More Than Fire

Nor did they swing wide of the bush. Silently, they passed within a few feet of it. Kickaha looked at the bush but could not see the bird. Now, if he were so inclined, would be the time for him to break suddenly into a run. Anana would do so a half-second behind him, but she would head for the side of the bush opposite the one he would be racing for. The raven would flee, but it would not have time to take to its wings or to hide again.

Anana said nothing. She was waiting to see what Kickaha would do. He walked on by the bush and into the forest. He did not have to tell her that they were going to pretend they were not aware of the bird. Let the raven follow them. Eventually, they would find out why it was stalking them.

And then he almost halted. He grunted.

Anana noticed the break in stride and heard his suppressed exclamation. Instead of looking around and thus notifying whatever had startled him that she was aware of its presence, she looked straight ahead. She said quietly, "What is it?"

"I wish I knew," he said. "I saw ... off to the right ... just a flash ...-a something like a man but not human. Not quite, anyway. Maybe my mind's playing tricks. But he, if it was male, looked like he was human. He was very big and very hairy for a human being. Only. .."

She waited several seconds, then said, "Well?"

"His face, I don't know. It was not quite human. There was something, uh, bearlike about it. I've been all over this planet and have never seen or heard of anything like it. On the other hand, this planet has more land area than Earth. So, I just never knew anybody who knew about it."

She looked to the left, then to the right.

"I see nothing."

He half-stepped out from behind a tree, then stepped back. "Angle casually over toward the tree."

She went in the direction he had indicated by bending his head. She must have noticed that the arboreal animals in the branches five hundred feet above her had fallen silent. But, like him, she must have thought that it was their approach that had caused this.

They went approximately a hundred feet before he spoke.

"The one just ahead."

It was one of the gigantic sequoialike plants. Its bark was as shiny as if thousands of pieces of mica were embedded in it.

"I hope there's only one of him," he said.

He lifted his bow with an arrow and started to go around on the left side of the enormous trunk. She headed toward the right side. Anybody still on the back side of the tree would be caught between them.

When they came around the trunk, they saw only each other. Though the thing Kickaha had glimpsed did not look as if it had claws, he looked upward along the bole. No creature clung to it, and not even a squirrel could have gotten to the branches this fast. Anana had stepped back so she could see more of the other side of the trunk. The tree was so huge, however, that a section of it was invisible to both of them. After telling Anana to stay where she was but to keep looking upward, he ran around the tree. At the same time, he kept his gaze on the upper reaches of the bole. But he saw no living creature.

When he returned to Anana, he said, "It was too heavy to climb up the trunk even if it'd had claws a foot long. I had to make sure, though."

She pointed at the thick piles of dead leaves on the ground. He was already looking at them. They were scattered in so many directions that he could not tell if the creature had been coming to or going from the tree.

He sniffed. There was a faint musky odor in the still air.

"I smell it, too," she said. "Maybe we should capture the raven. It might know what the thing is. In fact, it could be working for it."

She paused, then said, "Or it could be working for the raven."

"Why don't we wait a while before we grab the bird?"

They pushed on at a faster pace. Now and then, they looked behind them but saw neither the bird nor the bear-thing. After a few minutes, they smelled a whiff of wood smoke. Silently, they walked toward the odor, guided by its increasing strength. They waded through a narrow creek to the other side. When they heard voices, they slowed their pace and made sure they did not step on dry sticks. The voices became louder. They were women's, and it seemed to Kickaha that he heard only two speakers. He made a few signs to Anana, who crept away to circle around the place. She would be his unseen backup if he got into trouble. Or vice versa.

He got down on the ground and wriggled forward very slowly to keep from rustling the dead leaves. He stopped when he was behind a thick bush between two massive tree trunks. He peered through the lower part of the bush and saw a small clearing. In its center was a small fire with a small iron pot suspended by its handle from a horizontal wooden stick set between two forked wooden uprights. Kickaha smelled boiling meat.

A blonde who was beautiful despite her disarrayed hair and dirtied face stood near the fire. She was speaking Thoan. Crouching down on the other side of the fire was a red-haired woman. She was as good-looking as the blonde and equally disheveled and dirty.

Both wore ankle-length robes reminding Kickaha of illustrations of the type of dress worn by ancient Greek females. The material was thin, clinging, and far from opaque. At one time, the robes had been white, but brambles and thorns clung to them, and dirt and blood smeared them.

On the far side of the clearing were two knapsacks and a pile of Thoan blankets, paper-thin but very heat-keeping. Three light axes, three heavy knives, and three beamers, which looked like pistols with bulbs on the muzzles, were on top of the blankets.

A butchered fawn was lying on the far side of the clearing. No flies buzzed around it; the planet Alofmethbin lacked flies. But crawling and scavenging insects were begi

Kickaha shook his head. The women were not very cautious, hence not very bright, if they had not kept the weapons close at hand. Or, perhaps this was a trap.

He turned and looked behind him and up into the tree branches, but neither saw nor heard anything to alarm him. Of course, the raven could be hidden among the leaves overhead. After he had turned around toward the women, he lay for a while watching and listening.

Though the two looked to be no more than twenty-five, they had to be thousands of years old. They spoke in the same archaic Thoan that Anana fell into sometimes when she was excited. Except for a few words and phrases, Kickaha understood it.

The blonde said, "We can't survive long in this horrible place. We must find a gate."

"You've said that a thousand times, Eleth," the auburn-haired woman said. "I'm getting sick of hearing it."

"And I'm sick of hearing nothing practical from you, Ona," the blonde snarled. "Why don't you figure a way out for us, suggest just how we can find a gate?"

Ona said, "And I'm about to vomit from your childish bickering and screaming."

"So, throw up," Eleth said. "At least you'd be doing something instead of sitting on your ass and whining. And vomiting certainly wouldn't make this place stink more than it does, even if your puke stinks more than anybody else's."

Ona got up and looked into the pot. "It seems to be done, but I still don't know how to cook."

"Who does?" Eleth said. "That's slave work. Why should we know anything about it?"

"For Shambarimen's sake!" Ona said, and she shook her head so violently that her long auburn hair swirled like a cloak around her shoulders. "Can't we do anything but talk about things that don't matter? A fine pair of sisters we are. Lords one day, and the next, we're no better than slaves."

"Well, at least we don't have to worry about putting on weight," Eleth said, and she gri

The redhead looked hard at her.

"I'm trying to be as lighthearted as possible," Eleth said. "We have to keep our spirits up or they'll be so heavy they'll sink down to our toes and ooze out onto the ground. And we'll die or become leblabbiys. We'll get eaten by some beast or, worse, be captured and raped by leblabbiys and spend the next hundred years or more as wives of some stupid, ignorant, dirty, smelly, snot-wiping-on-their-hands, wife-beating savages. They'll be our Lords."