by Robert Adams
Solomon Claxton himself supervised the careful removal of the closest cranklight from out the special closet that housed it. He saw to its setting up in the carved wooden swivel socket in the rail of the porch, personally connected the power box to the light, then set a husky young farmer to cranking the handles on each side of the box.
First, a coal-red spot commenced to glow from somewhere deep beneath the thick, polished glass lens. As the crank man maintained the steady rhythmic cranking, the spot became red-gold, then yellow-gold, then silver-gold, then silver, silver-white, and soon was become so bright that no man could look directly into it without a degree of pain and a long period of near-blindness.
Taking the handles of the lamp, Solomon swept the far-reaching beam out across gardens and the fields beyond. Expecting to see nothing, he was deeply surprised when the beam picked up a clear movement. His scalp prickled and his mouth took on a touch of dryness.
“Cat!” Ehud almost shouted in Solomon’s ear. “Long-tooth cat, Sol, a dang big ’un too, moving th’ough the wheat, yonder. See ’im?”
Solomon had good eyesight, he saw the beast too, and it surely was a big cat, even for a specimen of its Devil-spawned ilk — a good two cubits at the shoulder, in fine flesh, with a fawn-colored pelt and the white fangs that extended well below the lower jaw. Had it been coming toward the buildings of the Abode, he most certainly would have awakened his father, the Elder, and then led a party out against the huge predator — one of the most dangerous of all the wild beasts that plagued man here on the verge of the vast, grassy wilderness.
But the monstrous feline clearly was not bound for the Abode and presently harbored no designs upon the beasts below or their owners above; rather was it pacing slowly, deliberately across the expanse of the rippling wheat field at a right angle to the buildings. He had done much hunting in his lifetime, had Solomon Claxton, and he knew well that the big beast would not be moving so slowly and calmly were it not carrying a good bellyful of meat.
He let go the handle of the cranklight and turned just in time to see Ehud settle his shoulder firmly against the buttplate of a long swivel-rifle, shake a bit of priming powder into the pan, position the frizzen, then start to draw back the flint.
Moving fast, Solomon threw open the just-primed pan and brushed out more of the fine powder, then slammed down the hinged wooden breech cover over the action of the piece.
“No, Ehud,” he told his friend gently, not in a tone of reprimand. “Not tonight. A gunshot would awaken every soul in the Abode. You’d rob them all of their sleep to no real account, and the Elder would assuredly wax wroth.”
“Come sunup, the hunters will track that cat, kill him if he’s denning dangerously near to the Abode. Never fear, you saw him first, so you’ll get the pelt if the Elder doesn’t want it. You know I’ll look out for my oldest friend, don’t you?
“Now, I’ll see to the putting up of the light, and you grab a man to reshroud the rifle.”
Chapter II
In the close darkness of the horse barn, with straw under her bare feet and the short, wiry, odd-smelling man beside her, poor Bettylou Hanson felt no fear, only a numb, dumb acceptance that what would here befall her would surely befall her. The man still held her arm clasped firmly in one hand, but he did not grasp so lightly as to hurl her. Then she felt his other hand rove lingeringly over her swelling breasts, then move downward, stopping and resting upon the distension of her abdomen.
“Hairless woman,” he hissed into her ear, his warm breath laden with an odor of milk and curds, “how many moons before you foal?”
“Four moons, maybe part of another.” Bettylou answered dully.
Abruptly, there were two more men close beside Bettylou and her captor. One of them, no taller or stockier than he who held her, jammed some kind of rag into her mouth, using his other hand to force and hold open her jaws in order to effect his purpose, then a strip of cloth was knotted tightly behind her head to hold the gag in place, while at the same time another man was behind her lashing her wrists together with a cord or thong of some description.
She was led, bound and gagged, among a group of horses and mules, and strong arms raised her easily to the withers of one of the beasts before a mounted man. Though this rider grasped her tightly with his right arm and hand, she somehow sensed that he meant her no slightest harm, that his grasp was as much intended to steady her as for any more sinister purpose.
