The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  Now it was dawn.

  Again I could hear a growser just over the ridge. Not a sleepy one this time, but a restless one, pawing the earth.

  Then I saw the figure of a huge man moving past a streak of light between two rocks. He crept past slowly. A moment later his head showed as he peaked over the crest. I waited for a gun to appear.

  But the bulky head drew back out of sight and didn’t reappear. What was the meaning—

  I knew that face. That was the jailer who had watched over me—the one man who could identify me. So Flint Fingers was taking the trouble to make sure I hadn’t sent a substitute to do my “conferring” for me.

  The first ray of light shot across the crest from the first rising sun. I marched forward, gun ready. My eyes and ears were on the alert. But no attacks were moving on me from the rear. The scene of action was straight ahead.

  Thump-thump-thump-thump—

  Over the crest the big growser came bounding pell-mell. The figure astride it was a veteran rider—and shooter. He paved the way for his rush with a line of purple fire. Straight as a taut string the deadly disintegration rays came at me.

  I leaped to the left and plunged forward. For three swift jumps my nimble feet outguessed the Clankolite’s shots. By that time my own gun had thrown one fatal bar of fire straight through the growser’s head.

  The big ugly head broke into blue flakes and melted away. The big decapitated mass of growser-flesh went crashing down over the stones.

  The rider leaped off, barely catching himself on his feet. His claytung armor clanked as he jerked up straight and swung his gun around for action.

  Then he stopped. His action froze so suddenly that I wondered if my disint fire had penetrated his deathproof armor. He was staring at me. In particular, he was eyeing the symbol of the eagle that I wore on my hip. Instinctively I knew it.

  I cut off my gunfire on the instant. At his feet lay a red brocaded saddle blanket that had flown off the growser with him. A red brocaded blanket! Flint Fingers was less clever than I thought.

  It was a strange way for a duel to end. The armored man slowly and deliberately flung his gun off to one side and marched down toward me with his armored hands extended.

  That stride of his proved what the blanket had not. It was Stone Jaw. He was refusing to kill me. He would take his chances on my killing him.

  “Fire Jump!” he cried, his words resounding through his metal helmet. “You’ve earned the name. Am I safe—”

  “Where’s the jailer?” I croaked back at him.

  “Who?” Stone Jaw whirled, suddenly aware that the trouble was not over. It had just begun. It was plain that he had been hoaxed into this fight without knowing any of the circumstances.

  Then it came—three sprays of disint fire from a hideout on the Clankolite side of the ridge. The fire was aimed not at me but at Stone Jaw. He had just started to remove his helmet when the lines of purple darted toward him. I spanked the headpiece down over the back of his neck as I jumped past him.

  “Run south!” I cried.

  Stone Jaw ran south, and from then on it was up to me. But I had wings and I knew when to use them. And at the moment it was apparent this frame-up was aimed primarily at Stone Jaw.

  Not because he was a traitor. He wasn’t, and three-fourths of the Clankolites knew it. In recent days these rumblings of revolutions had been heard all the way to the tops of the purple mountains.

  No, they were pouring their deadly efforts upon Stone Jaw because he was a threat to Flint Fingers’ leadership. The young warrior had overplayed his hand, inviting the Karloorans to bring on their war weapons. Stone Jaw’s moderation—his willingness to listen to a fair plan from the vultures—had gained support like a wave of wildfire in a high wind.

  And so at this moment, as Stone Jaw hurled his gun aside upon discovering he had been framed to murder me, three hidden warriors, not including the sluggish jailer, started after him to make an end of him.

  My disint fire was worse than useless. Those three men were as completely armored as Stone Jaw. Yes, better. The fact that they tried to catch him with gunfire was proof enough that they had given him defective armor.

  I threw my gun. I threw stones. Every object that my hands touched went whizzing through the air toward the three armored Clankolites. The jailer was out of range, jogging down the mountainsides screaming for the growsers that must have been hidden farther on. But my barrage of stones succeeded in smashing the gun out of the hands of one of the three.

