“You will learn to respect the tump,” Haleka stated from his lofty perch. “You will always walk on the uphill side of him, because it is from the forest above that the danger comes, when the jaguars walk at night. You will match your pace to his, because he dislikes being hurried or held back. His very life depends on steady movement across the grass because he cannot move his head.”
Karina paced slowly along in the late afternoon sun. The other tumps had diverged on their separate paths, the tumpiers sitting on their backs, the apprentices walking alongside. The apprentices were the lowest of the low.
Karina, for the time being, was one of them.
“The sun and the grass are all the tump needs,” Haleka droned on. “When God created the tump, he created the perfect meat producer.”
“If the tump is so goddamned great, how come it’s got no goddamned legs?” Karina shouted in sudden temper.
“The tump has no need of legs, because it can move by flexing its ribs. There have been tumps on these hills for many thousands of years, and they’ll be here for thousands more.”
But even as he said this, a sadness took Haleka. The tump numbers had dwindled alarmingly in recent years. The trouble was, they didn’t breed. At one time this didn’t matter, because they didn’t die, either. But increasing felino demands on them had resulted in some overflensing, and recently there had been the occasional death through disease.
More worrying, though, was the increasing incidence of suicide. Disturbed tumps — those who had been attacked by jaguars, for instance — were subject to a mental disorder known as loco. The symptons were a tendency to travel downhill until the tump’s progress was halted by the sailway track. It would then butt against this structure, endlessly, unable to feed, until it died. A few tumps had even been known to smash their way through the track and to disappear into the sea, presumably to drown.
It was a serious problem. It was also degrading for the lumpier who was obliged to stay with his mount, subject to the jeers of the True Human passengers on the sail-way.
Was that why they had sent Karina?
El Tigre’s story was that Karina was in disgrace for some reason, but there was a rumor rife in the tump-fields that the Canton Lord had commanded her presence here. The Lord must be worried about the falling tump population. He might look on sailway-butting as evidence of tumpier incompetence — the felinos always said the tumpiers were too gentle with their charges. The tumpiers’ methods contrasted sharply with those of the felinos, who simply terrorized the shrugleggers into obedience.
Perhaps the Lord intended the felinos to take over the tumpfields, and had sent Karina as an experiment.
Haleka shot Karina a glance of intense suspicion. The girl paced alongside like some big cat, nostrils twitching at the scent from the still-fresh wounds. Granted, she was a beautiful creature — even old Haleka could not help being stirred by her — but she was dangerous and the tump sensed it. Its path across the hillside — the wide wake of cropped and fertilized grass — showed a definite curve away from the side on which Karina walked.
It was beginning to head downhill.
It might be going loco.
“Get on the other side of the tump!” shouted Haleka.
“But you said.…”
“I don’t care what I said. Do what you’re told!”
The path of the tump straightened out over the next few minutes, but soon showed a marked tendency to the right. Haleka knew a moment of sudden fury, unusual for a tumpier.
How could he drive a tump when a wild animal walked beside it?
Night in the foothills.
The foothills were exposed and, although Haleka halted the tump in a shallow declivity, the air was cool and breezy.
The tump did not halt readily. It edged relentlessly forward, its jowls chomping, while Haleka leaned against its nose and shouted tumpier oaths. Karina watched him with contempt. He was frail, and slant-eyed like all tumpiers — more like a True Human than a Specialist — and she wondered what creatures had lent its ineffectual genes to his make-up.
There were legends of a sea-going race of similar appearance to Haleka, who populated the floating islands of Polysitia and helped provide the continents with life-giving oxygen. In the Dying Years the minstrels would sing of Belinda, the most famous Polysitian, who was pursued and imprisoned by the black rider Or Kikiwa, blown ashore in a gale and loved by Manuel of the Triad before the Great Blue took her back to her people.
Haleka looked like the Polysitians of legend.…
Karina stepped forward and laid her hand on the tump’s nose.
The tump’s tiny eyes blinked, and it stopped moving.
