Sunset. The battle was over....
The Hunters who still lived—there could hardly be a dozen of them left, Dane thought in a dreamlike despair—were splashing back through the water. The great bear-thing shouted, as if to rally them, raised his club, as if to urge a final attack; one or two of the Hunters paused, fingering their weapons, but the others kept on going and, after a minute, dejected, the giant proto-ursine turned away, brandishing his weapons in a final menace, and retreated.
Aratak and I must have killed more than half of them. I'll bet every Hunter on this planet was here—there were only forty-seven in the whole Hunt last time.
But the price was too high. Even if they'd exterminated the whole breed, it would have been too high....
He turned and ran to where Dallith lay among the rocks. Behind him he saw what he thought for a moment was the pseudo-Aratak rising to his feet, but at that moment he didn't care. Then he knew it was the real one, and he didn't care about that either.
Dallith lay on her back across the heap of rocks where she had made her final stand, her arms flung out to both sides, her great dark eyes—eyes of a wounded fawn—staring up blindly into the darkening sky.
Love and death. Love and death.
He cradled her cold body in his arms, then slipped down and lay unmoving, half unconscious, his head resting against her lifeless breast.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Hunters' World was high in the sky, round and full and glowing brick-red, apparently obscuring most of the sky. Again Dane had that sense of claustrophobia, of moving under a lowering brightness that could come crashing down on him. (Who cared? Let the sky fall; Chicken Little was right all along...)
He hadn't wanted to leave Dallith's body. Neither Aratak nor Rianna could help him carry her, and he finally had realized that it wasn't just that they didn't want to, as he'd screamed at them. "You want to leave her here, for some damn Hunter to stuff for some kind of obscene trophy!" Then he'd realized that they were both wounded, Rianna's leg slash broken open again, Aratak's leg so badly twisted that he had to lean heavily on his club. Dazed and apathetic, Dane went along with them toward the neutral zone. He heard Rianna say something about battle fatigue and knew with some small fragment of himself that she was right, heard Aratak say that the Eclipse couldn't be far away now (but whenever it came it would be too late). But he walked in the dazed, dreamlike knowledge of Dallith's death, and nothing else mattered.
Her braid of hair is still inside my tunic, he thought. He fumbled at it in an agony of grief, and only then realized that he was bleeding from a wound on the forearm and another slight one on the scalp.
He walked in a dark dream until Rianna gave a slight moan and collapsed, her wounded leg crumpling under her; then, forcing himself to care, to pick her up again, he tore a strip from his own tunic and bandaged it up with robot-like efficiency. He let her lean on his shoulder; he would have picked her up and carried her if she hadn't protested. He himself would have collapsed right there and slept, but remotely and without the slightest awareness that it had anything to do with him, he realized that the girl needed food and rest in safety. It could not have been more than a half hour that they walked before reaching the lights of the neutral zone, but to Dane it was a great amorphous stretch of time longer than the battle before it, longer than the Hunt, an abyss cleaving his life in two. He still had his life. For what that was worth.
Inside the neutral zone he smelled food; but the smell somehow made his stomach turn over. Rianna brought him a plateful, and he said, "I'm not hungry, I couldn't eat," but when she put it into his hand he began automatically shoveling it into his mouth without tasting it. He finished it all and she brought him some more, and suddenly his head cleared. The dark nightmare was gone but at the same time it was more real. Dallith was dead, and he sat here eating the steak dinner he'd planned to ask for—
In sudden horror he put down the remnants of the second plateful. There wasn't much left. He wanted to vomit. He said in a sort of dazed wonder, "How I can sit here eating—"
Rianna didn't say anything. She simply laid her small hard hand over his without a word, and he saw that her own eyes were streaming with tears. She hadn't sobbed, she didn't wipe them away, she simply went on eating and crying at the same time, and Dane's mind and emotions awoke, aching. He took her plate away and put his arm around her. He wiped her face with his tunic and said, "Darling, if you keep on stuffing yourself, you'll be sick."
"What a pig I am, he thought. She's wounded and she had to look after me. He looked with amazement at the amount of food they had devoured. Of course, after a hell of a fight like that. How many did I kill, anyhow? I guess I'll never know, but l doubt if the old Samurai, would be ashamed of me. He must have put up a damn good fight himself, if they still remember him well enough to wear his face after three hundred years.
Again he wiped Rianna's wet face, tenderly. Dallith was gone, and nothing in the world seemed worth living for, but Rianna was alive and she still needed him.
She said, beginning to sob at last, "I loved her too, Dane. But she couldn't have gone on living, with the memory of that. The Hunt had destroyed her, had been worse than death for her—"
Aratak came close to them. He said in his gentle rumble, "She feared to go on living when her whole being had absorbed part of the Hunters. Rianna was right, Dane; empaths of Spica Four always die, away from their world alone. She began to die when she left her world, but she stayed with you while she could, because you needed her so terribly and she knew it...."