  He leaped after it, which was exactly what I wanted him to do. It gave me my chance to leap after him.

  A deadly chance it was, for one spray of the disint fire shifted in my direction would have been the end of me. Such a spray didn’t come—not until I had seized the tall warrior, scrambling for his gun.

  I lifted him bodily, barely in time to catch a blast of purple fire against the back of his armor. My hands froze on his armored ankles and I swung him like a club.

  He was Flint Fingers. I knew by the voice. He shrieked just before he struck his fellow Clankolite. He was my club, and my muscles wielded him as if he had been a dead tree limb.

  Clang. Clang. Clang.

  The crunch of claytung against claytung rang out. Down the mountainside the terrorized shouts of the retreating jailer stopped cold as he turned to see what was happening to his three compatriots. They were being beaten to pulp within their claytung armor.

  The two stunned gunmen sank lower and lower as I alternated my blows upon them, swinging the battered bloody frame of what had once been Flint Fingers as a metal-covered club.

  From a safe distance Stone Jaw stood gazing fixedly. Slowly he removed his head covering and trudged back to meet me.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  The jailer sat on a flat stone above the patch of grass where the growsers grazed. He was far enough away to be out of hearing if we talked low; close enough to shudder like a loose boulder whenever Stone Jaw barked at him. He was tractable enough, and it was fortunate that he had run out of range when my rage against Flint Fingers broke loose in a fury of killing.

  For the jailer would be useful to Stone Jaw. He could be made to report the truth of what he had witnessed when they got back.

  Meanwhile Stone Jaw and I had the brief visit that would spell destiny for his race and mine.

  “Had you, too, forgot Flint Fingers’ threat to pit us against each other?” Stone Jaw asked, after explaining the sly deceptions which had led him to come storming over the crest at an unknown enemy.

  “I expected it to be Flint Fingers, bent on killing me,” I said. “But I had overestimated myself as a thorn in his flesh. And I had underestimated his cleverness at concealing your identity. I supposed he would have exchanged saddle blankets with you.”

  “You mean—”

  “To trick me into killing you by having you ride the yellow blanket—his. When I saw the red I thought, ‘Stone Jaw? Surely not. This is Flint Fingers, bent on killing me, wearing the red brocaded blanket thinking to save himself,’ for I wouldn’t shoot at you, willfully. But the red matched your stride—”

  “Stop talking in colors,” said Stone Jaw, “before you bring back my blindness . . . Tell me, how is Breath of Clover?”

  “Breath of Clover? I haven’t seen her.”

  “She meant to come to you.”

  “To me? How—”

  “I mean to your land. That is—” Stone Jaw reddened in confusion. “I supposed you had seen her. She’s all right, of course. Probably married to one of your braves by this time.”

  He tried to change the subject, but I prodded him until I learned what had happened. Breath of Clover had kept in mind the things I had told her about the life of the captured women. She had held to it as an escape from the reality that had become unbearable—her promises to Flint Fingers.

  Then came the fatal day that a band of Clankolites rode toward her hiding place. She and Stone Jaw fled. One narrow escape followed another.

&
nbsp; But Flint Fingers knew, by that time, that she had not been captured. She was simply running away from him.

  The story spread and did much to hurt his prestige as a leader. Nothing could have happened to throw his brutal character into sharper focus. But he was determined to win, and at length the chase ended in the foothills where the vultures and Clankolites were warring.

  But Flint Fingers didn’t win. In a last crucial moment, when the force of Stone Jaw’s protection had been broken, Breath of Clover threw herself upon the mercy of a vulture, who snatched her up and flew off with her.

  I scarcely breathed as I listened to Stone Jaw’s story. Finally I broke the spell of silence that followed the telling.

  “Why did you say she meant to come to me?” I asked.

  “I had no right to say that,” said Stone Jaw. Then, “Do you recall those times she questioned you? Didn’t those questions mean anything? Or did you think she was interested only in escaping Flint Fingers?”

