By Tooth and Claw

by S. M. Stirling

  Her muscles still ached a bit, from the strenuous effort. But she knew that by the morning she’d be full of energy and excitement.

  All of them would be, Dancers and tekkutu both. A partnership had been forged here that was like nothing any of them had ever seen before. Meshwe had told her that he was just beginning to comprehend the great changes that would take place in tekku as a result. The future looked to be magnificent, he said.

  If they got there at all. The only way anyone had ever found to reach the future was through the present, and tomorrow that meant sailing one raft against a great fleet.

  True, that one raft would have help. Of a sort. You could hardly call them allies, though.

  Njekwa

  For the first time in her life, the chief priestess of the Old Faith was considering a possibility she’d never once imagined. What would happen if the rule of the nobles were broken?

  More specifically, the rule of their noble, Zilikazi.

  The thought had first come to her on the day the army had started down the slope to the sea and word had begun to spread that the fleeing Kororo had successfully made the crossing over to the island. That was something that no one had really expected. For Liskash—for Mrem too, she thought—the sea was a place full of monsters so immense that no one ever seriously thought of venturing far out onto the waters. Most Liskash were even reluctant to approach the shores and those who engaged in fishing, other than in fresh water streams, were considered not much different from lunatics. Either that, or outright idiots.

  But apparently the Kororo had managed it. Rumors were also spreading that they’d done so by using their peculiar and little-understood “tekku” powers.

  For days, now, the priestess had been pondering those powers. She’d always dismissed them in the past as not much more than superstition. But after watching the Krek’s success in eluding Zilikazi for so long, she was beginning to wonder.

  What if they did have psychic powers that were unknown to the nobility? Might those powers be enough to thwart Zilikazi?

  Or might they even be enough to destroy him?

  It was possible. For the first time ever, she thought it might be possible. The Kororo couldn’t have managed the crossing of the strait unless they could somehow control the sea monsters, could they?

  She went so far as to privately broach the question to Litunga.

  But the shaman was skeptical. “Control them? I don’t think so. If they could control animals the way the nobles can control people, they’d have already been sending monsters to attack us. There are plenty of monsters on land, after all. None of them as big as the sea monsters are said to be, but they’re plenty big enough. Have you ever seen a gantrak up close?”

  Njekwa shook her head.

  “Neither have I,” said Litunga, “and I plan to see that remains true. I once saw what was left of a trapper who’d been killed by a gantrak.” She used her hands to indicate something about the size of a newborn youngling. “The biggest piece of him they found was about this size. One of his shoulders with bits and pieces still attached to it. Most of him was just . . . gone. Eaten, I suppose.”

  Njekwa thought about it for a while. “You might be right,” she said finally. “Probably are, in fact. But just in case . . .”

  She thought for a while longer. “Spread the word quietly to all the priestesses and shamans. Every adherent to the Old Faith should be ready if the time comes.”

  “Be ready to do what?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Her voice hardened. “Whatever I command.”

  Sebetwe

  He’d come here alone on a little coracle every evening, since the first day they arrived on the island, rowing his way with a crude paddle. It took quite some time, with such a clumsy vessel and means of propelling it, before he got far enough out at sea for the depth to be acceptable to the one who came to meet him each evening.

  He—she?—there was no way to know—was the greatest of the Sure Ones. A creature so immense that if you didn’t spot the slowly moving nest of tentacles and if the ammonite had its eyes submerged, you might think you were approaching a small island. Birds and flying reptiles did perch on the Sure Ones’ shells, especially in the evening.

  The enormous creature took no notice of them, any more that it took notice of the small fish and big shrimp that were constantly swimming around it and even settling on its body. Sebetwe had wondered, at first, how the fish and shrimp avoided being eaten like all the other sea life that came within reach of the tentacle mass. Eventually, he decided they were feasting on the Sure One’s parasites, and somehow the ever-moving tentacles knew they were not to be engulfed.

  Such an arrangement suited the Sure Ones. It was the way they dealt with their environs. They were neither predator nor prey. Generally, they ate flesh, but now that he’d gotten more familiar with them Sebetwe knew the Sure Ones ate quite a bit of plant matter as well.

  They could swim through the water. Quite rapidly, in fact, although only for short distances. But for the most part they seemed content to drift with the tides and the currents.

  Unless something caught their attention. The one thing that was familiar about the minds of the Sure Ones—perhaps the only thing—was their curiosity. You couldn’t exactly call it an intense curiosity, because nothing about the great ammonites was intense. But it could be quite unwavering. The Sure Ones were patient in a manner that eclipsed any Liskash or Mrem understanding of the term.

  They were one with their world. They ate from it, they let it eat from them. Such matters were not worthy of their notice. Mostly, they observed.

  He spent some time, as he did every evening, just floating in the coracle and staring at the Sure One. And it stared back at him. His eyes blinked, now and then. The Sure One’s, never.

  On the third evening, he’d given this Sure One a name. Bekezel, he’d decided to call it, after the shaman of legend who waited faithfully for her husband to return from a voyage until she died of old age.

  The name would mean nothing to the Sure One. The need for a name had been Sebetwe’s, not the giant so named.

