The Sky People

by S. M. Stirling

  "We've got some work to do." He looked a question at Teesa, and she nodded. He raised his voice to address the tribesmen:

  "Warriors of the Cloud Mountain People! You do not go to fight."

  A puzzled buzz came from them. He continued, "You go to hunt beasts. Beasts that walk like men, but are they not beasts?"

  "Beasts! Beasts!" the crowd screamed, drumming on their shields once more.

  "Then we should not fight them as men do, honorably, face-to-face, but instead stalk them, like—"

  "Beasts! Beasts! Death to the beastmen!"

  Teesa stepped forward to take up the harangue. Blair raised an eyebrow at him, and Marc shrugged. Cynthia had the last word:

  "Hey, it's a damn good thing you didn't stay home on Earth and go into politics!"

  "The bewitched one is not with them," the scout said, pointing down the long open slope towards the forested river.

  Teesa frowned and looked at Marc; he made a gesture—later. The man went on as Marc knelt and sketched in the dirt. "They come all together, up the valley here. The ones with the thunder-sticks come second, spread out, so, where the trees don't cramp them. The rest come first with club and spear."

  "How many?" Teesa asked.

  The man held out his hands and clenched and unclenched them twelve times, then one hand once: a hundred and twenty-five.

  "Twice our numbers," she said. "And how many with the thunder-sticks?"

  This time his fingers flexed once, and then he held out a hand with the thumb tucked away; fourteen.

  "And we have four," she said. "Though thanks to our friends, we understand them better."

  And "we" know how to clean them now, too, Marc thought, looking up for an instant into the hazy brightness of a Venusian morning. It's amazing how fast crud builds up in this climate; the extra oxygen makes things rust faster.

  "Here's how we'll do it," he said confidently.

  Mais, I would come up with a scheme that leaves me in the front without a gun, Marc thought sourly on the open grassy slope, feeling even more naked than he really was in the tribal breechclout. Not a chateau general, me.

  He could smell his own sweat, rank and musky. Well, no wonder. It's hot, and I'm terrified, he thought. For some reason that made him chuckle a bit… silently.

  A fluting cry came from downhill, an oddly musical hooting like nothing that had ever come from a human throat. From a tree ten paces over a Cloud Mountain warrior flashed him a grin. Marc responded in kind and reached over his shoulder for an arrow.

  Carefully, he reminded himself as he set it on the string of the bow: The twenty-four in the quiver were all dipped in the black-spider venom. Wouldn't want to nick your hand, eh? Glad they're good with leather here. He had a stout antelope-hide glove on his left hand, where the arrowhead would rest close.

  The Neanderthals seemed to have a fair grasp of what their new weapons could do. From the reports, they weren't even wasting ammunition by firing away on full-auto… though he suspected that Binkis, or whatever was running Binkis, simply hadn't shown them how to push the selector to that notch. They did realize that the weapons had about three times the effective range of a Cloud Mountain blowgun or four times that of a thrown spear, and that they'd go through a shield handily.

  And they could shoot surprisingly well, considering how long they'd had the weapons.

  So…

  He was carrying his pistol, which wouldn't be much use unless things got uncomfortably close and personal, and his binoculars. Those he could use; he unlimbered them and scanned downslope. A face rose over a bush of greenish-yellow leaves…

  Great shelf of bone above the eyes, huge, coarse blob of a nose, protruding mouth, chinless behind a sparse brush of reddish-brown beard… easy enough to see why the Cloud Mountain folk called them beastmen. The face was painted, streaks of black soot and red ochre, for some esoteric purpose or perhaps just as camouflage. A long bone dagger was thrust through hair drawn up in a topknot on the long head, and a smaller sliver pierced the septum of his nose. He carried a long oval shield in one hand, and a long club of some glossy dark hardwood with an end shaped into the likeness of a clenched fist.

  His eyes scanned about; then he hooted again. At that instant the brushy tree line was empty of anything but birds and insects; then a wave of beastmen with spear and knobkerrie came out into the open, grassy hillside. There were about forty of them—the number of the whole Cloud Mountain force, until the other settlements sent their fighters. At least Teesa was out of it for now…

  Uh-oh, he thought, at the rush of protective tenderness, blinking a little in surprise. That wasn't just a roll in the hay—though it was that, literally.