Dane bowed his head. He had thought Dallith had lived because he had taught her to want to live. Maybe, for a little while, she had shared his own desire to live, as she had shared so much with him in that little while. But he realized that what Aratak said was true. He had saved Dallith's life not for her own sake but for his; while he fed her will to live he was holding at bay his own fear of coming too close to her death.
Love and death, love and death—I thought I understood them. But perhaps no one ever knows everything about them....
They were the only ones in the neutral zone; probably, he thought, the only Prey left alive at all. The Servers, moving silently about the area and not speaking, nevertheless seemed to convey to them a certain sense of awe.
We're still the Sacred Prey, he thought.
He and Rianna lay down at last to rest, deathly weary, wrapped in a single cloak; desire stirred and flickered briefly in his body, but in the very thought exhaustion took him, and his weary body and exhausted mind fell down a bottomless cliff of deathlike sleep.
When he awoke the dawn had come and the sun was rising, and for an instant, realizing that they had all long overslept the time of safety, he wondered why they had not been slaughtered in their sleep. And then, seeing the Servers ranged around him, and a scant half dozen Hunters standing inside the neutral zone, he understood. After such a fight as this they respected the sleep of the gallant fighter. Rianna awoke at the same instant and shrank against him at the sight of the Hunters. Aratak reached for his club, wincing as he tried to put his weight on his foot.
And at the same moment Dane realized that above the sun the great brick-colored, crimson-glowing Hunters' World hung in the sky, a round and untouched disk, and the sun was rapidly rising to meet it....
The great proto-ursine Hunt leader strode toward him. Dane rose to his feet, reaching instinctively for his sword.
The Hunt leader gestured to him to leave his weapon, but Dane grasped it anyway. He himself was weaponless, although his sword was in the hands of one of the metal Servers and the tall, featureless robot rolled quickly toward Dane.
The proto-ursine spoke. Dane could not understand him, but the Server's flat, expressionless voice rolled out.
"Our leader has a personal score to settle with you. You have killed five of his hive-brethren, but so gallant a Prey, who has made this Hunt greater sport than in the last seven-hundred-and-eighteen cycles, deserves some special attention t
o his end. The hour of the Eclipse is upon us. If you are willing, since your two companions are wounded and they too have fought with a truly Sacred bravery, we offer them their lives; had you not slain his five brethren of the hive, he would offer yours as well and see to your rewarding. As it is, he asked that you grant him a final bout in single combat. If you are the survivor, all of you shall be released; if you die, your companions will be freed in your memory."
"We fight to death?" Dane asked.
"Unless the Hour of the Eclipse frees us first," said the Server.
Dane looked around at Rianna and Aratak. Without consulting them, he said, "I'll do it."
"Dane—" Rianna protested, and Aratak said, "Don't be a fool. They've got to kill us. They won't let us live and tell their secret—how easy they are to kill."
But strangely Dane still trusted to their word. Maybe because he had no choice. He said to Server, "Tell him I accept."
Maybe the communication was telepathic, for Server said nothing he could hear, but the leader took his vast shield and sword, and Dane drew his own. The leader's left side was turned to him, vast shaggy chest almost hidden with the shield; the deep bend of the legs kept the lower body covered as well. The sword was hidden behind the body, probably straight back.
It's a fencing stance in reverse, Dane thought; he can strike and guard at the same time. I can't.
But he'll have to move the shield in order to cut. Go for his shoulder....
Watch it, Marsh, he warned himself. Don't get overconfident. Every time you've faced a shield, you've had friends to help. This is single combat.
The Hunter advanced by cautious sliding steps that kept his body turned and covered by the shield. It looked like the Hunter wasn't too confident either and wasn't going to oblige Dane by rushing to trap his sword so Dane could use the sidestep that had won the other fight. Dane ran forward, leaping into the air for a cut to the head. The Hunter lunged to meet the attack, shield snapping up to catch the sword and press it back, and as Dane jumped back he saw the tip of the broad blade as it arched across his thigh. The hack that would have taken his leg off only scratched the skin. The shield clung to his blade as if glued there, hindering Dane's movements; the broadsword was whistling toward Dane's temple and he sidestepped quickly.
Dane's long lunge back and to the left took him under his enemy's cut, though the wind of it stirred his hair, and at last he could free his sword from the shield. He spun to cut at the other's shoulder, but the bear-man pivoted to face him, shield rising to catch the blow. Dane's sword was pressed back against his left shoulder and the Hunter's blade was coming down at his head.
Like lightning Dane let his left knee crumple under him, managing to get his blade over his head; he took the shock in his wrists as the other's blade struck, the cold steel of his own sword striking him lightly and snapping back. He slashed out at the giant's thick shaggy knees.
