A Different Flesh (12 page)

The sims also kept patting his forehead, the chief bodily difference between them and him. From their incredulous grins, they found it funny. They had obviously never seen a human before. He suspected the hunting band's curiosity was all that had saved his life back in the clearing.

“I'm not your enemy,” he said, and gave the grunted greeting-call wild sims of the same troop used with one another back in Virginia. They understood it; he saw puzzlement on their heavy features that he, so plainly alien, should mimic the snort they used among themselves.

For a moment, he thought they might loose his bonds. But he was too strange for that, even if he knew their calls. And then the sim that had been carrying his belt began opening the pouches and powderhorn that hung from it, which proved interesting enough to distract a good part of the troop from his person.

The fine black grains of gunpowder made the sims sneeze; some tasted the stuff, and made faces at the result. The scout hoped they would toss the powderhorn onto the fire. The blast might scare them away long enough for him to get free. Of course, after a pound of gunpowder went off close by, he might not be in any condition to try. Given his present predicament, though, he was willing to take the risk.

The sims poured the powder out onto the ground, scotching that chance.

His tin water jar enthralled them a good deal more. Like his belt, it was an idea they had not thought of. One rushed over to a tiny creek a few hundred yards away, filled the jar, and brought it back.

The sim that had bound the stone to the vine belt suddenly snatched up the powderhorn. It hurried to the streamlet and filled the powderhorn with water. Adapting a tool from one use to another showed quicker wit than most sims could boast.

They came to his shot-pouch next. The bullets cascaded out. As soon as the sims discovered they were not some queer kind of fruit, their youngsters pounced on the musket balls, which made toys unlike the sticks, leaves, and stones they had known before.

The older sims went on exploring the scout's gear. He ground his teeth as they opened the leather bag that held the canines of the spearfangs he had killed. The sims recognized the fangs at once. Surprised hoots arose. The sims stared wide-eyed at Kenton, unable to imagine how he had slain so many of the big cats.

Last of all, the sims pulled his knife from its sheath. The only sharp edges they knew were the ones they laboriously chipped and flaked onto stone. They did not recognize the gleaming steel blade as something familiar until one of them closed her hand round it. She shrieked at the unexpected pain, gaped to see blood streaming down her fingers.

One of the males seized the knife then, by the hilt—more through luck than design. The sim brandished the weapon wildly, then suddenly stopped, realizing what it was for. Again Kenton fought panic; men likely would have tested the blade on his flesh.

But sims had minds more strictly utilitarian. The male squatted in front of one of the joints of meat the hunting party had brought back. It screeched in pleasure at the ease with which the knife slid through the flesh. Another sim stuck the carved-off gobbet on a stick and held it over the fire.

The first smell of roasting meat made most of the sims forget about Kenton. They armed themselves with sticks and dashed over to the butcher, who, grinning, was cutting chunk after chunk from the doe's hindquarters. The males jostled round the fire; such a feast did not often come their way. Females and youngsters beseechingly held out their hands. With so much food, the males were generous in sharing.

The wind had shifted till it came out of the west, filling the sky with clouds and blowing smoke from the fire straight into Kenton's face. It made him cough and his eyes water. Mixed with it, though, was enough of the aroma of cookery to drive him nearly wild. He could hear his stomach growling above the racket the sims were making.

He loudly smacked his lips, a signal sims gave one another when they were hungry. The sims who heard him sent him the same curious look they had when he imitated their greeting-call. But they did not feed him. Taking a captive was so unusual for them that they had no idea how to treat one. Any being outside their troop was not one of them, and so was entitled to nothing.

Things might have been worse, Kenton decided. Instead of begging for food, he could have
been
food. That the sims showed no signs of moving in that direction was mildly heartening, enough at any rate to help him resist his hunger pangs.

He wondered what Charles was doing. By now the sim should long since have returned to their camp, and it was late enough for him to be wondering what had happened to Kenton.