Haleka glanced at her without expression. He reached into his robe and took out a handful of dried herbs, which he crushed in his palm and held under the tump’s nose. It was a mild narcotic — falla — to deter the tump from moving off during the night. Then Haleka gathered grass and leaves from the fringes of a stream. He took two rocks from a hempen bag hanging from the tump; a large flat rock and a smaller spherical one. With these he pounded the vegetation into a paste. This he ate with apparent relish, sucking his lips afterwards. Then, without having suggested that Karina satisfy her own hunger — indeed, without having uttered a word since she’d immobilized the tump — he unrolled his blanket on the ground, lay on it and closed his eyes.
I was only trying to help, thought Karina. She lay down too, but the ground was hard and she was cold. She had no blanket, and she felt alone and frightened. She longed for the companionship of the grupo. She didn’t feel whole. She wasn’t even sleepy. In her sorrow she began a soft whimpering.
She’d seen her sisters briefly after the meeting, when a mysterious messenger had arrived and spoken to her father just before he propelled her through the camp to the meat train, his face like thunder. The grupo hadn’t spoken to her. They’d avoided her eyes. They blamed her for their disgrace over the Iolande incident. They thought that if she’d stayed with them, instead of fooling around in the jungle, Iolande would never have got the better of them.
Karina whined.
“Will you stop that caterwauling!” Haleka was propped on one elbow, staring fiercely at her, the moonlight glittering from his slant eyes so that he looked like an alien creature.
After he’d settled back again, Karina crawled over to the tump and nestled up against the rough hide which provided some small warmth and shelter. She lay awake for some time, swallowing heavily and continuously and wondering whether she was sickening for something — her whole throat seemed to be choking up.
Then she realized that the proximity to the tump was making her salivate …
It was a night of discomfort and strange dreams, and just before dawn she discovered, drowsily, that she’d been incontinent; and in her despair she thought: this will surely convince Haleka that I’m some kind of wild animal.…
But in the morning Haleka had other matters to worry about.
“There was another attack!” An apprentice stood panting steam in the cold dawn.
“Where?”
“Further up the gully. They got at Axil’s mount!”
“Did he see them?”
“No.… We slept.” The apprentice avoided Haleka’s eyes.
“You were scared,” said the tumpier. “You heard, but you were too scared to do anything. By Agni, this is too much!” He stared around furiously. “Where in hell is that goddamned jaguar-girl? She’s at the bottom of this, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s insane, letting her loose among the tumps. As if the big cats in the forest aren’t enough for us to contend with, every grupo in the Canton will home in on the smell of her! This attack — was it felinas or jaguars?”
“There was a lot of damage. Jaguars hunt alone. I think it was a felina grupo.”
“And I know which grupo it was!”
Haleka sniffed the morning breeze, stiffened, then strode down the gully, splashing through the stream. Further on he came to a tiny waterfall
spilling into a pool. Sitting beside the pool was Karina, naked and shivering, squeezing the water out of her tunic.
“Washing the blood off, eh?” He stood looking down at her, trembling with outrage.
“What? No, I.… What do you mean?”
“Explain what you’re doing!”
Karina stood with downcast eyes, the tunic hanging from her fingers, dripping. “I.… I thought, maybe it would make the tump more easy for you to control, if I.…” She swallowed. “If I washed myself and my clothes, so that.… So that the tump wouldn’t be so sure I’m a felina, and wouldn’t be so scared of me.”
“That would make a better story if you and your grupo hadn’t attacked Axil’s tump last night!”
“My … grupo?”
“Yes, your grupo. The famous El Tigre grupo. Or are you saying you’ve disowned them suddenly?”
Karina said quietly, “I think perhaps they’ve disowned me.”
“What do you mean?”
So she explained. And as she stood there, shoulders drooping, defeated, something of her sorrow transmitted itself to Haleka. She’d scrubbed herself until her skin glowed in the thin morning sunlight, her wet hair captured this sunlight like glowing copper and her figure was beautiful beyond belief. All this touched something in Haleka which took him right back to his youth, returning to him a strength and compassion which had been leeched away by the lonely years on tump-back.
