by Nathan Long
A Barahir warrior, some crazed berserker who couldn’t wait for the rain of krae to stop, charged down on us in full, four-legged gallop mode, two swords held high. Queenie shoved the wounded girl down the trail and tried to follow, but Two-Swords was on us way too fast. One sword slashed Queenie low on the left back leg. The other would have took my head off, except I ducked.
Queenie went down, howling. I got thrown clear and crashed into some low scrub. Good old low gravity. I hopped up, unhurt except for a few scrapes, and looked around. Two-Swords was raising his blades for the killing blow.
If I’d thought about it, I’d have remembered that Queenie was my enemy and I was her slave. After all that “good girl” and “bad girl” stuff I should have been happy to see her buy the farm. I wasn’t. I still liked her. So I didn’t think at all.
My hand grabbed a rock. My legs sprang. I landed right between Two-Swords’ shoulder blades and swung with the rock. I put it inside his skull easier than breaking an egg. Two-Swords dropped, his head a concave half-moon, red and wet. My hand was drenched in blood. I’d killed a guy. Another one. I wanted to call a time out and wash myself before I puked.
I looked up. Queenie was staring, amazed. She’d seen my leap, and probably had a better idea than I did what it took to crush an Aarurrh’s skull. I shrugged, still dazed.
No time for interrogation though. A full company of Barahir was barreling down at us. Queenie snatched me up again and we galloped down the trail. Queenie cried out in pain from her slashed leg every time we leaped the body of a dying krae or dead Aarurrh girl.
Before us, down in the ravine, I saw that the alarm had been raised, but maybe not soon enough. Our boys were still scrambling into their harnesses and galloping up to form a ragged line of defense, snatching up swords and spears as they came. But the double line of Baharir charging behind us was like a railroad spike shot from a bazooka. Nothing short of a steel wall was going to stop it. Ours was barely under construction.
The front line parted as we roared through, then closed up again behind us, but it wasn’t enough. Not even close. I could hear the smack of flesh on flesh as the two fronts met. It sounded like the Packers and the Jets coming together after the snap, except with a car wreck mixed in.
Queenie pulled up near Kitten and a cluster of other Hirrarah women and started to herd them further into the camp. Hirrarah men raced past us toward the front, which had crumbled almost instantly. The Barahir had plowed through the center and done end-run plays around the edges. Now they were fanning through the camp, swiping at anything that moved, kicking over cooking tripods, and starting fires in a dozen places. And as if that wasn’t enough chaos, maimed, terrified krae were running around like panicked, half-ton chickens, crashing into tents and clawing good guys, bad guys, everybody.
Snatching up a spear somebody had left behind, Queenie led her flock through the camp and into a narrow arroyo in the ravine wall. It was a tight squeeze at the mouth; we had to go in single file, but further in it opened up like a wine bottle. There was hardly any room for us. The place was already sardine tight with Hirrarah gals and kids. This was a planned safe hole for the women-folk, the most easily defended place in the ravine. Only problem was, it wasn’t defended. Whatever males were supposed to hold the entrance weren’t there. It was pretty obvious they were either dead or real busy right about now.
Queenie grunted, then whistled up a few of the heftiest gals to back her up. She planted herself dead center in the arroyo’s tiny opening, spear at parade rest.
I was ready to help out. My blood was up. I generally try to avoid fights, not because I don’t like them, more because I find it kind of hard to stop once I get going. Queenie had other ideas. She nodded up to the peak of a nearby teepee, and mimed me jumping up there for a look around. “Up.”
I tried to look like I didn’t know what she meant, but it was no good. She’d seen me brain Two-Swords at the end of a fifteen-foot jump. The cat was out of the bag. She smirked and raised a sly eyebrow at me.
I shrugged, sheepish, and leaped to the top of the tent like a cat jumping onto a fence post. Queenie was right. It was a good vantage point. I had a clear view of almost the whole camp.
Man, what a mess.
