A heavier man, with a bruise from her staff already purpling on his forehead, shouldered his way through to her and cracked a slap across her face. Alea screamed and, as the hand came back, bit at it, but the man yanked his hand aside and slammed a fist into her stomach. She doubled over in agony, struggling for the breath that wouldn’t come, but he yanked her chin up and stared into her face—face to face, for he was a good foot shorter than she.
“Six and a half feet, big dark eyes, straight nose, brown hair—this is the one that ran from Karke Village, right enough,” the slave-hunter said. “Back you go to your owners, woman, and harshly may they punish you.”
Breath came back in a rush. Alea used it for a wordless shout and lunged at the man, lashing out with her free foot. He cracked another slap across her face and snarled, “We can hurt worse than you, my lass!”
“We should, too,” one of the other men growled. “She’s given me a harsh knock, and I’ll be limping for a week!”
“You’re right there, Harol,” the leader said with an ugly glint in his eye. “After all, we have to take her back to her village for judgement, but no one says what kind of condition she has to be in when she gets there—and she has to be taught not to run, doesn’t she?”
“She does!” One of the men moistened his lips, eyes greedy. “And what’s the worst hurt you can give a woman, eh?” The others answered with a shout of agreement. Someone caught at Alea’s free foot, but she screamed in terror and kicked, wrenched a wrist free, and lashed out with a fist. It connected, but the men roared and descended on her in a body. She fought desperately, afraid of death but suddenly not caring, as long as the nightmare didn’t happen again.
But they were falling back away from her, something was making dull thudding sounds, and men were crying out in rage and alarm. As breath came back, Alea saw a huge man laying about with a proper quarterstaff, knocking her tormentors aside. They shouted with anger and leaped away from the madman, and she saw her chance. She scrambled to her feet and ran toward the trees.
“Catch her!” the leader bellowed.
Alea heard feet pounding behind her, but she heard something crack too, then heard the knocking of wood against wood, and the trees closed mercifully about her as she ran, gasping and sobbing, trying to find a tree big enough, a cave deep enough, anywhere to hide, to be safe.
Behind her, Gar laid about him with his staff, taking his share of knocks but dealing out five for each one he received. More importantly, though, he reached out with his thoughts and struck terror into the minds of each of the hunters. One or two had the courage to come back at him a second time, though dread was surging up from their stomachs. The rest ran, howling in sheer terror, away from Gar and from the poor woman they’d been wrestling.
“Giants!” someone shouted. “Giants!” But none seemed to remember that they’d been trained to fight the huge man.
Gar lashed out at the last two with virtual explosions of panic as his staff whirled to strike first one, then the other. They spun away, fear finally mastering them, and ran down the road, back the way they had come.
Gar stood watching them go, chest heaving with exertion, filled with the elation of victory, even if he’d had to cheat a bit—but when it was one man against half a dozen, using projective telepathy to scare them into running was fully justified. He was quite willing to let them think he was a small giant. After all, by the time they reached home, he would have grown three feet in their memories anyway.
They went around the bend in the road and were gone from his sight, and from his mind, too. Gar looked around for the woman they’d been manhandling. He didn’t see her and, all things considered, he didn’t blame her, either. He went on the way he’d been going, noticing where her tracks ran off the road, then where her steps began to shorten. She had run to hide in the woods—wise, under the circumstances. He hoped she was good at covering her trail, for the hunters had dogs. True, with the scare he’d given them, they might not stop running till they were home—but then again, they might. In fact, they might even try to cover up their fear with anger, and come back to take, revenge on the vulnerable one.
Of course; they wouldn’t try to attack her if Gar were with her, or even nearby.
He had a notion he’d have to settle for nearby—after the shock the woman had just suffered, she wouldn’t be likely to trust any man again. She’d seemed unusually brave, though, fighting back every inch of the way. She hadn’t caved in for a second.
Gar was surprised at the admiration he felt, and told himself he would have admired that kind of heart just as much in a man. Nonetheless, he decided to dally a while, to stroll down the road and take his time pitching camp. The woman would make an excellent ally, after all, if he could win her friendship. On every planet on which he’d landed, he had always tried to team up with a local—how else was he going to learn all the details that had developed since the last computer entry about the world? In most cases, that last datum had been entered hundreds of years before, and almost everything had changed since.
He definitely needed a local, and the woman was at least aware that he was on her side—if he could find her. In addition, if he really wanted to try to heal the wounds of this world, she might be the key to the puzzle of making peace between the three nations—dwarf, giant, and Midgarder.
He remembered how the situation had looked from the bridge of his spaceship in orbit, when he and Herkimer had been surveying the world via telephoto scanners, and he’d still been thinking of himself as Magnus. They’d watched Vikings battling giants, then dwarves battling Vikings, all in so short a period of time that Gar could only think the warfare was constant.
“So we have a land of pseudo-Teutonic Viking-type people of normal height,” he’d summarized to Herkimer, “with a land of dwarves to the west and a land of giants to the east, tundra to the north and an ocean to the south.”
“The Teutons seem to outnumber both other nations by a considerable margin,” Herkimer pointed out, “even if we don’t count their slaves.”
“Rather odd to leave your biggest men at home when you go off to war,” Magnus mused, “but the Teutons might figure that the big ones would be apt to desert to the giants—not surprising, considering how they’re treated at home. By the way, Herkimer, what was the name of this planet? Other than Corona Gamma Four, that is.”
“The records of the plans for the original expedition are more scanty than usual,” the computer told him, “but they do include the information that the intended local name for the planet was Siegfried.”
“So somebody was planning on the Teutonic theme from the beginning,” Magnus said. “Were they planning on breeding three separate sub-races, or was that an accident?”
“It could hardly have been an accident, Magnus,” Herkimer reproved. “The Terran government insisted on very stringent safety precautions for colonial expeditions, including having a gene pool large enough to prevent inbreeding.”
“Yes, even private expeditions had to pay lip service to the regulations, at least,” Magnus agreed. “If they didn’t have enough colonists, they had to bring frozen sperm and ova—but once they had landed on a new planet, there was no one to guarantee they would use what they had brought.”
“Surely you don’t think the original colonists actually planned this state of affairs!” “No, I think it far more likely that they had a horrible accident,” Magnus said, “something that killed off half the colonists or wiped out the gene bank—or that in spite of their precautions, genes linked up to cause unusual effects.”