The Almost Complete Short Fiction
Page 136
It turned toward me. I was being pursued by the ship! What would the odds be now?
It skimmed along like a light cloud in a swift current of air. I raced toward the distant cliffs.
But I saw I would never reach them. This race called for new tactics. I nose dived for the ground as hard and fast as I could go. If only the gravity were stronger! It was so light it seemed no help at all.
I shot down and the space ship skimmed over me. I darted back. The ship began to turn. I headed straight down. Again the ship slid over me—this time so close that I could see the pilot’s face at the window. Twice more I switched directions as the big clumsy pursuer sought to keep sight of me. The low levels were my way out. I sped for the trees, and shot back toward the stream where I had left the tangle-haired girl.
A mile upstream from where I had left her I knew it was time to get down—clear down—out of sight. For if the ship succeeded in flying over me at this low elevation, I could be trapped in a shower bath of disint fire. Unless I rushed through it, I’d be taken alive.
The one chance, I saw, on first thought, was to hide under the surface of the water.
But a backward glance showed me that I was concealed from view, at the moment. Before the ship showed over the tree tops there was time to act.
I thought of Tangles and her rocks. I swooped to the bank of the lazy brook, hovered for an instant while my right talon closed over a stone, then hurled it with precision. It skimmed over the mud, cutting a sharp line, and plunged into the mirror of water.
In a flash I winged for the thickets, flying so low that I could have snatched grass with my hands. And a moment later I was bounding along on my talons with my wings folded close behind me.
This was perilous, deserting my wings for my feet. But these tree trunks were my friends. I was in far less danger of being seen if I contracted to my wingless size. I crept along like a wild animal eluding a hunter.
Now I froze behind the trunk of a tree. The space ship was following as closely over the stream as it dared, almost brushing the tree tops. It approached the point where the water had been roiled by the rock, then it suddenly swerved toward a clearing and landed.
Now there were shouts of directions back and forth between the men who had been unloaded farther downstream and those who poured out of the ship. At last they thought they had me cornered. I was hiding in the stream, they said.
Almost immediately the space ship lifted again, as if anticipating that I would hear and take to the air.
But I kept my wings folded, and hiked doggedly upstream, slowly but surely, keeping in the shelter of the thicket, and they never saw me. I chuckled, satisfied with my discovery. Here was a new advantage that went with wings; the power to refrain from using them if they couldn’t win the race.
From a well concealed observation post two miles beyond, I watched the men spend the rest of the day searching, plying back and forth in the big ship, trying in vain to pick up my trail. Many times they returned to the place where I seemed to have dragged a talon in the mud while plunging for the stream.
Was Flanger with them? At no time during the chase had I seen anyone who remotely resembled him.
And when the ship finally floated away in the evening, I could only wonder whether all of its men were aboard or whether some had been left hiding by the brook to trap me.
Indeed, it looked very much like a trap.
Tangles was still nearby, stationed on a promontory a short distance above the wooded brook. I flew closer and circled within a hundred yards of her.
She was watching me, calling to me, beckoning me to come.
Would I fly back to her, only to find myself suddenly surrounded? Were Flanger’s men hiding on that promontory?
The answer to my questions came in a double-dose of decisive actions. As I was gazing toward Tangles silhouetted against the triangle of suns, the space ship shot across the horizon at high speed and rocketed off into the sky bound for Karloora.
I drew a deep breath. The chase was over. Flanger’s men had bowed down to the fact that I was free.
I looked back to Tangles. Against the bright western sky she might have been a tree stump, her waving arm a broken limb. The sight of the space ship rocketing away had momentarily hypnotized her.
Then came the real violence. A huge bird sailed down out of the sunlight toward the promontory where she stood. It slacked its speed as it approached her. She didn’t see it coming.
As it swept down upon her it reached out—with a pair of arms! It snatched her up and flew off with her.
CHAPTER IX
Like a stream of fire from a disint gun I was off into the air.
Never had my eagle instincts carried me into action with a swifter overriding of my human will. From now on, it seemed, my wings would think for me, and I could ponder their decision while flying.
I can’t describe the sweet satisfaction that filled me as I looked down and saw the ground scooting away beneath me—or as I looked ahead and saw the big bird growing bigger. I was overtaking it. Here was a race of wings against wings.
Tangles hadn’t screamed. Nor was she crying as I almost caught up with her. She was simply scared sick. The fading sunlight showed her face to be chalk-white beneath the dirt streaks.
I swallowed hard. It would be the easiest thing in the world for that vulture to drop her. Vulture. Vulture. Vulture. The word stuck in my throat.
Vulture! He was no more nor less than an eagle man—exactly like me.
I was within a few yards of him, now, and he looked back to see me coming. His arms clutched the scared girl like heavy vines stiffening around a willowy tree. His wings flapped hard against the air and he surged away from me.
But I hadn’t begun to try my speed. The advantage was all mine. I had no burden.
I could see anger and dismay in the tightening of his beak and the flash of his eyes as he looked back at me. I glared at him with a fighting smile.
