by John Jakes
She saw him coming and kicked her mount just as he let fly. The bolo whipped past her, the ropes just barely missing, but one of the stone weights clipped her head, stunning her, and she tumbled to the ground.
From some distance away, Ari saw Daena fall. She grabbed the mane of a riderless horse, swung herself up, and galloped into the battle.
Daena had barely managed to stagger to her feet when Ari arrived. The chimp, clinging to her mount with her strong thighs wrapped around its middle, leaned out, grabbed Daena, and with a single mighty heave, flipped her up onto her mount. Then she wheeled to retreat, but her horse screamed and reared, its path blocked by an advancing phalanx of apes clashing their weapons fiercely.
Ari cast a despairing glance at Daena, who sat behind her, pale and shaken. There was no way out. The apes growled in triumph and charged toward them. Ari took a deep breath—
A thunderous roar crushed the other sounds of the battlefield, as Krull, in full fury, sprang at the charging apes, scattering them like bowling pins. Some few dodged his assault and, preferring easier prey, leaped at Ari and Daena, while the rest picked themselves up and closed in a ring around the gigantic old ape.
Ari tried to ride out of trouble, but one of the monkey spearmen got in a lucky thrust and laid open Daena’s shoulder to the bone. Once again the human nearly lost her seat, but then Ari grabbed her and steadied her with one hand as she guided their mount with the other.
The apes who outnumbered Krull got a nasty surprise as they piled onto him. His hands were like vises, twisting and crushing everything he touched. His claws were still sharp, as sharp as his fangs, and he knew how to use both. In moments, his gray coat was splotched with fresh blood, and the field around him was littered with crippled apes either moaning in pain or choking on their final breaths.
He’d almost fought his way free of them when a shadow fell on him, and he looked up.
Attar stared back at him. He’d lost his horse somewhere and was on foot. It didn’t make him any smaller.
The two, once teacher and student, then friends, and now mortal enemies, faced off against each other. Krull raised his sword as Attar drew his own blade.
They launched themselves at each other in a flurry of whirling steel. Attar had the advantage of his youthful strength and speed, but Krull was a wily old swordsman, whose skill with edged weapons gave him parity. They clashed, clashed again, and somehow in the third collision, both swords went spinning away.
Neither ape hesitated. They went at it again, with tooth and claw, in a spinning blur of blood and fur and dust. But Krull, despite his strength and skill, was old, and in the end, it was enough; Attar, slashing and gouging, his endurance seemingly inexhaustible, inexorably began to wear his teacher down. He sank his claws into Krull’s throat and bent him back, back…
Not far away, Limbo, trying to sneak across the battlefield and escape, suddenly found himself flanked by a pair of armored apes who snarled and rushed him at the same time.
Limbo was carrying a spear, but he didn’t think to use it, didn’t think at all, in fact, just leaped straight up into the air at the last moment, leaving the two soldiers to crash headfirst into each other and then stagger off, dazed, as he landed again. The little chimp stifled a shiver and kept on running.
* * *
Deep inside the Oberon, as the battle raged above, the bridge was silent. The only movement was the back-and-forth swish of the main tracking screen. The glowing line moved slowly from one side to the other, undisturbed, a ticking metronome of light.
Then, abruptly, as the locator line passed the center of the screen, a single glowing dot bloomed in its wake near the bottom of the screen.
Ping…
* * *
General Thade, his sword nicked and dripping with blood, swept across the battlefield like a plague, reached the far edge, and wheeled back again, his mind in flames.
The battle fury was on him now, leaving him nothing but a rage to kill, maim, destroy. He wanted the wild human. He should have killed him when he’d first seen him, that night at Senator Sandar’s house. It had been a mistake to let him live, but the time had come to rectify the error. He’d seen him once, early in the battle, but hadn’t been able to find him again in the frantic, bleeding scrum the plain had become.
But a quick glance showed him it would be over soon. Most of the humans were down. Some were already being led away by his men, chained up properly, as animals should be.