“No doubt you brought it on yourself,” he said eventually, gruffly. “Get dressed and I’ll find a slice of meat for you.” He turned away abruptly.
She smiled like the sun itself. “Thanks, Haleka.”
When they got back to the tump, Axil was there. “I see you’ve caught her,” he called. “That’s good. Now we can deal with her. One thing I know — she won’t pull a trick like this again.” He held a tumpstick with which he took a practice swing, making the air whistle.
“She didn’t do it, Axil.”
“Tell that to the howler monkeys!”
“I said she didn’t do it.” He faced the man squarely. “She told me so, and I believe her.”
Now Axil got his first good look at Karina. The cat-girl met his gaze and for a long moment held it, and during that moment two minds met: the mind of a girl whose race had been created thirty thousand years ago in a laboratory, and the mind of a man whose race went back to the Paragonic Years, which had lived for millennia on remote islands before undertaking a duty which took it around the world and deprived it forever of a permanent home. The two minds met and recognized each other as human. And a third mind was there too — an alien mind, a catalyst.
“No, Karina didn’t do it,” said Axil.
He walked away slowly, as though sleep-walking.
Moving camp.
Saba said, “I wish Karina was here. She was good at this. The vampiro liked her.”
All over the hillside the vampiros were rising into the afternoon sky like leaves in an autumn wind, trailing thongs. There was excitement in the air and the felinos were singing as they set off northwards, an old felino song:
“My house is like a warm cocoon,
And shelters me from fear.
But when the Festival draws near,
My house is like the Moon.”
And the vampiros soared on membranous wings, filling the air with their shrill piping.
“You fed it too much,” Runa accused Teressa.
“I never fed it.”
“Well then, you starved it. It’s too weak to fly.”
“What about you? What about you? Why blame me?”
All around them the vampiros were taking off, the felinas gripping the ends of the thongs and hurrying away. Teressa was tugging at the giant bat’s claws which remained obstinately fixed into the ground, like the roots of a very old tree. The vampiro watched her with baleful eyes. It had folded its wings so that the grupo’s furniture was uncovered, but some unknown grudge caused it to remain sulkily earthbound.
“Get moving, girls!” called El Tigre, passing by.
“Mordecai!” swore Teressa. “All the best sites will be taken!” She jumped up and seized the vampiro around its scrawny neck. “Help me!” she shouted to her sisters.
“What are you trying to do, strangle it?”
“I’m trying to knock it over, you fool!” The vampiro had straightened its back, lifting Teressa’s feet from the ground. She hung there kicking. “If we can get the weight off its legs, we stand a better chance of unhooking its claws from the ground!”
The vampiro, a creature of great stoicism, ignored her. When crouched with spread wings to form the traditional shelter, vampiros are bell-shaped and not much taller than a man. In the standing position, though, they are of impressive height, and Teressa’s feet were a good meter from the ground. The vampiro gazed stolidly at the distant ocean, as though reflecting on the timelessness of it all. Its face was small and mouselike with a curious harelip but its neck was comparatively long, and bald. This gave the whole creature the appearance of a giant and dignified condor.
Runa flung herself bodily at the animal.
It absorbed her momentum like a leathery pillow.
“Oh, God!” shouted Saba in mortification, glancing frantically at the grinning faces which were beginning to turn their way, then taking a short run and hurling her own slight frame against the resilient vampiro.
Dull Torpe drew near, blinking. “I may be stupid,” he said, “But I can’t understand what you girls are trying to do.” His mouth dropped open again, his face resuming its characteristic expression of doltish surprise.
Teressa dropped to the ground, turned, and in her frustration attacked Runa. “It’s all your fault! It’s all your fault! I hate you!” They rolled to the ground in furious combat while Saba backed off hastily.
