Gribardsun understood without being told that this was to be trial by combat. He wondered, briefly, if this custom had actually arisen in this tribe and spread out from there. But he knew that it was doubtful that one small group would have originated the custom. In any event, no one would ever know, since study of this period was so restricted.
He hopped up and down and flexed his legs and arms and worked his fingers to restore his circulation. His shivering, however, had stopped.
The big man, smiling confidently, walked up to Gribardsun with his arms out and his hands open.
Silverstein, shivering in one corner of the arena, guarded by the juvenile expected Gribardsun to win. Though the tribesman was bigger, Gribardsun knew all the philosophies and techniques of twenty-first century schools of hand-to-hand fighting. He should be able to chop his opponent down with karate or judo in short order.
But the Englishman at first made no attempt to use anything but brute strength. He grabbed the tribesman's hands in his and waited. The big man, grinning, pushed against his smaller opponent. Gribardsun dug his naked heels into the snow and pushed back. The two slipped back and forth and then, suddenly, Gribardsun twisted the other man's hands, and the man dropped sideways onto the snow. The man struck heavily. The spectators grunted, or said something like'Uhunga!'
His grin lost, the man got to his feet. Gribardsun seized his hands again and yanked downward and inward, and when the man was near enough, brought up his knee and drove it against the chin beneath the thick beard.
This time the man had great difficulty getting to his feet.
Gribardsun helped him up, grabbed him by the back of the neck and his thigh and lifted him above his head. He turned around and around, slowly, smiling at the awed tribespeople, and then heaved the man, who must have weighed at least 280 pounds, over their heads and against the edge of the arena. The man struck it side-on, slid down, and lay at its bottom motionless.
The witch doctor advanced from the crowd, shaking his baton and muttering something rhythmic. He brought the end of the baton under Gribardsun's nose, held it there, and then moved it from side to side.
Gribardsun suddenly grabbed the baton, tore it from the doctor's grasp, and sent it spinning far out into the snow.
The doctor turned gray under the paint on his face and chest.
The next step was up to the tribesmen. Silverstein hoped they would not try something simple and logical, such as launching every spear they had against the two prisoners.
Nobody moved. Everybody stared at Gribardsun. He smiled and walked toward the exit of the arena.
They gave way before him, and he took Silverstein's hand and led him back to the chief's lodge. There they sat down by the fire. Gribardsun added wood to it despite a muttered protest from the old woman who had not witnessed the combat outside.
The witch doctor and the chief entered. Gribardsun looked at the fire and ignored them. The doctor danced around the fire, passing behind Gribardsun and shaking his baton, which he had rescued, over the Englishman's head. He went around the fire widdershins twelve times and stopped on the other side of the fire just opposite Gribardsun. He raised the baton to his eye and looked through the hole in its end at Gribardsun.
Gribardsun raised his eyes and stared back at the doctor, then made an O with his thumb and first finger and stared at the doctor through that.
The witch doctor became pale.
'When among the Romans, out-Roman them,' Gribardsun said to Silverstein.
He stood up and walked around the fire and seized the doctor by the nose and twisted it.
The doctor yelped with pain and flung his baton across the tent.
Gribardsun released the nose and went to the side of the tent and picked up the baton. It was of carved bone, and the hole in its end was large enough so that the shaft of a spear could be thrust through it. Originally, in the nineteenth century, the scientists had thought that the batons de commandement were for use in magical rites only. Then they had decided, in the twentieth century, that the batons were used to straighten out shafts. The truth, as the expedition had discovered, validated both theories. Some batons were used as physical tools and some as magical tools. In a sense, the magical batons were also shaft straighteners, since they were used by the witch doctors to straighten - or to bend - the invisible shafts that bound the universe together. The witch doctors kept the philosophy of the use of batons as a guild secret, transmitting the knowledge only to their successors. Gribardsun had tried to get Glamug to tell him the arcana of his trade, but Glamug had refused. However, by using a highly sensitive directional microphone, Gribardsun had eavesdropped on the school Glamug conducted for his two sons. He knew that the bone or wood or ivory baton was considered to be powerful. But a doctor who was powerful enough to use his own fingers to form the magical shaft-straightening hole was dreaded. There were very few. In fact, Glamug had never actually seen one. But the great doctor of tribal history - Simaumg - had used only his own fingers.
Gribardsun assumed that this tribe had its equivalent of Simaumg, and that its doctor would be aware of the dangerousness of such a man. He was right. The witch doctor gave way completely. He lowered his baton and stared wide-eyed at Gribardsun. Then he reversed the baton and walked around the fire and handed it to him. The Englishman passed his finger through the hole in it several times and handed it back to the doctor.
Silverstein had watched all this bewildered. Gribardsun explained and then told him to put on his clothes. He doubted that anyone would interfere.
