Champions Of The Gods rb-21

by Джеффри Лорд

  If the beast's hiss had been loud before, now it sounded like the end of the world. Blade braced himself harder and leaned forward on the spear, driving it in deeper. Blood and foul-smelling yellow fluid gushed over him. The spear point struck bone. Blade put all his weight and all his enormous strength behind one final furious thrust. He felt bone crack, splinter, and give way, and the spearpoint rammed itself down into the beast's brain.

  The beast reared up as if it was reaching up to bite at the sky itself. Its jaws opened and shut, the teeth clashing and crashing together with noises like an enormous threshing machine. The hiss came again, then turned into a scream. A convulsion twisted the beast from the tip of its tail to its head. The head snapped forward, then back. Blade felt his feet slipping, felt his hands torn loose from the spear with a jerk so violent that it seemed to yank every one of his fingers out by the roots. Then he was flying through the air.

  He flew high, turning over and over in mid-air. He had time to see the beast starting to topple, and the other warriors standing as if they were rooted to the ground. Then he plunged downward. A branch caught him, sending a burning pain up and down one leg. Then he landed.

  Blade was expecting to smash down on the ground. Instead he landed with a tremendous splash in the river. Pure reflex made him exhale desperately as he went under, to keep the water from entering his lungs and choking him.

  He went down so far that his legs sank up to the knees in the sticky, slimy mud of the river bottom. For a hideous moment he kicked and thrashed furiously, struggling to break the suction of the mud. In another moment he knew his lungs would fill with water and the dark river would do what the dying monster on the bank hadn't been able to do.

  Then the mud let him go. Blade's churning legs drove him upward into the daylight, into the air. His starved lungs took in an enormous gulp of air. Then he paddled to the bank and climbed out, water and mud and strands of weed dripping from him.

  Now to find out what the three warriors thought of what he'd done. For all he knew he might have barged into a religious rite and now be doomed ten times over for sacrilege and blasphemy.

  The dinosaur was dead, sprawled full-length along the river bank. In its fall its neck and tail had smashed down still more trees and hurled them about like matchsticks. It lay completely motionless, not even the tip of the great tail twitching.

  Shouts sounded from the other side of the body and the three warriors appeared. They sprang over the outstretched neck and ran toward Blade, holding their spears level across their chests with both hands. Blade crossed his arms on his chest and stood where he was to meet them.

  The three warriors ran up to Blade, thrust their spears into the ground, took off their feathered headdresses, and hung them on the ends of their spears. Then they threw themselves facedown on the ground in front of Blade, hands outstretched toward him.

  If he'd done anything religious, it didn't seem like anything they were objecting to! It looked more like those warriors were worshipping him. Blade let them lie for what seemed like a dignified length of time, then spoke.

  «Rise up. I would look on the faces of brave warriors.»

  One of the three warriors slowly rose to his knees. «You cannot mean that. We are as nothing compared to you, who have done what no Hunter of the Ganthi has ever dared do. We are barely worthy to wash the feet of your woman.»

  That reminded Blade of Arllona. He grimaced. «My woman has no more need of any aid, except that of men to bury her. The creature slew her, so I slew it.» He motioned to all three men. «Rise, I said. The Hunters of the Ganthi need not be ashamed before any man of any people.»

  All three Ganthi warriors rose uncertainly to their feet, brushed themselves off, and retrieved their spears and headdresses. The first one to speak turned to the others.

  «Brothers of the Hunt, we shall return at once to Thessu. The Eldest Brother of this Hunt is slain, honorably and bravely. So are the others of our band. We can do no more.

  «We have also found a warrior not of the Ganthi who is worthy to be admitted among us. Perhaps he shall even be an Eldest Brother of the Hunters. Since the Ganthi lived in this land, such a warrior has come among us only five times. We shall bury our Eldest Brother and the woman of this warrior, then we shall return to Thessu.»

  The man turned to Blade. «I am Kordu. It is the law of the Ganthi that Strangers in our land must die, unless they prove worthy to live among us. You have proved that you are worthy. You have proved it ten times over!» For a moment awe at what he had seen Blade do overcame him and he was silent.

  Blade nodded. «I thank you and your Hunters. It will be a pleasure to be among the Ganthi if all are such as you. Now let us go bury our dead.»

  Blade let the Ganthi bury the dead warrior first. This did not take very long, since there was hardly enough of the man left to bury. Then Blade led them over to where Arllona lay.

  A last jerk of the dying beast's tail had hurled the fallen tree twenty feet away. Arllona lay exposed to view where the tree had smashed her into the ground. She was not a pretty sight, but Blade had seen more than his share of gruesomely mangled bodies. The face was almost intact. He knelt and rested one hand briefly on the pale forehead, then closed the staring eyes, stood up, and turned away.

  He did not turn back until the three Ganthi had finished scraping the earth back over Arllona's body. He stood in silence for a moment, looking down at the grave. What could he say about Arllona, the girl who had lived a short and unhappy life in Kano and had met a wretched death far off in some other Dimension? That was about all the epitaph he or anyone else could give her.

  «It is done,» he said briefly to the three Ganthi. «Let us go.»

