A Different Flesh (33 page)

Quick had expected something of the sort.
You not work noise-stick
, he signed. To make sure he was not lying, he had surreptitiously removed the flints from his guns while the females were carrying on. He did not resist when Martin took the pistol away from him.

The sim knew what the trigger was for, but only a click rewarded him when he pulled it. He tried the rifle, with the same result. Growling in frustration, he shoved them back at Quick and stalked away. The trapper made sure the sim was not looking before he restored the flints to their places.

The next morning, most of the hunting party set out early, as they usually did. Martin hung back. He walked up and down examining the windbreak, plainly trying to decide whether it was time to turn it into firewood.

Caesar and two members of his clique also stayed behind. As far as Quick could see, they were not doing anything in particular. He practiced his walking, limping along leaning his right side on his rifle and carrying his pistol in his left. The morning was humid, so his leg hurt more than usual.

When Martin turned away from the windbreak and spotted the other males still in the clearing, he shouted angrily at them.
Go! Hunt!
he signed, his gestures quick and peremptory. He was still wearing the makeshift belt Quick had made for him from a bootlace. He yanked free a dagger, waved it in the air.

Quick expected Caesar and his followers to go meekly on their way, as they always had before. They did not. Maybe they had planned it among themselves, maybe they simply noticed they were three to Martin's one. They held their ground and yelled back.

Instantly pandemonium filled the clearing. Several females ran to Martin and added their yells to his. Almost as many, though, backed Caesar and his two comrades. Quick stood off to one side and wished his hands were free so he could cover his ears. Sal, he thought, would have favored Martin, but she was already off in the woods.

The two groups of sims, still shrieking, drew closer to each other. Caesar, perhaps given courage by the males at his back, did not shrink as Martin approached. Instead he advanced to confront Martin, windmilling his arms and shouting as loudly as his opponent. The encounter was at a level too basic for either of them to bother with signs; their innate responses were what counted now.

All the same, the quarrel might have ended peaceably, or with no more than pushes and shoves. Most incidents among sims did. But when Martin reached out to push Caesar away, he still had the sharp steel dagger in his fist. It scored a dripping line down the other sim's chest.

Caesar shrieked again, a cry full of pain, surprise, and fury. Martin might have finished him at that moment, but instead stared for an instant, as much taken aback as his foe, at the blood running through Caesar's hair. An instant was all Martin got. Fast as a striking snake, Caesar bent down, grabbed a branch, and slammed it into the dominant male's side. Then he sprang for Martin. They fell together, biting and gouging and kicking.

Henry Quick had not thought the din could get louder. He found he was wrong. The sims gathered in a tight knot around the two battling males. They were all screaming at the top of their lungs, and beginning to struggle with one another.

One of Caesar's supporting males also had a knife. He shoved a female aside, almost pitching her into the fire, and stooped over the two main combatants. He slashed at one of them, presumably Martin. An anguished bellow arose, loud enough to be heard through the chaos all around.

Quick limped forward. That Martin had to fight for his life was one thing, that he should be beset by two at once something else again. The male was raising an arm to bring down the dagger again. The trapper shifted his weight to his left foot; that leg would have to bear most of it for a moment. He used the stock of his rifle to knock the knife out of the sim's hand, then hit him in the temple with it.

That second blow might have felled a man, but sims had heavier skulls and thicker muscles over them. The male blinked, shook his head, spat blood. He grabbed Quick by the shoulders and threw him to the ground. A burly lumberjack might have matched it, but the sim was half a foot shorter than Quick.

The trapper landed heavily; the rifle came out of his hand and bounced away. Pain flared in his ribs and in his bad leg. That's what you get for sticking your nose in, he thought blurrily. But the male was not done with him. The sim seized his rifle, lifted it high, and stamped toward him, plainly intending to beat him to death.

Quick still held on to his pistol. He cocked it with desperate haste and fired. He aimed for the sim's chest. The ball took the male in the belly instead.

