THE YNGLING AND THE CIRCLE OF POWER by John Dalmas

To stare dumbfounded. It looked like a—sort of cross

297

298

between man and dog, with coarse green-gray fur. It would, he thought, weigh about four tradestone—roughly twelve kilos. The arrow had entered its chest and thrust out its back.

It was, of course, a monkey, a macaque. They’d lived in those hills from ancient times, and increased with the return of extensive forest, despite a difficult climate. With the worsening winters of recent decades, they’d decreased again, the survivors tending to have the thick­est fur and the greatest mass-to-surface ratio.

Kneeling, he examined it more closely. It had ears much like a man, and hands, and a gnome-like face, but its feet had thumbs. He wasn’t sure if he’d killed some kind of person or not. It wore no garment though, or belt or anything else, so he decided it wasn’t. He hobbled his horse, and within five or six minutes had gutted, skinned, and spitted the creature and constructed and lit a fire.

Even so, he didn’t watch it roast. Without the fur, it looked more human than ever, though the proportions were wrong—the legs were as much like a dog’s as a man’s, and the forearms were too long for the upper arms. The genitals, on the other hand, were almost min­iatures of his own.

At the first bite he nearly got sick, but controlled it. To find the meat tough and a little dry, but sweet withal. He thought wryly that now he knew what a cannibal knew—how the flesh of a man tasted.

As he ate, he thought about his situation. He had no idea where Nils might be, or how to find him. And sum­mer wouldn’t last forever. Nor did he care to winter alone in an unknown land, although if he had to … Perhaps he should turn back westward to the land of the Buriat and winter there. He didn’t doubt that Achikh would take him in. As for Baver—Hans shook his head. He’d seen the star man taken away, and there’d been nothing he could do for him.

He didn’t stop eating till one thighbone was bare. The sun was only midmorning high, but his belly was stuffed,

299

so he lay down in a gap, to nap where the sun had warmed the ground.

His dream was confused and ugly, even frightening. He seemed to waken from his nap to see a creature like the one he’d eaten, but it was as big as Nils, carried a sword, and wore armor. “You have eaten my child,” it said. “Now you will have to live with my wife and me, be our son and tend our cattle.”

“Where do you live?” Hans asked.

“Up there.” The creature pointed into the treetops. Then, even bigger than it had been, it grasped Hans by the scruff as if he were a cat, and began to climb. He wanted to struggle, but it seemed hopeless. The crea­ture’s knife was within his reach, and he considered drawing and striking with it. But clearly it was a human of some hairy sort, and he had killed its child. It seemed to him he owed it something. If it wanted him to herd its cattle, he’d just have to do it.

When they reached the treetops, a skyboat awaited them, with steps. A hairy woman stood in the door. “Is this the one that did it?’ she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she took Hans from the hairy man, and grip­ping him with both hands, began to roar, shaking him. She shook him hard and long, her roar seeming too great to come from any human throat. Terror swelled. Then she dropped him.

It seemed he fell and fell, so frightened that the scream stuck in his throat. When he landed, his eyes flew open, dispelling the dream. There had been no impact, and for a moment its absence changed terror to surprise, but he continued to shake, as if those great hairy hands still held him like a dice box. And the roaring continued, like the sound of an avalanche. The fist of fear gripped him hard again, for it seemed the world itself must break apart with such shaking. Yet when he looked upward, the treetops, which should have been lashing back and forth, stood quiet against the midday sky. With that, his terror faded to a large extent. Something like this had

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *