Authors: Randall Garrett
I held her close for a moment, distressed by what she had said, but unable to comfort her.
“It’s not only that I’m afraid for them,” I said. “I’m impatient because I feel responsible and committed, and because I can’t do anything for them. The next step is yours, and your movement is restricted by consideration for Yayshah. I don’t question the Tightness of it, Tarani; it just makes me uncomfortable, caught between the need to go and the need to stay, with no real power to choose.”
She spoke with her head against my chest. “As always, it is better when we speak truly and frankly,” she said. “I know that Yayshah would be quite comfortable staying in Raithskar until the cubs are fully grown. I also know that her desire is born of the instincts and habits she has already abandoned, and she must adapt to the needs of her family—and I include us, as well as Keeshah, as her family. I promise I will judge the time to leave by when she and the cubs are fit to travel, and not by when Yayshah is ready to leave, which she may never be.”
“That’s fair,” I said. “Meanwhile, I’ll try to control this itchy feeling and be civil to you.”
I felt her smile. “Will you sacrifice so much?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but asked another question. “How much further to Raithskar?”
“Keeshah has covered a lot of ground,” I replied. “I think Raithskar is no more than half a day away from here.”
“Then let us also rest,” she said, and started rocking her body to wear a form-fitting groove in the sand. I did the same, until we lay side by side, separated by a few inches of sand, our hands joined. “A long, true sleep will bring us more refreshment than the brief rests we take as Keeshah runs.” She sighed. “I look forward to being with Yayshah when she is again sleek and able to run. Already, she has the same longing.”
I squeezed her hand.
“The two of you are a pretty impressive pair,” I said.
Night came and went while we slept. It was Keeshah who woke first. He roused us by belly-creeping until his head was on the ground, inches away from us, and letting go with his loud bass roar. Tarani and I shot straight up off the ground. Our waking minds rapidly processed the initial perception of danger into the anger-relief reaction of realizing it was a joke, but not before we had nearly strained something trying to get our swords out in the split-second of time while we were reacting and not thinking.
*Keeshah, that wasn’t funny!*
I said—but I was laughing. I was also shaking.
*
Home soon
* he said. *
Glad. Hurry
*
He butted his head between us and swung it, knocking us apart. A paw swept out at me; even though I had a flash of warning and tried to dodge, the clawless swat caught the backs of my legs and knocked them out from under me. He tried the same trick on Tarani, but she was forewarned and jumped to avoid Keeshah’s slash.
I could feel Keeshah’s delight; he abandoned me and went after her. Tarani, her body trained for both dance and sword, skipped and dodged his swings. The sha’um had such speed that he could have run right over her, but he accepted limits to the game and merely stayed within range to be able to knock her for a loop, if he could only connect. Tarani was laughing with all the joy of a child playing with a kitten. I felt warmed by Keeshah’s good mood and the feeling of
family
watching them play together gave me.
Keeshah swung his right paw, and Tarani ran in on the sha’um’s right side, sprang off on both feet, and vaulted over his back. The move surprised Keeshah, and in trying to keep her in sight, he twisted himself off balance, fell, and rolled over. He surged to his feet and they faced each other warily, catching their breath.
Suddenly, Tarani lay down on her side, grabbed her knees and tucked her head down against them. Keeshah crouched, all claws out and dug into the sand, ready to move in any direction. She lay motionless, and I thought:
Tarani never played with a kitten and a ball; this idea came from Antonia’s memories. It’s about time Tarani got something she can really appreciate from her association with Antonia.
Keeshah crept up on the curled-up Tarani, his tail whipping back and forth, sweeping up an occasional puff of sand. He patted her tentatively with one paw, drawing back twice before he actually touched her; she rocked a little, but kept her pose. He swung with a little more strength, and she rolled over her arms to rest facing the other way, still curled. He tucked his nose under her head and sent her into a lopsided somersault.
