Collected short fiction, p.724
Collected Short Fiction, page 724
A ripple of interest had spread through the crowd, and the lean old huntsman waited for the bailiff to drum again for silence.
“Fellow Blacklantern, we hear your appeal. We are reminded that all our clans once granted extraordinary rights and immunities to your Fellowship. Unfortunately, you have forced their cancellation.” The standing of an elder came as much from oratory as from skill on the trail, and his fustian phrases rolled melodiously across the pit.
“When we allowed the opening of the portal, you otherworlders promised us great good things. Instead, you have brought us only evil. We have therefore withdrawn all your immunities. You stand accused of capital offenses, and your appeal lacks merit.” He signaled the bailiff to thump again. “These two prisoners are remanded to the justice of the clan.”
“You can’t do that!” Blacklantern saw the black scars harden, and he tried to smooth his tone. “We have been cut off from Xyr. May we relay a message to our own leaders there?”
Old Flintbreaker waited for the ritual thump.
“Request denied,” he rapped. “Until your ordeal has been concluded. If it happens that you are able to reach the sanctuary with your heads untaken, the court will then uphold your innocence. Your lives will be protected. You will be allowed to go in peace. But the ritual of justice will now continue.”
“Mercy, sir!” Blacklantern shouted. “I was born here. I’ll take my own chances on the sacred uplands, but I beg mercy for Agent Snowfire. A tender girl. From a cultured world, where life is sheltered. The justice of Nggongga is too cruel for her. I beg mercy!”
“If our ways are too cruel for her, hers are too cruel for us.” Flintbreaker’s strong teeth glinted through his mask of scars. “Her white kindred opened the portal with promises of all good things—and came through to steal our sacred treasures and profane our holy places, to buy our bodies and blight our souls, to scatter the eggs of monstrous worms to eat our world. We have no mercy left.”
Approval echoed around the pit.
“But we do pledge justice,” he boomed again. “The game may be hard, but we play fair. We limit the huntsmen to three. We allow you a whole day to run, before the first takes your trail. We promise you freedom, if you reach Nggooth alive.”
A sardonic grin twisted his tattoos.
“If you find our own worldeating worms in your path, before you reach the refuge oasis, then I beg you not to blame the ancient justice of the Game clan for deeds you yourselves have done.”
At his signal, the bailiff drummed.
“Gather, huntsmen!” his rich voice lifted again. “Prepare to place your bids for the right to take these heads.”
“Sir!” Blacklantern begged desperately. “May we just have our translators back—”
The bailiff banged the floor till he fell silent. Bidders filed down from the seats, to peer and poke through the lancegrass bars. One huge slow pale bald man stopped to squint at both of them. He reached a huge yellow hand to tweak Snowfire’s nipple, spattered Blacklantern’s penis with a hot squirt of purple spit.
Toolsmith, the sunburnt mining engineer, shuffled along behind him, dripping sweat, looking uncomfortable and apologetic behind the bulging purple goggles. He murmured something in his own alien tongue and hurried guiltily on. The pale cold man, Blacklantern decided, must be Goldforge.
Dr. Killbird marched stiffly by, a gaunt puppet hung upon his humming exoskeleton, escorting his impatient age-wasted client. Blacklantern understood nothing they said, but he saw purpose enough in the way they both inspected Snowfire’s firm golden flesh.
Old Flintbreaker auctioned the hunting rights, his lilting chant as strange to Blacklantern as another alien tongue. He was clinging to the yellow bars, weak from heat and strain and stable stink, before the bailiff banged for quiet and announced the order of the hunt.
The respected Manager Goldforge, as highest bidder, would hunt first. Dr. Killbird had bought the next place for his client, the respected Redflower. Flintbreaker himself, as chief huntsman of the clan, had claimed the third day’s hunt.
And the auction was over. Whips cracked as the wardens brought howling nearmen to carry off the cages. Shuffling out of the pit, the spectators raised foul dust. After a fit of sneezing, Blacklantern twisted around inside his bars and tried to smile at Snowfire.