  Kordu nodded, picked up a spear drawn from the dead beast, and handed it to Blade. «By custom no one may bear a spear until he has received it at the Warriors' Feast. But I say you are worthy to bear that spear now.»

  «I thank you, Kordu,» said Blade. He took the spear and fell in behind Kordu as the warrior led the way toward the jungle.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Katerina Shumilova left her camp by the river at dawn. She would have liked to stay longer. The camp had become as much of a home as any place in this world could be for her.

  The British had discovered time-travel. They had sent her back into the past, into the age of the dinosaurs. She had seen and heard too much in the past week to doubt it any longer. Flying reptiles with twenty-foot wings, snakes forty feet long, a scaled horror stretching seventy feet from a horned and fanged head to a tail thicker than she was. There were other things that were only crashings in the jungle, shapes under the surface of the river, shadows and dreadful cries in the darkness. She was alone as no other human being had ever been alone. She would be alone as long as she lived.

  Some people might have decided that there was no reason to move anywhere and have sat themselves down to die. Katerina was not one of them. She would go on fighting to survive as long as she was alive. Part of this was sheer toughness, part of it was her training. Part of it also was the memory of her father, Pavel Shumilov.

  A fighter pilot in the Red Air Force, Captain Pavel Shumilov had been shot down behind German lines it 1943. Both legs broken in the crash, he had dragged himself along, through snow and wind and sub-zero cold, had dragged himself along for five days until he met a Russian patrol. After many painful months in the hospital, he had returned to combat. He had ended the war a Hero of the Soviet Union, an ace with more than thirty German planes to his credit.

  So if Katerina did not give up, it was partly because she was the daughter of a man who hadn't given up either.

  There were also practical reasons for moving on. There might be better food and water someplace else. There certainly should be some part of this land not completely overrun with dinosaurs. She had seen too many that could swallow her at a gulp, and she preferred to live without them as neighbors. Finally, scientific curiosity was still alive in her. Even though she knew she would die
in this land, she wanted to die after learning as much about it as she could.

  So that morning she put aside the last of her fear and headed south along the riverbank.

  She was no longer naked or defenseless. She wore a hat and a robe, which she had sewn together from large, heavy leaves, using vegetable fiber for thread and fish bones for needles. Other leaves were tied around her legs with strips of bark, and still more strips of bark protected her feet. In one hand she carried a broken branch heavy enough to make a good club. All this made her feel like a human being rather than an animal. The water and the fish from the river would keep her strong as she moved along the river. She was as well off as she could hope to be here and now, and before long she found herself whistling Russian folk tunes as she strode along.

  The sun climbed higher. After walking for about three hours Katerina started looking for a place to rest. Then suddenly she wrinkled her nose and stopped. A puff of hot air blowing up the river from ahead brought her the unmistakable stink of something very large and badly decayed. She slipped behind the nearest tree and peered along the bank. She had seen the splintered bones of the victims of the carnivorous dinosaurs before. This could be another one, and the killer could still be around, feeding on its victim.

  Katerina watched and listened carefully for a few minutes, saw nothing except large green birds flapping clumsily upward, as though they were gorged, and heard nothing except the normal rustle of leaves and drone of insects. The killer had fed and gone, leaving its victim to the scavengers.

  As she moved forward, the smell grew rapidly stronger, until it was nearly overpowering. A few more steps brought her around a line of young trees and in sight of what lay dead beside the river.

  It was one of the three-horned monsters, far larger than any she'd seen before, already bloating as well as stinking in the tropical heat. Several more scavenger birds flapped upward from a gaping red trough in the flesh of its back as they saw Katerina. Grim determination and scientific curiosity kept her stomach under control. This would almost certainly be her best chance to examine one of these monsters. She moved closer.

  As she did, she realized there was something odd about the body. Except for where the birds had feasted, it was intact. Smashed and broken trees lay all around it, so clearly the beast had died violently. But whatever had struck it down hadn't fed on any part of the body Katerina could see. Had it been struck by lightning, or perhaps bitten by a snake?

  Katerina stepped forward again, climbed up on the trunk of a fallen tree, then stopped so abruptly that she nearly lost her balance and sprawled forward off the log onto her face. Then she sprang backward, flattening herself on the ground behind the trunk.

  She'd seen the head and neck clearly, and she'd seen half a dozen spears jutting out of the scaled skin or lying on the ground.

  Katerina's fingers dug into the bark of the fallen tree as she fought the paralyzing astonishment and the fear sweeping through her. Somewhere in this jungle lived-some creatures, perhaps men, perhaps not-able to make and use spears. Not primitive spears, either-at least one of them had a heavy iron head a foot long. And that meant-

  Katerina deliberately stopped thinking for a moment. She knew that if she tried to sort out all at once everything this might mean, she might panic. She could not do that. She would not do that. She would clear her mind and calm herself. She would.

  Eventually she did. Then she began sorting out her thoughts. There were intelligent creatures, perhaps human beings, living in this world. Men and dinosaurs had never existed on Earth at the same time. The last dinosaurs had been dead many millions of years before Man's first and remotest ancestors had appeared.

