by Garon Whited
The other was a woman. Of the two, her life force was much stronger, her body being somewhat less damaged. She had suffered a good blow to the skull. The scalp under her black hair was also open to the bone from the edges of the weapon—I presume a sword that turned in the wielder’s hand—and provided enough blood to satisfy the murderers. I touched the leaking places with tendrils of power to get a better idea of the damage; head wounds are tricky things. The jagged edges of the skull fracture against my tendrils' touch was like licking sandpaper. I felt the slow oozing of blood into her brain from even deeper damage, so I applied that healing charm a bit more precisely, wrapping it around the wound.
They seemed stable enough when all was said and done, which presented me with a small dilemma.
What now?
With a sudden sense of realization and dread, I discovered I was now responsible for them. Much like picking up a stray kitten and feeding it, I was now honor-bound to care for them until they could care for themselves. While this struck me as something of an inconvenience, I thought better of it after a moment. The situation had some small upsides to it. If they lived—and I felt she would; his odds were worse, but still good—then they would be an invaluable source for learning the language and culture of the society into which I had been thrust.
Okay, okay—into which I had unknowingly plunged myself.
There wasn’t much to salvage from the fires; the wagons burned quite well. There were a few cows and horses loose in the vicinity, but none seemed disposed to be helpful and return to the scene of bloodshed and fire. So I was faced with the choice of either going to chase down a mount or two and leaving my newfound pets alone, or trying to move them by hand—an uncomfortable prospect at best. And in his condition, possibly dangerous. Hell, maybe for her, too. Travis is the nurse, not me!
The sound of an animal and the gleam of many eyes made my decision for me. No leaving them alone. There were wolves—or a boojum, maybe even a banth—within the wood.
Instead, I drew the sword. I hacked up the bodies of the fallen and tossed the pieces away from the burning wagons. It was a chore and took some time, but it kept the hungry things from coming up to sniff at me or my new pets. The sounds and sights of wolves and other things tearing flesh in the shadows of the trees gave a peculiar, surrealistic quality to the scene. Was this really some place on another world, or was this merely madness? Or perhaps this was Hell and I was damned. Whatever, it seemed to me the night was something more than it was, and it made me afraid. No, not of the wolves or of the night, but of something within me, because I responded, somehow, to the scene on a level I did not wish to examine too closely. Another time, another time, I promised myself, hoping I would forget.
The wolves were not at all unhappy, however. They lingered after they had eaten their fill of the dead, sitting or lying, fat and satisfied, all around the dying fires. They paced occasionally, or moved to a more comfortable patch of grass—always a little closer, drawing a ring about us as the burning wagons died to embers. Other things stayed out of the firelight and occasionally had a momentary challenge with members of the wolf-pack, but the abundance of food made such contests mild.
Then the lead wolf stepped into the shrinking ring of firelight and faced me.
I looked at him. He looked at me. He snarled.
I touched him with a tendril of power, lightly stroking his spirit. The taste of an animal’s spirit is different from a man’s. Less complex, less refined. In terms of human food, it is the difference between waving a stick with meat on it through a campfire, and an eight-course meal presented by a European school for chefs as a final examination. Still, there are times when all you want is a roasted chunk of meat.
It laid its ears flat, whimpered, and backed away. It didn’t know what I was, but it knew enough to realize that challenging me was a bad, bad idea. Once he was out of the light, he turned, howling, and ran for it. The rest of the pack was on its feet in an instant and chasing off with him.
I tried to analyze what I was feeling. Tasting the spirit of the wolf… it was… good, in a way. It was the stirring of some primal instincts men have forgotten. The smell of wind, the taste of flesh, the uncertainty of the hunt, the challenge of battle, the satisfaction of the kill, a different satisfaction from a belly full of good red meat, the vying for dominance and power within the pack.
Every piece of a spirit or soul or life-energy—or whatever you want to call it—brings a tiny fragment of itself to become part of me. This did not inspire me to howl at the moon or run naked through the forest, but it did make something within me stir in response. Are we all beasts? Are human beings just animals that have learned to think? Possibly. I knew there was something of an animal in my own heart.
