* No terrestrial conversion is supplied in the Cabot ms. for this figure. Equivalences supplied elsewhere in the Cabot mss. suggest a figure of a little over two hundred miles per hour. —J.N.
There were snappings, as of wood breaking, but it was not wood. The first tarn, that highest, was struck full in the back, the man broken between the two bodies. Its back was broken and perhaps the neck of the man in the same blow. As a hurricane can imbed a straw in a post so, too, are compounded the forces involved by the speed of the stroke.
Again the tarn aligned itself, smote downward, then lifted its wings, almost folded on either side of me, its talons, like great hooks, lowered.
It caught the second tarn about the neck, as it swerved madly, by the grasping talons of its left foot, and I was thrown about, upside down, the ground seeming to be over my head, and the two birds spun in the air and then my tarn disengaged itself, the neck of the other bird flopping to the side, blood caught in the wind, like red rain.
Its rider's scream alerted the third rider, but, in a moment, the talons had locked upon him, his bird exhausted, struggling in the air, and he was torn upward from the girth rope. He was released, falling through the clouds below us, disappearing. He would fall, I conjectured, through the Kinyanpi formation below, that formation being by now, I supposed, arrested by the other tarnsmen, those from Council Rock. Beneath those placid, fleecy clouds I had little doubt there was bloody war in the air.
The fourth rider made good his escape, descending through the clouds, disappearing.
I swung the tarn about, for a moment, over the clouds, and then entered them, several hundred feet from where the foe had disappeared.
An escape trajectory, if one is dealing with a wily foe, can prove to be a tunnel of ambush.
I took the tarn below the clouds and there again made visual contact with the foe. He was racing down to join his fellows.
This pleased me. I hoped that he would spread alarms amongst them.
I was less pleased by what else I saw and yet I knew I could have expected little that was different.
Our bold tarnsmen from Council Rock fought amidst circling Kinyanpi.
They were outnumbered easily by ten to one. The outcome of such an arrangement was surely a foregone conclusion unless some new ingredient might intervene, something unexpected or different, which might drastically alter the balances of battle.
That our men had lasted this long was a function of several factors, factors on which I had desperately relied. As nearly as I could determine, few tribes in the Barrens had mastered the tarn. That there were Kinyanpi had almost been taken as a matter of myth by the Kaiila until their dramatic appearance at the summer camp. This suggested that such groups were rare. The Kinyanpi, I conjectured, occupied a position rather analogous to that of Earth tribes who might have been amongst the first, in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, to master the horse. Due to lack of competition their battle skills, originally developed in connection with the kaiila, would presumably have declined. Similarly, due also to a lack of competition, and the merciless selections of war, they had not yet become to the tarn as the normal warrior in the Barrens is to his kaiila, namely, a member of a matched fighting unit. On the other hand, the shield and lance skills of the Kaiila were fresh, and our men were tried warriors. Secondly, I had had the men and their tarns train as fighting units, not only the man and his mount, but the men and their mounts, in pairs and prides, as well. Signals were conveyed not by tarn drums, however, but, in one of the manners of the Barrens, by Herlit-bone whistles.
In one of my calculations I had been disappointed. I had hoped that the mere appearance of the great black tarn would inspire terror in the Kinyanpi and that they would withdraw.
Five riders had done so, when it had appeared suddenly, unexpectedly, behind me, in the vicinity of a Yellow-Knife camp in which they had been sojourning, where we had captured the fifteen tarns.
The riders below, however, perhaps because of their numbers, or perhaps their leadership, or their confidence in their medicine, had not done so.
Discomfited they might have been. Frightened they might have been. But they had not withdrawn.
"Down, Ubar of the Skies!" I cried.
Perhaps they had feared less than might have Yellow Knives, Fleer or Kaiila, because they were more familiar with tarns than such tribes. Perhaps they feared less because it was daylight. Perhaps they had feared less because the tarn bore reins, a girth rope, a rider, and had approached them from Council Rock.
Their apprehensions must be restored.
I had formed a plan.
