The Lavalite World

Shaka

"That will get us into the dwelling of the Lord. By the way, we call his dwelling a palace."

"Bahdahss?"

"That's good enough. But the ... Horn ... belongs to me. You have no right to it. The Lord won't like your taking it."

"Here!" the chief said, thrusting it at her.

"You wronged me when you raped me. I do not know whether the Lord will forgive you for that or not."

The chief spread his hands out in astonishment. "But, I did no wrong! It is the custom for the chief to mount all female captives. All chiefs do it."

Anana had counted on avenging herself some day. She hadn't known if she'd be satisfied with castrating him or also blinding him. However, if it was the custom... he really hadn't thought he was doing anything evil. And if she'd been more objective about it, she would have known that, too.

After all, aside from making her nauseated, he hadn't hurt her. She'd suffered no psychic damage, and there wasn't any venereal disease. Nor could he make her pregnant.

"Very well," she said. "I won't hold that against you."

The chiefs expression said, "Why should you?" but he made no comment.

The shaman said, "What about the two men? Are they your husbands? I ask that because some tribes, when they have a shortage of women, allow the women to have more than one husband."

"No! They are under my command."

She might as well get the upper hand on the two while she had the chance. Urthona would rave, but he wouldn't try to usurp her leadership. He wouldn't want to discredit her, since her story had saved his life.

She held out her hands, and the chief used a flint knife to sever the thongs. She rose and ordered the chiefs mother to be brought to her. Thikka approached haughtily, then turned pale under the dirt when her son explained the situation to her.

"I won't hurt you," Anana said. "I just want my jeans and boots back."

Thikka didn't know what jeans or boots meant, so Anana used sign language. When they were off, Anana ordered her to take the jeans to the cha

She was afraid the woman might find the knife.

The chief called the entire tribe in and explained who their captives, ex-captives, really were. There were a lot of oh's and ah's, or the Wendow equivalents, and then the women who'd beaten her fell on their knees and begged forgiveness. Anana magnanimously blessed them.

Urthona's and McKay's bonds were cut. Anana told them how she had gained their freedom. However, as it turned out, they were not as free as they wished. Though the chief gave each a moosoid, he delegated men to be their bodyguards. Anana suspected that the shaman was responsible for this.

"We can try to escape any time there's an opportunity," she told her uncle. "But we'll be safer if we're with them while we're looking for your palace. Once we find it, if we find it, we can outwit them. However, I hope the search doesn't take too long. They might wonder why the emissaries of the Lord are having such a hard time locating it."

She smiled. "Oh, yes. "You're my subordinates, so please act as if you are. I don't think that shaman is fully convinced about my story."

Urthona looked outraged. McKay said, "It looks like a good deal to me, Miss Anana. No more beatings, we can ride instead.of walking, eat plenty, and three women already said they'd like to have babies by me. One thing about them, they ain't got no color prejudice. That's about all I can say for them, though."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ANOTHER DAY AND night passed. The thunder and lightning showed no signs of diminishing. Anana, watching the inferno from the pass, could not imagine how anything, plants or animals, escaped the fury. The chief told her that only about one sixteenth of the trees were laid low and new trees grew very quickly. Many small beasts, hiding now, in burrows and caves, would emerge when the storms were over.

By then the plains were thick with life and the mountains were zebra-striped with lines of just-arriving migrators. The predators, the baboons, wild dogs, moas, and big cats, were killing as they pleased. But the plain was getting so crowded that there was no room to stampede away from the hunters. Sometimes, the frightened antelopes and elephants ran toward the killers and trampled them.

The valley was a babel of animal and bird cries, screams, trumpetings, buglings, croakings, bellowings, mooings, roarings.

At this place the waterway banks were about ten feet above the surface. The ground sloped upwards from this point towards the sea-land pass where the banks reached their maximum height above the surface of the water, almost a hundred feet. The chief gave orders to abandon the moosoids and swim across the cha

Anana had crossed the cha

Urthona and McKay were on their beasts, since it was expected that all men would handle them. Urthona looked worried. Not because of the imminent danger but because she had the Horn. He fully expected her to run away then. There was no one who could stop her on this side of the cha

Something was going to break at any minute. Anything could start an avalanche on a hundred thousand hooves. She decided that she'd better do something about the tribe. It wasn't that she was concerned about the men. They could be trampled into bloody rags for all she cared. Nor, only two years ago, would she have been concerned about the women and children. But now she would feel-in some irrational obscure way-that she was responsible for them. And she surely did not want to be burdened with them.

She swam back across the cha

She helped them by digging away at the edge of the bank with her knife. The chief apparently was too dignified to do manual labor even in an emergency. He loaned his axe to his wife, telling her to set to with it.