Only near the center was some fighting still going on. He caught a glimpse of Attar, his mighty fists hammering his armored chest in triumph. Beyond him, a horse carrying two riders fled rapidly in the other direction. And a bit to the side of that…
Yes.
Thade’s fangs gaped wide. He jerked on his reins and sent his charger careening back onto the field.
Davidson raced toward a pair of apes, spear in one hand, net in the other, but before he could reach them, strong fingers leaped out of nowhere, grabbed him, and dragged him down. He twisted onto his back and saw a huge monkey standing astride him, eyes glittering, a great, crimson-smeared sword raised high over his head.
Davidson reflexively closed his eyes, heard a wet, punching sound, realized it wasn’t the sound of his own skull splitting, and looked up to see the soldier still there, but now looking down in disbelief at a bright spear tip that had somehow appeared, sticking out of his battle mail. Limbo put one foot against the ape’s side and yanked the spear out. The wound belched a gout of blood, and the ape fell over. Limbo nodded at Davidson and continued to back toward the spot where the humans were clustering to make their final stand. Davidson clambered to his feet and ran after him.
Ari rode right into the center of the last of the human fighters. Birn and Davidson helped Daena down. She had an ugly lump on her skull, her shoulder was bleeding freely, and her face was ghost-pale from the loss of blood. They tried to settle her down, but she pushed them away, snatched up a weapon, and dashed back toward the fighting.
Davidson wiped sweat and blood off his face, and looked around. There were so few of them left. And the apes surrounded them in an unbroken ring of fangs and steel.
As he watched, the ring split apart, just enough to allow a huge warhorse to ride through.
Thade.
In triumph.
* * *
On the Oberon’s bridge, the locator screen was flashing brightly. The glowing dot moved closer and closer to the center of the screen.
Ping ping ping ping ping…
Out on the battlefield, something glittered high above the haze, but nobody noticed.
11
As Davidson stepped forward, Thade charged him. Davidson dodged, parried with his spear, as Thade thundered past.
The field had grown quiet. Most of the fighting had died away, as if everybody could sense that this was the final confrontation, the ape general against the human hero.
Even Thade felt it as he wheeled his horse, then pulled up, staring intently at Davidson, who waited for his next charge.
Thade was many things, but he was no coward. And what would his men think, what sort of story would it make, for him to slay vermin from the safety of horseback?
He cantered slowly forward, then slipped down from his horse and faced Davidson on foot. A long, breathless moment as the two stared at each other. Then they closed with a rush.
Davidson was drained nearly empty, Thade less so, but it wouldn’t have made much difference if they’d both been fresh. Thade was still twice as strong and twice as fast as any human.
He met Davidson’s charge with a buffeting blow to the head that knocked the human sprawling. Davidson absorbed the force of the blow by rolling away, and then sprang back to his feet, only to be met by another flurry that ended with a bone-crunching strike that left him dazed and helpless.
Grinning, Thade flexed his long fingers and moved in for the kill…
The heavens split wide open.
The sound was ear-splitting, sku
ll-cracking, unlike anything ever heard on this world before. Thade froze, then looked up. All across the plain, people and apes crouched, yelled in terror, pointed at the sky.
It streaked across the heavens in a blazing line, impossibly fast. Davidson shook the fog from his brain and stared at it.
Could it be…?
Then the contrail popped out, scintillating like a hundred tiny rainbows, casting shards of light across the upturned faces below. And Davidson knew.
In the distance, he could hear his messenger beacon beeping wildly.
The craft swooped lower, lower, and now the wild wind of its passage split the dust cloud like an angel parting the murk of hell—or like the ancient pictures of Semos stepping down from ape heaven—and the pod appeared in all its glory. Its turbulent wake scoured away the haze as the pod settled in on a pillar of fire, then finally skidded to a halt in a storm of dust and light right on the edge of the rocks of Calima.