The noise of the shot shocked the sims into momentary silence. Nothing else, perhaps, could have distracted them so effectively from their own quarrels. Leaning up on one elbow, Quick saw one of the two males around whom the bigger squabble had revolved also sitting up, pushing away the inert body of his foe. Martin had won the fight; blood was still flowing from a score of Caesar's wounds. Yet by the way he moved, the victor was also badly hurt.

Quick spared him hardly a glance, though. The trapper's horrified attention—and that of all the sims in the clearing—was drawn to the male he had shot. Quick had heard tales of the agony of gutshot men. Now he saw it firsthand.

The sim rolled and thrashed, hands clutched to the hole above and to one side of its navel. Blood trickled between its fingers. Soon more came from its anus. When it emptied its bladder a moment later, that discharge too was red. The sim shrieked and wailed.

Several females came running from the woods; the gunshot drew those who had not heard the sound of the fight. Sal was the last of them; her bulging belly made her move slowly. Quick was glad to see her, and even gladder she had not been in the clearing before.

He struggled to his feet. His right leg groaned but did not scream; he had not rebroken it. He picked up his rifle and hobbled over toward Martin. When Sal came up to help him as she had so many times before, he gratefully let her bear some of his weight. The other sims, their eyes still on the awful spectacle of the male he had shot, stepped out of his way. None of them signed to him. None of them seemed to want to have anything to do with him.

Pain twisted Martin's face. His hairy hide was scraped away in a dozen places to show raw, bleeding flesh. Caesar had bitten half of one ear away. Martin was holding his ribs with one hand, and had the other at the back of his left heel.

When the trapper saw that, and saw how the sim's left calf was bunched but his foot limp, he had a sinking feeling that made him forget his bruises. Against all odds, he had recovered from his own crippling injury, at least enough to get about. Martin never would, not when he was hamstrung.

Martin took his hands from his wounds, signed
Fix leg
? His eyes were full of desperate appeal. They held Quick's.

Seeing how Martin's thoughts paralleled his own only made Henry Quick feel worse. Behind the trapper, the male he had shot screamed on, unceasing and dreadful.
Not fix
, Quick had to sign.

Sal stared at him in amazement.
Fix
, she signed firmly.
Use sticks. Sticks fix your leg, sticks fix his leg
.

Not fix
, the trapper repeated miserably.
His leg not hurt same way
. How could he explain that the splints only held the pieces of his shattered leg together while the bone healed, but that you could splint a cut tendon from now till doomsday and it would never mend? He could not, not with the limited hand-talk Sal knew.

And if he could, she would not have believed him.
Sticks
, she signed, and stepped away from him to get a couple.

At least she was doing something constructive. The rest of the sims in the clearing wandered about dazed, like men and women who had been through a train wreck. Quick could see why. In the space of a few minutes, the band had suffered disaster. Two prime males were dead (even if one might go on making horrid noises for hours). The dominant male was at best crippled; at worst, if his wounds went bad, he would join Caesar and his follower. The hunting party, never more than a dozen strong to begin with, would take years to recover.

Worse, Quick knew the catastrophe would not have happened in the same way had he not become part of the band. The fight between Martin and Caesar would not have turned savage had Martin not been holding the sharp steel knife, the tool he'd got from the trapper: it would have remained one of the shove-and-bluff contests typical among sims. Maybe Caesar would have backed down, maybe Martin. No one would have been much hurt either way.

The subhumans lacked a good part of the trapper's reasoning ability. They seemed to have reached the same conclusions he had, though, whatever the means they used to get there. All through the winter, they had treated Quick like one of them. Now they drew apart from him. He saw at once he was no longer one of the band.

Being rejected by mere sims should not have hurt Quick. It did. The trapper's fate had been too intimately tied with theirs for too long for him to be indifferent to their feelings about him.

That was especially true in one case. Quick's gaze went to Sal, who was still busy putting a splint on Martin's leg.
Better
? she signed when she was through.