  “I can’t believe she ever thought of me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she—she’s so timid and fragile and beautiful. And too lovely. Deep in her heart she still has a terror of vultures. Am I right, Stone Jaw?” The old hunter shook his head. “I don’t know, Fire Jump. She’s a woman, and women are always mysteries to me. I’m never sure I understand her.”

  “It all seems impossible, like being struck by lightning and—and liking it. I’d never felt as if I dared look at her. If she had given me a faith-gift, or some sign that she—”

  “She used to leave faith-gifts in the cave for you, Fire Jump,” said Stone Jaw with a twinkle in his eyes. “But you never saw them. The truth was, you were still thinking of Tangles. And Breath of Clover knew it. So she didn’t press her gifts upon you.”

  “I didn’t realize—”

  “But now Tangles has been gone for many seasons, and Breath of Clover hasn’t heard a word of her. She may never come back—”

  “She has come back, Stone Jaw.”

  “What! When—”

  “I’ve never seen her—except once from a distance—but I know she’s been here. She came on a Karloora ship, with a party of scientists who dig into the relics of the past. Each time the party comes they gather a few sticks and stones and bones. Once I saw traces of their work in an old ruined vulture settlement. They had removed an entire hut, from its mud-dabbed roof to the stones beneath it.”

  “Where does this ship stay?”

  “It doesn’t stay anywhere for long. It rushes back to Karloora. That’s why I’ve never got to talk with Tangles.”

  “How can you be sure it is Tangles, if you’ve only seen her from a distance?”

  “Because she has left gifts at my lair.”

  “Faith-gifts?”

  Stone Jaw had caught me with that question once before, long ago. Again I couldn’t answer. Maybe the gifts were meant for ritual; maybe they were only messages. Stone Jaw nodded thoughtfully. If it was Tangles, he mused, she would probably leave some reminder of her visit.

  But if I had not seen her, he suggested, it was possible that it was her fault. Perhaps she hadn’t intended that I see her.

  “Living on Karloora will have changed her, you know,” said Stone Jaw. “What were her gifts?”

  “The latest one—the third—was this disint gun—the weapon I managed to miss you with a few minutes ago. The gift of an earlier visit was a skeleton.” Stone Jaw’s eyes searched me. He must have thought I had been dreaming these things. “What sort of skeleton?”

  “The skeleton of a female vulture.”

  “There are no female vultures.”

  “These bones bear the characteristics of a woman. I have studied pictures in books. Bendetti the magistrate used to teach me from the school books of his son. This skeleton is a female—a winged female. It is a proof that there have been female vultures.” Stone Jaw began muttering, swinging his armored hand back and forth against the rock. Every time the claytung armor clanked, the big jailer, stationed a little distance away, gave a shudder that caused him to oscillate from his whiskers to his toes.

  Finally Stone Jaw’s hand slammed down with a bang, and the jailer jumped off his seat and landed in a pile of loose stones, causing a minor landslide.

  “Fire Jump, you’re the most confusing creature I ever bumped into,” Stone Jaw blurted. “You upset everything.”

  “How?”

  “Look what you’ve done to me in the past. First I think you’re a man. Then you turn out to be a vulture. Next I plan to return your favors by getting you out of prison. Instead, you break out and start doing favors for me—”

  “You’re the confusing one,” I broke in. “I fly off to rescue your daughter, and I return to find her safe with you. Then what does she do but go to the vultures—”

  “And just when I stop worrying over her, thinking she’s safe with you,”

  Stone Jaw continued, “I find you haven’t even seen her. Just when I think Tangles is gone for good, you tell me Tangles has come back.”

  “She has been back,” I corrected. “By now she may be gone for good.”