Though she faced him, her greenish eyes were staring blankly past, as if she had gone blind. Little rivulets of sweat had traced narrow ivory streaks down the dark grime that covered her. Yet, beneath the filth, she was still lovely. A pang of helpless pity clouded his eyes with tears.
The nearmen carried them swaying back through the arcade of huntman’s shops, toward the cells. They passed a little kiosk where an aged black woman, withered and toothless and blind in one eye, was hawking trophy heads more hideous than her own.
He hoped Snowfire wouldn’t see.
Progress of a sort had come to Tlootl Tloo, the mythical nesting place of the fire-winged tly of justice. A high stone wall, topped with electrical barbed wire, had replaced the thornbrush barriers that had guarded its sacred springs and lancegrass groves since history began. A new tourist hotel stood beside the central pool, with its own air pad and a tall observation tower for the hunters.
The prisoners for the game no longer came by nearman caravan, but by flyer. The old prison pit had given way to a long special cell that ran like a tunnel through the new wall. Blacklantern and Snowfire were released from their handling cages into that cell.
Behind them, inside the wall, he could see graceful plumes of green-and-golden lancegrass nodding above the wide blue pool. Ahead, beyond another wall of bars, bare red shale and black flows of ancient lava sloped sharply up toward the savage desert and the far-off sanctuary.
When the wardens were gone, Snowfire turned toward him slowly, moving as if in a dream of horror. She started to speak but saw that her words had no meaning for him. Trembling, she checked herself and stood looking at him in tragic inquiry. Slow tears welled out of her terror-darkened eyes, but she didn’t sob.
He wanted to tell her that he was not altogether without hope. In his hard apprenticeship for the arena he had lived with the primitive Sand clan people, hunting wild tlys and evading wild nearmen in country almost as dry and bleak as this. But all he could do was to murmur the music of her name and gesture for her to rest.
Worn dead, she was soon asleep, relaxed on the bare stone floor. He sat propped against the hot wall, watching her sweet and undefended nudity, now and then brushing off a biting fly, dozing a little, watching the sinking sun turn slowly red with dust.
The wardens came back at last with a pail of water and their last meal, a generous tray of ripe fruit and sun-cured meat. He woke her then. She smiled at his touch and murmured something in a child’s happy voice, before the shadow of terror returned.
She watched like a child, with huge frightened eyes, waiting to see what she must do. She ate at his signal, stopped at once when he had finished. After they had drunk, he raised the pail and poured water for her to wash away the prison filth. She stopped him with a low pleased sound, held the pail while he bathed himself.
When the blood-colored sun was grazing the rock-toothed black horizon, the wardens came back for the empty pail and the tray. The three selected hunters came down from the hotel to watch through the inner bars, while the outer door grated open.
Snowfire clung to Blacklantern’s arm, mutely watching his face. He turned to look back at the three. At Goldforge, roughly clad in tanned nearmen hide and a broad white hat, belted with manguns, Toolsmith trailing uneasily behind him. At Redflower, standing with Dr. Killbird, holding a thick-barreled paragas gun and eyeing Snowfire with a fierce hawk-face. At Flintbreaker, the Elder Huntsman, tattooed and impassive and black.
Only Flintbreaker spoke.
“You have one day to run.” He gestured toward the desert and far-off sanctuary with the lancegrass whistle he used to call his striker tly. “But we’ll meet before you reach Nggooth.”
“We’ll meet.”
Blacklantern made the slashing sign used by a contender in the arena to show that he was ready for the tly. He turned his back on the three. With a nod for Snowfire to follow he walked out of the dark tunnel cell, into the desert.
Though his feet had once been tough from running barefoot in the alleys of Nggonggamba, now he had to pick his way with care across the unkind rocks. Snowfire was already limping when he looked back, her face taut with pain.
He climbed the nearest barren hill. In the dry ravine behind, where hunters watching from the hotel tower couldn’t see, he turned downslope to follow the dry stream-bed below the oasis. Snowfire kept close behind, and he heard no whimper from her.
Inspecting the cruel-edged rocks, he picked up and carried a few choice bits of flint. Now and then he paused to scan the blood-washed sky, but he saw neither aircraft nor tlys. Listening, he heard no nearmen baying. With a bleak little nod of satisfaction, he decided that the Elder Huntsman was really playing fair.
