Then they were free of the devils for a while. A dozen little birds, blue with white breasts, equipped with wide flat almost duckish beaks, swooped down. They swirled around the people and the beasts, catching the insects, gulping them down, narrowly averting aerial collisions in their circles. They came very close to the three, several times brushing them with their wings. In two minutes those flies not eaten had winged off for less dangerous parts.
“I’m glad I invented those birds,” Urthona said. “But if I’d known I was going to be in this situation, I’d never have made the flies.”
“Lord of the flies,” Anana said. “Beelzebub is thy name.”
Urthona said, “What?” Then he smiled. “Ah, yes, now I remember.”
Anana would have liked to climb a tree so she could get a better view. But she didn’t want her uncle to take her gregg and leave her stranded. Even if he didn’t do that, she’d be at a disadvantage when she got down out of the tree.
After an almost unendurable wait for her, since it was possible, though not very probable, that Kickaha could be coming along, the vanguard came into sight. Soon dark men wearing feathered headdresses rode by. They carried the same weapons and wore the same type of clothes as the Wendow. Around their necks, suspended by cords, were the bones of human figures. A big man held aloft a pole on which was a lion skull. Since he was the only one to have such a standard, and he rode in the lead, he must be the chief.
The faces were different from the Wendow’s, however, and the skins were even darker. Their features were broad, their noses somewhat bigger and even more aquiline, and the eyes had a slight Mongolian cast. They looked like, and probably were, Amerindians. The chief could have been Sitting Bull if he’d been wearing somewhat different garments and astride a horse.
The foreguard passed out of sight. The outriders and the women and children, most of whom were walking, went by. The women wore their shiny raven’s-wing hair piled on top of their heads, and their sole garments were leather skirts of ankle-length. Many wore necklaces of clam shells. A few carried papooses on back packs.
Anana suddenly gave a soft cry. A man on a gregg had come into sight. He was tall and much paler than the others and had bright red hair.
Urthona said, “It’s not Kickaha! It’s Red Orc!”
Anana felt almost sick with disappointment.
Her uncle turned and smiled at her. Anana decided at that moment that she was going to kill him at the first opportunity. Anyone who got that much enjoyment out of the sufferings of others didn’t deserve to live.
Her reaction was wholly emotional, of course, she told herself a minute later. She needed him to survive as much as he needed her. But the instant he was of no more use to her …
Urthona said, “Well, well. My brother, your uncle, is in a fine pickle, my dear. He looks absolutely downcast. What do you suppose his captors have in mind for him? Torture? It would be almost worthwhile to hang around and watch it.”
“He ain’t tied up,” McKay said. “Maybe he’s been adopted, like us.”
Urthona shrugged. “Perhaps. In either case, he’ll be suffering. He can spend the rest of his life here with those miserable wretches for all I care. The pain won’t be so intense, but it’ll be much longer lasting.”
McKay said, “What’re we going to do now we know Kickaha’s not with them?”
“We haven’t seen all of them,” Anana said. “Maybe …”
“It isn’t likely that the tribe would have caught both of them,” Urthona said impatiently. “I think we should go now. By cutting at an angle across the woods, we can be on the beach far ahead of them.”
“I’m waiting,” she said.
Urthona snorted and then spat. “Your sick lust for that leblabbiy makes me sick.”
She didn’t bother to reply. But presently, as the rearguard passed by, she sighed.
“Now are you ready to go?” Urthona said, grinning.
She nodded, but she said, “It’s possible that Orc has seen Kickaha.”
“What? You surely aren’t thinking of …? Are you crazy?”
“I’m going to trail them and when the chance comes I’ll help Orc escape.”
“Just because he might know something about your leblabbiy lover?”
“Yes.”
