John Norman (47 page)

The two captors, with their captives, left the flaming fields, approaching the compound.

A man, in torn woolen tunic, fled toward them. A hunter seemed to rise from the ground before him. He, with a sweeping, horizontal blow of his ax, caught the running figure in the gut; the man stopped, bent over, retching unable to move; then the ax fell again, striking him down. A woman’s scream came from the compound. The man who had struck the running figure walked over to greet the captors. They spoke, while more screaming came from the burning compound. A sheep, bleating, ran past. The leashes of Hamilton and the girl cut from the altar were tied together, forming a single leash with double collar. This the man who had struck the running figure took in his fist, he subordinate to the two others, holding it in the center. The three men then approached the compound, the two captors in the lead, he who had struck the running man a step behind, holding the leash of the two female captives, naked.

The stockade, and the huts within, were burning. Almost at the gate, two more of the Dirt People fled outward. One was a woman, who was struck down from behind by a hunter within. She reeled against the palings, the back of her head bloodied, and stumbled into the darkness and fell. The second was a man. The first captor tripped him, and he rolled sprawling in the dirt; as he tried to climb to his feet the ax of the second captor struck him frontally, and he fell heavily, forward, into the dirt. Four sheep, bleating in terror, one with flaming fleece, hurried out of the compound.

Hamilton and the girl, her leash-mate, were dragged within the compound.

On a stake in the compound was the head of he who had been the leader of the Dirt People.

The gate was opened, widely. The work of the men of the Weasel People had been easier than they had anticipated, for the tall, gaunt man, in taking Hamilton from the compound, had left it open, that he might return silently. Yet this would, Hamilton knew, have made little difference. The men of the Weasel People would have, without great difficulty, scaled the palisade. A loop hurled over a pointed log and a swift climb, feet against the logs, would have brought them to the top, whence they might have leaped down to the dirt within. The palisade was effective against animals; it was not effective against men.

Hamilton turned her head away as she saw an older woman struck to the dirt.

From a hut, half burning, two men of the Weasel People dragged forth a man, throwing him to the dirt before them, then striking him six times with their axes. The flint of the axes of the men of the Weasel People, and their faces, sweaty, exhilarated, glowed in the reflection of the flames. Inside the compound it was almost as light as day, reminding Hamilton of the electric lights of the compound in Rhodesia, where she had been held captive. About the compound, in the dirt, lay several bodies, bloodied, their heads broken open. Before one wall four of the younger women of the Dirt People stood, huddled together; they were separated and thrust back against the wall; their clothing was cut from them; shuddering, they were inspected, closely, and felt; the leader of the Weasel People, the heavily built, bearded man, pointed to two of the women; immediately they were turned about, their hands tied behind their backs, and a rope put on their necks; they were dragged across the compound, to the post at which Hamilton, several days before, had been tied and whipped with switches; they were tied by their necks to this post; the leader turned his back on the other two women, who were not comely; Hamilton and the girl with her screamed with horror; then they turned away. From a storage pit, where she had hidden herself in the barley, another girl, caught in the grain, was forced to climb the ladder to the surface of the compound. She was stripped and bloody; there was grain on her body, stuck to the blood, and caught in her hair. The hunter who had found her followed her up the ladder. When she stood on the surface of the compound, she stood before the leader of the Weasel People. Proudly she threw back her head, shaking her hair, unafraid. He said a word and, as she stared angrily ahead, her hands were tied behind her back and then she was thrust, stumbling, to the post, where she, too, was fastened to it by the neck.