The ponderous bar came up with a shrill, protesting squeal, and then the high, broad door swung wide agape, opening the way for the dozen or so raiders to ride out on the choicer of the horses and mules they were lifting this night while leading the rest, these others hurriedly packed with such gear and hardware as had been easy to hand in the stable and adjoining areas. Those equines they were rejecting for one reason or another they drove out before them.
The last raider, before he left the stable, used flint and steel to light a torch, whirled it about his head until it was blazing brightly, then rode up and down the length of the now-empty stable igniting piles of straw, bales of hay and the like before trotting out to join his comrades.
The barking, howling, yelping and snarling of the kenneled dogs had never ceased; and now, as the riders kneed their mounts over to cluster about the man bearing the blazing torch, the shouts and curses of men were added to the canine clamor.
Bettylou Hanson heard the deep-throated thrrruum of bowstrings all around her and saw half a score of fiery red-yellow streaks mount upward from the stableyard to sink into and commence to lick avidly at as many sections of the residence levels of the two nearer buildings. Seemingly directly over her head, a swivel-rifle boomed, throwing a lance of fire for a good five cubits beyond its muzzle. Far back, from the highest porch of the Building of the Father, there were two more reports, and the girl heard close by her ear a humming like that of some monstrous bee.
The raider archers followed the fire arrows with a couple of volleys of shafts aimed at the black silhouettes outlined by the lamps, the torches and the leaping, crackling flames now throwing yellow-white sheets of destruction across whole lengths of wooden wall and nibbling here and there at roofings. Some hideous shrieks and several thuds of fallen bodies testified to the skilled accuracy of these raiders, and Bettylou could not but marvel at how such deadly aim was maintained by men loosing from the backs of nervous and restive horses.
The Hanson girl’s last, departing glimpse of the Abode, wherein she had been born and had lived all of her young life to date, was of smoke billowing out of the emptied stable which was the ground floor of the Building of the Son, while the upper levels of both it and the adjoining Building of the Holy Ghost looked to be completely wreathed in leaping flames. A few more swivel-rifles boomed to no effect as the raiders galloped through the gardens and across the grain fields but all these were from well above ground level.
They rode on at a steady, easy pace for about a mile as the moon emerged from her cloudy shroud to light their way through the last of the farthest pastures and thence into the flat and brushy wilderness toward the line of copses that marked the verge of the prairie.
On the far side of a low hill in the sheep pasture, some score of small, big-headed horses stood about cropping the moon-silvered grass, while a brace of men who looked akin to and were dressed and accoutered like her captors squatted, grinning, one of them holding a sheep, a young ram, by a tether.
Bettylou was amazed at the silence of the raiders. Not a single word was exchanged among any of the men, while the grazing hones ceased to feed almost as one and rapidly ambled over to stand still as girths were tightened and the men mounted them, ready now to lead all of the beasts stolen from the Abode of the Righteous. The ram blatted piteously just before a sharp raider knife slashed open his throat; the blood was carefully caught and shared out equally between all of the men. Bettylou was offered a horn cup, but she paled and gagged; she knew that she would certainly have spewed had there been aught save pure emptine
ss in her stomach.
Still without a word spoken, the raider drank the hot blood himself and turned away just as another approached bearing a greased hide bag from which he took a lump of whitish-gray and very strong-smelling cheese. This lump he held at the bound girl’s mouth until she finally took a bite of it then a larger bite, then all of the remainder of the lump.
Tied into the saddle of one of the captured horses — Solomon Claxton’s hunting horse, God-sent, she noted — chewing at her mouthful of the delicious cheese. Bettylou saw the pair who had captured the stray ram flop the still-quivering carcass onto its back, open it and rough-dress it, helping themselves while they worked to the raw liver, heart and kidneys of the sheep as well as to the blood that collected in the body cavity. The gutted ram was lashed onto another of the stolen horses, and leading it and all the others, the raiders set out at the same slow, easy pace toward the western prairie.