  Just as the words Sebetwe spoke to Bekezel on each one of those evenings meant nothing to the Sure One either. But they mattered to Sebetwe.

  The sun was almost touching the horizon. It was time to return to the shore.

  “Tomorrow, Bekezel,” he said. “Tomorrow, I will come in the morning. And I will need you then. Please do not disappoint me.”

  Did the tentacles seem to coil with an unusual flourish?

  A silly notion.

  Probably.

  Then again, who knew?

  CHAPTER 16

  Zilikazi

  He’d been puzzled when he saw that the Kororo were only sending one raft into the strait to challenge him. Why had they even bothered? That single raft was smaller than any of the ones in his flotilla—and he had seventeen of them. Even that great number held not more than a third of his army.

  But as his armada neared the oncoming raft, he eventually spotted the huge shells that surrounded it. One, two, three . . . he counted seven of them! For the first time since he’d emerged into his adulthood, he felt a surge of fear.

  Angrily, he thrust it down. There was still only one raft and he was now close enough to see that it held not more than thirty opponents. Most of them he assumed to be Kororo, but there were at least half a dozen Mrem there also.

  Few of them would be warriors, then. That raft would be carrying mostly tekku shamans and the Mrem dancers they seemed to use as auxiliaries. Did they plan to send the tentacled shells to attack his fleet?

  Possibly. It seemed a poor tactic, though. From what little he’d seen of the creatures—ammonites, one of his subordinates called them—they were sluggish and slow-moving. The seagoing equivalent of gigantic snails. He thought it would be easy enough to simply avoid that raft and its escort altogether.

  Yes. He’d let them fester in the middle of the strait with their ammonites while he p
assed around them and landed almost two thousand warriors on the island. His own rafts moved sluggishly themselves, but he had dozens of warriors available to staff each of the great oars that drove them through the sea. He was almost certain he could outmaneuver his enemy.

  He turned and gave the order, which his subordinates began passing through the ranks.

  That took no time at all, on his own raft. But he realized quickly that the orders shouted across the water to nearby rafts would soon become so degraded as to be worthless. There wasn’t much of a wind, but it was enough to make voices blurred and indistinct when they tried to shout against it.

  He’d blundered, he realized. He’d been so impatient to finally settle accounts with the Kororo that he hadn’t thought to develop a system—flags, perhaps—whereby he could transmit orders to his entire fleet once they were at sea.

  No matter. He could guide his own raft where he would. The rest would follow. They would not dare do otherwise, even though he could sense the great fear that was coiled under the surface within all the warriors on those rafts. They were on the very edge of terror. By now, many of them had also seen the ammonites accompanying the Kororo vessel.

  No matter. They were in greater fear of him—and his fury could far exceed that of any pitiful snail, no matter how large.

  Sebetwe

  “Begin the dance,” he commanded.

  Achia Pazik

  It was a strange Dance. A wedding Dance, in its origins—and it still retained that basic structure. But Nurat Merav had modified it beyond recognition.

  To start with, she’d stripped away any trace of its celebratory and ceremonial spirit. That had all been replaced by a great expansion—to the point of gross distortion—of the sexual aspects of the Dance. In essence, a wedding Dance had been transmuted into a mating Dance. And a crude and coarse one, at that.

  On the first day of rehearsal, Achia Pazik and her Dancers had struggled to overcome their own embarrassment. Mrem were by no means prudish, but this Dance . . . !

  Then, Nurat Merav had blended into it elements from various feasting Dances—and always the most coarse elements of each of them. The end result had been a Dance so grotesque that no Mrem would have dreamed of performing it in front of any audience.

  Except one. An audience of enormous sea lizards. Creatures whose lives were dominated by two simple, crude emotions: hunger and lust.

  Meshwe

  The oldest and still greatest of the Kororo tekkutu would lead now. Meshwe would be the first to agree that in many ways he had been surpassed by his once-pupil Sebetwe. But none of them had Sebetwe’s sense for the Sure Ones, and if he couldn’t keep the ammonites steady, they would be doomed even faster than Zilikazi’s fleet.

  So, Meshwe ignored the Sure Ones. He would let Sebetwe deal with them. He found his tekku, found the minds of his companions in the great art who had joined him on the raft, blended their art with that of the Mrem dancers as they had all now learned to do, and sent that collective mind in search of what were probably the world’s purest and certainly greatest carnivores.

  The lizards ate anything as long as it was meat—and they were instantly willing to tear something apart to find out if it contained meat. Their great jaws could shred sharks and crush sea turtles. No one had yet observed them mating, but it wasn’t likely such beasts would be any more delicate and fastidious in that endeavor.

  How many of them dwelt in the strait? No one knew. But they were about to find out.

  Sebetwe

  His initial fear began to fade. He’d worried—they’d all worried—that the Sure Ones would get swept into the tekku maelstrom along with the lizards. But it seemed he’d been correct in his estimate. The huge ammonites simply didn’t have enough of the emotions being whipped into a frenzy to react to the great surge of tekku that Meshwe was casting into the sea.

