Monsters and Magicians (2 page)

"Most of the smaller, furry animals, look fairly much like the small furry beasts anywhere else. But then there's the flying rabbits. The grown ones are about the size of a prairie jack-rabbit, though they look to have much thicker bodies at first glance, when you see them moving about on the ground. It's not until they get spooked and jump that you see that what you thought was a thick body is actually folds of furred skin that stretches from the forelegs to the hind legs and allows them to glide when extended, so that they can cover distances that would be incredible if not flatly impossible for rabbits back where I came from.

"There's also some kind of horned animal that I've

only seen from a distance with the binoculars—and that only once, so there must not be too many of them or they are just rare in this area, one or the other. They're as big as the ponies or bigger, look kind of antelopish and all have a pair of long, curving, pointed horns with raised ridges around the shafts of them. The herd I saw wasn't at all large, smaller than some of the pony herds, in fact; but if there's any prey animal out here that could take on a Teeth-and-Legs with a chance of winning, I'd put my money on those great big antelopes or whatever, with their size and their horns.

"Something lives in the bigger lake over to the east that's big enough to take paddling birds the size of a duck; I saw it happen, twice, when I was camped beside that lake once. It may be just a largish fish, like a muskellunge or a pike, but I don't know, I never saw anything but ripples and the birds being pulled underwater. Nonetheless—he chuckled aloud at the memory—I stopped swimming in that particular lake.

"I know damned good and well there're other predators—large and small—around out here. I've found several shed snakeskins and seen feline paw-prints of a number of sizes on the muddy banks of the ponds and lakes; but the only snake I have actually seen was in process of being eaten by a small eagle perched atop a big thornbrush. Apparently, the raptors and the Teeth-and-Legs are the only real predators out here that hunt by day—them and the terrestrial lizards, none of which are all that big."

Atop another rise of ground, the man paused as usual and swept his immediate surroundings on all

sides carefully with his eyes before using the big binoculars. Some mile ahead, a herd of ponies had converged along the nearer fringes of a reedy pond to drink and graze on the short, tender red-green grasses that grew there and in the hills beyond, but not out on the more arid plain.

Fitz recognized the herd stallion, a big one for his weedy breed—between fourteen and fifteen hands. The equine was missing part of his near-side ear, and the cheek below that eye bore three long furrows of scar tissue, quite dissimilar to his other battle scars. Fitz had often wondered at the origin of the facial scars in times past while roaming the plains among the herds. Now he thought he knew: the big stallion had at some time faced and fought a Teeth-and-Legs and survived the encounter. One tough pony!

Unslinging his two-quart waterbag, Fitz drank to the courageous pony stallion in the bottled mineral water which, its provenance not withstanding, still harbored an unpleasant, vaguely-chemical undertaste and aftertaste as compared to the fresh waters of this place. Disgusted, he upended both of the waterbags and poured the otherworldly liquid out onto the sandy soil at his feet; he could refill them shortly when he reached the pond ahead, with water, real water.

In the deep-cut, steep-sided gully that dropped away from the rise on which he sat his idling machine, lizards of a plethora of sizes and shapes and many different iridescent colors scuttled among the rounded pebbles of the seasonal stream bed seeking insects and worms. They and the scattering of small birds obviously set to the same mission all ignored

him and his noisy transportation, not considering him a threat.

He had cased his binoculars and was just about to proceed when, with the speed of insanity, everything happened at once. With a wild blur of fluttering wings and squawks of alarm, all the birds in the dry stream bed took flight, the lizards abruptly flicked out of sight, and suddenly there was one of the huge, pithecoid Teeth-and-Legs standing on the dry, round pebbles, its fierce, feral gaze locked upon him and its orangy teeth and fangs displayed in an utterly unhu-morous grin. With a howl, the thing raised its over-long arms and ran two steps, then leaped upward.

Sitting there, Fitz was appalled to see a pair of big, black-nailed hands appear on the verge of the cut; he gauged the depth of the gully at least twenty feet and not even something on the order of this outrageous predator should have been able to leap so high straight up . . . but it clearly had done just that. He could hear the feet clawing the clay wall for support and the debris of that frenetic clawing cascading down to rattle among the pebbles below.

