by Джеффри Лорд
«Here, Riyannah. Take this. It is yours.»
Riyannah stared at it as if he'd slapped her, grabbed for the rifle, and missed. It fell to the ground with a thud. She knelt to pick it up, but her hands were shaking so badly she couldn't grip it. Her eyes shut, squeezing out tears which washed paths through the soot on her face.
«Why?» she said, in a voice so strangled that Blade could barely understand her.
«There are dangerous animals in this forest. I did not think there were any, but now I know I was wrong. You must have a rifle and ammunition, to defend yourself against the animals.»
«You did-I-«, then a wordless choking noise. For a moment Riyannah seemed too stunned and confused even to cry, let alone speak.
«I do not want you to be killed by the animals,» said Blade, smiling. «Why should I? That would make me stupid and cruel, like the soldiers.»
Slowly, as if all her joints were rusty, Riyannah stood up. Her fists were clenched and her eyes were open but staring blindly. Then she stepped forward, tripped over the rifle, and nearly fell into Blade's arms.
He held her gently and kissed her on the forehead and on the eyes until she stopped shaking. At last she straightened up and he let her go. She stepped back and nearly tripped over the rifle.
Blade laughed. «Riyannah, the first thing you must learn about this rifle is not to jump up and down on it.» She laughed in turn, bent down, and picked it up.
«You will teach me how to shoot the animals?» she said. «I know this gun, but only-«She fumbled for the words, then went through a pantomime of firing it from the hip on full automatic. «Is that good for the animals too?»
«No. With the animals, you must fire one shot at a time. But I will teach you that, and other things as well. Then you will be safe from the animals as long as we are in the forest.» This was the first time he'd even hinted they might sooner or later be moving on.
«What if there are more animals than there are shots for the rifles?»
«Then-«He hesitated, then decided to take the risk. «Then I suppose we will have to go somewhere else, where there are no dangerous animals. Do you know such a place?»
Only a trained eye like Blade's could have detected Riyannah's little gasp and the slight stiffening of the slender body. She licked her lips three times, one fist still clenched. For a moment Blade could have sworn she was going to answer, «Yes,» and perhaps say even more.
Then the moment passed. She frowned and slowly shook her head. «I do not think I know such a place. Do you?»
«No.»
«Then we must make this place safe for both of us. Is that not true, Blade?»
This time he reached out and drew her to him with one arm, to kiss her on both cheeks. She did not protest, but smiled up at him until he let her go.
Chapter 8
Blade and Riyannah went out into the woods for a little target practice. Blade fired five rounds at a tree fifty yards away to show Riyannah how to aim. Then he watched as she fired ten rounds herself. On the eleventh round the tree fell over, cut completely through.
Blade decided that was enough practice. Riyannah wasn't going to be another Annie Oakley, but she could aim the rifle and didn't freeze on the trigger. Blade knew trained soldiers who couldn't hit the broad side of a barn unless they were standing inside it or firing on full automatic. Riyannah could certainly put at least one bullet into anything the size of a bat-cat before it could get to her. With the heavy slugs the rifles fired, one should be enough to stop a bat-cat or anything else smaller then an elephant.
Blade also told Riyannah, «Do not go out of the camp alone if I am close enough to be called. If you must go out alone always take your rifle. Leave the safety on, but keep looking upward and be ready to fire if you see anything suspicious.»
Blade still didn't know if the bat-cats would be a menace or only a nuisance. He thought of strengthening the shelter, then decided against it. Before he could build anything able to resist the bat-cats, he and Riyannah would probably be on the move again.
Giving Riyannah her own rifle and ammunition made it very clear he trusted her. That display of trust had wiped out much of her suspicion of him. She'd already been on the edge of revealing something important. Next time she might go ahead and reveal it, and then what? Blade didn't know, but he suspected it would mean leaving the wilderness.
The prospect of facing bat-cats didn't change their daily routine much. Blade built bigger fires at night and made his morning trips shorter. When they bathed, they bathed one at a time, the other sitting on the bank with rifle in hand and eyes on the sky.