  "Now!" he shouted, stepped out from around the tree, and drew to the ear. A score of Cloud Mountain warriors did the same. Snap, and the string of his bow slapped against his bracer.

  Twenty arrows slashed out over the hundred yards or so between them and the beastmen. His own hit, just, slicing across the first Neanderthal's arm. The beastman took three steps forward and then stopped, going rigid; then he screamed, with froth spraying from his lips, and sank down in convulsions that shook the tall grass over his body for a few seconds. Two more arrows went home, one right in a Neanderthal's chest, the other through a leg—both deadly hits thanks to the poisoned arrows. They didn't have enough of the poison for all the arrows they'd made, not nearly enough, so they'd been told to use them for the first volley.

  Two hits was good practice at this range and with men who'd only been training for a month. You could become a fair or at least middling rifle shot in a month, but even practicing ten hours a day wouldn't make you more than a novice with a bow; that took thousands of hours. The Cloud Mountain men screamed their joy and shot again and again, as fast as they could draw.

  Most of the enemy raised their shields and rushed forward, bellowing, as they would have against a shower of blowgun darts. That did them less good than they'd thought it would. For one thing, they had a wider killing ground to cover than they would have with blowguns.

  For another, a string under a hundred pounds of tension could punch a couple of ounces of arrow a lot faster than your lungs could push a dart. Arrows hit hard, and harder still as the enemy got closer. Marc drew and shot, drew and shot, distantly aware that he was glad of the activity distracting him from the fact that scores of gorilla-strong humanoids were rushing at him with intent to kill him and eat his flesh, and not necessarily in that order. The noises they made were louder than any a human could have made, coming from those barrel chests, but they covered a smaller and deeper range of sounds. It was rather like being charged by a line of carnivorous foghorns.

  Crack. One of his arrows punched right through a shield. The beastman held it by a single grip in the back, but it must have gouged through far enough to scratch his sweat-slick skin, because he stumbled and went to his knees, then began to shriek like a teakettle and jerk and twist as the nerve toxin did its work.

  Thud, and another sank through a massive hairy torso; that one would have been fatal even if it weren't poisoned, but inside the body cavity, the venom killed between one stride and the next, and the creature flopped down as boneless as a dead chicken. Four or five other beastmen were down, dead or badly wounded.

  "Pull back!" Marc shouted, and did just that, running up the open slope behind.

  The beastmen had been hesitating a little. Now they bellowed more loudly still and rushed forward. A few threw their knob-headed clubs at fleeing humans; one struck at the base of a skull with the thock a maul would make on hard oak. The man flopped down as limp as the beastman who'd taken Marc's arrow through the chest.

  "Now!" Marc shouted, more loudly this time, as his foot came level with a short piece of peeled willow wand. "Down!"

  As he threw himself flat he really hoped everyone remembered what to do.

  Ten feet ahead and several feet above him on the slope four Cloud Mountain fighters came erect, holding the AK-47s they'd taken from the
Wergu. The lids of turf and grass on wicker that had covered the holes that concealed them flipped back like the covering of a pot, and each had a solid place to rest their elbows as they took aim, firing with the steady shoot-breathe-pick-target-aim-breathe-out-and-shoot rhythm the Terrans had taught them.

  "Although I wish we'd had more ammunition for practice," Marc said to the roots of the grass under his nose. "At least they don't have to adjust the sights—"

  Crack. Crack. Crack-crack-crack—

  The bullets went through the air just over his head; there was an overwhelming sweet scent of crushed grass in his nostrils, but a thin, bitter-acrid scent of nitro powder under that. He began crawling—leopard-crawling, with his belly kept firmly pressed to the earth and his chin touching it as well. He could see Teesa firing as he'd taught her, carefully, picking a target and concentrating, squeezing the trigger gently as she exhaled. The range was only twenty yards, and the targets were standing up; she and the three men had to be hitting. Once Marc was past the line of gunmen and out of the line of fire he could rise again and look.