  “There you are upsetting me again,” Stone Jaw put on a show of terrific exasperation, almost clowning; though under it all he was much disturbed. “But now you’ve gone the limit. All my life I’ve known that there are no female vultures. They just aren’t born. But now you try to tell me—”

  The thumping of growser hoofs thundered through the morning stillness. We turned to see the party of Clankolite warriors approaching. Stone Jaw knew them at sight. He glanced toward the crushed bodies of Flint Fingers and the two gunmen. He took a deep breath of satisfaction.

  “At last,” he said, “I’ll have a chance to proclaim you a hero before Clankolites who will give you fair credit. Those are my friends, Fire Jump. They’re coming to find me. They’ll take me back to make me the Clankolite leader—”

  “I won’t wait,” I said, spreading my wings. “You and I have agreed on the peace—”

  “It’s incredible that you can persuade the vultures to live beyond the Lake of Fire, agreeing to steal no more wives. It’s a voluntary suicide for your whole race—”

  “We’ll keep our promise, Stone Jaw,” I pledged. “As long as I live, we’ll never violate it.”

  “Then I can promise, in turn, that we Clankolites will cease to accept weapons from the men of Karloora.”

  “Is our business complete?” I asked. Stone Jaw nodded. He waved to the approaching band of Clankolites and they returned his signal of friendship. Once more he returned to me with questioning in his deep-cut face.

  “Breath of Clover?”

  “Our agreement is to return none of the women we have already captured,” I replied. “But I will search out Breath of Clover to make sure she is not unhappy.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  I returned to vulture land to search for Breath of Clover.

  I learned from the old women still living near White Tooth Point that she had not yet been won by any vulture. She had moved from one home to another, part of the reason being that many families were moving across the Lake of Fire. It was a difficult time to expect any newcomer to make an adjustment.

  The exodus across the lake would be completed in a few more days, now that the peace agreement had become a reality.

  But the old women with whom I talked did not know whether Breath of Clover had made up her mind to crossing the lake. They had not seen her. The ubiquitous gossip had it that she was disappointed over coming, and was reluctant to accept the gestures of friendship from any of the brave young vultures.

  “But she’ll soon get over that,” the women said. “She’ll swallow her pride and settle down to married life like the rest of us. Though if she doesn’t do so right away, no vulture is going to bear her across the Lake of Fire.”

  I thanked the women, and they promised me they would postpone their own crossing until Breath of Clover was somehow cared for. They would find her and try to
reason with her.

  I flew across the Lake of Fire, then, eager to see how the new colony was progressing. It was good to be flying on south again. It was good to have the radiation of the red fires wafting up against my body as I flew across high above the red flames.

  It was gratifying to see that the other vultures made the flight readily. Once the taboo had been forgotten, it was not an impossible flight. In fact, there was always a restorative effect upon tired wings, according to my experience—and this I attributed to the radiations.

  A sense of expectancy took hold of me as I approached the southern rim—a hunch that something momentous lay waiting for me.

  Whence did that feeling arise? Was it because I had not been here for more than a year? Much might have happened in that time—favorable or otherwise.

  For more than a year the first colonists had been partaking of this eagleman’s paradise with its bountiful game, its sweet mineral springs gushing from the blue chasms, its forests of rugged beauty.

  The only reports that had come back to me during my year of absence were the simple grunts and squawks of those vultures who made brief return trips to get the rest of their possessions or to pick up a double armload of vulture boys who had been left behind.

  The first vulture I met when I alighted beyond the rim was a well known friend named U-Kawk—a brave young eagle man, well muscled, handsome, a good fighter.

  U-Kawk called out to me, “Fire Jump . . . Good . . . Good!”

  I returned his greeting. I studied him with new interest. In the back of my mind was the problem of Breath of Clover.

  “Are you mated yet, U-Kawk?”

  “No.”

  “There is a beautiful Clankolite girl waiting to be brought across. Her name is Breath of Clover. Will you fly back and get her?”

  “Yes—get . . . But not marry.”

  “I’m not telling you to marry her. She would have something to say about that.” I sensed a suppressed excitement in U-Kawk’s manner, and added, “What makes you so sure you won’t want to marry Breath of Clover?”