Down we plummeted into the midst of the Kinyanpi. Screaming, men scattered on their tarns. We struck none. I had slung my weapons about me. My shield was at my hip.
The tarn hung, hovering, in the air, as the Kinyanpi regrouped.
I pointed to three of them, one after the other, and then, my arms folded, spoke a command to Ubar of the Skies. "One-strap." The bird began to ascend.
I had seen the surprise of the Kinyanpi when I had released the reins. Their eyes had widened when they had seen my arms were folded. Let it dawn on them that the tarn had obeyed my mere word. I did not look back, for fear of spoiling the effect. I hoped, of course, that the three men would be following me.
As soon as I had entered the clouds I whipped out my small bow and put an arrow to the string, and held two in the bow hand, and, reseizing the reins, brought the tarn about, and yet it seemed it needed no guidance. Dark and silent in the fog it veered about. One by one the Kinyanpi, consecutively, as I had hoped, entered the cloud. This was the tunnel of ambush, as it is called. A trained tarnsman is taught to avoid it. Three tarns, riderless, returned to the formation below.
I replaced the bow. Again, allowing a suitable interval, I plummeted the tarn downward, again into the midst of the Kinyanpi.
Interestingly, as nearly as I could determine, no fighting had taken place in my absence.
My tarn braked in the air, spreading and beating its wings. Again my arms were folded. I pointed dramatically at a fellow. He shook his head wildly and pulled his tarn away. I pointed at another fellow. He, too, declined my invitation. One of the Kinyanpi struck his painted chest, crying out. I pointed to him. Then I pointed to two others. They looked at one another, uneasily. Then, regally, I looked away. "One-strap," I said to Ubar of the Skies.
We ascended again to the clouds.
I listened carefully, every sense alert. The fellow who had struck himself on the chest was eager. I barely had time to enter the cloud, with apparent leisure, than I had turned and he was upon me. I had no time to draw the bow. The lance thrust at me and I clutched at it, and then caught it. Tarn to tarn we grappled for the lance. I let him think he was wrenching it away from me. This freed my right hand for the knife. He took it, to the hilt, in his left side, under the ribs. I cut the girth rope on his tarn and drew him across to the back of my own tarn. I killed him there. I then took the tarn to a place in the clouds which I judged to be above the Kinyanpi formation. There I released the body. It would fall through the formation.
"Hunt," I said to Ubar of the Skies. We moved quietly, a stroke at a time, through the sunlit vapor of the cloud.
Then, too, within the cloud, I saw the other riders below me. They had kept together. They were wiser than the others. Then I could not see them in the cloud.
"Hunt," I whispered to Ubar of the Skies.
Ubar of the Skies, given his rein, began to circle, every sense in that great body tense and alert. I fitted an arrow to the string of my bow.
Sometimes it seemed almost as though we were motionless, floating, or arrested in time and space, and that it was the moist, nebulous substance of the cloud that flowed past us, almost as though we were immersed in a river of fog.
Then I saw shapes before us. Ubar of the Skies was approaching from behind and on the right. Most men are right-handed. It is more difficult, thusly, for them to turn and fire over their right shoulder. Uba
r of the Skies was a trained tarn of war.
The arrow, fired from not more than fifteen feet away, entered the body of the rider on the right below the left shoulder blade and almost at the same instant Ubar of the Skies, screaming, with those hooklike, terrible talons tore the body of the rider on the left from the girth rope. I seized the reins of the tarn whose rider I had struck with the arrow. I lowered my head, avoiding the wing. Then the wing, for a moment, was arrested, caught against that of Ubar of the Skies. I jerked free, from the front, where it protruded, the arrow, drawing it through the body. I did not want visible evidence of how the rider had met his end. The tarn freed its wing and I was almost struck from the back of Ubar of the Skies. The other rider was screaming, locked in talons below me. I returned the bloody arrow to the quiver. As I could I drew the tarn whose reins I held beside us, leaning forward on the back of Ubar of the Skies. Such reins are not made for leading and the stroke of the wings, so close to my bird, was irregular, uneven and frantic. Then I cut the girth rope on the tarn, when we were over the Kinyanpi below, and let the body slide from its back. With little regret I released the tarn. It sped away.