Thade recovered quickly. He didn’t know what this was, but he didn’t like it. Some kind of human trickery, no doubt. He spun around, glanced across the battlefield, and saw that, trickery or no, it was having an effect on his army.
They’d already been battered by the fire weapon Davidson had used on them in the beginning. And now this, this impossible flying thing smashing down from the sky. His troops seemed unable to move, frozen by terror and confusion.
He turned back to the pod. Its superheated flanks steamed in the morning light. Its hull gave off sharp, creaking sounds, as the metal cooled.
The hatch on the pod suddenly popped open. Light poured out. Davidson, staring in disbelief—he knew what must have happened, he just couldn’t quite make himself accept it—felt a shiver as a single hand appeared in the opening, reached out, and groped around until its long fingers closed on the top rung of the escape ladder.
The hand was covered with thick, silky hair.
Then a face slowly rose into the opening, eyes huge, peering about uncertainly. At the sight, a deep, pervasive murmur of awe whispered across the battlefield. Pericles, the chimp pilot Davidson had left behind only a few days before, or thousands of years ago, depending on your viewpoint, heard the exhalation, but didn’t know what to make of it. He looked lost, and confused by the sight of so many apes. Then his gaze found Davidson. As soon as he spotted his old friend, Pericles seemed to relax. He pulled himself the rest of the way out and made his way to the ground.
What with the heat still steaming from the pod’s shields, the dust beginning to settle back, and the clear light of the two suns illuminating everything like dual spotlights, the chimp looked a lot like he was descending to Earth from clouds of immortal splendor.
Attar sank slowly to his knees, his eyes wide and brimming with wonder. “Semos,” he whispered.
Those nearest him heard what he said, and within instants the name was spreading in an irresistible tide across the gathered ape troopers. Then the whispers became roars, as word of the miraculous return reached even those too far away to see.
The army became a mob, hands outstretched, pressing forward.
“Semos!” they howled. “Semos! Semos!”
Jaw hanging, Davidson utterly forgotten, Thade stared at this impossible apparition, a chimp who flew down from the sky in a steel chariot, and appeared before them wreathed in glory, wearing garments the likes of which none of them had ever seen before.
Pericles stood at the bottom of the pod’s ladder, staring about uncertainly as the thunder from the apes rolled over him in waves of ear-bursting sound.
Attar rose to his feet and ran to Thade. “Sir!” he cried. “The prophecy is true! Semos has returned, to us!”
The humans watched all of this in stunned silence. Some of them used the opportunity to pick themselves up from the ground and slowly retreat back toward the rocks. The thunderstruck apes paid them no attention. Every simian eye was riveted on what they believed to be the Second Coming of their Creator.
So everybody saw Davidson run across the field to Pericles, pick him up, and give him a heartfelt hug. The chimp looked up at him, spread his rubbery teeth in a wide smile, then looked down at his hand. He thought a moment, then picked out his right thumb, glanced at Davidson, and offered him a perfect thumbs-up sign.
Now the humans began to cheer. They still didn’t understand what they were seeing, but they could see that the relationship between this ape from the sky and their strange human hero was unlike anything they’d ever known. To them, after the disaster of the battle, it seemed a sign of hope.
Davidson heard them cheering. He grinned at Pericles, and returned the thumbs-up.
“Okay, Pericles,” he said. “Let’s go explain evolution to the monkeys.”
Pericles clung to him happily, as Davidson carried the chimp out into a world now utterly changed from what it had been only a few moments before.
For both of us… Davidson thought.
For the apes, too, as it turned out.
They were simple soldiers, but devout in their belief, and unshakable in their view of their world. They had marched out behind their general, ready to fight and die in the cause of slaughtering human vermin, just as Semos commanded.
And now Semos had returned. But not to lead them to victory. No, their God now approached them in the arms of a human!