Martin's breath hissed through clenched teeth. He shrugged, as if he did not want to say no but hurt too much to say yes. Quick knew he was not going to get better, with or without the splint.

Sal got to her feet awkwardly. She patted her swollen belly in annoyance, almost in reproach. Most of her attention, though, remained on Martin. At last she looked away. Her eyes met the trapper's. She looked at him, at the male he had shot (who was still ululating piteously), at Martin, at Caesar (whose skin was pierced in so many places it would have been worthless as a pelt). When she glanced Quick's way again, it was with no more warmth than if she had been looking at a stone. That told him the last thing he needed to know.

If the sims had decided to tear him to pieces, he could not have stopped them. They ignored him instead. Perhaps they thought ostracism a worse punishment. In their small bands, with each member knowing all the others so intimately, that made some sense. Quick was never sure. Living like a sim, he found at last, could not make him think like a sim.

He reloaded his pistol, put his powderhorn, ammunition pouch (which also held flint and steel), a knife, and a hatchet on his belt. Leaning on his rifle, he took a couple of limping steps toward the edge of the clearing, then turned back. No matter what the band did to him, he could not stand having the wounded sim's shrieks pursuing him through the woods. He aimed carefully, shot the male in the head.

He reloaded again, limped away. The sims still did not try to stop him. He looked back at Sal a last time, and at the unborn child he would never see now, the child that would live out its life with its mother's band.

Maybe that, at least, was for the best, he told himself, and not just because of the social strictures in the Commonwealths against such babies. In the world of humans, a child half sim would always be at a disadvantage, slower and stupider than its fellows. But in the world of sims, a half-human child might prove something of a prodigy, and earn a place in the band higher than any it could look for east of the mountains.

He did not know that was so. He could only hope. The woods closed in behind him, hiding the clearing from sight.

The tavern was hot and noisy. Henry Quick knocked back a whiskey with reverent pleasure. He was wearing clothes he had left behind before he set out on his last trapping run. He had been in civilization a month, and regained some of the weight he'd dropped in his slow, painful journey east and south. All the same, his tunic and the breeches that should have been tight flopped on him as though meant for a larger man.

“Have another,” James Cartwright urged. The fur dealer had been generous with Quick, giving him a room in his own house and a place at his table. Quick knew he had an ulterior motive. He did not mind. Even Martin had had an ulterior motive.

The trapper caught a barmaid's eye, held up his empty glass. The girl looked bored, but finally nodded and went off for a bottle. She was blonde, smooth-skinned, and pretty. Quick could easily imagine sharing a bed with her. Caring afterward was something else again.

“Your health,” he said to the fur dealer when he had been resupplied. He drank again, sighed contentedly.

“Now, then, Henry,” Cartwright said, seeing that look of relaxation on the trapper's face, “you really ought to tell me more about the clearing where your cache of furs is. They'd be worth a pretty pile of silver denaires, I dare say.”

“So they would, so they would,” Quick admitted, “but drunk or sober, I have nothing to say to you about them. You can test it if you like; I'll sponge up as much as you care to buy.”

“Worse luck for you, I believe it.” But, laughing, the fur dealer signaled for another round. After it arrived, he turned serious again. “Henry, I just can't fathom why you're being so pigheaded. It's not as if you could hope to get those pelts back for yourself. Moving the way you do, you needed a special miracle to make the trip out once. You can't be thinking of going in again for them.”

“Oh, I can think about it,” Quick said; the urge to get away would never leave him. But whenever he tried to walk, even now, he knew long journeys were really behind him.

“Why, then?” Cartwright persisted.

The liquor had loosened Quick's tongue enough to make him willing to justify himself out loud. “Because of the sims,” he said. “That band deserves to have men leave them alone, instead of flooding in the way they would after they found my trail and took out my furs. Those sims took me in and saved me, and they've had enough grief for it already.”

“They're just sims, Henry,” Cartwright said. He knew the trapper's story, as much of it as Quick had told. No one knew about Sal; no one knew about the child. No one ever would.