Realizing that there was no time to unship either the double rifle or the carbine and knowing from the first encounter the fatal folly of trying to outrun one of the things on his bike, Fitz instead drew his big magnum revolver, levelling the long barrel just as the gigantic, toothy head came into sight above the rim of the cut. He rapid-fired, double-action, at the horrible head. On impact of the weighty slugs, the hairy skull above the beast's eyes dissolved into winking-white bone splinters, grey-pink globs of brain and a spray of bright-red blood, the remainder of the

head tilting far, far back under the impacts of the bullets. His fifth and final shot missed as the dying creature's grip slackened and the body tumbled back down the side of the cut to sprawl among the pebbles and send little lizards streaking in every direction.

Although the visible body's only movements were twitching muscle-spasms, Fitz still felt the pressing need to reload. He was able to open the revolver and eject the brass all right, but found himself fumbling out a speed-loader, dropping it, and having to use the second one to recharge his handgun. Replacing the pistol loosely in its holster, he unslung the Holland and Holland, and it was as well he did.

Preceded by a roaring howl that echoed back from the walls of the cut, another of the Teeth-and-Legs, this one if anything larger than the dead one, issued from somewhere to bounce onto the blood-flecked pebbles, race along the bed to a lower stretch of bank and mount to the same level as the man, only some score of yards distant . . . and rapidly closing, teeth flashing and long fingers hooked for clawing.

Fitz stood up, one foot still on either side of the cycle, brought the rifle to his shoulder—some part of his roiling mind surprised at how the very heavy weapon seemed now almost weightless—sighted on the hair-covered chest of the nearing monster, and squeezed off the load in the right barrel.

Not really braced as he should have been before firing a piece with such brutal recoil, it was all that he could do to stay on his feet at all, so he did not witness the moment of impact of outsized bullet with oversized killer-beast. But when he looked down the barrels again it was to see the Teeth-and-Legs on its

back on the ground—though still thrashing, roaring and trying repeatedly to arise.

After briefly considering putting the left barrel's load into the downed creature, too, he decided that the rifle's butt had done him enough injury for one day, slung it, and instead drew his revolver, sending three of the 240-grain, soft-point .44 bullets into the beast's head. Not until he clearly heard the death-rattle did he reload and holster the revolver, reload the rifle, pick up the dropped speed-loader, then head for the distant hills at full throttle, lest more of the monsters should suddenly make an appearance.

As he neared the pond he swung well clear of the ponies, rounded a smallish body of water to the site of the bubbling spring that fed it, and refilled his two waterbags, after first rinsing them of the remaining residue of that other-worldly water. A glance into a blue sky flecked with wisps of lacy white clouds showed him that the sun was barely past its meridian and so, knowing that he had plenty of time to get back up to the cave where he had left his companions, he indulged himself in stripping and wading out to a deeper section of the icy-cold pond to swim and lave off the sweat. For he knew that the pony herd would give him adequate warning of the approach of Teeth-and-Legs or any other dangerous beasts.

When finally he waded out of the frigid, refreshing water to air-dry himself beneath the patchy shade of some palms and cycads, the ponies were still there on the other side of the pond, the young ones frisking about while their elders gorged on the short, tender grasses. Not intending to halt again until he

had reached his destination, Fitz took advantage of the opportunity to eat a brace of tomato-and-lettuce sandwiches, washing them down with a cup of the cold, clear water from the spring.

Shortly he was setting his machine to the slope of the first hill, threading his way between the trees and thick shrubs up a gradual incline toward the point at which the incline abruptly became more preciptious. But luck was with him, for where the slope steepened and the underbrush thickened, he chanced across the path that he and the Norman knight, Sir Gautier, had hacked through it when they had manhandled the motorcycle down from the higher hills two or three days previously. Staying to this path made the ascent faster and much easier than had been his first climbing of the hill; it meant that he could ride, though in low gear, rather than push the bike while hacking a way through the dense brush with his machete.