Urthona’s red face was twisted with rage. She knew it was not just from frustration. Distorting it were also incomprehension, disgust, and fear. He could not understand how she could be so much in love, in love at all, with a mere creature, the descendant of beings made in laboratories. That his niece, a Lord, could be enraptured by the creature Kickaha filled him with loathing for her. The fear was not caused by her action in refusing to go with them or the danger she represented if attacked. It was—she believed it was, anyway—a fear that possibly he might someday be so perverted that he, too, would fall in love with a leblabbiy. He feared himself.
Or perhaps she was being too analytical—ad absurdum—in her analysis.
Whatever had seized him, it had pushed him past rationality. Snarling, face as red as skin could get without bleeding, eyes tigerish, growing, he sprang at her. Both hands, white with compression, gripped the flint-headed spear.
When he charged, he was ten paces from her. Before he had gone five, he fell back, the spear dropping from his hands, his head and back thudding into the grass. The edge of her axe was sunk into his breastbone.
Almost before the blur of the whirling axe had solidified on Urthona’s chest, she had her knife out.
McKay had been caught flat-footed. Whether he would have acted to help her uncle or her would never be determined.
He looked shocked. Not at what had happened to her uncle, of course, but at the speed with which it had occurred.
Whatever his original loyalty was, it was now clear that he had both to aid and to depend upon her. He could not find the palace without her or, arriving there, know how to get into it. Or, if he could somehow gain entrance to it, know what to do after he was in it.
From his expression, though, he wasn’t thinking of this just now. He was wondering if she meant to kill him, too.
“We’re in this together, now,” she said. “All the way.”
He relaxed, but it was a minute before the bluegray beneath his pigment faded away.
She stepped forward and wrenched the axe from Urthona’s chest. It hadn’t gone in deeply, and blood ran out from the wound. His mouth was open; his eyes fixed; his skin was grayish. However, he still breathed.
“The end of a long and unpleasant relationship,” she said, wiping the axe on the grass. “Yet …”
McKay muttered, “What?”
“When I was a little girl, I loved him. He wasn’t then what he became later. For that matter, neither was I. Excessive longevity … solipsism … boredom … lust for such power as you Earthlings have never known …”
Her voice trailed off as if it were receding into an unimaginably distant past.
McKay made no movement to get closer to her. He said, “What’re you going to do?” and he pointed at the still form.
Anana looked down. The flies were swarming over Urthona, chiefly on the wound. It wouldn’t be long before the predators, attracted by the odor of blood, would be coming in. He’d be torn apart, perhaps while still living.
She couldn’t help thinking of those evenings on their native planet, when he had tossed her in the air and kissed her or when he had brought gifts or when he had made his first world and come to visit before going to it. The Lord of several universes had come to this … lying on his back, his blood eaten by insects, the flesh soon to be ripped by fangs and claws.
“Ain’t you going to put him out of his misery?” McKay said.
“He isn’t dead yet, which means that he still has hope,” she said. “No, I’m not going to cut his throat. I’ll leave his weapons and his gregg here. He might make it, though I doubt it. Perhaps I’ll regret not making sure of him, but I can’t …”
“I didn’t like him,”
McKay said, “but he’s going to suffer. It don’t seem right.”
“How many men have you killed in cold blood for money?” she said. “How many have you tortured, again just for money?”
McKay shook his head. “That don’t matter. There was a reason then. There ain’t no sense to this.”
“It’s usually emotional sense, not intellectual, that guides us humans,” she said. “Come on.”
She brushed by McKay, giving him a chance to attack her if he wanted to. She didn’t think he would, and he stepped back as if, for some reason, he dreaded her touch.
They mounted and headed at an angle for the beach. Anana didn’t look back.
When they broke out of the woods, the only creatures on the beach were birds, dead fish—the only true fish in this world were in the sea-lands—amphibians, and some foxes. The grewigg were breathing hard. The long journey without enough sleep and food had tired them.
Anana let the beasts water in the sea. She said, “We’ll go back into the forest. We’re near enough to the path to see which way they take. Either direction, we’ll follow them at a safe distance.”
