Monsters and Magicians (9 page)

bull-mind not known just what the cat was, the animal-mind could identify the sounds for the warnings of a feeding feline, not the coughs and growls of a hunting-stalking-attacking cat. And no mere leopard would have dared to essay killing a bull aurochs anyway.

No, he need fear precious few creatures in most lands. True, the smell of lion had lain heavy about that kill on the remains of which the pair of jackals had been gnawing, but having fed so recently, it was doubtful if any save a very large pride would be hunting again so soon. Long-tooth cats liked hiUier country than this, as too did the most of the land-dragons, while water-dragons never were seen this far from the sea or at least a sizable river, riverine swamp or deep lake. Smaller predators were dangerous to such as Seos now "was" only in numbers and could often be heard or scented from a distance, especially the two-legged packs.

Fitz could see in Seos' memories the two types of "dragons"—the water-dragon was a large crocodile and the land-dragon looked like nothing more than a lizard, but what a lizard it was. Could Seos' memories be believed, the thing must have been as long as the crocodile—between twenty and thirty feet!—and, although not apparently armored, of a lighter and more slender physique and with a long, tapering tail. The thing stood at least four feet at the shoulder, with a toothy, snaky head on three feet of thick, dewlapped neck, and every line of its scaly body spelled speed. Seos also recalled that there had been a related species— though larger—on the island when first the hybrids had settled it, but as the things were an ever-present danger to anything that lived and

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breathed, they had hunted them down and completely wiped the species out there. Pure-strain humans feared and hated the things too, and banded together to exterminate them whenever or wherever they were found, so the monsters were becoming exceedingly rare, rarer even than the long-tooth cats, in lands inhabited by humans or hybrids. Nor did it help their chances of survival that the larger of the monsters had an inborn proclivity to chase down, kill and eat the smaller whenever they could.

The young bull had been moving into the wind, deliberately, so that he was ever downwind of the herd and could scent it before his own scent was available to them. This was the cautious thing to do, for if the king-bull grazed with or close to the herd on this day, he was certain to take rather ferocious exception to a strange, younger contender for the favors of his cows and heifers. And it developed to be as well that he had so done, for closer in to the herd he smelled, not the scent of a mature king-bull, but the unexpected—the reek of two-legs, men. When he was come close enough to actually see the cattle, it was clear that they were some generations from the pure, wild strain. These had obviously been bred smaller, with shorter legs and horns, though still were they closely enough related to their larger, wild progenitors that their scent was the same.

Here and there about the far-flung periphery of the herd stood stripling boys and a few older men, some of them leaning on the shafts of long, stone-tipped spears, chewing on stems of grass and watching that their charges did not graze too far from the

rest of the herd, while keeping a sharp eye out for any possible dangers.

As the Seos-bull came within sight of the herd, so did he himself come within sight of some of the watchers and these, too far away to themselves do anything about him, signalled to those closer with a series of meaningful whistles. To them, the advent of a wild bull was as dangerous and serious a menace as the appearance of a lion or bear or wolf, for the very last thing they wanted, was to have the original size, horn spread and savagery bred back into their carefully nurtured strain of cattle.

Running at full tilt around one end of the herd, an older man—likely about forty, thought the hybrid part of the Seos-creature, with grey in his hair and beard, a profusion of puckered, off-color scars on his hairy limbs and torso, missing an eye and most of an ear moving with a slight but very noticeable limp, of late-middle age for a pure-strain human—took command of the striplings nearby. With a few panted words and gestures he rapidly formed them into a semicircle facing uphill and the strange bull, each of them now with a tall shield on his left arm and his spear presented and menacing. Then he set his troops in motion with a harsh, barked word, advancing on the deadly-dangerous interloper, hopeful of running him off without a fight, but certainly prepared to do whatever it took doing to keep him from their herd.