There was one good thing. Our guys had finally gotten themselves together. It wasn’t looking like quite the massacre it had when it started, but even now it wasn’t pretty. The damn krae were still running around, some on fire, and the tent fires were spreading. The fighting was all over the camp. There was no front anymore, just a bunch of isolated ass-kickings and bloodlettings wherever there was room to swing a sword.
Recon training took over. I was assessing threats and preparing contingencies just like Captain MacPherson had taught me. The nearest fight was four tents away, a swirling mosh pit of snarling, slashing Aarurrh and flashing steel. It took me a second to sort out the two sides, and another to recognize One-Eye and Handsome in the thick of the scrum. It was One-Eye’s squad, fighting a gang of Barahir and separated from any other action by at least fifty yards and any number of tents. It looked like they’d stopped to rescue a downed Hirrarah gal from some Barahir and got caught up in a scrape they couldn’t disengage from.
One-Eye, like the coward I’d always figured him to be, was leading from the rear, shouting insults and encouragement from behind his men and waving his sword around a lot, while Handsome was fighting like a demon at the front. As I watched, he ran through two all by himself with a desperate double-sword lunge, and he paid for it. He’d left himself wide open. He parried a slash at his gut, but took a slobberknocker crack on the temple from the butt of a spear. He screamed and wheeled, doing the boxers’ rubber-leg dance on his hind legs, then fell back, crashing heavily on his flank.
His pals closed up the gap like good soldiers, and pressed the advantage he’d created. The bad guys were starting to retreat. One-Eye cheered his men on, but I saw him shoot a glance down at Handsome, still in dreamland beside him, then look over his shoulder. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Something was brewing behind One-Eye’s one eye and he didn’t wait long to act on it. He bent his middle arms/legs to kneel by Handsome like he was going to check his wounds. It was perfect. Nobody around, all his men looking the other way, fighting for their lives. It would look like Handsome had died in battle. One-Eye pulled his hunting knife from its sheath.
I said before that my blood was up. Now it was boiling like a gumbo pot. I launched from the tent. I have a vague idea that Queenie shouted something, but it could have been me. Two tents away I hit dirt and sprang forward again like a kung-fu kangaroo.
One-Eye was just laying his knife against Handsome’s helpless throat when he caught my motion out of the corner of his eye. He looked up, guilty. I hit him in the numbers with a cross body block.
It didn’t go so well. The problem with living on a planet with less gravity than Earth is that, for the same reason I can leap ridiculous distances and not hurt myself much when I crash, I don’t make much of an impact when I hit something—particularly not something four times my size. So it was more surprise than power that knocked One-Eye back on his haunches.
I careened past him into a rack of drying bird meat and was up and flying at him again before he could get his multi-purpose limbs back under him. The impact thing was a bust, so this time I hopped on his back and got him around the neck with a triangle choke.
Now this was where that alien, strength/mass thing worked out. This wasn’t weight against weight. This was strength against strength. There we were an even match, and I was in the one place he couldn’t get a good grip on me.
One-Eye’s eyes and tongue were popping out in seconds. He shredded my arms with his big, clawed paws. I took the pain. I didn’t even feel it. I had a mad on, blind, red, and roaring, and when I have a mad on, everything goes away—pain, cold, hunger, exhaustion.
There was shouting in the distance. One-Eye’s squad was turning, winners of the rumble, just in time to see their lead
er getting punked by a pink midget. Someone clipped me on the head. The next thing I remember I was flat on my back, staring up at rising spear points and sword blades. I was dead. Then there was a shout, and a big body leaped over me, scattering the swords and spears.
Queenie! There were growls of protest as she yanked me up and crushed me in a hug. For a second it was a stand off—One-Eye and his squad demanding that Queenie hand me over, and Queenie refusing, but then another gang of Barahir veered into view and One-Eye’s squad had to get busy again.
Handsome, shaking off the cobwebs, was about to join them, but Queenie, an odd look on her face, called him back and ordered him to come with her. He didn’t put up much of a fight.