Suddenly Hamilton remembered Gunther, in the camp of the Weasel People, remarking to her that he surmised that such groups, so small, so isolated, which had initiated at this early date a form of herding, of agriculture, of metalwork, would not survive. His words, for the first time, now seemed weighty to her, rich with an insidious import she had not at first understood. Why had he brought her here? Why had he sold her to the Dirt People? It had puzzled her, for she had suspected, given the contempt in which he held her, his irritation with her intelligence, his scorn for her vulnerabilities, the profound, desperate needs of her female sexuality, which could turn her into a helpless slave in a man’s arms, that he would have kept her for himself, a despised love captive it might have pleased him, from time to time, to abuse and use for his pleasure; surely he would not have soon relinquished his title to the helpless, delicious slave who had once been the prim, reserved, formal, proud Dr. Brenda Hamilton? No, it was his intention to have her back, and he had never intended for the Dirt People to keep her. She had been brought here for another reason, to give him an opportunity to take reconnaissance of the compound of the Dirt People; under the pretext of selling two females he had studied the compound, its men, their numbers, the weapons, the land; oh, it had amused him, doubtless, to sell her as a nude slave, the once proud Dr. Hamilton, but that, pleasing though it might have been to him, had not satisfied the full intention of his plan; her sale had been a pretext, a diversion, to permit himself access to the compound and conduct the inquiries of his espionage. Hamilton knew then that she had been a dupe in the plans of the brilliant Gunther; she wondered if, in the stresses of the temporal translation, in his accession to power among the men of the Weasel People in his finding himself, with his rifle, almost a god in this wild country, he had gone insane. She recalled the throne on which he had seated himself, the robe of bearskin he had worn about his shoulders. In Rhodesia Gunther had been hard, brilliant, efficient, and, even then his genius had bordered on the fine line that separates incomparable intellect from madness, but he had been, clearly, sane; here, in this ancient, primitive time and country, she feared he had crossed the border into madness; what had the Dirt People done to him; had he seen fit to ventilate on them his hatred of diggers, his esteem of hunters; she recalled the violence, the force, with which, in Rhodesia he had once spoken to her of such things; the hunters are dead, he had said; but perhaps they are not dead, but only sleeping, he had suggested; perhaps they will come again; perhaps they will hunt again, he had seemed to feel, building ships and voyaging to stars, taking up again the hunt, that which gave meaning to man. But how, wondered Hamilton, could the hunters waken if they had not slept; one cannot attack the stars with ships of stone, and poles and logs; the world must change a thousand times before the fleets of steel ships could be built, before they could be launched for the systems of distant suns. It would be a contest between the hearth and the mountains, between barley and the call of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, Arcturus and the clouds of Andromeda. Turn their eyes to the stars, had said Herjellsen, who was mad, mad. Hamilton could do nothing. And Gunther, she feared, had gone mad, too. It was wrong to kill the Dirt People. They had not harmed him. The Men would not have injured them, though they would, in all likelihood, have avoided them, or, if they wished, taken their stock, or one or two of their women. The Weasel People, she recalled, fed on human flesh. She wondered if Gunther, in his hatred for diggers, had gone insane.

She looked up, startled. The leader of the Weasel People was looking upon her and the other girl. Her leash-mate stood very straight, frightened; she arched her tiny, virginal breasts toward the bearded beast who looked upon her; she sucked in her belly, and put her head back; she trembled; he looked upon her face and figure; she was white and small before him; he was large and hairy, and darkened by the sun; would he find her pleasing; if he did not she knew she would be killed, struck down by the heavy axes; he turned from her, stopping before Hamilton; he looked closely at her face squinting, seeing that it was truly her; he took her by the head and pulled it down looking at it, running his hand over the head it was still cut and scraped, from the first time it had been shaved; only this morning had the older women shaved it again; it had not been their intention to let Hamilton soon forget her shame; furthermore, a vital girl, with long hair and bared legs, might trouble their men; much less would they be troubled, or should they be troubled, by a girl with shaved head, heavily and grossly clad, and kept busy constantly, kept exhausted and bent with labor, with digging and the carrying of water. She had had, since the first day, very little to do with the men. Women had been, constantly, her merciless supervisors. Often, indeed, even the young girl, now her leash-mate, had been in charge of her labors. How proud the young girl had been. Now she was stripped and tied by the neck, only a slave girl, naked, trying desperately to stand and display herself in a way that would please the brute who had led the attack on her village. Hamilton’s head was released; she straightened; she was sure that, even in spite of her shaved head; she would not be killed; she looked into the leader’s eyes. Gunther, she was sure, would have told him to bring her back. The leader, with a grunt, gestured to the man who held the common leash. Hamilton’s leash-mate uttered a tiny, joyful cry. They were pulled stumbling to the post. There were three other girls there, each with her hands tied behind her back, each tied by the neck to the post. The man who held Hamilton’s leash, that shared by the raped, virginal beauty, did not tie their hands behind them. He forced Hamilton, rather, to walk once completely about the post, stepping over the ropes of the other tethered women; the leash was thus looped about the post; then, pulling the loop out from the post, he forced Hamilton to duck beneath it and then step over it, and draw it tight; then, having used Hamilton’s body to tie the loop about the post, he bade them kneel; they did so.