  The Cloud Mountain fighters had thrown themselves flat when he yelled, crawled as he had, and they were all out of the way now. Most of them were on their feet again and bending their bows; that reminded him to do likewise. Just then the remnants of the Wergu turned and ran; his arrow sank six inches into the hairy buttock of a beastman, and the hominid ran a dozen paces before the poison knocked him down.

  About twenty of the beastmen were down altogether, half of the forty or so who'd come out of the woods. That was shocking casualties to a tribe of primitives; Stone Age warfare could kill plenty of people, but it usually did so one or two at a time rather than all at once.

  "Cease fire!" Marc shouted, going down on one knee. "Now let's see if they do what we want them to," he added more quietly to Teesa.

  She grinned at him as she pulled the magazine out of the assault rifle, took a handful of loose rounds from a pouch, thumbed six into the magazine, and reinserted it with a practiced twist and smack and click sound.

  The archers filled their quivers from adolescents who dashed forward with reloads. Zore brought Marc's, giving him a thumbs-up signal; she'd probably picked that up from Blair.

  "Speaking of which…"

  The Wergu were running, but they slowed down as they approached the forest, throwing themselves down and helping their wounded, which mostly seemed to consist of pressing handfuls of grass to the wounds, pulling out arrows, and—he checked through his binoculars—actually licking the wounds, much the way a dog would.

  "Zeerahb," he heard Teesa mutter.

  That made him smile a bit. The word meant disgusting… in Cajun-French dialect. The version of English she'd picked up from him was definitely what he'd learned on Grande Isle from his mawmaw, rather than the school version he used most of the time.

  "Here come the gunmen!" he called out as the brush stirred behind the defeated Wergu. "Remember the plan!"

  "Marc," Teesa said.

  He glanced over at her; her face was sober, and her eyes steady. "Why is the possessed one not here? Why does the Diadem of the Eye no longer answer to my will?"

  Marc licked his lips. "I can't be sure—"

  "Tell me! I can see from your eyes that you know!"

  "I don't know. But I think that… there is a thing in your Cave

  of the Mysteries that works through the Diadem of the Eye. It is that which has taken Binkis… the possessed one. It uses him for some purpose… I don't know what. That's how he can do impossible things. He isn't here because without the Diadem of the Eye, it can't control the man so far away from the Cave of the Mysteries. And it's…"—he dropped into English for two words—"… shut down the Diadem of the Eye."

  Teesa's face crumpled. "The Mystery has turned against its people?" she said, her voice trembling on the verge of tears. "We who have served it for so many generations?"

  "I don't think it has. It just works with whatever's closest…" He thought quickly as her face showed stricken grief. "If we can take the Cave of the Mysteries back, I'm sure"—or at least pretty sure—"the Diadem of the Eye will work the way it did before."

  She took a deep breath and nodded. "I will trust your word, my beloved," she said.

  Marc turned back towards the slope and the forest below. He didn't want to see her wince, and he didn't want to look at her face right then, either.

  Instead he looked as the Neanderthals with Russian assault rifles—and isn't that a sight—came out of the brush. They looked as if they knew what to do, as well; they strung themselves out in a line and began to crawl forward, shooting to pin the four Cloud Mountain guns down. Scores more with shield and club and fire-hardened spears appeared on either flank, hooting and stamping as they worked themselves up into a frenzy of bloodlust.

  "Weh, someone told them how to do it," Marc muttered as the first shots cracked out. "Pin us down, then send the clubs in to noogie on us."

  He flattened himself to the ground again. Teesa popped back out of her hole and shot; before the brass cartridge had sparkled its way down to the dirt she was hiding again. And as well she did; three or four bullets kicked up little spurts of soil from the ground all around her…

  Marc waited; then he waited a little more. Wergu riflemen ran from tree to tree, rock to rock, or crawled more through the long grass. That wasn't as good concealment as it might have been; the breeze was from the south, but eeling through the grass on your belly made it ripple against the wind. The Cloud Mountain fighters knew all about that, and the pits they were standing in still gave them a good view downslope, as well as protecting most of their bodies. Two of the beastmen with Terran weapons died before the rest were within fifty yards of the foxholes.