The trees around their bathing place grew thinly, leaving more open sky than Blade liked. On the other hand, the next nearest place for bathing was two miles away, and the path to it led through several large clearings. Unless bat-cats could land on a dime, they were safer where they were.
Certainly the beasts were prowling the forest. Three nights in a row Blade awoke to their screams and growls. They were never as close as they'd been the first night, and he never bothered looking for their victims. He wondered what was bringing them into this part of the forest all at once. The nights seemed to be growing colder. Was the change in the weather causing a migration of the wildlife so that the bat-cats had to follow their food supply? If so, how thickly would they gather? Too many carnivores in any one area would eat the forest bare of game. Unfortunately it wouldn't take too many bat-cats to make the area of the camp unpleasant for Blade and Riyannah.
On the tenth night, the screams of the bat-cats and the wild cries of their victims were louder than ever before. Either they were hunting closer to the camp or it was a larger pack. Blade not only woke up but found it uncomfortably hard to get back to sleep. He finally dozed off again as the forest outside began to turn gray.
He awoke to find Riyannah curled up snugly against him, her own blankets lying rumpled and discarded in her corner of the shelter. She was naked, and for such a slim woman she gave off a surprising amount of warmth.
Blade took Riyannah gently by the shoulders and kissed her even more gently. He had to fight to keep his lips and hands from moving on down her body, or even to pull them away. As he crept out from under the blankets, she turned over with a gentle sigh, blinked, then went back to sleep.
She didn't wake up until Blade was fully dressed. Then she rolled out from under the blankets, pulled on her own clothes, and smiled at Blade. As usual, the smile turned her face into something warm and appealing. It also hinted that she'd known exactly what she was doing when she crawled under his blankets.
Half an hour later, Riyannah was naked again. She climbed out of the stream, raising both hands to wring out her hair. The motion lifted her breasts and formed the rest of her slim body into a graceful curve, like a bent bow. Her nipples were hard and dark in the chill of the morning and beads of water stood out on her skin.
Her skin was a shade darker than before, from weeks of soot and grease no cold-water scrubbing could remove. It hadn't lost any of its beauty, though. Her silver-white pubic triangle stood out like a beacon. The sunlight shining through the trees overhead turned the drops of water on her skin into sparkling jewels and threw moving patterns of light and shade on her throat, shoulders, and breasts. Riyannah might not be at home in the wilderness, but she certainly looked enough like a wild creature of the forest and the waters.
At last Riyannah stopped posing, got dressed, and sat down on a boulder with her rifle across her knees. Blade's rifle rested muzzle up against the boulder. Blade stripped off his clothes, except for the knife in a sheath on his right ankle, and plunged into the stream.
The biting chill took his breath away, as it always did at first. He went deep, letting the current carry him downstream, then swept upward toward the sunlight and the air.
As his head broke surface, Riyannah screamed. Blade shot half clear of the water like a leaping dolphin, then turned toward Riyannah.
Three bat-cats were gliding out of the sky at
her. Their tails were rigid, their membranes fully spread, their forepaws reaching out, and their eyes fixed hungrily. Blade was twenty yards downstream from Riyannah and nearly on the opposite bank. The bat-cats were too intent on Riyannah to care about any other prey. He ducked under and churned toward the woman.
Her rifle went off, the sound distorted by the water, a bat-cat screamed, and the rifle fired three more times. Blade surfaced, and a bat-cat plunged into the stream almost on top of him. He drew his knife, then saw that half the beast's head was blown away by Riyannah's bullets.
Then the rifle jammed. As the second bat-cat came at her, Riyannah thrust at it with the bayonet. The bat-cat saw what was waiting for it, tried to twist aside in midair, and failed. A hundred and fifty pounds of fur and claws, bone and sinew impaled itself on Riyannah's bayonet. The bat-cat screamed and spat and hissed more like a snake than an animal. It thrashed frantically, foam on its lips. Riyannah screamed as the dying bat-cat's writhing tore the rifle out of her hands. Then she screamed again as it rolled into the stream, taking the rifle with it.