  The Sure Ones possessed the urge to eat and the urge to reproduce. But they carried out those activities the same way they did everything: constantly, slowly; most of all, surely. The two emotions that seemed completely foreign to them were impatience and anxiety—without which, frenzied activity was simply not possible.

  The most Sebetwe could detect was what seemed to be a heightened . . . interest, for lack of a better term. But most of that interest remained focused where it had been since the Kororo first came to the sea—on the Kororo themselves.

  By now, Sebetwe thought he understood why the Sure Ones behaved the way they did. So little ever changed in their world that they were fascinated by anything new. And since they felt little (if anything) in the way of fear, they did not hesitate to indulge their curiosity.

  For days and days on end. A curiosity which, with experience, Sebetwe had learned how to meld with and nurture. In their own placid and cold-blooded way, the ammonites were entranced by him. That was especially true of the one he called Bekezel, the most enormous of them all.

  So, the Sure Ones might have felt a mild urge to increase their feeding; or mate; or simply drift away in search of food or mates. But those urges were overwhelmed by the much greater urge to continue observing these enchanting newcomers.

  Meshwe

  Not so, with the lizards. They had about as much in the way of calm observational instincts as a waterfall.

  On the other hand, they were curious. But their curiosity had a very tight and narrow focus. Basically, their lives rotated around finding the answer to three questions:

  Is this food?

  Is this a mate?

  Is this an enemy?

  For days, more and more lizards had come swimming into the strait between the mainland and the island. They were drawn there, as much as anything, by the simple fact that so many of their kind were gathering there. As a rule, the only thing that drew large numbers of the lizards into one place was an abundance of food.

  Or possible food.

  But they’d been frustrated for all those days, as well. Yes, there was something new in the water. Which might be food and might be mates. Which were almost certainly enemies also; but for the lizards, almost everything animate was a potential enemy.

  But they’d been kept at bay by the Sure Ones. Not even angry and frustrated sea lizards were foolish enough to threaten the giant ammonites. Those tentacles might normally be slow-moving, but they were immensely strong—and somewhere at their center was a beak that could cut through or crush anything a lizard could.

  * * *

  Meshwe began stirring them up—not that they needed much stirring to begin with. Within a short time, the frenzy began to build. And this time, there was a clear and unimpeded target for that frenzy.

  So much food! So many possible mates, too. Although that was a secondary issue for the lizards. Everything was a secondary issue for the lizards, compared to eating.

  Almost certainly enemies, as well. But although the lizards were wary of the Sure Ones, they weren’t given to worrying much about enemies, other than their own kind. Why should they? A large fully-grown sea lizard was fifty to sixty feet long and weighed somewhere between twenty and thirty tons. Their mouths held four rows of sharp conical teeth which could be half a foot long and could exert a bite force as great as that of a giant shark.

  Enemies, pfah.

  * * *

  They were circling, now. Dozens of them, ranging in size from ten to sixty feet long. The smallest ones, of course, stayed at the fringe. They had to avoid crowding the larger ones, lest a big lizard decide a smaller one was an easier meal than anything else.

  Nearest to the rafts were seven or eight of the very largest lizards. One of them was sixty-two feet long, measuring from the tips of her snout to her tail, and weighed thirty-four tons.

  In whatever manner thoughts moved through such a brain, the lizard decided it was time to take an exploratory bite. What was this great, bloated body floating on the surface?

  She drove in. Her target was the obvious one. The one in front and more separated from its mates than the rest.

 
Njekwa

  No one could have missed or misunderstood the spike of terror that Zilikazi sent screaming through the minds of his subjects. Certainly not a priestess as old and experienced as Njekwa.

  “Start gathering the faithful,” she commanded Litunga and the other shamans and priestesses gathered around her. There were nine of them, all told. “Quickly!”

  All raced off except Litunga.

  “Gather them where?” she asked.

  Njekwa looked around. Zilikazi had taken fewer than two thousand warriors with him, the most that could be crammed onto the rafts. The rest, somewhere between four and five thousand, were ranged along the beach.

  No, not “ranged,” exactly. They were clustered; and, as she watched, the clusters began tightening.

  She knew what was happening. Zilikazi had long since crushed anyone in his army who might challenge his mindpower. But that still left at least a dozen subordinates who had noble ancestry and might have the potential to develop a noble’s mental control.

  All of them had kept whatever such talents they might have carefully concealed, but it was impossible to conceal them entirely. Zilikazi had been satisfied if they were discreet and made no overt show of their power. He couldn’t kill everyone who shared noble lineage. Some day, the nobles might evolve into a completely different species, but that was not true today. The nobles still could and did breed with normal Liskash. The only way Zilikazi could have prevented the emergence of any possible rivals would have been to kill all of his own offspring and disband his harem.

  He’d considered the first course of action, several times, and might someday do it. But there was no chance he’d dismiss his harem. He was still young and vigorous.

  The Liskash officers in the army with noble lineage who possessed at least some of a noble’s power would have naturally drawn subordinates around them over time. Now, they reacted the same way to Zilikazi’s mental shriek of fear.

  The same way sea lizards reacted to the smell of blood in the water.