My talons itched to get at him.
Tangles was watching me now. With each flap of the vulture’s wings I could glimpse her head and shoulders hanging limply outside the crook of his right arm.
She nodded to me eagerly as I came closer. That was a thrill. For once no one was screaming “Vulture!” at me. That look of confidence from her frightened eyes was fresh power to my muscles. I’d have flown around the moon for her.
Her captor put on one hard burst of speed after another. How far would he go? And where? Maybe my boast that I would fly clear around the moon for her was going to be put to the test.
Where were we now? I glanced back and saw the whole wide valley spreading back of me. On the horizon, miles to the north, the distant fires of Clankolite villages; wavered in the twilight like a row of tiny stars. Ahead of our chase were the jagged purple mountains that I had seen on the day of my arrival.
This land to the south was new territory to me. But not to the creature I pursued. Again I was within a few yards of overtaking him.
The safest thing would have been to follow along until he alighted and placed Tangles on the ground. If I tried to tackle him in the air, there was no telling what might happen to Tangles.
But the daylight was passing. I wouldn’t dare hazard a fight in the dark with an unknown enemy in an unknown land. Much less, an air fight.
He was flagging. My time was at hand.
I plunged forward, turning myself in the air so that I was flying on my back. I rushed under the vulture with such fury that before he could start kicking me my arms locked around the girl’s body.
From that moment it was a fight of talons.
I locked my wings behind me and became dead weight, the same as Tangles. The vulture’s wings fought the air with the burden of both of us. He was gasping for breath.
Tangles rolled forward, throwing her weight against my shoulders and pressing her knees against my right side. Luckily she was out of the way of the kicking talons; her bruised feet would have been torn to shreds.
But now my adversary was getting the worst of the vicious kicking battle. Suddenly I dared a strategy that was too much for him. Clinging to Tangles with only one arm I thrust my fingers at his feathered throat. My clutch tightened with the power of a machine. He gulped. I fought harder. His arms began to slip.
The shadows were swirling up at us swiftly with their promise of sudden death. Tangles saw, and I heard the slight gurgle of her voice as she repressed a cry.
Then her captor’s arms slipped off, just as my wings spread to catch our fall. We arched up into the air, and as he fell away from us I saw that his eyes were closed. My vise on his throat had done it.
Whether he was dead or only halfdead as he plummeted down I do not know. But a moment later his body crashed against the rocks below us. He lay still.
We flew past him three times to make sure there was no life left in him.
If there had been—
Well, now that I was living by my wings I had a new, special feeling about such things. I was sure that if he had been only half-dead, lying there with broken wings, he would have preferred a death of mercy . . .
We flew northward through the darkening sky—Tangles and I. The girl looked up at me questioningly. I drifted at an easy, lazy pace. My speed was spent.
It seemed a long time before we came within sight of that long row of shimmering dots of lights on the valley horizon.
Tangles was so silent she might have been asleep. But from time to time her head turned against my left arm and I knew she was peering off to the north to make sure I was taking her back. When she finally saw the pinpoints of lights that were the far-off Clankolite village, she relaxed in my arms and for an hour’s flying she did sleep.
By the time she awoke, Karloora, the Blue Moon’s moon, was casting its mellow creamy light upon us.
This was a flight to remember. The moon lent a touch of beauty to everything—the wooded valley over which we were sailing, the bank of clouds rising in the west, even the ragged rebellious little figure in my arms. Her hair was blowing in the wind; the ribbons of her costume were flapping, her bruised dirty knees were two dots of reflected moonlight resting on the crook of my fight arm.
“Are your feet bleeding, Fire Jump?” she asked abruptly.
“They were. They’re feeling better now.”
“We must stop by the brook and rest, Fire Jump,” Tangles said. “You’ll grow faint from loss of blood.”
“I can take you to the nearest village before I rest,” I said.
“No. The brook first. I’m sure you’re thirsty.”
We flew down to the same pool where Tangles had bathed and wallowed in the sand earlier in the day. While I soaked my bruised talons she gathered some fruits from a tree that had provided her dinner a few hours before.
To me there was something at once weird and pleasurable in the turn this night had taken. Its terrors were gone, now. And though the storm clouds were piling high in the west, flinging magic fingers of light up into the sky, there was nothing about the weather to engender any fears. A spirit of deep contentment was upon me.
Part of it was my new confidence. My owners had gone back to Karloora without me. I was my own master. My wings had been put to the test against the wings of a vulture—or should I say another vulture—and I had fought a victorious fight.
But more than this, I had won confidence and appreciation from Tangles.
She was only a ragged unkempt child of nature, a mischievous scamp of a girl. But she recognized that I—an eagle man—had become her friend.
It was fascinating to listen to her excited, scatterbrained talk. She had never realized until the last few hours that she was outgrowing her rough-and-tumble girlhood and about to become a young woman. But this night’s adventure had started her to thinking seriously about herself.
“The vultures come and steal women to be their wives,” she said between mouthfuls of food. Her jaws were working excitedly. “They never came after me before. I knew they might some day when I got older—but I was always sure that when the time came I’d be able to fight them off with rocks.”