***
We won. I mean they won. I mean the Hirrarah won. Barely. I didn’t see any more of the battle. Queenie kept me by her side until it was over—I wasn’t sure if she was worried about my safety or One-Eye’s—but I learned later that it had been a hell of a close call. The only reason we came out on top was that that big hunting party of ours that had gone out early had felt the rumble of the stampede through their feet and raced home, thinking more about meat on the hoof than danger. But when they saw the smoke from the burning tents rising from the ravine they breaknecked it down the trail, fresh as daisies, just as the Barahir thought they had us licked.
After that it was all putting out fires, clearing wreckage, repairing tents, burning our dead and carting theirs away. Plus, there was the logistical nightmare of what to do with more dead krae-flesh than the tribe could eat in ten years. Most of the slaves helped out, but not me. Once the all-clear blew and the women came out from their hidey-hole, Queenie took me straight to her tent and tied me to the king post with leather thongs that I couldn’t have broke with twice my strength.
I looked up at her. “I’m up shit creek here, ain’t I, Hur-Hranan?”
“Hin?”
“Trouble. I’m in trouble, right? Bad girl?”
She looked me in the eye and stroked my cheek sadly. “You good girl. Good girl.”
Then she turned and walked out.
Yup. Shit creek. Big time.
CHAPTER SIX
CONDEMNED!
After a day when nobody but Queenie came into the tent—and she only came in to feed me and didn’t say a word—two tough looking hardcases, wearing the Chief’s colors of orange and green woven into their dreads, stepped in, cut me loose, and led me out.
I’d had plenty of time to think about what I’d done and what kind of shit storm paying the piper was going to involve—time enough to go from dead certain I was going to die to optimistic and back again. It was automatic death for a slave to strike or even lip-off to an Aarurrh, so I knew I was fucked. But then I started thinking. If they were going to kill me why wasn’t I dead already? Had Queenie put in a good word for me? Had she seen One-Eye try to ice Handsome? Maybe I’d get a pardon. Maybe they’d even let me go. Yeah right. On Queenie’s say so? Females, even wise old mamas like Queenie, didn’t get much respect in a testosterone boy’s club like an Aarurrh tribe. And with One-Eye’s clan practically running things? The men would probably just laugh at her and kill me anyway. But I wasn’t dead yet, so...
A big crowd surrounded a square of open space in front of the chief’s tent. The camp, as they dragged me through it, was only half repaired. The teepee skyline had more gaps in it than a shark with dental problems, but it looked like everybody had downed tools to see the pink chick get the axe.
The chief was impressive—a massive, white-muzzled silverback with a head full of gray dreadlocks and so many white scars criss-crossing his fur it looked like somebody had written on him in Chinese. He sat on a low-slung, upholstered hassock, built to fit an Aarurrh’s lower body. It was the biggest piece of furniture I’d seen in the camp.
He was flanked by a bunch of other higher-ups. They didn’t get couches. Under their feet was a beautiful rug decorated with twisting purple and black lines that looked like a cross between Arab stuff and the Celtic knot-work from a biker’s tattoo. It was big enough to cover a basketball court. I wondered who the sucker was who had to lug that thing from camp to camp. Some poor slave most likely.
Standing before the bigwigs, in the open space in front of the rug, were Queenie, Kitten and Handsome on one side, and One-Eye and a couple of his clan homies on the other, like plaintiffs and defendants in a trial—which I began to suspect this was. The space was square, with wooden posts pounded into the ground at the corners and roped off to keep the crowd back. The posts were taller than me and carved to look like big swords sticking into the ground. I didn’t care much for the symbolism.
My two guards ducked me under the rope and pushed me to the center of the square, then stood at my shoulders. They carried battle-axes as tall as stop signs, with huge double blades nearly as big around.
The chief gave me a skeptical once over while his mouthpiece, a thin Aarurrh with a face like a stuck-up bobcat and some kind of official necklace, got the show started with a long loud roar and a little ceremonial semaphore. Once the crowd simmered down he introduced the players, giving the two sides big build-ups like the ring announcer at a wrestling match, while the chief continued to look from me to One-Eye and back again like we were a nut and a bolt that just wouldn’t fit together. Then the mouthpiece finished speechifying and we got down to business.
