West of January (7 page)

What could I hope to accomplish? Anubyl had only to wait until I became exhausted and the woollie crawled away, leaving me lying in full view. He would certainly stay awake long enough for that to happen, and I did not think his murderous rage would cool very much in the meantime. I should have run while I had the chance and died with a little more dignity.

And eventually I managed to convince my craven body of that, or else the pain in my knees did so. I spread myself flat and let the rear canopy of hard wool scrape over me. Sunlight and blessed fresh air returned. I prepared to breathe my last…

Somebody sniggered.

I sat up with a wail.

It was Rilana, regarding me with much amusement. “What’s it like in there?”

“Where is he?” I looked around at the humped shapes of woollies.

She smirked. “He’s gone out to get the women and poles.”

Of course! I should have thought of that. Work parties could evict dashers, and they would race around until they found unoccupied woollies, or the one with me under it.

“Here!” Rilana said and held out a canteen. “It’s only half-full, but it’ll have to do. There’s a gully over that way.”

She shook her head and was suddenly serious. “Good luck, Knobil!”

I grabbed the water bottle, spotted a quick kiss on her forehead, and ran.

So my cowardice did save me in the end. Anubyl had first looked for me in the open and then guessed—or been told—that I had hidden in the herd. Later, while he was looking for me under the woollies, I was fleeing away over the grasslands. Obviously Rilana had kept her word and hadn’t told him I had gone. My luck held again. I was able to stay down in gullies for a long way. One small herder does not show up for very far on a landscape so huge. He did not come after me on his horse, or if he did, he did not find me. Probably he preferred to stay close to the camp while the angel was there.

By chance, or because my luck still held, I was heading south. Anubyl had said that there were water holes that way. Even after the angel left, he would probably want to scout to the north, if he believed what the angel had told him. South was my safest road.

I settled into a long-distance lope, a loner at last.

—3—

T
HE LOPE FELL TO A WALK
, the walk at last to a stagger.

The sun burned without mercy above my left shoulder. Desiccated ridges and hollows rolled on without end. Boulders and sand, scabby grass between patches of gravel and shattered dry clay—an empty land beneath a vacant sky.

“You can’t go on forever, you know,” said a whisper in my ear.

“Who are you?”

“I am Loneliness. I am your companion now.”

“Go away.”

“Not until you die. I shall be with you always, until then. It won’t be long.”

“I have a knife and a bow string and a water bottle.”

Loneliness laughed at my side. “An empty water bottle and no sling. Even Indarth had a sling.”

“What need I fear? Thirst? I shall find a pond. Food? I can eat miniroos. Poisonthorn? I am not a child!”

“Eagles. Rocs. Roo packs. People.”

“They are rare,” I insisted. “Anubyl survived. I shall find a pond with trees and make a bow.”

There was no shade, but I sat on some thicker grass to fashion a sling from my pagne. It had been tattered before, and I was now left with little to cover my nakedness. That hardly seemed to matter very much.

“Or even traders!” I said loudly. “I may meet some traders.”

Loneliness laughed again. “You have nothing to trade. Traders would not be interested in you.”

He was wrong, of course. He did not know—because he was me, and I did not know. Traders would have been very glad to see me, but I met no traders, not then. Those canny, nervy folk would have long since fled the grasslands.

I was surprised at the effort needed to force myself back onto my feet. Loneliness fell into step beside me once more. His voice was the sound of the wind on the hills. It was the crunch of grass below my feet, and sometimes it was my voice.

“What if you see another herd?” he asked. “People? You will want to go to them, won’t you? You have never been away from people before.”

“And the man will kill me. No, I must be alone. Until I can go back and kill Anubyl.”

“He is a man. You are a boy.”

“I am a man now.”

“Are you?” Loneliness inquired. “Your body hair is coming in gold, like the stuff on your head. Your eyes are blue like a newborn’s. They never turned brown, as eyes should. There is something wrong with you. You will never be a proper man, freak.”

The grass was withered to its roots, littered everywhere with dry dung. The hollows held the corpses of ponds, and the only trees I saw had long since been cut down or shriveled to useless brittle tinder.