Presently the tribe came out onto the beach on the right side of the channel. With shouts of joy they ran into the waves, plunged beneath its surface, splashed around playfully. After a while they began to spear fish, and when enough of these had been collected, they held a big feast.
When night came they retreated into the woods on the side of the path near where the two watchers were. Anana and McKay retreated some distance. When it became apparent that the savages were going to bed down, they went even further back into the woods. Anana decided that the tribe would stay put until “dawn” at least. It wasn’t likely that it would make this spot a more or less permanent camp. Its members would be afraid of other tribes coming into the area.
Even though she didn’t think McKay would harm her, she still went off into the bush to find a sleeping place where he couldn’t see her. If he wanted to, he would find her. But he would have to climb a tree to get her. Her bed was some boughs she’d chopped and laid across two branches.
The “night,” as all nights here, was not unbroken sleep. Cries of birds and beasts startled her, and twice her dreams woke her.
The first was of her uncle, naked, bleeding from the longitudinal gash in his chest, standing above her on the tree-nest and about to lay his hands on her. She came out of it moaning with terror.
The second was of Kickaha. She’d been wandering around the bleak and shifting landscape of this world when she came across his death-pale body lying in a shallow pool. She started crying, but when she touched him, Kickaha sat up suddenly, grinning, and he cried, “April fool!” He rose and she ran to him and they put their arms around each other and then they were riding swiftly on a horse that bounced rather than ran, like a giant kangaroo. Anana woke up with her hips emulating the up-and-down movement and her whole being joyous.
She wept a little afterward because the dream wasn’t true.
McKay was still sleeping where he had laid down. The hobbled moosoids were tearing off branches about fifty meters away. She bent down and touched his shoulder, and he came up out of sleep like a trout leaping for a dragonfly.
“Don’t ever do that again!” he said, scowling.
“Very well. We’ve got to eat breakfast and then check up on that tribe. Did you hear anything that might indicate they are up and about?”
“Nothing,” he said sullenly.
But when they got to the edge of the woods, they saw no sign of the newcomers except for excrement and animal and fish bones. When they rode out onto the white sands, they caught sight, to their right, of the last of the caravan, tiny figures.
After waiting until the Amerinds were out of sight, they followed. Some time later, they came to another channel running out of the sea. This had to be the waterway they had first encountered, the opening of which had swept Kickaha away. It ran straight outwards from the great body of water between the increasingly higher banks of the slope leading up to the pass between the two mountains.
They urged their beasts into the channel and rode them as they swam across. On reaching the other side they had to slide down off, get onto the beach, and pull on the reins to help the moosoids onto the sand. The Amerinds were still not in view.
She looked up the slope. “I’m going up to the pass and take a look. Maybe he’s out on the plain.”
“If he was trailing them,” McKay said, “he would’ve been here by now. And gone by now, maybe.”
“I know, but I’m going up there anyway.”
She urged the moosoid up the slope. Twice, she looked back. The first time, McKay was sitting on his motionless gregg. The next time, he was coming along slowly.
On reaching the top of the pass, she halted her beast. The plain had changed considerably. Though the channel was still surrounded by flatland for a distance of about a hundred feet on each side, the ground beyond had sunk. The channel now ran through a ridge on both sides of which were very deep and broad hollows. These were about a mile wide. Mountains of all sizes and shapes had risen along its borders, thrusting up from the edges as if carved there. Even as she watched, one of the tops of the mushroom-shaped heights began breaking off at its edges. The huge pieces slid or rotated down the steep slope, some reaching the bottom where they fell into the depressions.
There were few animals along the channel, but these began trotting or running away when the first of the great chunks broke off of the mushroom peak.
On the other side of the mountains was a downward slope cut by the channel banks. On the side on which she sat was a pile of bones, great and small, that extended down into the plain and far out.
Nowhere was any human being in sight.