Riyannah spent one second too long screaming. She lunged toward Blade's rifle leaning against the rock. The third bat-cat landed right on top of the rock, knocking the rifle to the ground. Riyannah jumped back as sharp claws flailed at her, slashing her trousers without breaking the skin underneath. She sprang backward, tripped over a root, and went down. The bat-cat's growl drowned out Riyannah's next scream. The beast let out a hiss and gathered itself to spring.
Then three more bat-cats sailed down out of the sky, landing beyond the boulder. The first bat-cat checked the spring which could have torn Riyannah to shreds in the next second. Before anything else could happen, Blade leaped out of the water with a yell.
He put all his lungpower into that yell, and it paralyzed all four bat-cats for a moment. Blade swung up onto the bank, pivoted on one foot, and smashed the other into the side of the first bat-cat. One of Blade's back kicks could crack a brick wall. The bat-cat flew off the top of the boulder, smashed into a tree ten feet away, and fell to the ground as limp as an empty balloon.
Blade dove for the rifle, but another bat-cat launched its spring first. Blade swerved and ducked in the same movement, so that the bat-cat's spring brought it down inches from his left foot. He leaped high and came down with both feet on the beast's neck before it could realize what was happening. Then he jumped to the ground, picked up the dead body by the tail, and hurled it into the faces of the other two bat-cats. They backed away, snarling and hissing defiantly. Then they dug in their hind feet and got ready to leap at Blade together.
A moment's hesitation had nearly been fatal to Riyannah. Now it was fatal to the bat-cats. Blade snatched up the rifle, snapped off the safety, and switched the selector to automatic. He squeezed the trigger as the bat cats soared into the air, and the burst raked them from heads to bellies. They seemed to bounce backward as if they'd struck a wall of rubber, then collapsed on the ground. One of them writhed briefly, but that ended when Blade jabbed a bayonet into the base of its skull. Then there was silence in the forest except for the faint plok-plok-plok of water dripping off Blade.
Blade snapped on the safety and turned to Riyannah. She'd managed to struggle to her feet, but her face was still a pale coffee color under the dirt. He held the rifle out to her.
«Take this and watch for more bat-cats. I'm going to dive into the stream and try to get the other rifle back.»
«Blade, do you think we need it so badly that you should put yourself in danger again?»
«I don't think there's any real danger. If more bat-cats come, try to get up into a tree before you start shooting. I imagine they can climb trees, but they'll be better targets for you while they're climbing.»
Riyannah nodded and her hands steadied as they closed on the rifle. Blade turned away and plunged into the stream again.
He could only guess where the rifle might be and what could have happened to it, but luck was with him. The rifle not only stayed in the bat-cat's body, it weighted the body down enough to make it sink quietly to the bottom of the stream. On his third dive Blade saw the rifle sticking up like a flagpole. On the fourth dive he got his hands on it, and on the fifth he jerked it free. He came to the surface, gulped in air, then scrambled out onto the bank and began drying himself.
Riyannah didn't seem to be hurt at all, but she walked slowly on the way back to camp. Blade let her set the pace, though his feet itched to break into a run and his fingers itched to strip and oil the salvaged rifle. It was half their arsenal, and he was quite sure they hadn't seen the last of the bat-cats.
They reached camp without seeing or hearing any more of the beasts. Blade quickly built the fire up to a roaring blaze, spread a blanket on the ground beside it, then started laying out the parts of the rifle.
«Riyannah, there's a can of oil in your pack. Get it out, will you?» Blade spoke without raising his eyes from his work. When silence followed his words, he looked up. She was nowhere in sight.
«Riyannah?» He started to get up. Then she stepped out of the shelter, wrapped from shoulders to knees in her blanket.
«Riyannah, did you get the-?»
