Monsters and Magicians (8 page)

"That man-became-lion," beamed the panther-sized feline, "thinks entirely too much about keeping its belly overfilled. He should know, as long as he's lived here in Tiro-na-N'Og, that no creature—from the greatest to the least—ever truly hungers for long here. Food abounds and all are provided their needs. Think, have you seen any emaciated creatures here?"

"No." Fitz unconsciously and unnecessarily shook his head. "Every beast I've seen or killed or butchered or eaten was sleek and well-fleshed."

"Just so," said the grey cat. "The lion needs only to apply himself to his hunting . . . unless he can delude another into doing his hunting for him, of course."

"All right," agreed Fitz, feeling like a taken mark, "I'll shove off in the morning: east, I guess. I'll send

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Cool Blue to track down Sir Gautier and bring him back here, then leave signs they can follow to catch up to me. Til head along that glen just north of here; as I recall, it runs roughly east-west."

"Be you cautious," admonished the cat, "for many and great dangers lie ahead along your path to the Dagda. I am forbidden to myself accompany you, as I have previously told you, else I would, old friend. It were better that you go not alone, but travel with at least one other; even the blue lion were better than none at all. So hurry slowly, take no unnecessary risks, leave clear and unmistakable signs for those to follow and allow them time to catch up to you. You mean more to this world than you presently could comprehend.

"Now, sleep."

.

return beaming of "his" body. "But if you do, become a deer, there are more than enough shrubs over there to feed another."

"I am rather going to become a cat and eat a deer," "said" the other. "What about you?"

"Sister-mine," beamed Fitz's body, "do as you wish, indulge yourself, for we two must return soon enough from this lovely place. I think 111 become a young bull and trot over to visit with the heifers of yonder herd."

"You would!" came the response. "Just for that, I should become a lioness and make my meal of young bull flesh, this day . . . but I won't. But before you change, watch me make my kill. . . please?"

"Of course I will, sister-mine. Then I will be able to use some of that kill in forming my young bull."

A few rods away, a slender but well-formed body rose up into the air, moved forward at some speed and then sank, as lightly as a falling feather, into the depths of the thicket around which the cervines browsed. To the mind of Fitz, the sun-browned body appeared to be that of a girl in her mid-teens, as totally devoid of clothing as the masculine body he just now inhabited. Like "his" body, the female's was possessed of reddish-blonde hair, almond-shaped blue-green eyes separated by the bridge of a straight, slender nose. Her face of course lacked the curly, feir beard that his bore, but both owned lull lips that smiled often to show the white teeth. Fitz guessed her height at between five feet and five feet four, her weight at a hundred pounds, tops. Her nipples were the same red-pink as her lips and the breasts, though smallish, stood up proudly. Though her hands and

feet were on the small side, they were proportionate to her body which, at the distance from which "his" body's eyes had viewed it, had seemed almost hairless, apparently hirsute adornments appearing only at armpits and crotch. The fine bones had all looked to be properly sheathed in flat muscles.

While the cervines browsed on, unsuspectingly, the eyes of the body within which Fitz was visiting continued to watch the base of the thicket, knowing what to expect to see.

Then, with the suddenness of a lightning-bolt, a yellow-and-black, hook-clawed streak launched itself from out the dense dimness of the thicket, landing squarely on the back of a plump doe. One taloned paw hooked under the chin of the frantically plunging deer and drew the head up and back so far and at such angle that the spine was compelled to snap . . . as it quickly did. As the dying doe sank beneath her deadly rider, the rest of the deer scattered at flank speed, making no single offer to fight, as was their natural way unless defending fawns or cornered by predators of any kind.

The cat speeded the death of the kicking, twitching cervine by using strong jaws and sharp fangs to tear out the throat, the torrents of deer blood from the veins and arteries drenching her yellow-gold, black-spotted hide, dripping from her stiff whiskers.

