. Proto-felines. Sapient cats that could pick up an arm you'd lopped off—after being stabbed right through the jugular veins—and run off with it, and then vanish into thin air.
He began slowly to climb down the slope to where he had left his friends. Aratak and Rianna were running toward him; evidently they had heard the thing's final yell. With a dazed feeling, he realized that he had left them less than five minutes ago.
Rianna demanded, "What was it? A Hunter? I thought for a moment it was Cliff-Climber—"
"So did I, at first," Dane said grimly, "until I saw he had a sword."
"And I saw Cliff-Climber still with us. We began to run—Dane, did you kill him?"
"I should have." Dane told them the story. One by one they came up to look at the blood, but none of them had any explanation. Cliff-Climber was openly scathing; it was evident that he didn't believe a word of Dane's story.
"Your last stroke missed him, obviously," he said, "and he simply ran behind the rock and—"
"And walked straight through the rock wall?"
"Probably he hid behind some of the bushes. There might be a cave-mouth there somewhere, and he worked his way down to it when you weren't watching."
Dane looked grimly at the Mekhar. "Could you pick up your arm and run away with it if I lopped it off, Cliff?"
Cliff-Climber shook his head. "Perhaps you only thought you cut
off his hand. It was your first fight. Maybe you were overexcited," he said patronizingly. "If you killed him, his body would be there. It's as simple as that."
Dane didn't answer. He couldn't afford to fight with Cliff-Climber, and he knew if he answered this time, he would. In silence, he turned away and gestured to them to come along. "In any case I think we'd better get out of this valley," he said. "If one of the Hunters is here, there are likely to be others."
But they saw no other living thing as they toiled up to the lip of the valley and came up into a long, level, rock-strewn plain. The sun was setting behind the ruins of the city, and the shadowy shapes rose against the light like jagged teeth protruding from a broken skull-bone.
"What's that?" Dallith asked, and pointed to a light against the horizon.
"The moon—excuse me, the Hunter's World—coming up," Rianna said. Dane shook his head.
"No. The light's yellow," he said. "Neutral zone, and the sun's set. The Hunt's off till midnight. We'd better go down there and see what we can get to eat."
Wearily, they turned toward the lights. Dane was very tired, and Rianna was stumbling with weariness; even Aratak dragged his club behind him instead of carrying it jauntily over his shoulder. The lights seemed very far away, and even the knowledge that safety lay beyond those lights hardly kept Dane moving. He wondered if they would reach them before he fell in his tracks.
The great brick-red disk of the Hunter's World was high over the ruined city before they reached the first of the lights. The whole area was brilliantly lighted with great yellow globes raised high on enormous metal poles; within the great circle—three or four acres at least—enclosed by the poles, Servers moved, imperturbable; gliding back and forth as smoothly here amid rocks and moss and underbrush as they did in the Armory itself. There was no other living creature within the circle of the lights except the huge proto-ursine creature, who slept in a furry huddle with the remnants of a large meal beside him.
Of course. There are other neutral areas; other prisoners must have found those. We will, too, if we live long enough, Dane thought.
At the very center of the ring of lights, there was an assortment of food in great bins, color-coded as food had been coded on the Mekhar slave ship.
It was, Dane thought, a symbol of how well this day had welded them together in adversity that they all turned to Dane before touching the food. He said, "Eat what you can, and sleep for a little while. But not too long. I want to be well away from here before midnight—that's when the Hunt's on again."
"I want sleep even more than food," Dallith said, but dutifully she went and ate some fruit before wrapping herself in her cloak and casting herself down on the thick moss. The others followed her example. Dane said to Aratak, "Get a couple of hours of sleep, and then you stay awake while I do the same."
"You don't think we're safe here? You don't trust the Hunters?"
"I trust them to be Hunters," Dane said. "I think we're safe here. But I don't want to walk out straight into their arms. Get some sleep, Aratak. I'll tell you all about it afterward."
The giant saurian lay down and soon was glowing blue all over as he slept. Dane watched him, moodily thinking over his plans. He let Aratak sleep for a couple of hours, then awoke him and lay down to rest himself.
When he woke, as if his plan had been maturing in his sleep, he knew exactly what he meant to do. Quietly he woke Cliff-Climber and the women.
"Each of you make up a small portable pack with food for two or three days," he directed. "Maybe they do call the Hunt off every night at dusk; for all I know they're sleeping the sleep of the unjust—or holding the Hunter equivalent of a campfire and singsong—over in their own rest areas. But remember how the Mekhars tested us, on the ship, for thinking ahead? I'm willing to bet this is the same thing here; maybe for the first night, or the first two or three nights, it will be safe to sleep till midnight and then come out, but I'm betting that sooner or later anyone who gets into that nice safe routine, and trusts it, will find himself being cut down to make Hunter soup, From now on we camp in the open—standing watches for each other—and go in very briefly, just after dusk, once in two or three days to get food."
"That makes sense," Cliff-Climber agreed. "I was thinking roughly along those lines."