Again, it was not something I wanted to explore right then. I had too much to do.
I watched them go before I started looking for some smaller trees or larger branches. I built a large travois, a triangle of two long branches and several smaller ones. This I bound together with belts and bits of harness, then covered over with the clothes of the dead.
This is not as easy as I make it sound.
After loading both my charges on this, I began to drag them along—no real destination in mind, but definitely away from the scene. I headed away from the road immediately; the ground was chewed up enough that the twin scars the travois left behind might be missed. I hoped.
My passengers were heavy, but I was well-fed and strong. What slowed me down was the twisting path I had to take to avoid undergrowth and close-spaced trees. I kept going until nearly morning and wasn’t a bit tired. I stopped when the man moaned; I put the travois down.
“Are you awake?” I asked, moving to the rear. He opened the eye that wasn’t covered in bandages, stared at me with it, and then made a weak gesture: thumb and little finger held out from the fist. He directed it at me and said something—I believe he would have been forceful if he hadn’t been quite so beaten up.
“Sorry, old fellow,” I replied. “I don’t quite understand. I almost feel as if I should; doubtless my recent meals are helping with that. So you lie down and rest.”
I took out my canteen and unscrewed the top. Mentally, I thanked Travis for insisting I bring some mortal survival equipment. I poured a little of the water into my hand so he could see it, then drank from my hand.
It made me queasy, but it stayed down. I doubt I could have held it down if I’d had much more of it. File that away under “only blood at night,” as a reminder. Eat what I like during the day, drink wine, water, or Grandma’s Herbal Cure-All, but only blood at night! I held out the canteen toward him; he shook his head. I put it away and moved to take up the travois again, slogging on into the woods.
He asked me a question. I knew it was a question. I couldn’t tell what it was, though, so I ignored it and kept going. Presently, I heard him weeping. I suppose I might have too, if I had been hacked across the face and left for dead amid the slaughter of my family and friends.
It was getting on toward morning when I came to a creek. It looked to be about hip-deep and maybe twenty feet across, with cut banks and a lot of smooth rocks at the bottom. I could see small fish.
Good enough. I put down the travois and got to work, pulling down vines and branches. A lean-to isn’t hard to make, just time-consuming. Build two, facing each other, and you have something that looks a lot like a tent and is pretty good at keeping the rain off. I had time to get all the branches I could want and set the main poles before sunrise started to get close.
I did my best with some stick figures in the dirt and a lot of hand-waving to tell him to stay here. I was fairly certain he wasn’t going to go anywhere, but it never hurts to make sure. I set off into the bush at a good clip, heading off to find a bit of privacy; I doubted that either of them would take kindly to the idea of a dayblood—and I didn’t want to be forced to sit still where they could just unzip me. It would be more than just embarrassing.
I found a good s
pot and got out the bags. Sunrise came and went. I packed up the bags again and jogged back to my human pets, resolving on the way back to have a bath.
He might have been in pain—surely he was—but he wasn’t willing to lie still. He had dragged himself to a tree, leaned up against it, and was tying a large twig of pine needles to a length of straight branch.
“Buddy, you’re one of the toughest men I’ve ever known,” I said. He looked up, saw I was smiling, and showed his teeth in return; I can’t really call it a smile, but I give him an A-for-effort.
I let him tie stuff together and I helped. We started language lessons at that point, too; Rethven, he called it. I learned his name was Ubar, and the lady—still unconscious—was a relative of some sort whose name was Utai. We also traded a lot of nouns. Tree, rock, water… and then more difficult things, like pine, oak, maple, creek, river, boy, girl. Verbs required a lot more drawing and hand-waving; I decided most of them could wait until the necessary effort wasn’t damaging to him.