To his own big-boned, hundred-sixty-pound body mass, Seos began to gather and add a vast assortment of natural materials—animal (from the new-slain doe), vegetable (from the plants and trees and grasses all about) and mineral (from the rock-studded soil and that soil itself). Adapting, restructuring and shaping

the constituents of all these in the manner first taught by the Elder Ones hundreds of generations before to the first hybrids, the blond young man slowly became transformed into a large wild ox—a bovine that later, much later, generations of humans would call aurochs or bos taurus primigenius.

The final creation was, to Fitz, impressive in the extreme. In this dream as in previous ones of similar nature, he was not only participant but observer, and so he could view the formed beast as from a close distance even while he realized that he along with his host-body were actually a part of the beast.

Its color was so dark a brown as to look almost black, which caused the two-inch-wide white stripe down the length of its spine to stand out in startling contrast. The long, thick horns were a yellowish-white, save at the sharp-pointed tips where they were shiny black. Under the glossy hide, the creature was a mass of thick bones, steely sinew and rolling muscles, a good six feet in height at the withers, with the big head carried even higher, the cud-chewing mouth and wide nostrils edged with off-white.

Within that huge, weighty, very powerful and vital body, Fitz noted how much concentration was required on the part of his host, Seos, to maintain his creation in its present shape and to prevent his own mind from becoming submerged in the simpler mind of the beast. Fitz, from his vantage point, could understand how such a thing was done but discovered that his own, human mind owned no words or even speakable concepts to explain it.

Then the young aurochs bull set out across the

rolling plain at a slow trot, leaving the "leopard" to her bloody feast just inside the confines of the thicket, admonishing him telepathically, "Have your fun with those heifers and cows, brother-mine, but be careful, too; big as you now are, you're still not as big as some of the king-bulls I've seen here and there. There still are but few enough of us and I fear that our sire would be most wroth were I to arrive back upon our island with only your well-horned body."

In great good spirits, Seos replied, "You be careful too, my sister-mate. That form you now inhabit is such as to set any male leopard to full arousal, and I think our sire might be equally wroth were you to throw before him a litter of furry, fanged and clawed grand-get. Hahahaha."

Despite the flippancies of the exchanges, Fitz knew that there was real and abiding love between the sister and brother, who also were sexual mates, in the ages-old tradition of their hybrid race, and both love and awesome respect for their sire, Keronnos, ruler of their small group of Elder Ones-human hybrids, resident on the rocky but verdant island in the midst of the sea.

The mind of Seos was as an open book to Fitz, and the man-bull was completely oblivious to the presence or delvings of the "visitor" within him. In the memories of Seos, Fitz could see that island—soaring peaks flung high above broad, long plains, little deep-green glens between hills, large and smaller streams of crystal-clear water flowing from the montane springs to cascade down rocks and race down hillsides and flow upon the plains and feed the lakes and ponds before finding ways to the purple sea—was able to

know that, before Keronnos and his kin had come upon and settled it, there had never been humans or even primates thereon. Even now, after the passage of hundred of winters, there were few on the large island—though only a bit over twenty miles in average width, the island's length was more than eight times that distance—for, though the hybrids lived very long as compared to pure-strain humans, their birthrates were very low.

In hopes of partially rectifying these problems, Keronnos and all of the others had taken to seeking out among the smaller clans and tribes of humans in the lands and islands scattered around and about the sea, using their inborn mental talents to try to scry out supposedly-pure humans and find those who might own within them enough of hybrid descent and undeveloped but developable talents to make decent breeding-stock. Those chosen had been taken up and borne back to the island, set down upon it and given all that was needful for them to lead happy, healthy and comfortable lives—hunting, fishing, gathering wild plants, breeding kine and sowing crops in the rich, volcanic soil of the island—while the hybrids got children upon them or from them, guided them into breeding among themselves in ways that would concentrate and enhance their own heritage of talents, and undertook the awakenings and training and discipline of the ever-more-talented young.

Even so, people of any strain still numbered few upon the island and the hybrids still flew out over the surrounding lands and islands in search of promising humans for the carefully controlled breedings they had undertaken.