The chief and the witch doctor conferred in low tones for a while on the other side of the fire. Gribardsun got tired of waiting for them to come to a decision. He got up and put on his own clothes and resumed his place by the fire. Silverstein took out his pocket transceiver and soon got into contact with Rachel. He described as best he could their situation and location.
'We were their prisoners, and I suppose we still are,' Drummond said. 'But, somehow, John has gotten the upper hand. I don't know how long he can keep it, though.'
Silverstein confined himself to reporting the situation, though Rachel tried to get him to talk about his running away. Gribardsun gestured, and Silverstein brought the transceiver to him.
'Don't come after us,' he said to Rachel. 'You might upset the rather delicate balance of the situation. We'll keep in touch. I'll report in an hour.'
'And if you don't?' Rachel asked.
'Then you can come after us. But if this tribe loses any more men, it's going to perish.'
That evening the chief, the doctor, the big man (subdued and somewhat banged up), and a white-haired old man ate with the two prisoners in the tent. They tried to carry on a conversation with sign language. The chief managed to get across the idea that they were not prisoners but that the tribe could use the help of the two. By then the firearms had been returned to Gribardsun, who used signs to indicate that he would use his rifle to get meat for them.
Gribardsun also tried to find out from them what had happened to cause them to attack Silverstein, but he failed. Silverstein stuck to his story that they had jumped him, and he had been forced to shoot them. Gribardsun did not say anything about his narrow escape from one of Drummond's bullets. But he did not return the revolver to Drummond, nor did Drummond protest when Gribardsun dismantled the pistol and put the parts in his pack.
He did object when the Englishman said they would spend the night in the tent and perhaps stay for several days.
They'll murder us in our beds!' he said. 'They must be just waiting to catch us off guard. My God, we killed almost half their men!'
'But through what is, to them, magical means,' Gribardsun said. 'So they expect us to reimburse them somehow. We are under obligation to them. At least, that is the feeling I get. And, in a way, we are obligated.'
'But we can't support everyone we run across!' Silverstein protested. 'You've already got Dubhab's family on your hands. In fact, the whole tribe, since they've come to depend more
and more on you. Would you add another tribe to your entourage?'
'We are intruders,' Gribardsun said. 'Our presence is unnatural, if anything that exists in nature can be said to be unnatural. We are here to observe and study. But our very intrusion upsets the natural order of things, so that we are not observing things as they would be if we were not here. We constitute an example of Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty, but in a social sense. We can't but affect what we would like to see in its natural state. So our observations are necessarily distorted or qualified.'
'I know that!' Silverstein said impatiently.
'Yes, but the point is that if we come to these people and bring catastrophe and ruin, then we must do something to help them. If we could be the ideal observers, invisible, unnoticed, then we would have an obligation not to interfere in the slightest. We could gather valid scientific data about them, and if they flourished or perished, were well or ill, tortured or the torturers, we would be the ideal observers, the unseen camera. But we can't be. To make an intimate study, we have to become intimate with them. And that, to me, involves a certain amount of obligation.'
'I don't see why we should be obligated to people who tried to kill us without reason.'
'I don't know that they had no reason,' Gribardsun said. He turned his large gray eyes on Silverstein, who flushed and chewed savagely on the piece of bison meat he had just put in his mouth.
'I feel I owe some obligations,' Gribardsun said. 'But I'm not neurotic about it. There are limits to what I owe.'
'Are you talking about them or about me?'
'Both.'
A little while later he stretched out on a pile of bison hides and apparently went to sleep almost at once. He did not cover himself with furs, as the natives did, since his thermicron suit kept him warm enough. In fact, he had to open some vents in it against getting too warm. The many bodies in the tent built up the temperature.
Silverstein opened his own suit at many places and took refuge beneath three wolf-skin blankets. But he had trouble getting to sleep. The stench of smoke and unwashed bodies and rotting teeth and chamber pots and the loud snoring of the chief and his old mother and a bite now and then from a louse kept him awake for hours. He had no sooner fallen asleep, or so it seemed to him, than a noise awakened him. He sat up and saw Gribardsun pushing the teenager blonde from him. Evidently she had just come over to him. But Gribardsun was having none of her.
In the morning, Drummond commented on the incident. Gribardsun said, 'I have no moral objection to temporary matings, and I may even have offended her deeply. She probably Wanted to have a child by me because I am a powerful magician and warrior, according to her lights. But I would feel an additional obligation if she had a child by me. I'm not ready for any such thing - yet.'
'You mean you may be ready some day?' Drummond queried. 'How could that be?'
'You'll know if it happens.'
They did not talk much during the rest of the day except on matters of business. Silverstein filmed the day's hunting, which consisted of finding a herd of bison penned inside deep walls of snow. Gribardsun shot one bull to remind the tribesmen of the power of his rifle. Then he used spears to kill several more bulls. After that, he called a halt to the slaughter. By signs he told them they shouldn't waste the meat by killing the whole herd. They wouldn't be able to haul all the meat home today, and if they left carcasses behind, the wolves would get them. The bison were trapped in the 'yard' and most of them would probably starve as soon as they had dug down through the snow and eaten all the grass under it. This was a common event; the heavy snows often trapped the herbivores.