He might, the scout decided, be clever enough to visit the salt lick; Kenton went there most often. The scout could not guess what Charles would do after that. He was used to the company of humans—maybe he would try to go back to Virginia. Kenton wondered if the men at Portsmouth would believe his explanations, or kill him for doing away with his master. He hoped they would believe him; Charles deserved a better fate than disbelief would get him.

The sim might have a better chance here west of the mountains. He was an able hunter; he would have no trouble feeding himself. Eventually he should be able to find a home among the wild sims here, suspicious though they were of all strangers.

Charles would be able to show them so much that he could prove himself too valuable to exclude. Apart from the knife and hatchet he carried, he had learned a great deal in Virginia that wild sims were ignorant of. Even something as simple as the art of tying knots was unknown here. These sims, if they were like the ones along the Atlantic, would not know how to set snares. Charles might even be able to show them how to tan leather, which would give them footwear and many new tools.

All that would make the wild sims harder to push aside when English settlers began coming over the mountains. Kenton found he did not much care. He and Charles had been a team for years now; he could not find it in his heart to wish the sim anything but good, no matter what resulted afterwards.

The wind was blowing harder now, bringing with it cool, moist air. It must have felt wonderful to the sims, who because of their thick hair suffered worse than humans from the usual run of summer weather. That dislike of heat, though, did not keep them from feeding the fire with branches and dry shrubs whenever it began to get low.

The amount the sims could eat was astonishing. Because they spent so much time hungry, they were extravagantly able to make up for it when the chance came. They also let nothing go to waste, eating eyes, tongues, and lungs from the carcasses, smashing big bones and sucking smaller ones to get every scrap of marrow.

At last, a sort of happy torpor came to the encampment. Females nursed their infants. Youngsters gradually lost interest in throwing Kenton's musket balls at each other and bedded down in nests of dry grass and leaves. Most of the adults followed them before long, singly or in pairs.

A few males stayed awake. One kept the fire going. Three more went to the edge of the clearing as sentries. One of those carried a club, another a couple of chipped stones. The third, a large, hulking sim, bore Kenton's rifle. It carried the gun by the muzzle end of the barrel and swung it menacingly every minute or so, as if daring anything dangerous to come close.

The clever sim sat cross-legged by the fire not far from the scout. It stared down at the dagger it held in its lap. From time to time it would run a hand along its chinless jaw, the very image of studious concentration.

Kenton felt a touch of sympathy; the sim could study the knife till doomsday without learning how it was made. At that moment the sim looked his way. It shook its head, exactly as a frustrated man might: it was full of questions, and had no way to ask them.

Some of the wild Virginia sims had learned sign-speech from runaways and used it among themselves, but it had not come over the mountains. The wild troops had so little contact with one another that ideas spread very slowly among them.

The sim picked up a stone chopper, took it in its left hand and the knife in its right. The crudeness of its own product next to the other must have infuriated it, for it suddenly scrambled to its feet and hurled the stone far into the night.

All three of the males standing watch whirled at the sound of the rejected tool landing in the bushes. The clever sim let out an apologetic hoot. The others relaxed.

The clever sim came over to glare at Kenton. The scout thought what a man would be feeling, confronted with skills and knowledge so far ahead of anything he possessed—and confronted with a being like and yet unlike himself. Sims were less imaginative than humans, but surely some of that combination of anger, fear, and awe was on the subhuman's face.

Anger quickly came to predominate. Kenton uselessly tightened his muscles against the knife thrust he expected.

He hardly noticed the first raindrop that landed on his cheek, or the second. Even when a drop hit him in the eye, it distracted him only briefly from his fearful focus on the blade in the sim's hairy hand.

The sim shook its head in annoyance as the rain began. To it, too, the early sprinkles were but an irritation. As the rain kept up, though, it forgot Kenton, forgot the knife it held. Its cry of alarm brought the rest of the troop bounding from their rest.