One of the striplings at the tip of the offensive crescent stopped long enough to take a hide sling from round his neck, load it, whirl it and accurately send a round stone against the near side of the head of the Seos-bull with such force as to bring a bellow

of pain from the bovine creature. Seos knew that he had but two options, then: fight and kill all or most of the herd-guards—for they stood no chance of killing him since he was not real, fully-formed flesh-and-blood, only a clever semblance of a beast—or beat a hasty retreat. He chose the latter course, turning and cantering off in the direction of a stand of forest from which came the good, cool smell of fresh water. A few spears were hurled after him, but the flights of the shafts were short, none of them intended to strike.the flesh of the Seos-bull. The herd-guards leaped and cavorted in an almost-dance of victory, they shouted and shrieked and screamed in their guttural language, anything to relieve the tension and express their patent relief at being spared a combat which, had it been well and truly joined, would surely have resulted in the messy deaths of more than one boy or man and the crippling or injury of others. Full-grown wild aurochs of either sex never died easily, the butchers bill for the hunters was always high, and- not a one of the herd-guards was so young or inexperienced to not be fully aware of the grim facts.

The girl half-reclined atop a high rock that was the point of a narrow peninsula of bank jutting out into the stream. The gathering of edibles was usually good in the streambed and along its banks up here above the falls, but the crystalline water that flowed over and among the rocks was icy-toothed cold, telling of the high-mountain snows that spawned the stream, despite its meandering journey across the sun-dappled high plains. And so, periodically, she

always found it necessary to find a place to sit or lie in the warm sunlight until the feeling was come back into her feet and legs and the skin of them was no longer all ridges and puckers.

She might not have suffered from the cold in the warmer, deeper waters below the falls, but there she would have been in danger from the water-dragons, which toothy, ever-hungry monsters now and again swam up from the sea to sometimes take their bloody toll of bathers—young and old and of both sexes— despite the best efforts of the priest-chief, the regular sacrifices of goats and all the prayers to the gods of their tribe and of this land.

Besides, her revered father often remarked on how much more tender were the greens from upstream, how much tastier were the shelled creatures she expertly plucked from among the rocks, and pleasing her tall, strong, powerful and wise father was of paramount importance to her, for it was through his loins that she and all her siblings were distant descendents of true gods.

The gathering had not been too good, this day— only some dozen of the shelled water-creatures and even them not so large as many a one she had taken hereabouts in times past, though a fair amount of tender sprouts of various greens—but she had lucked onto something that she knew was certain to bring a broad smile to show through her father's thick, sun-yellow beard.

The round, smooth rock was about as large as her two clenched fists together and might have passed for only another, streambed rock, had not a small chip been sometime broken from off one end to show

the white stone within—very fine-grained and about the hue of the fat from a mountain sheep. Her father already owned two axes shod with this incredibly hard and long-wearing stone; he treasured them as he treasured little else, and she knew that he was sure to be inordinately pleased to gain the wherewithal to fashion another.

On impulse, she sat up and looked down into the water at the side of her perch, hoping to see yet another of the rare stones, but the rocks seemed all alike and she ended studying her own reflection in the relatively still pool.

Sighing, she shook her head of thick, black hair. She had always wished that she could have looked more like her father, as did some of her sisters and brothers, and less like her mother—who had been taken in war against a clan of nomads who had tried to seize and hold tribal lands, pushing up with their herds from the southwest, years ago.

All the warriors of the scattered settlements had gathered under the priest-chiefs and had met the invaders on the plain nearest the sea. After a daylong battle, most of the male aliens lay speared or axe-hacked and dead on that plain, with dust settling on their wide-staring brown eyes and their black, oiled, curly beards. Then the priest-chiefs and their still hale warriors had descended on the camp of goat-hair tents, pitilessly slain the old, the infirm and the ugly, then taken the remainder for slaves or concubines or, in the case of the prettiest, more biddable young women, wives.