Although he remembered, knew just what to expect at the top, he still felt surprise when the bushy, natural wooded and steep slope abruptly became level, grassy, parklike land with a vast assortment of hardwood and fruit trees growing in so uncrowded a manner as to appear unnatural. As before seen, both in ascent and descent, the expanse was virtually alive with birds and game of all descriptions.

On his last ascent he had seen two deer, spotted, adult deer, one of them bearing an impressive rack of palmate antlers. They were nowhere in sight this time, but a group of four smaller and unspotted cervines of some sort were visible, browsing some yards off to his left as he came up into the level

ground and headed toward the hill that loomed beyond it. These deer—if that is what they truly were—were much smaller, the biggest no more, he estimated, than a bit over two feet at the withers antl with antlers about the size and shape of wooden slingshots. What he could see of them as they slowly moved around under the thiek-boled trees showed bodies all of a solid reddish-brown color and rear legs looking to be a bit longer than forelegs.

The big persimmon tree was not, this time, being raided by an opossum and birds, but rather by six or eight big, tailless, dog-faced monkeys or apes of some sort—all a yellow-brown on the back and sides, shading to a yellowish-white on the chest and belly. Fascinated, Fitz halted and idled the bike fairly close to the spreading tree, hoping to get a better look at these, the first primates—unless one considered the savage Teeth-and-Legs to be of that order—he had seen in this world.

One of the larger of the beasts ran out along a limb high above, until it began to sag under his weight— Fitz estimated that the big one weighed in the neighborhood of forty to forty-five pounds—keeping a secure grip on his elevated avenue with both his hands and hand-shaped feet. Halting, he looked down at the upward-looking man, showed a mouthful of good-sized teeth, then barked.

Fitz started at the completely unexpected noise. The ape had the exact sound and timbre and pitch of an Eskimo Spitz once owned by a friend of Fitz. He still was laughing at himself when the big beast cupped one hand behind him, defecated into it, brought the hand up long enough to regard and sniff at its con-

tents, then hurled said contents down at the unwanted observer.

The foetid mess missed . . . barely, and Fitz decided to move on. Even over the noise of his engine, he could hear the raucous, triumphal barks of the most inhospitable apes in the persimmon tree.

Following the blazes he had hacked into tree-trunks when he and Sir Gautier de Montjoie had crossed on the way back down to the Pony Plain, he once more passed close to the hollow full of blackberry bushes. Repeated shakings of the tops of these showed clearly that some thing or things fed within the depths of the prickly thicket, but he could not see it—possum, raccoons, that long-legged and skinny bear or whatever.

Remembering that the ascent of the knife-sharp ridge was far too steep for the engine of the loaded bike, he dismounted and pushed it to the narrow summit, being a bit amazed that the near exhaustion he recalled from the last time he had had to do it alone failed to this time materialize.

"Not bad for a man over a half-century old," he thought. "This roughing it in the boondocks Tve been doing in recent weeks must be good for me. I don't think Tve felt this good, this fit since ... oh, hell, since I was in my twenties, anyway."

In the grassy glen beyond the ridge he stopped, dismounted and sprawled on the pebbly bank of the little, fast-flowing rill to drink of its icy water, then gathered a handful of round stones before he arose and uncased the drilling, loading its two smooth-bore barrels with birdshot and its rifled barrel with a hollow-poined .22-caliber magnum. The two shot-

loads garnered him as many plump pheasants and a lucky shot from the rifle barrel dropped a peculiar, hornless cervine or antelope—he could not be certain which the creature, little larger than a large hare and equipped with upper cuspids that projected well below the lower jaw, really was, but it was well fleshed and, if Sir Gautier did not immediately claim it, it would make a nice tidbit for Cool Blue.

After very roughly field-dressing his mixed bag, Fitz added them to the load of the motorcycle and headed up the next hill, aware that before he reached the rendezvous at the small, hillside rock-overhang, he would perforce be once again afoot and pushing the conveyance due to the steepness of the rocky ascent.

But when arrive at the rendezvous he finally did, it was to find himself completely alone, neither the 12th-century Norman knight nor the baby-blue lion being anywhere in sight and the ashes in the firepit being dead-cold and dampish. Such supplies and equipment as he had left far back in the shallow cave appeared just as he had placed them prior to his departure, only a canteen being missing.