John Norman (31 page)

In the old brain of the beast this was a sound it well remembered.

It preceded momentarily the almost instantaneous, terrified scattering of the pigs.

Suddenly, without an instant’s hesitation, the dark, low shape, swift and terrible, sprang up, bounding forward. At the edge of the pit it sprang into the air.

Hamilton and Ugly Girl threw themselves back against the brush.

There was a sudden snapping of light branches, and a scream of rage.

For a wild instant Hamilton saw the copperlike eyes blazing not more than a foot from her body, and one paw, extended over the edge of the pit, and then the beast, twisting, fell sideways, down, away from her, disappearing in the darkness. There was a horrid scream of pain and rage, and she heard stakes snapping and the ripping of the body of the animal. Then she heard movement in the pit and more cries of rage and pain. The animal, she knew, with a sinking feeling, was among the stakes, injured, terrible, maddened with pain.

She heard it scratching at the sides of the pit. She could not see its head.

Then she heard it leap up, and saw the head for an instant, wild, frothing, bloody, and then it fell back. Again it screamed with pain.

Then again it leaped, and she saw its head, huge, broad, and the teeth, fangs white in the night. The head was more than a foot wide. Two mighty paws, claws extended, caught to the earth not more than five inches from their bodies, and the animal tried to scramble up, back feet digging at the side of the pit, snarling, roaring. Hamilton saw that it was now blind in one eye. There was blood, black against the side of its head, on the left side of its head. The left ear was torn.

The animal, partly out of the pit, regarded them.

It held, precariously, to the side of the pit. Then, suddenly it pitched backward into the darkness.

Its six hundred pounds fell from some sixteen feet backward onto the stakes.

Hamilton heard a sudden whimpering. Hamilton did not know the sound. It came from the pit. It was that of a cub crying for its mother.

Then there was silence. The pit was dark, and very quiet. Hamilton, tied against Ugly Girl, lost consciousness. Ugly Girl, bracing her body, held Hamilton and herself upright. Ugly Girl began to make a low, crooning noise with her mouth, a repetition of some four or five notes. She repeated this over and over, happily, to herself. It was the Ugly People’s way of singing. She, and the human slave girl, were alive.

Brenda Hamilton laughed.

She had made good her escape.

Yesterday night she had fled from the group. The group had come, in the late afternoon, to a group of high, almost sheer cliffs. In them, here and there, high, some of them more than two hundred feet from the ground, there was a set of openings, leading to deep caves.

These were the shelters.

They were the home of the Men, and of their properties, their skins, their flints, and their women and children.

The cliffs, with their height, and the dark openings, had frightened Hamilton.

She was afraid to be owned in them.

Camp had been made at the foot of the cliffs, for the men must investigate the caves again, many with torches, to make certain that the cave bear had not, in their absence, claimed them as his own.

The group was in good spirits. The cave lion had been killed, and such beasts, preying on humans, were extremely rare. Many hides and much meat had been taken at the game camp, and the men had found salt; and much flint had been carried to the foot of the cliffs.

Brenda Hamilton, naked, thonged to Ugly Girl by the throat, her body aching from the weight of the flint sack, had, with the other women, thrown down the flint, and knelt with them, at the base of the cliffs, exhausted. No longer were she and the others hurried forward by the switches of Fox and Wolf. Her body had been struck many times. The other women, except Ugly Girl, were happy; they were home; Brenda Hamilton, her body aching from the weight of the stone, and stinging from the blows of switches which had encouraged her to carry it more swiftly, looked up at the cliffs; she was afraid; they were very high, and the dark openings frightened her; some of them were more than two hundred feet high in the cliff. Ugly Girl did not seem happy or unhappy; she seemed only stupid, docile, vacant; she would do whatever her masters told her; Brenda Hamilton would not; she was determined to escape. She no longer wished to carry flint as a slave; she did not wish, again, to be used as a piece of meat, living meat, to bait a trap. Many of the women had smiled, when she had been tied with Ugly Girl, particularly the dark-haired girl, and the shorter, blond one. And the hunter had looked upon her, when her eyes had pleaded with him, impassively. She would flee.