“Did you see this one coming?”
“Oooh, no,” she gasped. “I was up there on the hill waving at you—”
“What for?”
“To tell you it was all right to come back. You see, I knew the Karloora men had quit looking for you. I heard them talking. And I knew it was true, what you’d said about coming from Karloora. So I was waving. Then I stopped to watch the ship jump off into the sky—and the next thing I knew I was sailing off in the sky myself.”
“Were you scared?”
Her squinty little eyes grew big, glistening with moonlight.
“I almost couldn’t breathe, I was so scared,” she said. “What made it puzzling was I’d been talking with you all day. And this bird was so different. I tried to argue with him, and he gave such an ugly beastly squawk—”
She shuddered. Again the strangeness of her confidence sent a new warmth flooding through my chest. For I knew that to the eye there had been very little difference between that vulture and me.
But here was some one who saw me not as I looked, but as I acted.
Had Stone Jaw been able to do as much? I thought not.
And his daughter? Her terror had blinded her. And yet I could credit Breath of Clover with a little of the same trait. She hadn’t overlooked the harsh actions of Flint Fingers. His striking self-importance hadn’t blinded her to his brutal actions against the tangle-haired girl.
“Where would the vulture have taken you?” I asked, as I studied Tangles’ wistful face.
“All the way to the mountains. That’s where the vultures live.”
“You’d have had a long hike back.”
Tangles shook her head. “The stolen women never come back. It’s too far, and there are too many forest animals.”
“Can’t the Clankolites put a stop to this stealing?”
“They’ve tried. The war goes on almost constantly. But our arrows can’t catch the fastest vultures—just like Flint Fingers couldn’t shoot you—” The girl broke off, glancing up as if wondering whether she had said the wrong thing. I was smiling, but she didn’t realize it. She went on talking and suddenly she was telling me the most amazing thing of all.
“The vultures insist on stealing Clankolite women for their wives,” she said, “in order to keep their race going.”
“But why must they have Clankolite women? Aren’t there enough vulture women?”
“There are none at all,” she said. “No female vultures are born. Only males. That’s why there’ll always be stealing—and war.”
CHAPTER X
The rain came down in torrents.
Was it only last night that Stone Jaw and I had chosen the cave for our night’s lodging? Now it was Tangles.
I huddled outside the entrance where I could keep guard against any chance intruders. I had chosen a warm dry corner, and should have slept. But the excitement of my adventures weren’t conducive to rest.
Before me there loomed a tremendous obstacle. It hovered over me as real as those rain clouds and far more threatening. It was sure to soak me again and again as long as I should live on this moon.
I was a vulture.
There was no escaping that fact any longer. I belonged to this race of creatures who lived in the mountains and came to the valley to steal Clankolite women.
I was not a scientist’s copy of them—I was one of them.
Why I had been taken to Karloora, and why Flanger should lie to me and make me think I was a laboratory experiment might always remain a mystery to me. But I could see now, as plainly as I could see those great gashes of lightning splitting the black sky, that Flanger had known what he was talking about when he had boasted tha
t he could get thousands more like me.
The more I thought about it the more I hoped Flanger had fallen into the teeth of a growser. Some day I would go back to that ledge where I had left the claytung wire hanging and see if I could find any clues to his strange disappearance.
Had I known what great scheme was in the minds of the passengers on the space ship that night, as they sped back to Karloora, my thoughts would have been far heavier. Perhaps I would have sped away at once, heedless of the ripping, threshing storm, to start spreading an alarm over the Blue Moon.
But I didn’t know. And so the great trouble that was slowly gathering—which indeed had been gathering through all of my seventeen years—was destined soon to break upon the unsuspecting denizens of the Blue Moon.
Not knowing all this, I huddled more or less contentedly, enjoying the glory of the storm . . . I was growing sleepy . . . I mused over the funny things Tangles had said . . . How relaxed she had been as I had flown with her in my arms. . . Did she mention being thrilled over this new experience of sailing through the air, supported by my wings? . . . Or was I lapsing into dreams?
Tangles awakened me with a shout.
“Fire Jump, come quick! Hurry if you want to see them!”
Her cry came from somewhere overhead. It was morning. I bounded up. My sore stiff talons sprung me into the air and I leaped to the brow of the rocky hillside above the cave.
“Keep down!” Tangles cried. “They have sharp eyes.”
“What—where—” My mumbled questions gave way to a sharp ejaculation, “Vultures!”
Tangles gave me a quick curious look, her eyes tracing the tight lines of my beak. Evidently the bitterness of my tone struck her as ironical.
The vultures were flying low under the foggy morning sky. I counted twelve of them. At least half of them were carrying prisoners in their arms—Clankolite women.
Occasionally we could hear a faint cry of terror echoing across the hillsides.
In a moment the procession had sailed out of sight over the southern horizon. Tangles kept on watching in deathly silence for several minutes. When she spoke her voice was mostly a whisper.