My heart burned with contempt for the angel. So my mother’s death was not his business? What use were the angels, then? Nasty little man, I thought—old, fat, and useless.

“You can’t go on much longer,” Loneliness remarked. “If you lie down, you will never rise. The sun will cook you while you sleep.”

He was right. Without water I would die soon. Even my eyeballs were dried out—I fancied my eyelids squeaked when I blinked, and I laughed long and loud at the thought. Todish would have found that funny, too, and Rilana…

I stopped in a hollow and tried digging in the clay with a stick. I found no water and almost fried my feet. I scouted for miniroo pellets, but even miniroos seemed to have vanished from the great lonely world.

“There is a hill,” my invisible companion remarked helpfully. “It is a little higher than the others. Climb that, and if you do not see water there, then give up.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Thank you.”

I was almost ready to drop to hands and knees when I reached the top, and it was so wide and flat that I could not see the land beyond. Behind me, to the north, there was no sign of the family’s woollies; no sign of anything except endless gray rumpled landscape, shimmering and writing in heat haze below a cloudless sky. I must not stray east or west, or I would lose my sense of location. I wanted to keep that, so that I would be able to find Anubyl when I was ready to kill him.

“His danger does not seem very great,” Loneliness said, but I did not reply.

If Anubyl had truly found water holes in this direction, then I had missed them. Scouting was much easier on horseback than on foot.

For a while I sat on a rock and gave way to despair. Never had I been alone like this, out of sight of my family. Even our herder hunting parties had been communal affairs. The thirst and hunger were bad, but the solitude was worse. I was the only boy in the world.

Finally I managed to overcome my frightening torpor, climb onto my aching feet, and trail wearily over the flat summit. The country to the south came into view. I stood and stared blankly. It seemed just the same as the country to the north…except…

Fatigue had slowed my thinking, I suppose, and at first I thought it was only a roo. A single, solitary roo would be no great threat—and edible, if I could somehow catch it. Then a terrible recognition began. Roos traveled in packs, and this creature was alone. Roos bounded, and this one was walking. It was very far off to the southeast, two or three ridges over, and a roo would not be visible so far away Therefore it was very big. It had to be a tyrant.

At the distance it seemed white and the tiny forelimbs were invisible. The massive tail balanced the forward-sloping torso above the enormous hind legs, the gigantic melon-shaped head. The pointed ears stuck up like horns.

My mind began to race, rummaging through memory for all the stories I had heard. Tyrants were so huge that they could overturn and eat woollies. They were implacable and could outrun a horse. No arrow could penetrate them deep enough to kill. They had one weakness: their eyesight. All they could see was movement, and a man who stayed still was invisible to them. I dropped to a crouch.

But it saw me. Even at such a distance, even so small a motion, it had seen. The massive head swung around and the monster came to a halt, peering across the landscape, seeking the source of that movement. I stayed as still as a boulder, only my heart moving.

That may have been the first time in my life that I truly appreciated what time was—it crawled. Then the tyrant’s great jaws opened. And closed. And a faint roar came drifting over the ridges to me. I shivered, feeling a strange prickling down my back.

At last the tyrant decided that it had been mistaken. It started moving again, resuming its original progress, heading north.

I was enormously, intoxicatingly, relieved. All I needed to do was stay where I was, and it would go away.

Go away north. I thought of Anubyl, riding out with bow and sword to defend his ill-gotten riches. The tyrant would swallow him whole, and his horse also, and my soul rejoiced at the vision. Then I thought of the others: my brothers and sisters, my aunts, the woollies. The tyrant would have a great feast. Once it came in sight of the woollies, my family would be lost, for there was no way to make woollies keep still. There would be no way to keep the toddlers still either—not for the length of time it would take a tyrant to eat all that herd.

My sense of relief died. It dried up and blew away, and horror replaced it. I must try to turn the tyrant. We had been traveling southwest for the last few camps, so the monster was merely prowling, not following our tracks. I tried to convince myself that it would change direction of its own accord, as if by mere wishing I could create a wisdom about tyrants. But I watched, and it did not deviate at all from its course. It vanished briefly in a small dip and then reappeared, still striding northward.