The girl's sire had taken two attractive sisters and, though one had died in childbirth after a few years,

he still felt well served, for he had by then had three sons and a daughter out of her, while her sister still remained healthy and fecund, throwing another child every couple of years as a woman of any value should. She was just upon the point of arising and descending from the rock back into the knee-deep water to work her way back downstream when she noticed movement in the woods that came almost down to the edge of the stream-bank opposite her and she froze, for wild beasts often came to the stream to drink; she had seen the tracks of their hooves and pads imprinted in sand and mud and atop flat rocks, though seldom the beasts themselves, for most of them moved by night. And she had no slightest desire to meet one of them here and now, armed with only a small cutting-stone and a couple of scraping-stones, especially not one that looked so big as what was on the move through the gloomy shadows under those trees.

The Seos-Fitz-bull knew in its hybrid mind that the spearmen would not pursue him, follow after him, for their responsibility was to the herd and it was their assigned duty to stay nearby it, protect it and keep it from straying beyond easy protection. Of course, they would most likely put hunters on his trail, soon or late, for his huge body represented much meat, fat, horn, sinew, hide and other very valuable items, but by the time the hunters got around to undertaking the tracking of this particular bull ox, he would no longer exist in his current form.

Although the periphery of this wood was of the same thorny brush as the copse out on the plain

where Ehra-leopard had killed the doe, within it was true temperate forest—mixed with deciduous and evergreen trees such as oak, maple, ash, pine, larch, walnut, elm and chestnut. Once under the shade of the huge-boled old trees, the bull's hooves sank fetlocks-deep into a mold of damp, dead leaves, wherein a host of insects, worms, mice and shrews crawled and scuttled about their daily lives. Squirrels chattered and scolded from the trunks and limbs of the trees, and a vast profusion of multihued birds occupied every level and flew through the air between those levels. Without exception the denizens of the forest ignored the interloping bull, knowing that they had nothing to fear from him so long as they kept from beneath his big hooves.

Unable to take a direct route to the enticing smell of the water because of the erratic placement of the trees, the bull continued to veer in that general direction and, at last, even his nearsighted eyes could detect the sheen of the sun on a stream. Pacing slowly and deliberately out from the shady concealment of the forest, the bull waded out into the stream and dipped his mighty head down to drink of the clear, cold water, ignoring the cloud of insects that came swarming from every direction to buzz and drone about him.

No truly wild beast survived long without being always on the alert for danger in all its forms, but not even this created facsimile of a wild ox was or could properly be an exception to the universal rule; therefore, when the bull, even as he drank up the water, heard the ghost of a sound, sensed a flicker of motion above and to his right-front, he abruptly brought his

dripping muzzle up, snorting, one hoof unconsciously pawing at the water-rounded cobbles that covered the streambed.

On the point of bellowing his awful challenge, the Seos-bull caught full sight of the creature above him, atop the rock. Even with the lack of color perception he could identify the young woman as a stunning beauty of a human female. So much, in fact, did the observance of her lissome form attract and arouse the man within the bull that the hybrid mind let slip its control of the creation it inhabited and first small, then larger and ever larger portions of it began to slip away, slough off into the current to be borne away downstream, an unexpected feast for the water creatures, large and small.

As for the girl, crouched upon the rock with her baskets of gatherings, the cold, trembling, whimpering fear of the great, deadly and known-vicious wild ox rapidly became lost in a degree of awe that left her unable to move when she witnessed the quick transformation from beast into a tall, fair young man, resembling in so many ways her god-descended sire. In the inchoate turmoil that her mind was become, she knew that this could be, must be none save one of the true gods.

The last of the short-lived bull-creation dropped off into the stream, Seos waded through the icy water to the side of the rock, lifted himself into the air to its top and stood on the sun-warmed surface, devouring the recumbent girl's toothsome young body with his eyes.

The skin being darker to start, the sun had taken it to some shades deeper brown than his own, and not

only was her head of blue-black hair thick, long, full and wavy, she owned more body-hair than Ehra or most of the other island-women, either hybrid or human—arms, thighs and lower legs having visible black hair, in addition to the thick, dark tangles protecting her pubes and armpits.