I nodded. Someone in the crowd of centaurs was holding up a pole with a dirty piece of cloth tied to it.
“When the symbol falls,” he said, “the fight begins.” I nodded and kicked Paint in the ribs to get him turned around. I rode a few paces, then turned Paint around again. The centaur also had turned around and we were facing one another. The pole with the dirty piece of cloth still was held on high. The centaur unsheathed his sword and I followed his example.
“Paint, old hoss,” I said, “now we’re in for it.”
“Most honored sir,” Paint told me, “I shall strive my utmost in our cause.”
The pole with the dirty rag came down.
We rushed together. Paint was going full speed after the first two swings he made upon his rockers, and the centaur was thundering down upon us, his driving hoofs cutting great clots of earth out of the ground and throwing them behind him. He held his sword on high and his shield was raised above his head. As he charged toward us he let go with a strange shrill yodeling warwhoop that was enough to freeze the blood.
Not more than a couple of seconds could have elapsed between the time the flag had dropped and we were upon one another and in those two seconds (if it were two seconds) my suddenly busy mind thought of at least a dozen clever tricks by which I could outsmart my opponent, and as speedily dropped them all. In that last moment, I knew there was nothing I could do other than try to catch the blow of his sword upon my shield and to try, by whatever means presented itself, to get in a blow of my own.
My mind dropped its wild flurry of ideas and became a hard, cold block and a grimness settled on me and I knew that this was it. I had to finish him off quickly or he would finish me and the matter of my finishing him must depend largely upon luck, for I had no skill and no time to learn the skill.
I saw his sword coming down in a full-armed swinging stroke and I knew also that my sword was swinging at his head, driven by every ounce of strength I could muster in my arm. His eyes were half-closed and beady and his face wore a look of self-satisfied alertness.
For he knew he had me. He knew I had no chance. From many little things that he had noted, he must have sensed that I was no expert swordsman and was at an utter disadvantage.
His sword struck the edge of my shield so hard that my arm was numbed and the blade went skidding off it to go slicing past my shoulder. But even as this happened, he jerked suddenly, beginning to rear up and backward. A glazed look flitted across his face and the arm that held the shield dropped away and the edge of my sword came down squarely on top his head, driven with all the strength I had, slicing into his skull and bisecting his face to drive deep into his neck.
And in that instant before my blade had struck him, when his face had taken on that glazed look and his shield arm had sagged away, I had glimpsed the black hole which blossomed in his forehead, on a line between and just above his eyes. But I saw it only for a fraction of a second, for almost as soon as it appeared, the sword was slicing through it, almost as if it had been placed there to show me where to strike.
SIXTEEN
The brain case was nicked and battered. It had had hard usage.
I handed it down to Sara. “There it is,” I said. “That was a hell of a chance you took.”
She bristled at the anger in my voice. “It was no chance at all,” she said. “The bullet goes where I aim the rifle and I am good at it. It worked out, didn’t it?”
“It worked out just fine,” I said, still shaken. “But two feet to one side. . .”
“It couldn’t have,” she said. “I aimed it…”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Right in the center of his forehead.”
I climbed down off Paint and shucked off the robe. Tuck was crouched at the foot of one of the twisted badlands trees. I tossed the robe to him.
“Where are my pants?” I asked.
“Over there,” said Sara, pointing. “I picked them up and folded them.”
I picked up the trousers and shook them out and started getting into them.
Sara had been turning the brain around and around in her band.
“What happened to it?” she asked. “What did they use it for?”
“What would you expect a bunch of polo-playing barbarians to use a brain case for?”
“You mean a polo ball?”
I nodded. “Now they’ll have to go back to balls chiseled out of stone. They’re all upset about it,”
Hoot came swarming down the slope from where he had been standing lookout.
“You perform excellent,” he hooted at me. “For one wielding an unaccustomed weapon. . .”
“Miss Foster was the one who performed so excellently,” I told him. “She bagged my bird for me.”
“No matter which,” said Hoot, “the deed be neatly done and the game-playing hobbies are evacuating.”
“You mean that they are leaving?”
“They are forming up to march.”
I climbed to the top of the hill and the centaurs had indeed formed into a ragged line and were marching west. It was a relief to see them go. Honorable as they might be (and they were honorable; they had given me the brain case) I still would have felt slightly nervous if they had hung around.
Turning back, I saw that Tuck and Sara had hauled Roscoe’s body off the pile of water tins and were opening up his skull so they could insert the brain case.
“Do you think it has been damaged?” Sara asked. “The beating it has taken. Look at all the dents in it!”
I shook my head. I didn’t know.
“He doesn’t have to know too much,” said Sara, hopefully. “We won’t ask much of him. Just some simple questions.”
Tuck held out his hand for the brain case and Sara gave it to him.
“You know how to do?” I asked Tuck.
“I think I do,” he said. “There are slots. You just slip it in…”
He slipped it in and slapped it with the heel of his hand to drive it home, then banged the skull plate shut.
Roscoe stirred. He had been propped against a wall of earth and now he straightened to stand upon his feet. His head swiveled about to look at each of us in turn. His arms moved tentatively, as if he might be testing them.
He spoke, his voice grating. “Whyever,” he said, “wherever, however, forever, whenever.”
He stopped speaking and looked around at us as if to see if we had understood him. When it must have been apparent that we hadn’t, he said, solemnly and slowly, so there’d be no mistaking him this time, “Hat, cat, bat, fat, rat, sat, vat, pat, gnat, gat, drat, tat.”
“He’s completely nuts,” I said.
“Guts,” said Roscoe.
“He rhymes,” said Sara. “That is all he does-just a rhyming dictionary. Do you suppose he’s forgotten everything? Do you think he knows anything at all?”
I grinned at her. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Roscoe,” said Sara, “do you remember anything at all?”
“Tall,” said Roscoe, “call, ball, mall, fall, gall.”
“No, no,” said Sara, “do you remember your master?”
“Pastor,” said Roscoe, maddeningly conversational.
“Oh, it’s no use!” cried Sara. “All the way we traveled, all the, trouble we’ve been through and you down there risking your neck and all we get is this!”
“Roscoe,” I said sharply, “we are looking for Lawrence Arlen Knight. . .”
“Kite,” said Roscoe, “sight, night, blight . . .”
“No, goddamn it!” I shouted. “We are looking for him. Point in the direction we should look.”
“Book,” said Roscoe, “cook, took.” But even as he mouthed his rhyming gibberish, he squared around and flung out his arm, with a finger pointing, holding his arm and finger rigid, like a steady sign board, pointing northward up the trail.
SEVENTEEN
So we went on, northward, up the trail.
We left the desert and the badlands behind us and climbed steadily for days up a high plateau, while ahead of us the mountains steadily climbed higher in the sky, great, mystic, majestic ramparts that still were touched with the blue of distance.
There was water now, flowing streams of it that ran cold and musically along the pebbled beds. We cached our water tins in one of the stone beehive huts that still sprouted, at intervals, along the trail. Since the badlands none of us carried packs; the packs we had carried were strapped on Roscoe’s sturdy back. Feeling a bit sheepish about it, I traveled with the shield slung behind my shoulders and the sword buckled to my waist. It was no kind of fighting equipment for a grown man to carry, but there was in that shield and sword a certain swashbuckling feeling of importance-a throwback to some old ancestor of millennia ago who had taken pride in a warrior’s outfit.