I was surprised, however, at how easily I remembered each of the things he taught me. My suspicion that my recent meals had carried some of their language with them felt nearly a certainty now. I’d had examples—my first meal had brought a lot of financial information with him; things I could not put into words, but seemed familiar whenever I came across such things again. They were like lessons learned long ago, now almost forgotten. Familiarity without proficiency.
After he finished a length of branch for roofing—I had done about two and a half, but he wasn’t feeling well and was also trying to answer me about objects—I took them and assembled them into something resembling a structure.
It took a while.
We took several breaks; I checked his wounds and found they had grown visibly better. He was still going to have a major scar, but I was fairly sure the eye wasn’t damaged. His chest was much better, too. If that kept up, he would be well in a week. That didn’t jibe with what I recalled as normal for that spell—at least not the description of that spell; I’d never tried it before. I guess I got some overkill. Or overheal.
I made a mental note to be stingier with power whenever I had recently eaten. Apparently my sense of scale was distorted. Like a person who is used to normal gravity who is suddenly on the Moon; he is six times stronger than he’s used to, and a simple step is a sizable jump!
His—sister? Cousin? Tribe member?—Utai was still unconscious. I didn’t fool around with any spells to probe her physical structure; I didn’t know any. It would have to wait until nightfall before I could look inside with vampire tendrils. But her breathing was strong and her heart regular.
Unfortunately, she was also quite unconscious. I had to clean her up.
This, surprisingly, brought out Ubar’s defensive nature. He spoke to me sharply when I started to undress her and was not at all mollified when I showed him the soiled clothes. I had to threaten him physically before he shut up. But I did clean her and then moved her to a pile of leaves where the lean-to would eventually cover her. Meanwhile, I covered her over with the clothes from the travois.
“Ubar, I’d have let you do it, but you’re in no shape to pick her up, turn her, and so on,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t understand; but my tone was gentle and apologetic. “Please don’t be angry.”
He was, though. He said something to me and I caught the words for “man” and “woman” and figured I wasn’t supposed to see her naked. Well, tough.
I left him with lean-to materials at hand and went down to the creek. I needed to refill my canteen and to wash out her soiled things. While I was doing laundry, I had myself a bath—sword and pistol in reach on a handy rock. I had forgotten about the facepaint until I rubbed water on my face and black and green came off on by hands. I got the facepaint off with some scrubbing; I can only imagine what Ubar was thinking when he first saw me.
When I got back, he had made little progress on the lean-to, but seemed to have made a lot of mental progress; he looked glad to see me. I hung up her clothes on the lean-to poles as he greeted me. I hailed him in return and he seemed very pleased.
We got to serious work on that shelter. There was a layer of pine needles, then a layer of oak and maple branches, then another layer of pine needles. If that didn’t keep rain out, we couldn’t do it. I started in on the other half of the shelter—I can’t call it a lean-to when it’s more like a full roof—when Ubar called a halt.
Another language lesson followed; I learned a lot of words about hunger, food, and eating. I was also pretty sure I had nailed down the word for “please.” I had been ignoring the gut rumbles of my own stomach—not an unnatural hunger; I’d fed well last night—but a typical one. Ubar and Utai were healing rather rapidly for mortals; doubtless they were both famished.
I got out a couple of MRE entrees—I hadn’t brought the full brown bags, just the smaller, green ones to save space—and poured water in the packages to heat them. Ubar looked surprised and watched in fascination. When I opened them up and handed him one, he looked impressed. I confess the chicken isn’t too impressive; it must have been the whole idea of using water to heat the things that did it.
We finished a layer of pine needles on the second side and called it quits on that score; it would keep out most rain and the wind, and that was good enough for now. I helped him into the shadow of the shelter and made him lie down. As I suspected, he was asleep soon.
It seemed like a good idea to conserve calories. So I did, too.
When I woke up, there was a cat looking at us.
Well, it was feline. It looked to be about three feet long, not counting the tail, and reminded me of a cougar. It was mainly dark brown with greenish stripes.
I looked at it. It looked at me. We both held very still.
Slowly, I drew one of my pistols. It growled, tail flicking low. I worked the action and then pointed it, taking aim. It flexed, slightly, crouching lower.