  But one of the Cloud Mountain shooters did as well, with a round blue hole between his eyes and the back blown out of his head. Teesa had a long scratch along one arm from a fragment spalled off a rock by a bullet; three inches to the right and it would have gone through her chest. Marc tried not to think of that, and kept asking himself whether it was worth the risk to stand and use his bow.

  Probably not, he thought, as a tribesman not far away stood and loosed a shaft, and then pitched over backward as a Wergu shot him through the stomach. The noises he made grew less human, and then he started to scream.

  Marc checked his watch—it went rather oddly with the Cloud Mountain breechclout and sandals, but there you were. It was set to Venusian hours, fifteen minutes longer than the Terran variety. It was ten o'clock now, only about eighty minutes since the whole thing had started, not even noon yet. The Wergu were getting very close…

  Crack. Something went over his head, barely a foot away and making a malignant peewwwww sound as it went away.

  They're bad shots, but this is getting too close. It's time; it's really time. I'm not letting being nervous about Teesa—or myself—cloud my judgment.

  He pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, tied it to the end of his bow, and waved the long stave in the air without getting up. Marc was lying on his back as he did so, looking upslope. About eight hundred yards away, halfway back up to the crest, was a dark lump of basalt boulder with a V-notch in it. As he watched and waved, a flash of reflected sunlight came from there, either Blair's telescopic sight or Cynthia's binoculars—she was acting as spotter and calling the shots for him.

  Then there was a flash of brighter fire, a muzzle-flash, faded in the bright Venusian sunlight but still discernible, followed a fraction of a second later by a crack deeper and longer and louder than the sharp, spiteful snap of the assault-rifle cartridges, halfway to a

  boom. Teesa gave a gleeful whoop; Marc rolled over and looked downslope, just in time to see one of the beastmen catapult backward, turning as he went. Marc winced slightly. What one of those heavy, high-velocity, soft-nosed big-game bullets did wasn't pretty even when an animal was on the receiving end, and the Wergu were close enough to human to make it plenty gruesome.

  The
heavy, deep crack came again, and a beetle-browed head dissolved in a pink mist. Crack, and another gun-wielding Wergu went down, his right arm torn away. Crack, and this time it was right through the sniper's triangle, the point right above the breastbone. Crack…

  The Wergu didn't run; they'd had just enough exposure to firearms to lose their first fear of them, without knowing much about them. Instead they snarled and hooted and bellowed, and then they began firing at the sangar from which Christopher Blair was savaging them with the single surviving game rifle. Hugging the ground, Marc gave a grin that would have done Tahyo credit. At better than eight hundred yards, the heavy, scope-sighted weapon in expert hands could punch the pips out of a card. With an AK, you weren't much better off than you would be throwing spitballs.

  Teesa looked at him, her eyes peeking over the edge of the foxhole. Marc waited an instant and then chopped his hand down. She rose and started shooting again; an instant later the two surviving Cloud Mountain warriors did as well. Seconds later, only half a dozen of the Wergu riflemen were still standing; they wavered for an instant and then turned and ran; the waiting horde with clubs did likewise.

  Marc leaped to his feet, drawing his bow. "Come on, you Texians, let them have it!" he shouted. Then, as the last of them fell: "Get the guns! Get the guns!"

  Teesa leaped out of her foxhole and flung herself at him. He returned the embrace…

  "You really want to go through with this?" Blair murmured to him beneath the chanting, speaking behind Cynthia's head for an instant.

  "I think we have to. We're in good with these people, but turning them down… that would be an insult."

  Blair smiled slightly. "It's just that I feel hideously self-conscious, don't you know."

  "Lover, if you think you feel conspicuous!" Cynthia said, staring straight ahead and not turning her head to meet the eyes of either man. "I just hope the folks back home in Harlem never hear about this."

  "You look very fetching," Blair said loyally.

  "I'd never live it down—it feels like bein' a cross between Josephine Baker and the Queen of the Zulus in this getup."