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Chapter 7
Jo
What a day. Blue sky and the wind a cooling freshness on his face.
Now two days out, he had come down from the mountains, through the foothills, and into the vastest plain he had ever imagined. He could still see the tiniest tip of Highpeak behind him, and with the sun it kept him true on course and reassured him that he could find his way home whenever he wanted.
Total security! The herds of wild cattle were many, but he had been living with those all his life. A few wolves, but what were wolves? No bear, no puma so far. Why, in all reverence to the gods, did anybody ever stay cooped up in the mountains?
And monsters– what monsters? Phagh! Crazy tales!
Even that shiny, floating cylinder that had gone overhead every few days the whole of his life was overdue down here. It had come from west to east with the regularity of every other heavenly body, but even it seemed to have stopped. On his present course he would have seen it.
In short, Jo
Pigs were usually easy to kill– if you were a bit nimble and watched out for charges of the boars. And a small suckling pig was exactly what one could use for supper.
Right there ahead of him, clear in the late-afternoon light, was a compact herd of pigs out in the open. There were big ones and small ones, but they were all fat.
Jo
With a bent-knee run, he brought himself silently around them until the wind was at right angles.
He stopped and hefted his club. The tall grass was nearly to his waist.
The pigs were rooting around a shallow depression in the plain, where water stood in the wet months, making a temporary marsh. There must be roots to be had there, Jo
With a crouching gait, staying below the grass tops, Jo
Only a few feet separated him now from the outermost fringe of pigs. Silently he rose until his eyes were just above the level of the grass. A small porker was only three arm-spans from him, an easy throw.
“Here's for supper,” breathed Jo
Dead on, a direct hit. The pig let out an earsplitter and dropped.
But that wasn't all that happened. Instant confusion roared.
Hidden from Jo
The squeal of the hit pig acted like a whip on the whole herd, and away they went in an instant charge, straight upwind at Jo
For the big boar, to see was to charge.
Jo
He rolled. But the whole sky over him was filled with boar belly. He didn't see but he sensed the teeth and tusks trying to find him.
He rolled again, the savage squeals mixing with the roaring pound of the blood in his ears.
Once more he rolled and this time he saw daylight and a back.
In the blink of an eye he was on the boar's back.
He reached an arm across the throat.
The boar spun around and around like a bucking horse.
Jo
And then the boar, strangled, dropped into a limp, jerking pile.
Jo
Jo
There was no herd in sight.
And there were no horses!
No horses! Jo
It might be worse. He looked at his legs, expecting to see tusk gashes. But he found none. His back and face ached a bit from the collision of the charge and his own collision with the ground, but that was all.
Mentally kicking himself, more ashamed than scared, he made off in the direction of the trail of crushed grass. After a while his depression wore off a bit, to be replaced by optimism. He began to whistle a call. The horses would not have just gone on ru
Just as darkness was falling he spotted Windsplitter calmly cropping grass. The horse looked up with a
“Where have you been?” and then, with a plainly mischievous grin, as though he had intended to all the time, came over and bumped Jo
It took another ten minutes of anxious casting about to locate the lead horse and the packs. Jo
That night he dreamed of Chrissie being strangled by pigs, Chrissie mauled by bears, Chrissie crushed to a pulp under stampeding hoofs while he stood helpless in the sky where the spirits go, unable to do a damned thing.
Chapter 8
The “Great Village” where “thousands had lived” was obviously another one of those myths, like monsters. But he would look for it nonetheless.
By the half-light of the yellowing dawn, Jo
The plain was changing. There were some features about it that didn't seem usual, such as those mounds. Jo
He stopped, leaning forward with a hand braced on Windsplitter's shoulder, to study the place.
It was a little sort of hill, but it had a hole in the side. A rectangular hole. Otherwise the mound was all covered with dirt and grass. Some freak of nature? A window opening?
He slid off his horse and approached it. He walked around it. Then he paced it out. It was about thirty-five paces long and ten paces wide. Hah! Maybe the mound was rectangular too!
An old, splintered stump stood to one side and Jo
He approached the window and, using the scrap of wood, began to push away the grass edges. It surprised him that he seemed to be digging not in earth but in loose sand.
When he got the lower part of the rectangle cleared, he could get right up to it and look into it.
The mound was hollow.
He backed up and looked at his horses and then around at the countryside. There wasn't anything menacing there.
He bent over and started to crawl into the mound.
And the window bit him!
He straightened right up and looked at his wrist.
It was bleeding.
It wasn't a bad cut. It was that he was cut at all that startled him.
Very carefully he looked at the window.
It had teeth!
Well, maybe they weren't teeth. They were dull-bright and had a lot of colors in them and they stood all around the outside edges of the frame. He pulled one of them out-they were very loose. He took a bit of thong from his belt and tried it.