West of January (8 page)

That rock had saved me, for I had not been expecting the monster so soon. Had I still been running, it would have seen me and been able to hold me in view. I lay flat, with blood running from my shins and tears of pain or terror running from my eyes. I tried not to breathe. The tyrant reached the top of the slope, leaned back, and slid all the way down in a landslide of gravel and dirt, balanced on its great spread feet and massive tail. The impact of its landing shook the world.

It stopped and peered around the hollow: where is lunch?

Its size was unbelievable, four or five times what I had expected. At close range—much too close now—it was an iridescent silver, the short fur gleaming with rainbow lights. I recalled a vague memory of a trader once showing my father a length of tyrant fur, and my father’s derision at the price being asked.

The head stopped moving; the eyes and ears did not. They flickered this way and that, together or separately. I wished I could turn off my heart, for if the tyrant could not hear it, I could hear nothing else. Then the monster roared, filling the whole valley with bone-breaking noise and rolling echoes. I very nearly jumped to my feet and fled in terror at that unexpected explosion of sound. Which was the why of it, obviously.

More roars followed, but now I was ready for them. My neck trembled with the effort of holding my head in the awkward position it had happened to be in when the tyrant came over the skyline. I did not even blink. Give up! I thought. I have beaten you! Go away!

But I did not say that, and the tyrant did not believe that. It lurched into motion, heading down to the copse of withered trees, and the ground trembled with the impacts:
Boom…boom…

Yet still I dared not move, for I could see that a tyrant, like a roo, had a third eye in the back of its head. Every animal or bird I had ever seen had three eyes, except people and horses, and I had always felt cheated by having only two. So I remained in my awkward sprawl, with gravel digging into my elbows and a steady agony of cramp spreading through my neck and shoulders from the twisted angle of my head. Black flames danced over my vision as I forced my eyelids not to blink.

The tyrant reached the little grove and swiftly demolished it. Stamping its huge feet and lashing its tail, it wheeled and trampled in a frenzy of destruction, pausing once in a while to bend and snuffle and inspect something suspicious. Tree trunks splintered and toppled, mud splashed, until in short order what had once seemed like a safe hiding place had been leveled. Nothing remained but a puddle of splinters. Then the monster paused, baffled, glaring around and roaring.

Could it not hear my heart? Would it give up?

No! Now it began circling outward, the thunder of its tread shaking the valley floor, the massive tail sweeping wide arcs over the grass. The tail caught a boulder larger than me and hurled it sideways. In a flash the monster spun around and slammed a foot down on it. It bent and sniffed, then turned back to its systematic quartering of the ground. My heart sank into black despair.

I blinked. Nothing happened. Very slowly I began easing my head into a bearable position. If death was imminent, then there was no point in enduring more pain. The tyrant froze. Two evil eyes peered across the valley in my direction. I stopped breathing again.

At that moment came salvation. The monster’s ears swiveled, then its head, and it stared hard at one of the flanking hills. Without more warning, it turned and went striding off, faster than ever, clods of mud flying from its taloned feet. With a whimper of disbelief, I watched as the tyrant flowed up the hill and vanished over the skyline. I collapsed with sobs of relief, my heart thudding against the ground, my gut fluttering with nervous reaction.

Then I heard what it had heard—a distant rattling and squeaking, faint hints borne by the wind. But there was nothing I could do to warn the angel, and I did not care what happened to him anyway. Sounds of monster footsteps and angel’s chariot died away together, and I was left in peace, alive.

Soon I rolled over and sat up to inspect my injuries. I had badly scraped both my shins and a few other places, but the worst damage was to my knees, especially the right one. It was already puffed and stiff. The left was painful, but not so bad. Only with great difficulty was I able to rise. Yet I needed water desperately, and I would willingly drink whatever foul muck the tyrant had left in the water hole.