"Good." Dane went and began to select food which would keep—nuts, dried fruits, hard wafers of some dried grain. When he had seen this laid out among the more perishable food (and, he supposed, its equivalent for non-humans) he had realized that here was another test; if the Hunters intended them to be safe every night for mealtimes, they would have provided only food to be eaten at once. Once again, they were sorting out the more intelligent and wary of their prey, providing them with opportunity—if they were intelligent enough to seize the opportunity—to prolong their lives and even to evade capture until the Hunt ended.
I don't imagine they're doing it for our benefit, Dane thought, or even out of any exaggerated sense of fair play. They want to prolong the Hunt—stalk us longer. And if we give them a really good time, they don't mind letting one or two of us go.
His mind leaped. If I could bring all five of us through... No. That was looking too far ahead. Concentrate on surviving through the day—on getting through this night.
He saw Dallith wrapping herself up in her cloak, the sack of dried fruit and nuts tucked inside the front of her tunic; she had knotted her hair into a single long plait. He came up beside her and said quietly, "Do you have a hairpin or something to screw that up on top of your head? Just now, hanging down like that, anyone who came after you would find that braid of yours a damn good thing to grab you by."
She smiled waveringly. "I never thought of that. One doesn't. I'll cut it off if you want me to."
He touched it, a gentle regretful touch, with the tip of his fingers. "It is beautiful hair," he said and on an impulse kissed the fine ends of the braid. "But if we live, it will grow again, and I'd feel safer about you if you didn't have any handles for easy grabbing."
She drew her knife out of the light leather sheath; with a quick movement she cut through the pale braid and let it fall to the ground. She smiled at him and moved away. Dane stood looking after her for a moment, then bent, on a strange impulse, and lifted the long silky coil in his hands. It clung there, fine and smooth and springy; he coiled it into a roll and thrust it inside his tunic next to his skin. A favor from my lady, he thought.
Seeing that the others were girded up and ready, he gestured to them and led his little group into the darkness. Long before the Hunter's World swung at zenith, the yellow lights of the neutral area had receded to a twinkle and then vanished far behind them.
They slept again, in turns, for a few hours, bidden in a fold of the hills; and at dawn moved on up through the foothills, going in the general direction of the ruined city. Once, shortly after the light broke, they heard from far off a sharp clashing as of swords and shields and a high, screaming bellow: a death-cry, but it faded into silence and the landscape was once again as still as death.
As still as death. As still as all the death it's seen. How true these old clichés can be....
It was late afternoon again when they reached a long rock-strewn hill and paused for a break, to eat a few mouthfuls of food and drink from one of the streams of water that flowed from the rocky cliffs.
It was the suspense and tension that was getting him, Dane realized. No one could keep a bowstring at full tension for days on end. So the game was rigged, after all, and rigged in favor of the Hunters, he thought, because they could stalk their Prey, tire them out, come at them at leisure. They could take a break without danger; the Hunted were unlikely to come up on them unawares or take them by surprise.
Chewing something that looked like strings of dried beef jerky; but probably wasn't. Rianna said to Dane, "If I live through this, I will never hunt for sport again."
Dane felt just the same way. Not that he'd ever been much of a hunter, except with a camera, but he'd al
ways appreciated the mystique of the chase.
He looked at Rianna, who was resting with her head on her arm. Dallith had finished eating and was standing on a rock, her cropped head tilted to one side as if she were listening for some distant sound. He called softly to her, "Did you hear something?"
"No—I don't think so—I'm not sure," she said, and her thin face looked drained and drawn.
If she looks like this on the second day of the Hunt, what's it going to do to her? How long can she keep up?
He let them rest for another half hour before calling them all together again and starting up the long slope. The top of the hill might be a good place to spend the night, if they were going to spend it in the open. They could sleep fearlessly the first part of the night, and keep watch the rest of the time without worrying about anyone sneaking up on them.
"Be careful at the top of the hill," he warned, as they started upward. "It's about the same time of day that the Hunter attacked us yesterday. Maybe they prefer to attack shortly before sunset."
He began to take his place in line, but Cliff-Climber thrust forward. "I claim the right to lead," he said proudly. "Yesterday you were at the fore, and you took the first blood. This is my turn! Do you want all the glory?"
Glory be damned, friend, Dane thought, but he didn't say the words aloud. He was beginning, slowly, to understand a little about how the Mekhar's mind worked. A human strategist thought in terms of efficiency. But Cliff-Climber wasn't human and he cared no more for efficiency than he did for the advancement of science. He was, in general, cooperating almost incredibly well with them; but if his morale sagged, he wouldn't. If it made him happy to lead and take the risks sometimes, Dane felt he shouldn't fight with him about it.
Cliff-Climber said eagerly, "In any case, my ears are the sharpest. Let me scout ahead."
Dane shrugged. "Lead on, MacDuff. But back him up with the spear, Rianna."
They started up the rocky slope, Cliff-Climber bounding eagerly ahead of them. The path was steep and Rianna fell farther and farther behind; the cat-man leaped nimbly over the same soil which slipped and slithered away under Dane's feet and started little showers of rocks below. Rianna's feet went from under her and she fell, just missing getting her feet tangled in the spear; Dane braced his hand under her elbow. She recovered her feet quickly and said, "Help Dallith," picking her way deftly through the stones.
Hunters of the Red Moon Page 14