The red dusk faded fast into moonless night, but the Nggonggan sun belonged to a dense swarm in a tight galactic arm. The blazing constellations gave light enough to show his way.
Snowfire had more trouble. Once he heard her calling after him in a stifled, childish voice. He went back and found that she had fallen. When he picked her up, she flung her arms around him. She was suddenly sobbing for her breath, her tender softness hot against him, searching for his mouth.
Lust swept him. For one reeling instant, he wanted to stop here, to give up escape and enjoy sex with her and wait for the hunters. Her alien notions of marriage no longer mattered now, when he had no possible rival. But he checked that hot impulse and let the moment go.
She had skinned her knees and hurt her ankle. When she could walk again, he led her on. The splendid stars rose ahead and set behind. The air grew cool enough to dry their sweat. Twice he stopped to let her rest. At last he caught a faint scent of moisture. In the still gray dawn, they came to a tiny clump of lancegrass, watered perhaps by underground seepage from the oasis behind.
While Snowfire slept on a bed of fallen fronds, he chipped flint for a blade and carved dry stalks to make two spears and a throwing stick. He tipped the spears with flint. When she woke, he showed her how to scrape the dead leaves into long skeins of fiber that he braided into a sling and a little pouch for projectile stones.
Hammering strips of the tough inner bark between two rocks to soften them, he made bindings for Snowfire’s bleeding feet and his own. He found fireweed blooming in the shade and smeared both their bodies with its milky sap, which turned to an ink-black pigment against the deadly sun.
It was burning noon by then, and they were both parched with thirst. He used a sharpened stick to dig in the old stream bed for water, but all he found was dry bedrock and pulpy lancegrass roots that gave a bitter juice when chewed.
Through half the incandescent afternoon, they hid beneath the golden plumes, plaiting strips from them into broad Nggonggan hats. Now and then he paused to look outside, but all he saw was the high black fleck of a carrion tly. Flintbreaker had kept his pledge, but their day of grace was nearly done.
Snowfire watched while he caught a bit of weary sleep, dreaming that he was back outside the tunnel cell at the oasis, with only its bars to keep him from a tantalizing pile of juice-rich fruits and a brimming pail of water.
She shook him awake to point at a tower of red dust creeping across the lifeless land behind. He thought it must be only a whirlwind, but still the time to move had come. As they gathered up their crude new gear, he saw a change in Snowfire.
Though they lacked words, he heard a dawning hope in the even tones of her voice. He saw courage in the straightness of her black-smeared body. He thought she had begun to find herself.
With a sudden ache of feeling, he wanted to kiss her again, yearned to take her to bed on the pile of dead fronds. Instead, he nodded toward the dessert. She caught his hand with a child’s trust, smiling so bravely that he was almost glad they had no translators, glad he couldn’t tell her that Nggooth was still a dozen days away, across the crudest highlands of the planet.
Leaving those dry ravines that long-vanished floods must have cut, they climbed a rocky slope where he thought their trail would be hard to follow. Though they started strongly, he soon had to slow his pace for Snowfire. Before sunset, their crude bark foot bindings had begun to wear out, and he knew they were leaving traces of blood for the huntsmen.
When the sharp horizon began to shear away the dust-dulled sun, he paused to look back. Their day of grace was gone. The first hunter would be starting. He glanced at Snowfire. Silently, she gripped his hand. They plodded bleakly on.
Before the blood-colored dusk had fully faded, he heard a droning in the sky behind. At first he hoped for the night to hide them, but that high drumming grew steadily louder, nearer, till the hot darkness quivered with it.
With a stifled cry of fear, Snowfire touched his arm. He saw her teeth and eyes shining strangely. When she bent to point at a rock, he saw glints of fluorescence brighter than the starlight.
The first place, he recalled, had gone to Goldforge, who scorned the use of trailing nearmen or striker tlys. Instead, the swarmworlder was following with a flyer equipped with black light and perhaps body-heat sensors.
Snowfire studied his face in the starlight and suddenly turned to wave her clumsy spear defiantly at that roaring in the sky.
5.