But this day, this trip to this land, Fitz realized, was not such a search-mission; it was rather in the nature of a romp for the sibling mates, Seos and Ehra, a vacation from the tight strictures of their sire and the other teachers of the young. For, although mature enough for most purely human pursuits, even for breeding, as hybrids their mental and emotional maturity lagged so far behind their bodies' that, in effect, they were only over-grown children. Not only did they naturally embody all the faults and failings of human children of similar mental and emotional development, they could add to them superhuman abilities—and, as their sire and other mentors knew only too well, this combination could, without discipline, sometimes produce devastating if not deadly results. Such unsupervised jaunts into distant lands were thus rare and precious to the hybrid young.

Seos made a good, believable bull, for it was far from his first inhabitance of a bovine body. Where not sown with grain and other crops, the plains of the island gave graze to herds of cattle which, although somewhat smaller, less rangy and much less ferocious, were still obviously the near kindred of the huge, fierce wild oxen that still roamed many of the lands surrounding the sea. Therefore Seos had been able to observe, move among and model the cattle almost since his birth.

Fitz could see in the mind and memories of Seos that there were other beasts and birds he enjoyed— sometimes he became a huge eagle or a monstrous, white swan, sometimes a fierce mountain ram, once a wolf, again, a bear or a boar or a desert lion. On occasion, he and one of his brothers had become

long, sleek, black-and-white porpoises and swum through the sea off the island, chasing schools of plump fishes into the waiting nets of human fishers from one of the island communities.

But of them all, among all creatures he had been, Seos still most preferred being that which he now was—three quarters of a ton of big bones, muscles, sinews, speed, ferocity and such horn-tipped strength that not even the hungriest Hon, the biggest bear would dare to attack him. Indeed, of all the predators in nearby lands, the mature auroch's in his prime and uninjured seldom fell to any save the increasingly rare long-tooth cats, pack-hunters such as wolves or hyenas or humans, or the almost-extinct dragons. But a herd of aurochs could usually stand off and drive away even these.

The big ox that was Seos-Fitz moved slowly, sampling a few mouthfuls of the herbiage along his way, tail swishing and skin twitching against the voracious, blood-hungry flies that swarmed about him. Along with the mind of his unsuspecting host, Fitz too was aware that, for all his impressive looks, the created bull-body was not quite solid, durable, for the parts of the doe not considered easily edible by Ehra in her leopard-body had simply not provided enough building materials of the proper kinds for Seos to use in creating a good, workmanlike construct.

Abruptly, as the bull crested a low-crowned hillock, he could first smell, then see just what he needed. At some time within the last few days, a largish hoofed animal—either a good-sized antelope or a short-necked giraffid, from the appearance of what the killer-predators and scavengers had left of

it—had been slain and mostly devoured in the tiny hollow bisecting two of the grassy knolls. Now all of the flesh and organs were gone, as was most of the hide. All that remained, presently being gnawed at and worried by a brace of jackals, were some of the larger bones, three hooves and a pair of long, pointed horns still attached to the remainder of the skull.

A snort and a few steps of a mock-charge, huge head and black-tipped horns lowered in a businesslike manner, were sufficient to send the jackals scurrying up the opposite slope. Fitz wondered to himself what the matted-haired scavengers thought to watch their feast silently and utterly disappear into nothingness.

At length, everything finally absorbed into the created bovine body, the bull that was Seos and Fitz descended the knoll, trotted across the stained, much-disturbed level surface whereon so much feasting had recently taken place, then set his now more solid bones and muscles to breasting the upward way, the two small jackals scuttling before him, ratty tails tucked between thin shanks. Fitz realized that, had Seos intended to spend more than a few hours in the creation, he would have sought around and about, located more carnal refuse and picked over kills, and used them to give full size, weight and solidity to the bull, but this was but a romp, an outing, for he and Ehra must fly back to the island soon enough.

The bull, unlike Seos, did not see colors, only shades of grey, and his vision was clear only within a relatively short distance. But his olfactory sense was exceptionally keen, as too was his hearing; even from this far away his ears could detect the snarls of the Ehra-leopard, but even had the Seos part of the