Softly, she said, “Kickaha?”
It was hard to believe that he could be dead.
She turned and waved to McKay to halt. He did so, and she started her beast towards him. And then she felt the earth shaking around her. Her gregg stopped despite her commands to keep going, and it remained locked in position, though quivering. She got down off of it and tried to pull it by the reins, but it dug in, leaning its body back. She mounted again and waited.
The slope was changing swiftly, sinking at the rate of about a foot a minute. The channel was closing up, the sides moving toward each other, and apparently the bottom was moving up, since the water was slopping over its lips.
Heat arose from the ground.
McKay was in the same predicament. His moosoid stubbornly refused to obey despite his rider’s beatings with the shaft of his spear.
She turned on the saddle to look behind her. The ridge was becoming a mountain range, a tiny range now but it was evident that if this process didn’t stop, it would change into a long and giant barrow. The animals along it were running down its slopes, their destination the ever-increasing depressions along its sides.
However, the two mountains that formed the pass remained solid, immovable.
Anana sighed. There was nothing she could do except sit and wait this out unless she wanted to dismount. The gregg, from long experience, must know the right thing to do.
It was like being on a slow-moving elevator, one in which the temperature rose as the elevator fell. Actually, she felt as if the mountains on her side were rising instead of the ground descending.
The entire change lasted about an hour. At the end the channel had disappeared, the ridge had stopped swelling and had sunk, the hollows had been filled, and the plain had been restored to the bases of the mountains just outside the sea-land. The animals which had been desperately scrambling around to adjust to the terrain-change were now grazing upon the grass. The predators were now stalking the meat on the hoof. Business as usual.
Anana tickticked with her tongue to the gregg, and it trotted toward the sea. McKay waited for her to come to him. He didn’t ask her if she’d seen Kickaha. He knew that if she had she would have said so. He merely shook his head and said, “Crazy
country, ain’t it?”
“It lost us more than an hour, all things considered,” she said. “I don’t see any reason to push the grewigg though. They’re not fully recovered yet. We’ll just take it easy. We should find those Indians sometime after dark. They’ll be camped for the night.”
“Yeah, some place in the woods,” he said. “We might just ride on by them and in the morning they’ll be on our tails.”
About three hours after the bright bands of the sky had darkened, Anana’s gregg stopped, softly rumbling in its throat. She urged it forward with soft words until she saw, through the half-light, a vague figure. She and McKay retreated for a hundred yards and held a short conference. McKay didn’t object when she decided that she would take out the guard while he stayed behind.
“I hope the guard don’t make any noise when you dispose of him,” he said. “What’ll I do if he raises a ruckus?”
“Wait and see if anyone else hears him. If they do, then ride like hell to me, bringing my gregg, and we’ll take off the way we came. Unless, that is, most of the Indians are in the woods. Maybe there’s only a guard or two on the beach itself. But I don’t plan on making a mistake.
“You’re the boss,” McKay said. “Good luck.”
She went into the woods, moving swiftly when there was no obstruction, slowly when she had to make her way among thick bushes. At last, she was opposite the guard, close enough to see that he was a short stocky man. In the dim light she couldn’t make out his features, but she could hear him muttering to himself. He carried a stonetipped spear in one hand and a war boomerang was stuck in a belt around his waist. He paced back and forth, generally taking about twenty steps each way.
Anana looked down the beach for other guards. She couldn’t see any, but she was certain there would be others stationed along the edge of the woods. For all she knew, there might be one just out of eyesight.
She waited until he had gone past her in the direction of McKay. She rose from behind the bush and walked up behind him. The soft sand made little sound. The flat of her axe came down against the back of his head. He fell forward with a grunt. After waiting for a minute to make sure no one had heard the sound of the axe against the bone, she turned the man over. She had to bend close to him to distinguish his facial features. And she swore quietly.
The World of Tiers, Volume 2 Page 35