I tried a step and almost fell. The valley danced black about me and then slowly cleared. For a moment I considered crawling instead of walking, but that seemed likely to be more painful, and slower. So I lurched forward, another step…then another…

The hollow was a wide place between three mesas. Three valleys led into it. I had not progressed very far when I heard the rattling of the chariot again, coming from the gap on my left. My terror surged anew. I had been hoping that the tyrant was now engaged in eating angel, but somehow the angel had escaped and was now leading it straight back to me.

Sure enough, in a moment the red and blue sails came into sight, and the violet body of the chariot below them. It was bouncing along at a leisurely pace, zigzagging around between the rocks and hummocks, certainly not moving fast enough to escape from the tyrant. The angel had seen me—he waved. Perhaps he had escaped the monster by accident and did not even know it was after him?

I stood, helpless and almost immobile, watching the chariot veer across the valley floor, growing steadily larger. I had never been close to one before, for chariots were strictly out of bounds for us children. It was bigger than I had expected; I should hardly have needed to duck to walk underneath it. It rocked and swayed, and I was surprised to see that the four great wheels were in some way flexible, as if made of something springy, like cartilage, and they absorbed the worst of the shocks from the uneven terrain. Two of the wheels were alongside the main body, just in front of the mast. The other two stuck out behind on a sort of flat tail.

Inasmuch as the chariot was like anything else I had ever known, it resembled the baskets in which my mother and aunts had gathered roots—wide and flat-bottomed, with sides sloping outward. But those baskets had been rectangular, and while the chariot was squared off at the back, in front it was pointed with a long pole protruding there, the bowsprit. The sharp front is of no great advantage on land, but it does help when the chariot floats on water. These were all things I was to learn much later, like
mast
as the name of the vertical pole in the middle.

The chariot swung suddenly up the slope on which I stood, slowed, and then turned aside before it reached me, stopping with a final squeal and sway. Silence returned. The angel was sitting by the mast, peering at me from under his wide-brimmed hat.

He bent from sight and then straightened up. “Catch!” he shouted. His throw was a poor effort, and the missile landed several steps short of me, but it was a leather water bottle. I almost forgot my pain as I lurched over to grab it. Nothing in the entire world could have been more welcome. Few things in my life have matched the joy of that drink. I spilled water over my chest in my eagerness. I almost choked. In that climate there was no such thing as
cool
water, of course, but I could feel the wet relief running down inside me, all the way to my stomach.

By the time I lowered the half-empty bottle, suddenly nauseated, the chariot’s sails had disappeared and the angel was climbing down clumsily at the back. Then he waddled over to me with a flat-footed rolling gait, wiping his red face with a grubby cloth. In his other hand he held a club, a wooden blade on a long, thin metal handle.

“Thank you, sir,” I croaked.

He scowled, looking me up and down. “You did that deliberately, didn’t you?”

“Did what, sir?”

“I was watching. I saw it notice you and then lose you. I thought you were safe. Then you started to run.”

“I thought it would find my family. I hoped to turn it.”

“You’re a brainless little bastard!”

“Yes sir.”

He grunted and turned to look back the way he had come. “Your cute little pet will be along shortly. Keep still again, and let’s hope it goes right by us.”

And if it didn’t? Would he hit it with his club? He seemed strangely unworried.

“You can’t outrun it, sir? In your chariot?”

“Shut up!”

As he spoke, the tyrant came into view around a distant bend in the valley. I froze. The ground began to throb below the great feet as the monster approached, growing larger with a terrifying swiftness. It came straight for us, as if it would pass between us and the chariot. From the corner of my eye I saw the fearsome silver head against the sky when it passed behind the mast. This was its closest approach yet. A rank, animal stench stung my nostrils. It moved beyond my sight, and I dared not turn my head to follow.

I remember watching the set of three colored ribbons streaming in the wind at the top of the mast and wondering why that sort of movement did not attract the monster. Either it could ignore wind motion somehow, or else it saw moving objects well enough to know that ribbons were of no interest to it. Once again I was not even daring to blink. The angel was motionless also, near me but out of my view. I stared at mast and distant sky, and I trembled.

The death tread stopped.