The body would seem to have fallen from the sky, from the clouds, mysteriously, inexplicably, like a meteor amongst them, penetrating their formation, thence descending to its encounter with the grasslands below.
I hovered, high in the clouds, over where the Kinyanpi circled below.
I waited a suitable interval.
The man was screaming beneath me.
I recalled a child, slain and mutilated in a summer camp. "Teach me to kill," had said Cuwignaka.
"Release," I said to Ubar of the Skies.
The man, gesticulating, flailing, screaming, the sound rapidly fading, the body seeming to grow smaller and smaller, sank away from me.
I waited another suitable interval and then I, again, took Ubar of the Skies downward. Again I hovered among terrified Kinyanpi, my arms folded. Let them consider what medicine such a foe might possess.
I then, regally, imperiously, pointed to the chieftain of the Kinyanpi, he most prominent among them, he next to the bearer of the feathered staff, the battle staff.
He shook his head, wildly. I then, with a sweeping gesture, pointed to the east, that direction from which they had come. Wildly he turned his tarn and, crying out, followed by his men, fled.
"Quickly!" I cried to Cuwignaka, Canka, Hci and the others. "Back to Council Rock!"
Soldiers had established a hold on the eastern ledges of Council Rock, to which they had been climbing, those ledges opposite those above the trail, up which, slowly, medicine drums beating, medicine men dancing about the beasts, the procession of Yellow Knives, a few minutes ago, had begun its climb. Behind the soldiers who attained the ledge other soldiers, roped together, clambered upward. The eastern face of Council Rock seemed covered with men and ropes.
Then tarns, screaming, talons raking, wings beating, hurtled among the startled soldiers on the ledge, seizing and tearing at them, blasts of wind even from the wings forcing some back over the edge. The defenders leaped forward. We landed our tarns among a litter of bodies, red and white, on the ledge.
I looked down, at the ropes of men, not yet to the top. "Let those with tarns, who lost women and children at the summer camp, attend to these," I said.
In a moment tarns had swept again from the ledge and then, seizing ropes and men in talons, at the very rock face itself, dragged dangling, screaming men from the sheer surface; ropes and men, tangled, were pulled away from the surface; ropes and men, torn loose from hand and footholds, unsupported, sped twisting and turning to the rocks below.
I raced across the top of Council Rock, men behind me. The Yellow Knives, on the western side of Council Rock, prevented by the mountain from knowing what had occurred in the air to the east, and on the eastern faces of the rock, singing their medicine, their hearing throbbing with the beat of drums, had not desisted in their procession to the summit; they had continued to ascend the trail.
"You are done!" cried Iwoso. "You are finished!" Roped to the post as she was, she, too, was ignorant of the developments to the east.
Yellow Knives were not twenty-five feet below me, on the trail. In their lead surrounded by medicine men, beating on drums and dancing, were Sardak and Kog, and five others of the Kurii. I also saw, prominent among the Yellow Knives, Alfred, with soldiers, and a Yellow Knife I recognized as the third of the war chiefs who had been at the summer camp. He had not taken part, as far as I knew, in the earlier actions. It was his intention, however, I gathered, to participate in the anticipated resolution of the siege, in his forces' climactic victory.
Before resistance had crumbled at the appearance of the Kurii.
Even now the barricade at the summit was deserted.
Some fifty to seventy feet from the barricade the procession stopped.
The drums stopped. The medicine men stopped dancing. They drew back.
Kog and Sardak came forward, followed by the others.
The barricade was empty.
The trail was silent.
Then the barricade was no longer empty. Atop it, on the logs and stakes, the wind moving in its fur, stood a gigantic Kur.
Yellow Knives crowded back against one another, uneasily. They looked to Kog and Sardak, but these beasts, standing as though stunned, or electrified, on the stony trail, were oblivious of them.
The Kur on the barricade distended its nostrils, drinking scent.
Sardak stepped forward. He reared upright, increasing his scanning range. He moved his tentaclelike fingers on his chest, which gesture, I think, is a displacement activity. Some claim it has the function of cleaning the claws.