There's no way to get at his head or chest with that shield. A leg blow won't kill him, but will weaken him—the pseudo-Mekhar howled and ran away when I lopped off an arm. If he traps my sword again, I'm dead. He's damned good—too good. But he knows a leg blow won't kill him, so he might be careless—
They circled one another slowly and deliberately for a minute. Then Dane shouted and leaped forward, his blade rising up over his head, drawn back until it rested between his shoulder blades. The ursine's shield lifted; Dane threw himself to the left, his blade falling away to the right in a great circling slash that sheared through the leg at the knee, came up without pausing to block the broadsword blow that Dane had half expected.
But it never came. He whirled, blade lifted, but the Hunter had rolled to a sitting position, balancing himself with the uninjured leg, shield raised over him and sword-arm raised to strike.
Good God! Now all he has to do is guard his head and chest. It's a draw; I can't hurt him but he can't attack. All I have to do is stay out of his reach, until—
Rianna shouted and Dane, flicking a glance upward, realized that the shadow was sweeping over the land; the disk of the sun, seeming tiny, was already half gone behind the huge mass of the Hunters' World. Below his astonished glance the leader was crumpling, collapsing; the severed leg flowed into shapelessness; the sword fell from a paw which could no longer grasp it. As the light lessened and was darkened, a wind sprang up and the shield crumpled down on the Hunter's body, fast liquefying.
Of course, Dane thought. That's the secret. They turn back to their own shape when they die—or in darkness. By bright moonlight they can attack. But the Eclipse ends the Hunt.
They all go back to globblies.
Two servers rolled up, trundling a third between them, and, while Dane and Rianna watched in the dying light, they gently lifted, on their extensible arms, the globular and transparent form of the Hunter. They packed it tenderly into the metal shell, and closed down the lid, and at once the strange metal voice of a Server spoke from it.
"My most gallant foe. In these last moments before I return to the hive-knowledge of my resting-life I pledge to you that you shall go free, whatever the cost. If I live another thousand cycles I shall know no such Hunt. Now I must spend another half year in the dormant stage, with no individual knowledge of self, before I emerge again, but I pledge myself to fight only in your shape for a hundred cycles in your memory...."
Oh, God. They spent half their time in those metal cans, as Servers. Not robots at all, no wonder the Servers tended and cherished the Sacred Prey... they represented the only individual life and awareness the Hunters knew.... Only during the Hunt were they alive as individuals, and at no other time were they, perhaps, truly sapient. Was a hive-consciousness sapience? Dane wondered.
"Again I salute you—in my last moments while I am self, I—we—"
The Hunt leader's voice vanished; from another of the metal Servers came, without interruption, the unbroken breath.
"We honor you. And yet you may have ended our Hunt for all time, if we release you, as honor demands, to tell our secret throughout the Galaxy."
"Not a bit of it," Dane said, sheathing his sword. "Remember the Mekhars kept running away to volunteer? Once it's openly known that you do exist, that it's not a meaningless slaughter but a duel, and that you reward the survivors richly—the tougher citizens of the Galaxy will be lining up on your doorstep. You can pick and choose your own Prey, instead of buying or stealing them! Do you wonder a lot of them have no will to live, facing only formless fear? But give them a chance—and you'll have so many volunteers that you'll have to put them on a waiting list!"
Server's flat voice somehow managed to convey joy. "Perhaps it will be so. In any case, Honorable and Sacred Survivors, let us now serve and refresh you. The next Prey await your victory banquet to give them courage and hope, and our brethren who have spent the last moon readying for the oncoming Hunt are even now boarding the ship to come here and make all ready."
The Servers couldn't do enough for them. They were conducted to baths and fed again lavishly, and clothed in fresh clothes and garlands of flowers. Rianna clung to Dane and it seemed like a dream to him.
"Riches," she murmured, "enough to start a scientific foundation—maybe to come back here and explore the old city and find out about the old race that saved my life—"
Aratak said quietly, "The Divine Egg has seen fit to preserve my life; he must have work for me somewhere in the Unity. But before I go and do it, I will journey to Spica Four and tell Dallith's people how she died—and Cliff-Climber's. I have no other use for wealth."
Dane stroked the scabbard of the samurai sword. Had the old Samurai been the only survivor ever to commit seppuku when he realized he must give up his sword to his victors? I'd like to keep it, but probably I'll never use a sword seriously again.
Rianna said, "Dane, you can go home!"
"What—and spend the rest of my life sounding like a flying saucer contactee?" he demanded, and drew her tightly into his arms.
First—Dallith's world, wi
th Aratak, to tell her people how she died. And then—well, it was a big Galaxy, and he had a lot of the rest of his life to live, and this was going to be the biggest adventure of all.
He hugged Rianna exultantly to him, and laughed aloud.
Love and Death. For the rest of his life he would carry Dallith in the innermost core of his heart as he carried her braid of hair next to his skin, but he had no longer any fear either of love or death.
He had mastered them both and come out alive, and he would keep learning about them until he mastered his own death someday.
Hunters of the Red Moon Page 20