The next day, Silverstein asked for, and got permission, to return to home camp. He hesitated for a few seconds before saying, 'I don't like to go unarmed.'
Gribardsun took the revolver and a box of ammunition from his pack. 'Use them with good sense,' he said.
Drummond flushed and said, 'Somehow, I have to clear myself. But I seem to get in deeper all the time. Yet I swear I'm innocent!'
'You haven't been proved guilty yet,' Gribardsun said. 'So you are presumed innocent until then. But that doesn't mean you're not on trial. The verdict depends on what you do in the future.'
'This is the damnedest situation!' Drummond said, striking his thigh with his fist. 'Whoever would have thought, when we got into the machine to go to 12,000 B.C., that I would be suspected of trying to murder you? Or that Rachel and I would be estranged, perhaps beyond any chance of reconciliation? This is supposed to be a scientific expedition, but if things continue as they have, we're going to fail! We'll return - if we return - with relatively little to show. And that would be a disaster! If this expedition doesn't pay off, there may never be another. Time travel costs too much!'
'Then I suggest that you curb your emotions and work harder,' Gribardsun said. 'Now, I prescribe a tranquilizer for you, but not while you're on the way home. You'll need to be as alert as possible.
Drummond agreed to take the pill when he got back to home camp. He also promised to radio the camp every five minutes so his progress could be checked. And he set out across the deep snow.
Silverstein did not get to the Wota'shaimg camp until late that afternoon. Gribardsun received from von Billmann the report that Silverstein had been sighted. Ten minutes later, von Billmann, very excited, called in. Silverstein had pulled his revolver as he walked up to Rachel and had shot at her. She had dropped to the ground, and so the bullet missed her. Drummond fired three times as she rolled away but missed each time. By then von Billmann had loosed six rounds from his rifle. One bullet struck Drummond in the left shoulder, spun him around and tore off much of the flesh and part of the bone of the shoulder.
Von Billmann had had a concentrated course in first aid and preventive medicine since he was to take over as doctor if anything happened to Gribardsun. He had slapped pseudo-protein over the wound and then given Drummond massive doses of P-blood from the stores brought from the vessel. Every person in the tribe had been blood-typed, and Gribardsun had convinced them that they could be donors and nobody would establish an evil control over them through their blood. (95 % of the tribe was A with 40% Rh negative.)
By the time Gribardsun arrived, late that evening, Drummond seemed to be out of physical danger. But it was evident next morning that he was suffering from more than physical shock. He did not recognize anybody; he seemed to have gone back to the age of twelve. He was a youth on the third level of Budapest, and his mother was dying. He spoke much in Mandarin Chinese, which his mother had taught him. She was half Chinese and had been born in Lin Shiang and lived there thirteen years before her family went to Budapest in one of those massive interchanges of population which took place during the early part of the twenty-first century and still occurred to a lesser extent.
'Here's another obligation for you,' Rachel said as she led him into the conical hut.
All Gribardsun could do at that time was to examine him and commend Robert von Billmann for his medical ability.
Since Drummond could not be moved yet, Gribardsun returned in two days to the other tribe, the Shluwg, as they called themselves. He supervised the care of Drummond through the transceiver at various times of the day. The rest of the time, he studied the Shluwg language and also worked out a means of communicating by signs. He succeeded in putting across his intentions and then, leaving them to think things over, he went back to the Wota'shaimg camp. There he performed several operations on Drummond; he replaced the destroyed bone with plastic so that the shoulder would be almost as good as new. When they returned to their time, the plastic could be replaced with bone.
Drummond was sitting up and walking by then. But he was still withdrawn.
The day came when the Shluwg tribe marched into the area next to the Wota'shaimg camp. The Bear People were prepared for this and so, though they were not friendly, they were not hostile either. They did not approve of Gribardsun's idea of amalgamation of the two groups. But they would do as he suggested
and try to get along with the strangers.
To do this it was necessary to set up channels for communication and certain rules of behavior. Several people from each tribe were set to the task of learning the language of the other. Gribardsun led hunters from both tribes on a great three-day hunt which brought in an immense amount of meat. He distributed the meat equally and then, after it was prepared, organized a three-day feast. There were only a few fights, - which he managed to cut short by threatening to punish both sides severely, regardless of where the fault lay.
Seven
One fine sunny day, the two tribes set off for the trek southward. In three weeks, they had reached Gibraltar. The great rock was larger than in the twenty-first century. Gribardsun halted the tribes long enough to establish contact with several related tribes which lived on or about the rock. Specimens of their language and body tissues were taken along with photographs. Meat was exchanged for their tools and weapons and their necklaces of sea shells.
Time's Last Gift - txt Page 14