Her opportunity had come much earlier than she had hoped. The men had gone up the cliffs, to investigate the caves. The women and children, thus, had been left below.

Before the men had left, dried meat had been distributed. Brenda and Ugly Girl had had four cubes apiece. It had been held in the palm of the hand of Runner. They had taken it, as kneeling women often did, in their teeth, directly from his hand.

At the flint lode, in gathering fruit, and roots and vegetables, and watching what was eaten, Brenda Hamilton had learned much.

She was confident she could now, in one way or another, survive.

She must make her way to the south before the onset of winter.

When it grew dark, and the others were asleep, the men, not wishing to descend the cliff at night, in the uncertain light of torches, camped in one of the shelters, Brenda Hamilton, carefully, silently, began to chew on the rawhide thong that tethered her to the slack-jawed, vacant-eyed, inhuman Ugly Girl. Ugly Girl approached her, whimpering, and tried to push her hand from the thong, but Hamilton, frenzied, furious, struck her back. “Stay away!” she hissed. Whimpering, Ugly Girl withdrew to the end of her tether. In time, biting and pulling and scratching with her fingers, she managed to part the thong. “What fools they are not to have bound me hand and foot,” she laughed to herself.

Then she had crawled from the group, slowly, silently. When she had cleared the area of the bodies, and the low, dim light of the dying fire, she leaped to her feet and ran.

She had escaped.

She had run for many hours, until she had gone so far no one could follow her.

Then she had slept. In the afternoon she had arisen, and, finding some nuts and roots, had fed; had, with the aid of a small stick, sharpened with a rock to a point, removed the remains of the tether from her throat, which had fastened her to Ugly Girl; and had then continued on her way.

“No more will I be subject to their switches,” she laughed. “No more will I have to eat like a female animal from their hand. No more will I have to carry flint. No more will I have to see that hateful hunter!”

Suddenly Brenda Hamilton threw her hand before her mouth. She saw the eyes, briefly, in a flash, between bushes. It was not an animal the size of the cave lion. It was much smaller. But it was a sinuous, stealthily moving animal. It weighed perhaps only forty or fifty pounds more than Hamilton, but it was quite capable of taking prey twice its weight or more. It was a strong predator, which could pull its prey, even if heavier than itself, high into the branches of a tree, to keep it from scavengers. It was the most agile of the large cats, and, to men, perhaps the most dangerous. Hamilton had seen one of its descendants in Rhodesia, smaller, but still quite dangerous. To her horror, it was stalking her.

She remembered the body of the calf, half torn, lying over the limb of the tree in the Rhodesian bush. She recalled the great care of William and Gunther, even armed, in approaching it, even when it was sleepy, somnolent and gorged. Gunther, who was a remarkable hunter, with excellent weaponry, would not have followed it into the bush.

“Oh, no!” wept Hamilton.

Sometimes she thought that she had lost it, but then, again, shifting in the darkness, almost indistinguishable among shadows, she would see it again.

Once she picked up a rock, and hurled it at the shape.

She heard only a snarling, and saw it crouch down. She sensed its nervousness. She remembered the cave lion.

She was terrified that she might provoke its charge. She moved a little away, and it moved a little toward her. She ran, shouting, toward it, but it did not retreat. She saw it gather its hind legs, like springs, ready to leap.

She stood still, terrified.

It hesitated, and lay down, tail slashing, watching her.

She looked about. It could be upon her before she could climb a tree. She sensed that it would charge when she turned her back. And, too, she knew, a tree would not be likely to much protect her. It was a far more swift, expert climber than she. If she were already in a tree, and had perhaps a heavy branch, she might perhaps, striking and thrusting, be able to keep it away, as it tried to approach, scrambling after her, but she was in no such position, and had no such implement.

The beast, eyes blazing, snarling, crept toward her.

Hamilton began to back away.

She wanted to turn and flee, but she knew that it, bounding and leaping, would be on her in a matter of seconds.