The roof of one of the huts tumbled in, burning. The men of the Weasel People busied themselves gathering the loot of their raid; they sacked barley, gathered bowls, fetched axes and implements of bronze; one of them overturned a vat of sourish beer; another fell to his knees and sniffed at it; Hamilton’s heart leaped; there was another vat; but the leader, striking it with his ax, puzzled, broke it open, and it, too, spilled onto the earth, mixing with blood; Hamilton saw the knotted thong on the young girl’s throat; she could not see the knot on her own; “Make no sound,” said Hamilton, in the language of the Dirt People. The girl looked at her with horror. She shook her head negatively. Hamilton crept to her and began to pick at the knot on her throat. “No,” whispered the girl, fearfully, and struck Hamilton away. Hamilton tore at her own knot, but could not see to undo it. The men, with bowls, were now dipping into the broken vat, toward its bottom, below its rupture, from the leader’s ax. The leader did not stop them. One of the men spit out the fluid in disgust. The others laughed. Hamilton, desperate, looked at the open gate, and then at the young girl. Then she seized her by the throat, choking her, putting her to her back; the young girl’s eyes were wild; “Make no sound,” said Hamilton. Then she took her hands from the frightened girl’s throat and untied the knot; she then, with the free end, slipped the knot about the post free. The men at the beer laughed. Another had tried it, and swallowed it. He looked puzzled, then smiled. The leader then, gruffly, commanding a bowl, partook. He drank it down, all of it, and grinned. Hamilton slipped from the compound.

By the Dirt People Hamilton had not been fed well. Too, she had been worked hard and long, ordered from the kennel shortly before dawn, thrust back within it, and locked within it, after dusk. She, and Ugly Girl, who had escaped when the gaunt man had secretly come for her, before the attack of the Weasel People, had been fed on barley cakes and water, and roots pushed through an opening in the kennel gate, after dark, which they had found on the straw and eaten. She had also, when she could, stolen apples. Once, detected, the young, dark-haired girl, now the slave-by-capture of the Weasel People, had, ordering her to remove her long, woolen garment in the brush, beaten her unmercifully with a supple switch. She had not dared to resist, not wanting to die. She had not stolen apples thereafter. She had done her work with the digging stick, and carrying water to the fields, well. But her diet, actually, had not been much different from, or too inferior to, that of the Dirt People themselves. They were less well nourished, at this early stage of agriculture, than the surrounding hunters, whose diet included the fats and concentrated proteins of fresh meat; and were inferior in physical stature to the hunters; and were less self-reliant and were mentally slower than the hunters, and more prone to superstition and fear, the latter properties perhaps functions, in part, of their inferior nourishment, with its attendant psychological consequences, and their greater dependence upon factors beyond their control for their livelihood, in particular the weather and temperatures of the seasons. Thus it was perhaps not surprising that the shamans, wizards and priests exercised more power among the Dirt People, and their kind, than among hunters. Yet, if their men were physically smaller, more bent by labor and inferior diet, than hunters, their women were not always, to hunters, without interest. It was not unknown for hunters to come down upon such communities to kill their animals and strip and lead away, tethered, the more interesting of their daughters. Hamilton knew that her own people, the Men, might well have raided the Dirt People, slaughtering sheep, and carrying off, for their slaves, the best of their women; surely they would have at least taken the dark-haired girl and the wench, proud, raped, who had attempted to conceal herself in the barley; but Hamilton did not believe they would have slaughtered the Dirt People, as had the men of the Weasel People; the Men, she did not believe, would not have indiscriminately slaughtered, certainly not the weak, the old, the children, the less desirable females; the Men would simply have left the less comely of the females free; they would not have wanted them; only the wrists of the most beautiful would have been bound behind their backs for the return trek to the shelters; only they would have been coffled; only they would have been taken for slaves; only on the necks of the most beautiful would the Men have deigned to tie the leather collar that marked its lovely wearer as their slave. The men of the Dirt People would not have been injured, unless, perhaps, they had dared to resist. There was little honor in a Hunter slaying a man of the Dirt People, or of that type. Such an act would not entitle a boy, for example, to enter the Men’s Cave, any more than the slaughter of a sheep or the killing of a female. Accordingly, the Men would, presumably, had they known of the Dirt People, and been interested in them, raided them in darkness, taking what animals and women they pleased, leaving the rest. The Dirt People might have awakened to find sheep killed and carried away, and some of the village girls missing; that would have been all. This was not because the Men would have feared the Dirt People, but because they did not wish to bother overly much with them. Later, Hunters would impose tribute on the small agricultural communities, letting them survive, taking from them a levy of produce, animals and, annually, a female or two; but, unmolested, permitted to survive and thrive, in time the agricultural peoples would accumulate the numbers to withstand the hunters, and, eventually, to resist them. Then, over the period of millennia, patiently, felled tree by felled tree, acre by spreading acre, the defeat of the hunters would be wrought. The hunters would be gone; the priest and the wizard would triumph; the bow and the spear would be exchanged for the hoe, and the horizon for barley.