I could sense Keeshah’s appreciation of the toy Tarani presented him as he came forward more confidently, and I laughed at the shock he felt when she unfolded suddenly and grabbed his head. He retreated backward, dragging her twenty yards or so through the sand and scrub brush, then pinned her body with a paw and pried her off of his neck. He was still in that pose, one paw resting on Tarani’s waist, when his head and neckfur lifted simultaneously and he called the warning:
*Danger.*
Keeshah whirled to face north, his head high and questing for the source of what he had scented. Tarani hadn’t heard Keeshah’s mental warning, but she couldn’t mistake his reaction. She was on her feet immediately, the steel sword in her hand. I saw her look down at it, momentarily surprised by its different weight and balance.
I had my sword ready, too, and was running to join Keeshah and Tarani when vineh seemed to boil up out of the sand.
The Gandalaran deserts looked flat, but weren’t. The ground has a rolling quality, rising into low hills and falling into shallow depressions. Let a few bushes take root in a hill and, even though there is nothing taller than waist-high as far as you can see, there is a respectable amount of cover for someone—or something—wanting to hide. And the pale tan of a vineh’s curly fur was further desert camouflage.
The vineh had stalked us with a cunning I had to respect. They had approached from downwind, creeping to within fifty yards of us without alerting Keeshah to their presence. I counted fifteen before I got too busy to worry about it.
Almost as many as we faced near Sulis
, I thought.
And we’re one man and one sha’um short. But we also have more experience.
I slashed up at the face of the nearest vineh; he flinched back, and I carried the momentum of the swing around and down, slicing into a leg and bringing the huge apish thing down. As Rika’s point slashed across his throat, I sensed another behind me and dropped into a crouch, avoiding the long, reaching arms. I pivoted in the crouch and drove my sword upward, gutting the second beast.
I had a moment to spare, and noticed that a vineh had one of his iron-strong hands clamped around Tarani’s left arm. He couldn’t take advantage of the hold because she was moving, tugging with her body to keep him off balance. She couldn’t deal with him more thoroughly because she was keeping another vineh at bay with her sword, driving him ahead of her with quick, cutting touches.
I was behind Tarani; I brought my sword down on the forearm of the vineh who held her, drew his attention, and finished him. Tarani dispatched the other one, but three more came after us, reinforcements right behind them.
The action had taken us some distance from Keeshah, and the vineh were quick to come between us and the sha’um.
*Watch your flanks, Keeshah
,* I reminded him. There was no response, only the surge of battle rage that, even more than his formidable weaponry, made the sha’um so dangerous.
They’re not harrying him from behind, the way the others did,
I thought.
And they’re concentrating on us, rather than him. Maybe these “domestic” vineh have accepted Gandalarans as their most powerful enemy. They do seem less hostile generally
—
if you can call an ape that outweighs you and is trying to kill you unhostile. I wasn’t wrong about the ones we met on the way to K
ä
, either. These are a little awkward, as if their fighting instincts aren’t totally reactivated yet.
Their strategy proved their undoing, because it placed the bulk of the group smack in the middle of a five-point attack machine: my sword, Tarani’s sword, and Keeshah (two paws, one set of teeth). The battle was noisy, but the sound had an unreal quality. Keeshah’s coughing roar mingled with the snarls and shrieks of the vineh as they fought and fell; I heard both Tarani’s voice and my own crying out with the effort of a swing or calling a warning. Yet there seemed to be an unusual quietness, and I finally figured out what was missing: the sound of metal on metal. I was using the muscles and judgment and techniques Markasset developed for fighting armed men, but these were animals, and the only thing our swords struck was flesh.
I wouldn’t say that we had never been in danger from this group; it took all our alertness and every bit of our energy to keep away from the strong, horny-nailed hands and the underslung jaws. I will say that, once we had the group in the pincer movement, our defense was well on its way to being a slaughter.
I was glad when one of the larger males, trapped in the center of the group and protected from attack by the bodies of the others, paused and rode out the jostling, looking around. Apparently he saw what he should have seen, because his lips pulled back from the heavy tusks. He barked three short sounds and started battering his way out of the middle, heading for the northern edge of the group.
The others caught on, and all that lay between a potential slaughter and a total rout was opening the pincer.
*That’s enough, Keeshah,*
I ordered.