The ears of the beast on the barricade, one half torn away, flattened themselves against the side of the head.
Sardak's ears, too, lay back.
I saw that the claws of the rear appendages, or feet, of the monster on the barricade, had emerged. So, too, I noted, had those of Sardak.
The beasts did not speak to one another. Words were not necessary.
Swiftly, moving with incredible grace and lightness for its bulk, the beast on the barricade descended to the trail.
Sardak, the two rings of reddish alloy on his left wrist, advanced to meet it.
They stopped, some ten feet from one another, alone, facing one another on the trail, between the barricade and the other beasts and Yellow Knives.
They then began, keeping very low, on all fours, to circle one another.
Occasionally one would reach out, or snarl, or make a sudden movement, but not charging, to see the response of the other. Fangs were bared.
The hair on the back of my neck rose. Was it like this, I wondered, in the ancient days of the Kurii, long before the steel worlds, long before, even, the development of their technology. Is it like this, I wondered, even today, in the steel ships, in the "killings."
Then the two beasts, as though they had satisfied themselves, squatted down, their hind legs under them, facing one another. To a superficial observer, they might have seemed somnolent. But I could sense the ripple of muscle, the tingle of nerve, beneath the fur in those mighty bodies. They were somnolent as a gun is somnolent, one with a finger tensed, poised, upon its trigger.
Suddenly, as one, both beasts leapt at one another, and seemed, grappling, biting and tearing, claws raking, almost as if they were a single, blurred animal cutting and tearing at its own body. There was a scratching of claws on the stony trail. They rolled and tore at one another and blood, from drenched fur, marked the stone, leaving the pattern of the fur.
They then backed away from one another again, and again began to circle.
It had been no more than a passage at arms.
Again they sprang towards one another and again, sometimes, their movements were so rapid, turning and grappling, biting and tearing, that I could not even follow them. The energy and speed of such beasts is awesome.
Then they had again separated.
The medicine men of the Yellow Knives looked at one another, frightened. There was blood on the rock. Such things, then, could bleed.
Zarendargar, Half-Ear, my friend, had then, I suspected, made his determinations. I do not think Sardak understood this, at the time.
I fitted an arrow to the string of my bow.
Once more the beasts charged and met with fierce impact. Then Zarendargar was behind Sardak. Sardak flung his head back, to close the space between the skull and the vertebrae, his eyes like wild moons, but it was too late. The massive jaws of Zarendargar, inch by inch, Sardak held in his arms, forced the head forward. Then with a sound of tearing muscle and skin, and crushed bone, Zarendargar's jaws closed. Men watched, horrified, as Zarendargar, holding it by the neck, it half bitten through, in his jaws, shook the body, fiercely. He then flung it from him and leaped up and down, scratching at his chest. He flung his head up to the sun and howled his victory. For a moment or two the body on the rock still bled, the movements of the heart marked in the gouts of fluid that surged over the fur. The head lay askew, to one side, held by vessels and skin. Zarendargar screamed and leaped on the stone, and, scratching, climbed a bit up the rock face from the trail, and then fell back, and leaped again. The sun and sky were again saluted by the victory cry of the Kur. There was blood and fur at his mouth. I could see the double row of fangs, streaked with red, the long, dark tongue emergent like a serpent from the spittle and blood, the foam, of the kill. Kurii, I reminded myself, are not men.
Yellow Knives shrank back.
Zarendargar then lifted the body of Sardak in his hands and held it over his head. The arm of Sardak, with its two rings of reddish alloy, hung limp. The head hung a foot from the body. Then Zarendargar flung the body from the trail, down, down, onto the rocks below.
I loosened the arrow from my bow into the heart of Kog. He stiffened, the feathers almost lost in the fur, and then fell.
Kaiila warriors had now appeared on the ledges beside me, and were visible now, armed, at the barricade.
The Yellow Knives began to back downward. The war chief cried out to them, presumably ordering them to remain in place. A medicine man turned and fled. Kurii looked about, at one another. None seemed eager to advance on Zarendargar.
Blood Brothers of Gor Page 54