He broke off as she shrugged her shoulders and let the blanket slip to the ground. Then she stepped toward him, naked and laughing, with a glow in her eyes that seemed to flow down and light up her skin as well. Slowly Blade put the rifle bolt down on the blanket. Then he rose to his feet and opened his arms to Riyannah.
She came up to him, then laughed and pressed both palms against his chest. «Blade, your clothes!»
«You're right.» He knelt and began unlacing his boots. As he did, he was very much aware of Riyannah's soft breath on his cheek and in his ear, and her breasts almost in his face as she bent over him.
Blade finished with his boots and stood up. Riyannah knelt, unbuckled his belt with one hand, and unzipped his trousers with the other hand. This time when Riyannah's lips drifted down onto his flesh, they stayed there.
They stayed there until the warmth in Blade's groin became heat, then a form of delicious agony he couldn't have described to save his life. Half his mind and body wanted those lips to continue their work until the agony came to an end in fierce release. The other half of his mind and body wanted her to leave him for a moment while he stripped off the rest of his clothes.
Riyannah got the message. Her hands met his at the waist of his trousers, and all four hands together pushed Blade's pants down his legs. He stripped off his shirt and flung it high and far, careless of where it might land. Riyannah pressed herself hard against him and he felt the warm dampness between her legs and the firm points of her nipples. She groaned, and something seemed to stop Blade's breath in his throat. His head was swimming and the world spun around him as he lifted Riyannah in his arms and carried her into the shelter.
The blankets were outside and the needles and leaves on the floor dry and stiff. Neither of them cared. Blade sat down. Riyannah put both hands against his chest and pushed. He let her push him over, then reached up and cupped her breasts with his hands. She moaned as his fingers played with her nipples. Then she was straddling him and lowering herself onto him.
Her cry held both pain and pleasure as he entered her. Then she was swaying back and forth, with small movements which grew quickly wilder. Her hair whipped about her shoulders like windblown leaves, her face tightened bit by bit into a mask, and once again Blade felt agony and delirious pleasure at the same time. Now it only started in his groin, then spread swiftly through his whole body. He could not think, he could not see or hear, he could barely breathe. Riyannah was drawing all his senses into her, as she'd already drawn his swollen flesh.
Then Riyannah's body arched backward, until her hair flowed down to brush Blade's ankles and her eyes stared blankly up at the ceiling of the but. She jerked convulsively once, twice, three times, mouth open but not a sound coming out. Waves of color came and went across her skin and tears flowed down her cheeks. Then Blade
stopped noticing what was happening to Riyannah. His breath went out of him in a thick, choking cry as the agony went out of him in a series off fierce hot spurtings. He drove his hips upward as Riyannah clamped her thighs about him, and they heaved and tossed and thrashed about.
The magnificent moments passed. Blade heard his breathing and Riyannah's, felt the needles and leaves sandpapering his bare skin, smelled the cool mustiness of the shelter and the sharper odor of burning cloth-
Blade started and slapped Riyannah on the buttocks. «Let me up-quick!» He sprang to his feet so violently his head crashed into the roof of the shelter, bringing down a shower of twigs and needles. Then he dashed out into the open.
The blanket where he'd laid the parts of the rifle was sending up a haze of gray-brown smoke. As he watched, one edge began to turn black and little flames danced up. Blade clutched the other edge and yanked hard. Several parts rolled off into the dirt. Blade snatched up a log of firewood and hammered at the burning edge of the blanket as if he was pounding the life out of a deadly enemy.
At last the fire was out. Blade gathered up the scattered parts, blew the dirt off them, and was putting them back on the blanket when he heard Riyannah laughing.
«Blade, are you-is this a thing your people do after sex? Pounding on the ground with a piece of wood?» Her laugh became a giggle.
Blade shook his head. «No. My people do many odd things, but this is not one of them.»
«Will you tell me more about your people, if I tell you about mine? I do not know who or what your people are, but they must be quite interesting.»
Now Blade felt like jumping up and down or running around the camp several times, shouting at the top of his lungs. The door to Riyannah's secrets was opening at last, opened by trust, shared danger, and shared passion.