As dawn began to streak the eastern skyline with muted reds and oranges and yellows, the raiding party and their loot — equine and inanimate and human — had advanced well out onto the endless expanse of grasses. Exhausted by the long ride, Bettylou Hanson drooped, her chin sunk upon her chest, no longer even trying to really ride and letting the hide thongs knotted about her legs and body keep her in the saddle of the big, powerful gelding. God-sent. But tired as she was, she could not sleep for the ache of her bruised, abused bottom and the discomfort of inner thighs rubbed raw and incessantly stung by salt sweat.
She was dimly aware that someone was riding now beside her, did not really take notice of the fact until a rough. callused hand lifted her chin to better view her face, then began to untie the thongs securing her numb hands.
They had been moving steadily southwestward, but then, as soon as her hands were freed, the entire party turned almost due north, coming presently to a trickling watercourse and following this to its confluence with another, larger one some few hundred yards from the marshy shore of a small lake.
In a sizable clearing carpeted in short grass — rare, this far out on the prairie, and of a bright, intense green — and surrounded by a dense stand of trees — cottonwood, elm, elder, basswood, walnut and, nearing the lakeshore, huge, droop-branched willows — the raiding party reined up, dismounted and began to unpack and unsaddle. Their own small horses they left unfettered, free to roam where they would, but those recently lifted from the Abode they made haste to hobble firmly, lest they essay a return from whence they had just been brought at such a cost of long, careful planning and deadly danger.
Bettylou was untied and lifted down from the saddle of the gelding with a rough gentleness, allowed to drink her fill from a skin of fresh, bitingly cold brook water. Then one of the raiders led her over to the shade of an elm, tied her ankle to its trunk with a long rawhide riata, indicated that she should sit there upon the sward, then left her to her own devices along with the waterskin and a leather bag of the strong, tasty, whitish cheese.
Munching at the cheese and sipping from the waterskin, the girl stretched muscles stiff and sore from the long hours in the saddle and watched the smoothly efficient activities of these strange, silent little men. Thus far, the only words she had heard any of them speak had been addressed to her, they never exchanged a single utterance between themselves or to horse or mule, yet they went about the communal-effort tasks of setting up camp without pause or miscue.
After unsaddling but before picketing, all of the captive horses and mules were led in groups down to the brookside and there watered, then briskly rubbed down with handfuls of the bigger, coarser grasses brought in from the encroaching verge of the tall-grass prairie.
This accomplished, the raiders posted guards, gathered wood, built a fire and finished dressing the sheep carcass for cooking. Bettylou noted how carefully the inedible portions of the sheep were retained — The stomach bags and the large intestines emptied of contents, turned inside out and washed in the brook, thicker, longer sinews painstakingly separated from bones and muscles, scraped and washed, then hung up on branches to air-dry; the small, pointed, black hooves were put aside and the inner surface of the hide was scraped clean of clinging bits of fat and flesh.
They set the legs of the sheep aside to roast, but the rest of the carcass was reduced by flashing knives to a pile of meat and fat and gristle which was heaped atop the offal — lung, small intestines, various glands and larger veins and arteries. The defleshed bones were all cracked and placed in a water-filled caldron along with the sheep’s head and the contents of three or four pouches produced by as many of the raiders, plus the partially digested herbiage that had been removed from the stomachs of the beast.
When she watched this penultimate addition, it was all that Bettylou could do to repress the urge to vomit up the fine cheese, and she vowed to herself then and there that come what might, she would never, could never partake of so barbaric, so nauseous a mess.
And, in her eyes. it got worse, While most of the raiders lay snoring or lazed or sat working sporadically a sundry small tasks, and the stew-pot began to send the first tendrils of steam aloft, hunters came strolling in from individual forays in the morning coolness. One bore a small, straight-horned antelope; two others had killed large hares; and these were dressed, skinned, butchered and added to the pot; and so too was a large fish one of the men had caught barehanded at the mouth of the brook. But meaty portions of each slain creature were always added to the pile of mutton and sheep scraps. Bettylou wondered why. Were these for a burnt offering to their false gods? (After all, the gods of these raiders were most assuredly false, for of all living folk, only the Chosen worshiped God Almighty.) But she dared not draw their attention to her by asking.