I put a bullet between its eyes.
I’ve fired several pistols before, from .22 caliber to one .44 Magnum. The kick doesn’t bother me and the noise is just loud. But it was always at paper targets or cans. This was the first chance I’d had to see the effects of a .45 automatic with hollow points at close range.
And I thought swords made a mess. Ick.
I made a mental note: This is not my world. There are dangers here I don’t begin to guess.
The cat—or what was left of it—collapsed on the spot. Ubar woke immediately, looking wild-eyed and panicky. I reassured him. With a dead predator handy it was easy; it helped that he could see it was, most definitely, dead.
Utai moaned and stirred.
We were both solicitous. She muttered and mumbled and Ubar spoke to her. I only caught occasional words and failed to follow; I let him handle it.
Meanwhile, I looked over the cat’s remains. I wondered if it was worthwhile to skin it and eat it.
Nothing ventured…
I strung it up by the rear feet and gutted it, taking care not to pierce the intestines. I’ve helped dress out a deer before; this was different in detail if not in gross. It was a bloody, messy job, and I don’t doubt a real woodsman would have finished in a quarter of the time it took me—and would have been a lot less messy about it. I ruined it as a skin, I’m afraid. Still, it looked like catburgers for dinner.
Ubar was already piling small sticks together. Apparently he was hungry again, but he wasn’t complaining. He was also doing a lot better; he moved more quickly and with less pain. I stopped him anyway and made him wait while I dug a hole with my knife. We built the fire in the hole. I didn’t want a lot of light to give us away at night. I also roamed fairly far afield to find all the driest wood possible—smoke could be bad, too.
We feasted on broiled cat; Utai ate some as Ubar fed her. I took that for a very good sign and resolved to double-check her as soon as night fell.
Ubar and I then discussed a bit. Apparently the creature was a tuva, and quite dangerous. Since it was
coming up on sunset, I pointed at the fire, made sure several long branches were sticking out of the hole in easy reach, and handed him my knife. Then I pointed at the blood, sniffed several times, and made a growl-and-hiss while raking my fingers like claws.
He nodded, grasping immediately that there might be more than one. I pointed at my eye and made walking motions in pantomime. He looked puzzled, then got the idea—I would go look around while he kept guard with a flaming stick.
I headed off into the bush and back to my hidey-hole to wait out the sunset.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1ST
First thing out of the bag, I sent out rolling tendrils all over the place. I reached out like an uncurling flower, looking for any more of those cats. Found one, too; it was coming upwind, following the scent of blood. I reached into it, hooked its spirit with the claws of my tendrils, and fed on it.
I felt the impulse to lick my fingers afterward. That gave me a shiver.
I went down to the stream instead; the water was cold but I needed another bath. Anything that wanted to bother me could brace me in the middle of the water at night, when I could see it coming. It was safer for me—and more comfortable—to bathe during the darkness; I resolved to try and stick to that.
Nothing bothered me. I washed up. A few moments of concentration were all it took to dry out my now-washed clothes. The bloodstains might never come out, but at least they weren’t sticky or itchy.
Ubar was awake and vigilant; he spotted me as I walked up to the campfire. I said, “Tuva” and held up one finger, then made a throat-cutting gesture. Ubar nodded and relaxed a bit. I checked his wounds—still healing nicely—and then checked Utai’s. Ubar made no protest, instead turning his attention to cooking. That he was still hungry was not surprising. I gave him my canteen and he drank a lot of it.
Utai was doing much better. Her eyes focused and she seemed more aware—more dazed than comatose. I carefully felt her head, both with fingers and with tendrils. The bone had knit, mostly, and the skin had mended well. She would probably have a pair of thin, parallel scars under her hair, but that was better than the alternative. The important thing was the inside of her skull seemed to be coming together nicely. I couldn’t detect anything out of place—and her life energies were flowing peacefully, not leaking out or “sparking” across broken areas. I was hoping that meant everything was going to be all right.