For a moment, Kenton wondered if the clever sim had gone mad. But soon he understood its concern, for the rain grew harder. The fire began to hiss as water poured down on it—and no wild sim could start a fire once it went out.

Because that was so, the sims had had to learn to keep their flames alive even in the face of rain. Some of the males held hides above the fire to shield it from the storm. Females dug ditches and built little dams of mud so the water on the ground would not get the fuel wet.

Their efforts worked for a time. The sims with the hide shield coughed and choked on the smoke it trapped, but they did not leave their post. The fire continued to crackle.

Kenton all but ignored it. His mouth was wide open, to catch as much of the rain as he could. The sims had given him no more water than food, and his throat felt raspy as a file. It took a while to get enough for a swallow, but every one was bliss.

The downpour grew heavier, the wind stronger. Soon it was blowing sheets of water horizontally. The sims' hides were less and less use. They wailed in dismay as the fire went out. Kenton could hardly hear them over the drumming of the rain. He was glad they had not dumped him face down; he might have drowned.

The storm lasted through the night, and began to ease only when light returned. Drenched, Kenton was relieved the rain was warm; had the cloudburst come, say, in fall, he would have been all too vulnerable to chest fever. He imagined it carried off many of the sims.

They huddled together, sodden and miserable, around their dead fire, their arms up to keep some of the rain from their faces. Now and then one would let out a mournful, keening cry that several others would echo. It reminded the scout eerily of a wake.

When the rain was finally over, the clever sim raked through the ashes, searching for hot coals that might be coaxed back to life. But the storm had been too strong; everything was soaked. As the sims saw they were indeed without the heat to cook their food and, in days to come, to keep them warm, they broke out in a fresh round of lamentation.

Kenton wondered if they would seek to have him restart the blaze. If that meant getting free of them, he would do so in an instant. He would have offered, if they understood his speech or if he could have used his arms to gesture. But they did not even look his way; it did not occur to them that
anyone
could start a fire. His strangeness, and the curious tools he bore, were not enough to overcome that automatic assumption.

Slowly, morosely, the sims began to pick up the usual business of the camp. A grizzled male chipped away at a chunk of flint to shape a new hand-axe. Females dug roots with sticks and went into the nearby forest after early-ripening berries. Youngsters turned over rocks and popped whatever crawling things they found into their mouths.

A hunting party set out, armed with an assortment of wooden clubs and sharp stones. The sim with Kenton's musket apparently decided the long gun would be too clumsy to swing in tight quarters, for it exchanged the rifle for a stout bludgeon. The scout shook his head, relieved that the sim did not grasp what the musket could do.

The clever sim did not go with the band of hunting males. Its arms were filthy to the elbows from grubbing in the ruins of the fire. It kept staring at Kenton, as if he were a puzzle to be pieced together. When a couple of toddlers came over and prodded him, it bared its formidable teeth and shouted so fiercely that they tumbled backward in fright.

It came over and squatted by him; it made squelching sounds as it sat in the mud. “I am not your enemy,” Kenton said, as he had the night before.

It grunted. He thought it sought to converse with him, but his words meant nothing to it. Sims came to understand human speech, but their own calls in the wild, even eked out by gestures, did not make up a language. The clever sim felt the lack, yet was powerless to remedy it. Had his arms been free Kenton might have, but he needed dumb show to ask to be released, and could not use it until he had been. Contemplating that paradox led only to discomfiture.

If the sim and he could not converse, though, only one thing was likely to happen to him. No sims he knew kept captives, and the treatment he was getting here showed this troop to be no different. His flesh might not be so tooth-some raw as roasted, but he did not think that would save him.

The way the clever sim was licking its lips now as it looked at him told him it had come to the same conclusion. The only reason he could find for its not killing him immediately was to keep his meat fresh for the hunting party when they came back. That did little to improve his spirits. He was getting thirsty again, too, and very hungry.