Once she had been tied to the tree and provided with water and cheese, she had been afforded all the attention and obvious scrutiny they had afforded the hobbled four-legged captives Very soon after the man who had tied her and brought the food had left her, Bettylou had repaired behind the thick trunk of the ancient elm and lifted her worn, torn, filthy scarlet smock — the only garment that such as she were allowed by the Elder and the Patriarchs of the families — and squatted long enough to empty her painfully full bladder. But if her brief absence was noted by her captors, such was not apparent upon her return to view.
Of a sudden. Bettylou recalled that rare visitors from other Abodes of the Righteous had been said to have spoken of fierce, murderous tribes of sinful thieves who called themselves the Folk of the Horse or some such name. Saturated with Sin, they were said to be true Servants of Satan, headhunters, cannibals drinkers of blood rather than water, filthy, stinking folk who never washed and who wore their clothing until it rotted off. These same visitors had averred, she had been told, that the Satanic savages lacked the ability of speech and made no other sounds save screams and roars and screeches like any other wild beasts. Could her captors be . . . ? Had she, Bettylou Hanson, been taken to provide a cannibal feast? Was this horror the final punishment of God for her Sin?
Briefly, she quivered in newfound terror, but then her keen mind took charge. Yes, the raiders did drink fresh, hot blood, but they drank water, as well; they might be headhunters, cannibals or both, these facts remained to be proved or disproved, but up to now, they had offered no violence or any real ill treatment to Bettylou. Indeed, they one and all had treated her far more kindly than had her own folk of late, at least since she had been proved one of the Accursed of God.
As regarded those other disgusting attributes of the legendary barbarians. Bettylou could not call any she had been near filthy. Yes indeed, they did smell very different from the boys and men around whom she had grown up, but they looked no grubbier and smelled no worse than any farmer or herder or hunter of the Abode might look or smell between his monthly baths.
And as she watched, this particular matter was resolved, as by twos and threes, raiders trooped down to the brook bank, stripped to bare skin and dived in to swim and frolic like boys, shouting and splashing for a while, the
n squatting in the shallows to wash their dusty, sweat-tacky trousers and shirts.
When the raiders stripped to swim and wash, Bettylou noted that although their faces, hands and other regularly exposed skin was nut-brown from sun and weather, the bodies of most were as fair as was her own, all save one man who was so different in so many ways as to make her think him sprung of a different race than the others.
Where they were fair, he was of a light-olive skin tone. Few of the other raiders were much taller than was she, but this man towered to better than four cubits, she reckoned. His bones, too, were heavier than those of the other raiders, though not quite so heavy as those of the men of the Chosen. And where men of the Chosen all developed thick, round, rolling musculature, this tall man and most of the smaller ones were equipped with flat muscles. Moreover, the tall man’s hair was as black as a crow’s wing, though streaked at the temples with strands of gray. He had not yet come close enough for her to see the color of his eyes.
Bettylou had decided finally that the pile of meat and innards was really and truly a sacrifice of some kind, when those for whom it was intended slipped silently out of the woods behind her to claim it from the heaving, crawling, buzzing carpet of metallic-hued flies.
The girl sprang to her feet, shrieked but the once before an excess of terror froze her throat. Then her eyes rolled upward in their sockets and she slumped bonelessly to the ground.
The bigger, dark man, he who had fired the stable, paced over to where Tim Krooguh crouched over the Dirtman girl, concern writ plainly upon his face. Laying a hand on the shoulder of the wiry clansman he spoke aloud.
“I’m sorry, Tim. I should either have mindspoken the cats to come into camp slowly so that she could come to see that they were not dangerous to anyone here, or beamed assurance into her mind beforehand, as I did on the first part of the ride, last night. But I’m tired and . . . Oh, well, what’s done is now done. Lets just hope the poor child hasn’t been shocked into premature labor.”