Hamilton backed into a grassy clearing, moving back, step by step. Her eyes were wide. Her hand was before her mouth.

The beast, creeping, eyes blazing, every muscle of it excited, tail switching, followed her.

Hamilton tripped over a root and, crying out with misery, fell.

In that instant the leopard charged. In less than the time it took Hamilton to see it clearly it was across the clearing and, snarling, leaping toward her. She saw the heavy shaft, not realizing at the time what it was, strike the beast in its leap and saw the flailing paws, claws exposed, striking toward her. Another body leaped over hers and she cried out in fear and, her weight on the palms of her hands, saw the leopard biting at the shaft protruding from his side, and the other shape, human, but bestial, ferocious, like nothing she had ever seen that was manlike, hurl itself on the spotted beast, a knife of stone in its hand. He clung to its back, one arm about its throat, rolling with the animal, jabbing and pulling the knife again and again across the white, furred throat. The great, clawed hind feet raked wildly but could not find their enemy. The blood flooded from its lungs, sputtering out like hot red mud, and then the blood, no longer flowing from its mouth, burst from its throat and the assailant, his fist and knife red to the wrist and hilt, drew his hand from the beast’s body.

The beast then lay at his feet, the arterial blood throbbing out, a pulsating glot to each beat of the animal’s heart. To Brenda’s horror the assailant then knelt beside the beast and, catching its blood in his hands, held it to his mouth, drinking. Then the glots became smaller, and their expulsions weaker, as the heart slowed, and then stopped. The assailant, dipping his finger in the throat of the animal, then drew signs on his own body with the blood, luck signs and courage signs and, among them, the sign of the Men.

Tree rose from beside the beast and looked down at the lovely naked female on the grass, whom he had saved.

Brenda Hamilton felt her ankles tied tightly together. Her hands were left free. She did not try to free her ankles.

Tree lifted the leopard.

Hamilton was indescribably thrilled, for what reason she knew not, to see that the stone. tip of the spear had emerged, inches of it, from the right side of the leopard. She could scarcely conceive of the incredible strength of such a cast.

Tree, placing the butt of the spear on the ground, forced the shaft through the leopard completely, thus freeing the weapon and protecting the bindings which fastened the long stone point to the wood.

Then, spear in hand, he stood over her. He was breathing heavily. She had seen him drink the blood of the leopard. And its blood, too, in strange signs, he wore on his body.

Her ankles were bound. She could not run. She lay at his mercy.

She could not even thank him for having saved her life. She only hoped that he would not kill her. She could not meet his eyes. Such a man, so mighty, so frightening, terrified her. She knew she would do whatever such a man commanded her, unquestioningly, even eagerly.

She dared to look up, to look into his eyes. Never had she felt so helpless, so much a mere female.

Quickly she looked down at the grass.

How miserable she was. She had been caught.

He went to the leopard and began to gut the beast, saving meat and skin, the head and claws.

When he had finished he untied her ankles, and gestured that she should stand.

When she did so he put the leopard over her shoulders. It was heavy, even bled and gutted. She felt the stickiness of bloody hair on her back, and the softness of the fur, and the heavy paws, with their claws, limp and weighty, touch her body.

She looked again into his eyes. She suddenly realized she was a runaway slave. She looked down again. She knew she would be beaten.

He then turned away and she, carrying the carcass of the leopard, followed him.

She understood then only too well, though she did not understand how it could be, that such men could follow her like dogs, that they might pick up her trail and, with ease, when they wished, pursue and retake her. “There is no escape for me,” she whispered to herself. “There is no escape.” And too she had learned that the primeval forests would offer her small refuge. She looked about herself now in terror, for the first time better understanding the ferocities and perils of her environment. Within twenty-four hours of her escape she had nearly fallen to a leopard. Had it not been for the intervention of the hunter she would, by now, have been half eaten. A lone female in these times, she realized, had need of the protection of a man. Without the protection of men she could not survive. The choice was simple for the female. Either serve men on their own terms or die.

Staggering under the burden of the leopard, Brenda Hamilton, the slave, followed the hunter back to the shelters.