Now the cynical Dozo appeared, smiling enigmatically as Teressa and Runa hammered each other and the gathering crowd hooted encouragement.
“This would never have happened if Karina had been here,” said Saba by way of an excuse, as Dozo cocked an eye at her.
“Grupos always fight,” he replied. “It’s in the nature of things. It strengthens the bond, although God knows how. Karina would make no difference … or would she? She certainly has a presence, that girl.”
“We hardly ever fought when she was around. Oh!” cried Saba in sudden despair, as Teressa straddled Runa, got a handful of her hair and began to pound her head into the dust, “I wish she was back!”
“I’ll have to speak to El Tigre,” said Dozo. “For what it’s worth. We can’t have our top grupo falling apart. Have you seen much of Torch lately?” he asked unexpectedly.
“Not since Karina left.… Anyway, it’s no use talking to father. Teressa’s the one who doesn’t want Karina around. She still blames her for running out on us.”
“I do. With good reason.” Teressa stood before them, panting, the tunic ripped from her breasts and hanging in rags around her waist. “A grupo is no grupo if one goes off alone. We’re supposed to share adventures — and Mordecai knows, adventures are hard enough to come by.” Runa lay in the dirt, shaking her head dazedly. There were a few delighted catcalls from the bachelors concerning Teressa’s state of dress, but the crowd was beginning to disperse, the fun over. “You’ll never see that traitor back in this grupo,” Teressa said.
The vampiro still stood there with folded wings, like a huge and dignified patriarch watching the squabblings of children.
“I wonder,” said Dozo.
“Ah, get out of here, you old faggot,” said Teressa in disgust. She dragged Runa to her feet. “Go and get a rope, Runa. We’ll lasso this stupid bat. Then we can pull him over with a couple of shrugleggers.”
“She wishes Karina was back, really,” said Saba to Dozo, but very quietly, so that Teressa couldn’t hear.
It was dark by the time the El Tigre grupo arrived at Rangua North camp. The other vampiros were all in position, replete with food, snoring softly while the grupos ch
attered under the domes of their wings. After a change of campsite the vampiros were always fed well — otherwise a grupo might awaken to find open sky above, and the giant bat winging across the rain forest, never to return.
Karina, hiding nearby, heard the creaking of cart wheels and the familiar, loved voices. She waited behind the curve of a tent for her chance.
Then, “Saba,” she whispered.
“Who’s that? Is that you, Karina? Oh …!”
Saba rushed into her arms and they hugged, pummelling each other in affection, stepping apart, then wrestling with soft growlings.
At last Karina asked, “Where have you all been? All the other felinas are here. I got worried.”
Saba explained the problem.
Karina laughed, then clapped her hand over her mouth.
“Saba? Saba, is that you, for God’s sake? For the love of Mordecai, where is that girl?” Teressa’s voice was tight with frustration. “Come and help hold this bastard down, Saba, otherwise he’ll take off for the hills the moment we untie him!”
“Maybe we shouldn’t untie him, Tess,” they heard Runa say. “Maybe we should leave him there until morning.”
“And let him meditate on the error of his ways, I suppose. God damn it, Runa, he’s just a dumb vampiro. A good whipping is what he needs!”
“No, I meant it would be easier in daylight. We could —”
“If you think I’m spending the night out in this cold, you’re dumber than this crazy vampiro.”
“Listen, Tess, I wish you’d stop calling me dumb. People can hear, you know. And anyway, I’m a sight cleverer than you. Everyone knows that. You’re just a quarrelsome brat. That’s what they all say!”
A scuffling broke out, and the sound of heavy blows. “I’m going to kill you, Runa!” Teressa screamed.
It was too much for Saba. “Stop it!” she shouted, rushing up to the dim figures thrashing in the dirt. “Karina’s here!”
“Huh?” The fighting stopped. The combatants stood, dusting themselves off. “Oh, it’s you, is it,” said Teressa as Karina stepped forward.
Cat Karina Page 11