Duty? I doubt that I had ever heard the word, but it was only Anubyl I hated. Aunt Amby, Aunt Ulith…young Todish, who had been my closest friend since Arrint left…even Rilana, nasty little snit though she was… Their faces floated before me in unexpected tears, and I knew that I must try. Better one than all.

When? Trembling, I rose.

Again it saw me. This time the motionless inspection lasted longer, the roaring was repeated several times. But it was still farther south than I was. I saw that I must wait until it had progressed more to the north. Then I would be turning it away from my family, roughly to the southwest. I must hope that it would pursue me for long enough to fix that southwest direction in its mind, so that when I had escaped it would continue to the southwest. If I escaped…but all I would have to do was freeze and it would lose me.

Or so I thought. The only animals I really knew were woollies and horses. Woollies were as stupid as cactuses, but I should have remembered that horses were not. I should have known that tyrants must have some means of catching prey and hence could not possibly be evaded as easily as that. I should have known that any predator in the grasslands would die of starvation were it so brainless. But had I known, I could not have done what I did.

I waited until I dared wait no longer. My terror seemed to be growing to fill the whole world and I thought my courage would fail. I poured sweat. My teeth chattered. I dribbled where I stood, not even daring a hand movement to lift my pagne—fear is agony, and we cowards pay dearly for our defect. The tyrant vanished, reappeared, vanished… Now it was moving away from me, and I thought I might do nothing if I waited any longer. I jumped in the air and waved my arms. I think I even yelled, although it was so distant that my voice would never have carried to it.

In instant reaction, the tyrant spun on one foot and headed toward me. Thirst and hunger and weariness were all forgotten now. A basic human instinct for survival took over, and I began to run in earnest. I fled.

Had I been smarter, I would never have started that race. Had I had any sense at all, I would have planned my route and conserved my strength for a final spurt. Instead, I plunged headlong down the slope into the next hollow and then straight up the opposite side. Not having eyes in the back of my head, I paused at the top and turned, panting for breath and watching for my pursuer. But this crest was lower and I could not see beyond the ridge I had left.

As the moments passed and the monster did not appear, I began to appreciate my stupidity. I did not know which way to run, and I was not sure I had any strength left to run with anyway.

Then it came into view, rising enormous over the skyline like the thunderclouds I could remember from my youth. And it was already on the hill I had just left. Far faster and far huger than I had realized, it seemed to grow up and up, white against the sky—ears and wicked eyes and then the enormous fang-filled jaws. Petrified, I could only stand and gasp for breath, and feel sick.

Then the whole monster was visible, striding across the mesa toward me. The great legs did not seem to be hurrying, but they ate distance relentlessly. Now I could see the tiny forelimbs, curled close to the chest, each bearing a single, gleaming curved claw. But mostly I saw the endless array of ivory daggers around the ghastly black maw.

Panic!
My paralysis vanished. I turned again with a squeal of terror and raced down the next slope.

Why I did not break my neck is a great mystery, for the hill was steep. I traversed it in bounds almost as long as the tyrant’s strides, and I was looking over my shoulder most of the time. The ground thumped against my battered feet, every blow rattling me to my teeth—cactuses and rocks and slithery patches of gravel—but I ignored the pain. I knew I must get out of sight for a moment and change direction, but I seemed to have left it too late. The slope was steep, but not steep enough. The tyrant’s eyes were high enough to keep me in view, and it was still moving faster than I was, even though it was on the flat plateau.

Then mercifully it reached the gully and dropped swiftly out of sight. And I had reached the base of the main hill. A long gentle slope stretched down to a tangle of dead silvery trees in the center of the valley. Water gleamed there. How I needed that water! And the trees would provide cover…

Fortunately I retained just enough wit to remember my strategy. I was not going to reach that cover before the killer came over the ridge behind me. Water must wait, and I must change direction. I veered hard to the right, leaping and staggering and bounding over rough grass and low scrub, still twisting my head around to watch for my pursuer—and running right into a boulder. I cracked my knees with an excruciating blaze of pain. I toppled over, hit the ground, rolled, and stopped. The tyrant s head appeared in the sky.