The process was called cognitive disassociation. If God commanded them to kill humans, but God didn’t kill humans, He hugged them, then did God lie? But God had told them He would return to them, and they could see with their own eyes that He had. But if God didn’t hate humans, then why did His church preach that they must do so? But if the church preached…
The mutual contradictions whirled faster and faster in each ape’s brain. They could not be processed, could not make sense, because each part was irreconcilable with any other part. Either their church was wrong, or their God was wrong, or they were wrong, and—
And still the impossible pair of God and man walked toward them!
They were simple apes, sturdy and brave. They did the only thing they could. They howled in fear and despair, threw down their weapons, and ran.
The sight of his army dissolving before his very eyes finally jerked General Thade from his stunned paralysis. He rushed at his retreating troops, screaming, “Stop him!”
He grabbed a couple of soldiers, tried to drag them toward Davidson and Pericles, but they just pushed him away, their eyes wild, and joined their fellows.
“Go back!” Thade screeched. “I order you! Hold your positions!” He began to rave, spit flying from his pink tongue. “Cowards!”
The surviving humans began to cheer again, as they watched their would-be killers fleeing the field en masse. None of them had ever thought they would live to see apes flee from a human. Especially a human carrying another ape as if they were old friends.
Attar watched his retreating troops, watched his raving general, watched Davidson and Pericles. His head swiveled back and forth, back and forth. He was an ape seeing everything he’d held high and sacred crumbling before his eyes, and he didn’t know what to do.
Thade uttered a low, groaning growl, snapped his fangs together like a trap, and launched himself at Davidson. He landed in front of the pair and backhanded Pericles so hard that he sent the shocked chimp flying ten feet away, and knocked loose the standard survival pack the monkey had been wearing on his shoulders. “Wherever you come from,” Thade snarled at Davidson, “you’re still just a wretched human.”
Attar and the few apes who had not yet run away gasped in shock at the sacrilege.
Thade didn’t care. He grabbed Davidson next, lifted him over his head, then tossed him away like a bag of garbage. Davidson landed hard, groaned, tried to rise. Several feet away, Pericles’s backpack had rolled to a stop near the cavelike entrance of the tunnel that led down to Oberon’s bridge.
Davidson stood, faced Thade again, and the general, now beyond rage into a sort of red-foaming insanity, leaped at him and threw him again.
Landing the second time was like being run over by a car. Davidson didn’t know if he could get back up, but at least Thade had thrown him in the right direction. Pericles’s backpack was only a few inches beyond his hand.
Furtively, he tried to reach inside without Thade seeing what he was doing, but Thade was too quick. Davidson had to settle for grabbing the pack and staggering into the tunnel as Thade charged a third time.
The narrowness of the tunnel constricted the ape general’s movements, so instead of picking up Davidson and heaving him again, he just punched him as hard as he could.
Davidson felt something crack in his chest—a couple of ribs, maybe—as he went flying backward. He landed right before the tunnel’s sharp downturn, and when he tried to get up, Thade hit him again, and knocked him over the edge.
He landed in a heap at the bottom of the decline, and looked up to see Thade grinning malevolently down at him from the top.
Davidson scooted backward, got his feet under him and lurched on, hearing the soft thud of Thade’s landing behind him. He made it almost all the way to the bridge before Thade caught up to him again and heaved him bodily through the doorway. Davidson crashed into the edge of one of the consoles, felt more ribs go, and landed on the steel deck. Thade swaggered over and looked down at him a moment, then, judging Davidson harmless, looked around the strange environs of the bridge. He seemed unimpressed.
“I will bury your remains.” He spat into the dust. “So they can be forgotten like the rest of your race.”
The moment he took to gloat was his mistake, because it gave Davidson a chance to finally get his hand inside Pericles’s survival pack. Now he pulled it out, and aimed the standard-issue handgun at Thade’s face.
Thade immediately froze, then abruptly stepped back, one hand coming up fearfully.
Davidson stared at him, then at the gun. He looked at Thade and suddenly understood. “You know what this is…” he said, shocked at the realization.
How? How could he know?
But Thade obviously did know that what Davidson held was a weapon, and a very dangerous one, from the way his eyes were bulging.