All night they stumbled on. All night the droning flyer followed, and the rocks about their bleeding feet darted glints of colored fire.
Once Snowfire tugged him toward a dark ravine, as if she wanted to take cover, but he knew the rules of the game would not allow any actual air attack. Goldforge himself would have to follow on the ground.
In the fiery dawn, they topped a knife-edged ridge and found a sea of golden dunes beyond. While he stood searching for a way across it, Snowfire made a sound and pointed back. Beneath the thrumming in the sky, he heard a deeper rumbling, rising and falling as the hunter’s surface vehicle met the hills and ravines they had crossed.
Scowling at the flame-streaked sky, frowning at that waste of billowed sand, peering into Snowfire’s blackened face, he groped for a plan. When at last he moved, he scooped out a shallow hollow in the sand. He made her lie in it, buried her body. He backed away, brushing out their footprints with his hat. He walked out a bold new trail from the rocks to the rim of the first yellow dune. He backed again, now on tiptoe to make prints small enough for Snowfire’s. Finally, he buried himself near that trail, leaving only a narrow peephole concealed with the brim of his sand-sprinkled hat.
There he waited.
He tasted dry sand in his mouth, and the bitterness of thirst. He contemplated the trust he had seen in Snowfire’s green-golden eyes, so strangely pale in her darkened face. He surveyed all the infinities of rock and sand and savage sun ahead.
He listened. The drone of the flyer rose and fell and rose again, as if the baffled pilot was circling to search for them. The growl and snort of the land vehicle grew louder, louder, till at last it lurched over the ridge, squat and dark in the red sunrise.
Armored, mottled gray and rust and dun, it ran on cleated tracks and sought its game with a complex sensor array and turret-mounted guns. After a momentary pause on the rise, it came grumbling down the trail he had prepared, passing so near him that the hard sand shivered.
At the lip of the dune, where his false trail ended, it hesitated again. The flat turret swung back and forth, sensors searching. It groaned backward, turned, stopped. A steel door clanged open. Goldforge jumped out.
A giant in motley, his nearman-skin jacket belted with otherworlder weapons, he peered warily right and left. He frowned skyward, toward his wheeling flyer. Wearing a yellow scowl, he came slowly back along the trail. His own machine had crushed out most of those careful footprints, but he bent at last to study the traces that remained.
Blacklantern slid upright, shaking sand from spear and throwing stick. He flexed his arm twice, while Goldforge squinted at the double row of prints. He braced himself, caught his breath.
“Your last hunt,” he said.
Goldforge straightened, yelping. He hauled a mangun from his belt. It crashed once, as Blacklantern threw the lancegrass spear. Unaimed, the bullet whined away into the sky. The flint point struck home. The mangun whirled across the sand.
The big swarmworlder toppled slowly backward, grabbing at the crude spear with both hands. It slipped free without the point. Blood spurted after it, darker than the purple drool on his mouth.
Blacklantern was over him by then, slashing at his yellow throat with his own hunting knife. He quivered and lay still. Blacklantern stooped again to scour the knife in the sand. Swaying with a sudden unexpected weakness, he stumbled back to uncover Snowfire.
The flyer was wheeling low by then, so near that he could see the pilot’s blue-goggled head in the observation bubble. He bent for his hat, fanned it triumphantly to wave the flyer off. It left at last, droning away toward the oasis of justice. Toolsmith, he thought, would soon be reporting the game still alive for the second hunter.
Snowfire had Goldforge’s mangun when he turned back, standing over the dead swarmworlder as if she thought he might come back to life. Ruefully, he showed her the thumbplate that keyed the gun to its owner alone.
She watched outside, while he explored the vehicle. All its controls were thumb-keyed, too. He failed to start it, or to activate its equipment. Yet that hardly seemed to matter, for his own hands could open the canteens of sweet water, the hampers of ripe fruit, the freezer of gourmet food.
They rinsed the bitterness from their swollen mouths, sipped and drank, tasted and ate. When he dared feast no more, he went out to strip the hunter’s corpse. The boots were too large, but he padded them with looted cloth. He cut moccasins for Snowfire out of the fringed hunting jacket. He took the translator.
