“Can—not—” she choked out.
“Can!” Naill cried with a confidence he did not feel. His ankle was paining again. But ahead was the river. As he pulled her to her feet, he held her so and demanded: “Can you swim?”
She shook her head. A shaggy animal hardly smaller than a phas lumbered past them, its heavy shoulder fur actually brushing against Naill’s arm. The man began to run again, pulling the girl with him, in the wake of the animal, which blasted an open path straight through the underbrush.
Somehow they made a bank ten feet or so above the waterline. The shaggy animal had gone over, to half wade, half swim into the deeper part of the stream where other life splashed. All were heading downriver in a wild and vocal mixture of life forms Naill found largely strange. The forest for miles must have emptied its population into the dubious safety of that strip of water.
“We can’t go in there!” Ashla clung to Naill, watching the struggle below with wide and terrified eyes.
Naill glanced across the river. The murk that hung over the waste was there stronger, thicker. In it he could see gleams of red he was sure marked flames. Even if they could win over there, passing among the battling animals, they would not be able to go ashore. In the water, a chance—over there, no.
“We have to!” he shouted in her ear, propelling her to the rim of the drop. “There—” he pointed to a piece of driftwood bobbing between two rocks, at any moment ready to be plucked out of its half mooring. “Get your arms over that. It will keep your head above water.”
But they were to have no time for a careful descent of the bank, a chance to choose the method of their water entry. A garble from behind, the whiff of an only too familiar odor—Nail whirled half around, his outflung arms striking Ashla full in the back, to send her over the lip of the drop.
In the dark of the trap pit he had seen a kalcrok as it normally appeared to its victims. Here Naill faced a half-grown specimen of the same horrible species running in the open. The silky hair growth on its back shell was scorched away; it must have lingered in its den until the last possible moment, perhaps having had to break through a flame wall to escape. The pain of those burns must feed its natural ferocity into madness.
Naill used his cloak as a flail, beating at the head of the creature. The cloth was torn from his hold, and he stumbled back, over the cliff. He had one moment of knowing that he was falling.
Then he landed in a pocket of sandy gravel, his left arm under him, with enough force to drive the breath out of his lungs in an explosive puff, and he lay there dazed. From the ground above sounded a snarl spiraling up into yowl. Sand and soil sifted over the edge, but the kalcrok did not leap after him.
Shaken and weak, Naill got to one knee. Ashla . . . where was Ashla? A barrier of rocks rose between him and the small cove where that floating length of drift had lain. He thought his forearm must be broken. But he crawled sidewise along the stones to look for the girl.
There was a place of disturbed earth, marks leading to the lapping water. But those could have also been made by one of the animals. And the drift piece still bobbed by the water-washed rocks. No sign of her! Suppose she had hit her head, slid helplessly on into the stream?
Naill crept to the water’s edge, but before he had a chance to look, a mass of reddish fur, torn and running with a brighter red from gaping wounds, rolled down from above. A fanged jowl dropped to emit one of those snarling yowls as the creature hit water, floundered, and then was washed on to sway limply against the very piece of drift which was to have supported Ashla.
There was just enough strength left in Naill to make him crawl on, away from that small cove. The dim hope that the girl might have gone so, instead of into the water, kept him going. Then came the sound of a motor hum. A remnant of self-preservation flattened him down on the earth. Naill lay there, whimpering a little as the waves of pain flowed from his arm, pulsed through his body—until he hardly cared that at any moment the flamer ray could hiss across him.
Inside him grew a full and sullen hatred for that off-worlder flyer—for all the species who killed trees, burned the land. These—these were of the Larsh breed! Should he live, by some miracle, should he come out of this fire hunt—then there would be a harrowing of these new Larsh, such a sword-feasting as the ancients had never seen! He was Ayyar and this was Iftin land—while still he lived, it was Iftin!
Pain. . . . The flamer? No, that would have finished him. And the flyer had passed over. For this small space—this very small space of time—an Ift had won, if the mere preserving of one’s life was a victory.
THIRTEEN
THAT WHICH ABIDES—
“Ayyyyaaaarrrr—”
His cheek scraped gravel as his head moved. Why was he so aware of that small discomfort amidst the haze of pain that wrapped him in? The kalcrok—he had fought a kalcrok, won free of its pit. No, that was wrong; he had faced another kalcrok on a riverbank and had fallen . . .
“Ayyyyaarrrr!”
Against his will his eyes opened. There were smoke wreaths over him, the choking fumes making him cough. That coughing wrenched his body, bringing gasps of pain. Heat came with the smoke; scorching fingers of it reaching him. Water . . . there was water . . .
Naill began to crawl until the one hand he could use plunged into that water. Then, without knowing just how, he rolled into the stream, floundering, his head under so that he choked again.
“Ayyar!”
Something pulled at him. Naill tried to fight away from that clutch, which was torture as it tightened on his arm.
“No!” He thought he shrieked that protest.
Water. . . . Naill was in the water, but his head was above it, resting on a support that moved, spun, pulled him with it first in one direction and then another. But the haze had cleared some from his head; he was able to look about him with a measure of comprehension.
His injured arm lay along a water-worn log; his right one dangled across it into the water on the other side so that his head and shoulders were above the surface of the river. And when with infinite labor he was able to turn his head, he saw he was not alone. Green-skinned face, the eyes very large, and bright, pointed ears above a hairless head.
“Ayyar?” She made of his name a question. But as yet Naill could not answer; he could only lie quiet, letting her will and the river’s current decide his future. That somehow he had found Ashla, that they were in the river—that Naill knew. The rest did not matter now.
There were other creatures in that waterway. A dripping head arose beside Ashla’s for a space; a clawed paw strove to cling equal with her hands. Then both vanished again without Naill’s really knowing what manner of animal had striven to share their very frail hold on the future.
“Ayyar—push!” Her voice roused him again.
Smoke—or dusk? The river was dim. Before them loomed a land tongue sprouting rocks and tangles of brush. On that were beached other fugitives above the water. Some still squatted above the waterline, others moved inland. The bottom rose abruptly under Naill, and his knees scraped on that undersurface, jarring his arm so that he cried out.
They crawled up among those other refugees from the fire. There were many rocks here arching high, and they squeezed into a pocket between two such. Naill collapsed; only the boulder backing his shoulders held him up.
“Your arm—” Ashla bent over him. “Let me see.”
Red hot agony was a lance reaching up into his shoulder, down into his chest. He tried to evade that torture, but her body was braced against his, her two hands cupping his chin, holding his head steady as she spoke slowly, striving to gain and hold his attention, to reach his thinking mind.
“The bone is broken. I shall try to set it. Brace yourself so—and so. . . .”
Her hands were on him, shifting him a little, his right hand put against a rock, palm flat. Dimly Naill understood, tried to do as she wanted. Then—pain to which what he had earlier felt was nothing at all! He swirled away wrapped in that pain, losing the rocks, the stable earth under him—everything!