*Pull back and let them go*
The sha’um fought on.
*Keeshah!*
I felt him rising back to rationality through his battle lust. He took one last swipe at a beast already bleeding in a couple of places, and stepped back. His roar of victory followed the vineh.
I looked around, a little stunned by the sudden end of the battle. Pale-furred bodies lay everywhere, leaking dark-red blood into the sand. I felt my stomach turn over, and remembered that Gandalarans seldom vomited; it wasted water, and their evolution had acquired that trait only for dealing with life-threatening situations, just as it had rejected the capability of shedding tears for purely emotional reasons.
Tarani looked grim, too. I took her elbow and called Keeshah to follow as we marched away from the carnage toward Raithskar.
We were within sight of the city walls when the vineh attacked again. This time they appeared from grain fields on either side of the main road, which we had been following for the past hour or so. Keeshah became aware of them a second or two before they would have liked, so that they had to leave their hiding places from fifty yards ahead and come after us.
Riding a sha’um during battle might be an advantage, if it could be done. It can’t—and there’s a much bigger advantage if the sha’um is free to use all its claws without worrying about dumping his riders.
Not that Keeshah was worried about it.
Tarani and I picked ourselves up off the packed dirt of the roadbed. Keeshah had met the group head-on; the fight was tumbling and snarling around him, doing absolutely no good to the edges of the grain fields.
Tarani and I were left to ourselves for a moment.
“Why?” she gasped. “Why are they doing this?”
I just shook my head as we ran to help Keeshah.
They learned from the last battle
, I thought.
They’re concentrating on Keeshah this time.
They had learned more than I expected. Tarani and I were already on the run toward the melee when the edges of the attack group around Keeshah swept around the core of noise and cut us off. Had there been fewer vineh, this might have been a repeat of the pincer victory we had scored in the desert. But still bleeding survivors from the desert battle and fresh “troops” were mixed here, and the vineh had the initiative. A few had picked up farm tools, but the number of vineh was more effective than the occasional swing of a hoe. The beasts pressed Tarani and me back, separating us further from Keeshah.
One of the vineh got past my guard, grabbed for my throat. I flinched back and he caught a big pinchful of flesh and tunic on the left side of my chest. I had my dagger in my left hand; I brought it up under his arm and into his rib cage. Instead of releasing me and going off to sulk, he howled with the pain but held on and jerked me forward. I pulled the dagger out for another stab, feeling the warm blood soak out of his side. We were eye to eye, the vineh and I, at that moment. And I swear that in the bestial eyes, nearly hidden under the prominent supraorbital ridge of his skull, I saw a glimmer of intelligence and a conscious choice as he threw himself on the point of my dagger. I staggered back under the sudden weight, struggling desperately to keep my feet, but failing.
I heard Tarani cry out my name as I went down and the vineh piled on. There were so many of them trying to get a chunk of me that there was no way I could get out from under the dead one, and I used his body as a shield. I was getting bruised pretty badly, but no one vineh could get a solid hold on me. I was reasonably safe but I couldn’t breathe. I rocked my lower body until I got my knees under the hips of the vineh, braced my elbows on the ground, and spent what seemed like three years of strain, lifting the vineh’s torso a half-inch up, to relieve the pressure on my chest, and gulped in air that reeked of blood.
In that literal breathing space, I felt chilled by what I had seen in the vineh’s eyes. An animal throwing itself into danger because it is too enraged to care about its safety is a far different thing from a creature sacrificing itself for the sake of the group’s objective. Assuming that I had not merely imagined that glimmer of intelligence, the character of this battle had changed.
The downward pressure lightened suddenly. Buried in vineh, I had been unable to hear anything but their snarling and the pounding of my own heart. The bodies around me were shifting; fresh air penetrated, and with it came sound: Tarani’s voice screaming my name, and the coughing roar of the sha’um.
Two
sha’um.
I heaved upward, and the pile of vineh shifted and scattered. Bloody hands helped me shove the dead beast’s body over, then helped me to my feet. Distracted by the arrival of the female sha’um from Raithskar, the vineh had left us alone momentarily.