I was still at square one when it came to understanding Aarurrh yakking—it just sounded like cats in heat to me—but I could get the gist of the arguments that went back and forth from everybody’s gestures and tone of voice. First One-Eye said his piece, pointing at me and growling something fierce. He had to have been saying that I’d struck an Aarurrh with intent to kill and that was all there was to it.
Handsome spoke next. It should have been Queenie, but apparently only males were allowed to speak at these things, so Handsome spoke for her. You could almost see her pulling his strings. He told ’em that I’d saved Queenie’s life and had only attacked One-Eye because One-Eye’d tried to kill him, miming the whole thing so I could almost see it happening.
One-Eye jumped in, waving all four arms and shaking his head. He hadn’t tried to kill Handsome, and he dared anyone to come forward and prove that he had. Handsome interrupted One-Eye’s interruption, gesturing again, with lots of looks back at Queenie to make sure he was getting it all right. He gave her testimony, acting out her running after me and seeing One-Eye leaning over Handsome with a knife. To back that up, Handsome showed everyone a small cut on his neck.
One-Eye laughed at this. Of course he’d had his knife out. He mimed being in the middle of battle—and giving himself a lot more action than he’d really seen, by the way. He motioned to the guys from his squad, showing all the cuts they’d picked up during the fighting. Then he crossed to Handsome and pointed out all his cuts. He was playing the jury like Johnnie Cochran. How could Handsome prove that he hadn’t got that little cut in battle along with all the rest?
I could see a lot of the big-wigs leaning his way, but the chief still looked undecided. He asked Queenie and Handsome if they had actually seen the attack. Because it was a direct question from the chief, Queenie was allowed to speak, but unfortunately she couldn’t give a good answer. She’d seen the knife and One-Eye’s position, but from her angle she couldn’t be certain if he was stabbing Handsome. Handsome said he’d still been knocked loopy and couldn’t remember exactly what happened. Triumphant, One-Eye again demanded my death.
That seemed to convince the last of the doubters, but the chief was still frowning. He called One-Eye’s squad forward and asked them something. From all the leaping and choking gestures they made—and believe me, you haven’t seen gesturing until you’ve seen a guy with four arms tell a story—I could tell they were telling him about my fight with One-Eye.
They were the last witnesses. After that we all stood around and waited for the chief to make a decision. It was a bit of a wait. The Chief rubbed his furry chest for what seemed to me, wh
o had the most to lose in all this, a half an hour or more, but was probably under a minute. The crowd got so quiet I could hear the “skritch skritch” of his claws scratching his skin.
Finally he spoke. This part I couldn’t figure out from hand gestures, but everybody took it big. The crowd gasped. One-Eye bellowed in anger. Queenie and the kids talked among themselves and looked over at me, faces going back and forth between relief and worry.
After a gesture from the mouthpiece, my escort dragged me over to Handsome and dropped me at his feet. Queenie came out from behind him and scooped me up into a hug that could have killed a grizzly bear.
“So, am I free?”
Queenie shook her head. “Almost not yet. Chief think One-Eye weak not to kill you first time. Aarurrh not win fight with insect? And only a she-insect?” She laughed. I wasn’t sure if she was insulting One-Eye or me. “Now he think One-Eye coward too, asking chief to settle his fights.” She leaned in, rolling her eyes like I was supposed to get her meaning. “One-Eye ask for you execute, not trial.”
I was confused. “Wasn’t this the trial?”
Queenie shook her head. “Not trial like that. Like this.” She drew her dagger meaningfully. I still wasn’t exactly following, but I didn’t like the gist.
“One-Eye say trial only for Aarurrh. He no fight animals. But chief, he hear how you jump. He want to see a good fight. Now, stay. We find armor.”
Queenie and Kitten trotted off, leaving me and Sai with Handsome. My heart dropped into my colon. Now I got it. Trial by combat with a twelve foot, four armed monster. That was the chief’s idea of a good fight.
Sai was beside himself. “Mistress Jae-En, you mustn’t. ’Tis naught but suicide.” This from the bone-head who tried to hang himself.