  Perhaps the spearmakers were not men. Perhaps they were another intelligent race that had existed on Earth in the time of the dinosaurs, one that had vanished without leaving any traces at. all. Had they evolved on Earth along some lines that scientists hadn't yet even imagined? Or had they possibly come from somewhere other than Earth?

  Katerina ran the arguments back and forth in her mind, looking at them as calmly and carefully as she could manage. She couldn't come up with any real answers. This might not even be Earth, for all she knew. The British might have discovered a method of transmission not only through time but through space as well. She might be-she shuddered at the thought-light-years from Earth. In that case, the spearmakers were certainly not human.

  At this point she stopped arguing with herself. She realized that she was once again about to frighten herself into panic or paralysis. She didn't like any of the possibilities she faced, and she didn't mind admitting it.

  All of the possibilities meant the same thing. She was not alone in this jungle. She would not have to play Robinson Crusoe to the end of her life, however long or short that might be. Sooner or later she would meet the spearmakers. She stood up and walked up to the body.

  Close up, it was obvious what had killed the monster. Three feet of spearshaft jutted out of one eye socket. The spear had either been thrown with tremendous force and accuracy or else driven in from close at hand.

  A few minutes' more exploring the area turned up two fresh graves, no more than a day or two old. Katerina was tempted to take a spear and dig up one of the bodies. That would answer the question of what sort of being the spearmakers were.

  But the day was hot, the smell of the decaying carcass was about to make her sick, and something inside her balked at descrating a grave. Besides, the spearmakers might be rather touchy about their graves. Many primitive peoples were, she recalled.

  Instead she took two of the spears. They had heavy wooden shafts and solid iron heads, but they were well made and well balanced. She swung them up on her shoulder and headed on down the river. It was nearly half an hour before the air around her no longer stank of a hundred feet of decaying dinosaur.

  By now it was close to noon. Katerina crawled under some bushes, making sure to brush out her trail as well as she could. Under the bushes the air was stiflingly close. But there was shade, and with luck she would be hidden from anything-dinosaur or spearmaker-that might wander along. Enfolded in the darkness, she felt the morning's built-up tension slowly ease out of her. It was easy to fall asleep.

  When she awoke, the sun was already well down toward the horizon. She grabbed her spears and scrambled out into the open. Then she picked out a convenient tree and began practicing throwing the spears.

  Katerina was a natural athlete, with superb muscles and reflexes made even better by years of training. She found it easy to get used to the spears, not only for throwing but for thrusting and even for swinging like clubs. In half an hour she decided she knew everything about the spears she needed to, shouldered them again, and went over to the river to drink.

  She was kneeling down, hands cupped to scoop up the water, when she heard a crackle of bushes behind her. She sprang up, snatching up a spear with each hand as she turned.

  Ten men-ten entirely human men, as far as she could tell-were filing out of the bushes. They were brown skinned, lean, and naked except for feather headdresses, belts, and loincloths. Each carried two spears slung over his back and a club hanging from his belt. Each one turned to stare at Katerina as he emerged into the open. The stares did not look at all friendly.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Katerina felt one moment of an overwhelming sense of relief. Whenever and wherever she was, the spearmakers were apparently human. Or at least they weren't nine feet tall, three feet wide, and six feet long, with two heads, six arms, a tail, and bright blue skin covered with purple feathers.

  The stares of the ten men were so hostile that the feeling of relief vanished after that one moment. Katerina wondered if she'd made a mistake in greeting them with her spears in her hands. Empty hands were an ancient gesture of peaceful intent. But it went against her training and instincts to disarm herself this close to an enemy.

  Slowly and carefully she lowered both spears, until the points rested on the grass. That way they did not threa
ten the natives, but she could still easily raise and hurl them.

  None of the ten men unslung a spear or raised a club. They stood silently like so many statues carved from dark brown wood, glowering at Katerina. She fought down an impulse to turn and run for cover. The nearest cover that would stop a spear was a good fifty meters away. She couldn't hope to get that far without at least being wounded. Alone in this jungle and hunted by men who knew it, she would have a slim chance at best. Wounded, she would have no chance at all.

  Minutes passed. The sun was sinking down in the west, but it was still stiflingly hot. Only the faintest breeze blew in from the river. Katerina felt sweat trickling down her face and thighs. The faces of the men still showed hostility. Now they also began to show curiosity. They might be wondering at her pale skin, blond hair, and odd clothing. So far they'd shown no sign of realizing that they faced a woman. Her improvised robe of leaves was as shapeless as a tent. As long as it stayed in place she'd be able to conceal her sex.

  Finally nine of the men formed themselves into two clusters, one on either side of the tenth man, who wore a blue loincloth and a blue headdress. Each man drew one of his spears and held it out in the same position Katerina was using, point forward and resting on the grass. Katerina acknowledged the gesture with a bow. Then she bent, took off her bark shoes, and tied her hat and hair in place with the bark strips.

  She was going to have to fight. These people seemed to have the custom of giving even strangers a fair fight. That would help. Katerina was reasonably confident she could take any one of these warriors in a fair fight, perhaps two or three. Would custom also demand that she fight and overcome all ten in succession?