Silence. Only the wind…

Roar!
The noise was so close that I jumped.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” my companion snarled. That broke the spell. The tyrant and I moved at the same time. I turned, and it was so close that I had to bend my head and look upward. It was spinning around, its beady eyes glaring down at us in triumph, the great jaws opening. I clearly remember the wet ropes of spittle hanging from them.

The angel raised his club to his shoulder, but backward—the wooden part against his shoulder, the long metal handle pointing up at the monster’s head.
Thunder!
Startled, I lost my balance on my bad knee and fell in a sprawl of agony. More thunder.

A moment after I hit the ground, so did the tyrant, and the whole world seemed to bounce.

The angel said, “Fornicating vermin!”

In great agonizing spasms, I threw up all the water I had just drunk.

—4—

“W
HAT IN THE NAME OF
H
EAVEN
am I going to do with you?” the angel demanded.

He was holding a bloody ax over one shoulder. Under his other arm he clutched the tyrant’s two foreclaws—curved, pointed murder, like shearing sickles…trophies. The rest of the vast carcass lay as the death throes had left it, so close that I could watch the insects settling on its eyes.

I was sitting on the earth, still close to my damp patch of vomit, barely mobile at all. The angel had laid a wet compress on each of my knees, had washed the worst of my scrapes, and given me a rag to make bandages. He had produced smoked woollie meat for me to eat, and I had drained the water bottle.

I was feeling shaky and light-headed, more like a small herder, or even a toddler, than a bold and predatory loner. The world was turning out to be a much tougher place than I had expected.

To the angel I was obviously an unwelcome complication. All the time while ministering to me, he had muttered angrily under his breath. It was very foul breath—he stank. Everyone did, of course, but his sweat smelled different. Now his face bore a ferocious scowl.

“You have been very kind, sir.”

He spat. “You insult a herdmaster in front of his women. You provoke tyrants. Now you have mashed your knee. Your life expectancy is not very high, stupid.”

“Sir?”

“Oh, shut up!” He stumped back over to the chariot and tossed the foreclaws up into it. He wiped the ax on the grass and threw it in also. Then he turned around and glared at me, spreading his feet, folding fringed sleeves over the round white-haired belly that bulged through the front of his unbuttoned jerkin.

“I was going to make sure you found a water hole. That was all. Not for your sake, you understand!”

“No sir?”

“Shut up!”

“Yes sir.”

“For your father’s sake… Then I saw the tyrant, and I decided to let it have you. It would have been a mercy. But you had the sense to keep still. And then you deliberately provoked it!” He glared in angry silence for a while. “Do you know how slim your chances are?”

I shook my head, not understanding any of that.

“About one loner in thirty lives long enough to make his kill. You have no herd, no bow…” He bared his yellow teeth. “And it’s hopeless anyway—the sun is coming.”

“Sir?” I glanced uneasily up at the sun.

“You’re almost into High Summer! Dry water holes…no grass…cactus…tyrants… An entire herd wouldn’t save you.” He shook his head in exasperation. “Stupid little herdboy doesn’t understand.”

“Sir? What did you do to kill the tyrant?”

Again that yellow-toothed snarl. He pointed. “That’s a
gun.
Only angels have them. That’s why people are nice to us.”

I had thought it was because angels helped people.

He was a strange man. I had very little experience with men, yet I could sense a deep rage in him. He was venting it on me, but I had done nothing to anger him.

“I suppose I could take you with me until we find a decent slough. Except that there aren’t any left around here.”

“No sir?”

“No sir! And I’m heading west. Every pee hole from here to the ocean has a herd around it—packed like flies on a dead roo. You’ll die for certain, anyway. Why should I bother with you?”

He was talking more to himself than me, but I said, “No reason.”

The fat face scowled even more furiously, but for the first time he spoke to me as if what I thought might matter. “What do you want?”

“To kill Anubyl.”

He snorted with disgust. “That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Why?”

“He killed my father and my mother.”

“Your mother, maybe. But I’ve never seen a herdman with fair hair and blue eyes. Those features come from the wetlanders, mostly. Did any of your older brothers or sisters have your coloring?”