More Than Fire

However, his unconscious mind had taken over, and he automatically rolled away. The thing growled like the birth of thunder. Kickaha kept on rolling for several yards, then started to get up on a knee. The thing moved very swiftly toward him. Kickaha raised the beamer. A paw knocked it loose from his grip and numbed his hand. Then the creature was on him.

Its sharp teeth closed on his shoulder, but it did not sink them deeply into his flesh. Its breath was hot, though it did not have the stink of a meateater. It quickly released the bite as a paw hooked itself under his crotch and lifted him up and away.

Kickaha was vaguely aware that he was soaring through the air and that his groin was hurting worse than his shoulder. When he struck the ground, he blacked out.

Through the slowly evaporating mists, Anana's face passed from a dark blurry object into lovely features and bright black hair. Her face was twisted with concern, and she was crying, "Kickaha! Kickaha!"

He said, "Here I am. Down but not out, I think."

He tried to get up. His knees could not keep their lock. He sank back onto his buttocks and gazed around. The creature was lying faceup and unmoving on the ground. The raven was not in sight.

"You got here barely in time," he said. "What were you doing? Following me?"

She looked relieved but did not smile.

"You were gone too long just to be urinating. And I smelled trouble. That's nonsense, I suppose, but I have developed a feeling for the notquite-right. Anyway, I did go after you, and I got here just in time to see that thing throw you away as if you were a piece of trash paper. So, I beamed it."

Kickaha did not reproach her for killing a source of possibly very important information. She must have had to do it. "The bird?"

"I never saw a bird. You mean the raven?"

He nodded slightly. "The one I told you about. As we suspected, the sisters are working for Red Orc. Willingly or unwillingly, I don't know which."

"Then Red Orc must know we're here!"

6

"NOT NECESSARILY THE EXACT SPOT," HE SAID. "WE CAN'T ASsume he's keeping close tabs on us."

He told her how he had spied on Eleth and the raven, and how noiselessly and swiftly the bearlike thing had attacked him.

"I'm glad you got here in the proverbial nick of time. But I think I would've gotten away from it and managed to kill it with the beamer."

"Your lack of confidence is pathetic," she said, smiling. "You stay here and get your strength back. I'll go after the raven. If I catch it, we'll get the rest of its story out of it."

"Don't look for it more than twenty minutes. If you haven't caught it by then, you'll never find it."

Before leaving, however, she ran to a small creek nearby and returned with her deerskin canteen full of fresh water. She poured water over his wounds, held the container to his lips so that he could drink deeply, then stood up.

"There! That'll hold you for a while."

She touched her lips with her thumb and forefinger together, forming an oval, and snapped the fingers of her other hand, a Thoan gesture symbolizing a kiss. Then she disappeared among the trees. He lay staring up into the bright green sky. After a while, he slowly and painfully got to his feet. Everything seemed to whirl around him, though he did not fall. His shoulder hurt more than his crotch did. His lower back was stiff and would be worse soon. He was bleeding from the shoulder, though not heavily, and from less deep claw marks on his belly and testicles.

When he got to the corpse, he studied it-her-in detail. The first thing he noted, though, was that Anana had shot the beam through the forehead just above the eyes. Though she had had to take swift aim, she had coolly decided to pierce its brain and had done so.

The creature was at least seven feet long and formed like a hybrid of woman and bear. The face lacked the ursine snout, but its jaws bulged out as if they would have liked to have become a bear's. That forehead indicated that she was highly intelligent. The structure of her mouth and the teeth, however, showed that she might have had much trouble pronouncing human words. Whether or not she could speak well, she must have understood Thoan speech.

It was then that Kickaha remembered some stories told by the Bear People, an Amerindian tribe on the second level. These were narratives he had thought were tribal myths until now. They spoke of creatures descended from a union between the original Great Bear and the daughter of the original human couple. Indeed, the Bear People claimed that they, like the Man-Bear, were descended from this couple. But this creature's first ancestors must have been made in some Lord's laboratory. Probably, the Thoan was Jadawin, he who became Wolff on Earth I.

By now, the scavenging beetles and ants, attracted by the odor of decaying flesh, were scuttling across the clearing. Kickaha walked woozily into the forest and sat down near the edge of the clearing, his back against a giant above-ground root. He watched from there. Presently, Anana walked into the clearing for a few feet and looked around. Her stance showed that she was ready to dive back into the woods if she saw or heard anything suspicious.

He hooted softly, imitating the call of a small tree-dwelling lemuroid. She hooted back. He got up stiffly and approached her.

"The raven was already dead when I found it," she said. "One of those giant weasels was eating it."

They talked for a few minutes. Having decided on their course of action, they started back to the camp. Kickaha's plan to shock the sisters into confessing their part in Red Orc's plan had been discarded. He had wanted to cut the head off the Man-Bear and to throw it down at the women's feet. But he agreed with her that it was best to keep them in the dark. For a while, anyway.

By the time they reached the camp, they had concocted a story to explain his wounds. Though a big cat had attacked him, he said, he had gotten away from it. Anana had supported him while he limped into camp. That needed no acting by him, nor did his lying on the ground and groaning with pain.

"We'll have to stay here until I've recovered enough to resume walking," he said.

Whether or not Eleth and Ona accepted his story, he had no way of determining. That they were Thoan made them suspicious of even the most simple and straightforward statement.

Two days later, he was ready to go. Like all humans in the Thoan universes, except for the two Earths, he had remarkable powers of physical recovery. Except for faint scars, which would disappear entirely, his gashes normally eaten. A faster healing required more fuel.

During this time, Anana trailed the sisters into the woods whenever they went there for privacy.

"It's obvious they're trying to get into contact with the raven, and they're upset because it isn't showing up."

"Let them seethe in their sweat," he said.

"Their bickering and quarreling is getting on my nerves."

"On mine, too. They're ten-thousand-year-old infants. They hate each other, yet they feel as if they have to stay together. Maybe it's because each is afraid that the other will be happy if she isn't around to make her life miserable."

She said, "Most Thoan couples are like that. Are Earth mates the same way?"

"Too many."

He paused, then said, "I suppose you know both asked me to roll in the leaves with them."

She laughed, and she said, "They've asked me, too."

On the early morning of the third day, they broke camp and set out toward the target mountain. Two days afterward, they left the great forest. About two days' journey across a vast plain was before them. They crossed it without harm, though they were attacked twice by the sabertooths, which dined chiefly on mammoths, and once by six of the moalike birds called axebeaks. And then they came to the foothills of the mountain named Rigsoorth.