The dead giant lay at the foot of the cliff.
They rekindled a fire from the embers while Joe held his right wrist clamped with his strong left hand. With the heated sword blade, Mary seared the stumps of finger and thumb. Joe screamed like a woman. Stacey sat with the face of one slowly going mad. She rocked from side to side and smiled foolishly.
Joe went to the dark interior of the cave and immediately fell into a deep sleep. Howard paced restlessly. Mary sat and watched the valley floor.
In mid-afternoon of the short day, the two uninjured ones made a concerted rush, looped a vine over the foot of the one who had died and dragged him off into the brush. As they did so, one of them glanced up at Mary.
He was dark, lean, powerfully built. But she noticed that there was a contradiction in his face. It had a specific sensibility, sensitivity. He had the look of a man who detested what he was doing.
Long after he had disappeared, she thought about him.
When Bannot, the Ninth Emperor Kane, ordered the court scientists to bring worthy foes from past eras, he had not sufficient training to realize, that his request violated the first rule of space travel. Were any man to be taken from a past era the fact of his disappearance would make appreciable change in the future. As the future had already been determined, any effort to alter the past by removing a specific living being would be doomed to failure.
But the court scientists knew that to fail meant death. Their researches carried them far afield. Many of them died painfully when the promises they made to Bannot were not fulfilled within the time interval allotted.
Court secrecy was such that posterity will never know which man it was who first brought a living being from a past era to his own time. His method was dependent upon scanning the person at the moment of death, thus assuring that there would be no specific effect on the past. The lateral movement in time of the person thus transported caused an actual physical split, so that the lifeless duplication of the body remained in the past world.
When the method was first disclosed there was an outcry from the philosophers and from the church, though both institutions had been carefully emasculated by the Kanes.
Bannot, in the week before his death, handled the outcry in typical fashion. He not only ordered the assassination of the more outspoken but explained to the peoples of all planets, in tones of sweet reasonableness, that these persons were not living, even though they seemed to be alive, as they had actually died in times long gone.
When Bannot felt death upon him he ordered the same technique to be used on him after his death, to return a few days to the past and bring him into a new life.
But Bannot died of an exceedingly painful disease, the result of past dissipations. His eldest son, who hated him, found that Bannot could be brought back, only to die again, in agony, within hours.
His eldest son extended those hours into a full year before at last tiring of the game and taking over the golden throne.
Chapter V
Battle-Ax Berserk
At dawn the next day, four attackers stood as before on the brow of the opposite hill.
Joe, his right arm badly swollen, laughed mirthlessly. “We kill one and cripple one and there’s still four. A nice game they have.”
“That’s what it is, Joe,” Mary said flatly. “A game. People who can make those little boxes that follow you around could do better than swords. This is like the old Roman amphitheatre. Those guys are gladiators. It’s a big game with the boxes watching. Maybe the boxes flash the battle on screens. Home movies for the public. Hired entertainers.”
Stacey had grown worse during the night. She sat with the empty smile on her lips and her eyes were far away.
Howard said, licking his lips, “Mary, do you think they could have…”
“For my money, yes. They want fun, so they grab us somehow just as we get knocked off and here we are and they have their fun.”
“It… it’s horrible!” Howard said.
“It ain’t pretty,” Mary agreed.
Howard said, “Why don’t we just... well... hold our hands up. If we don’t give them any sport, maybe they’ll—”
“A lot I can do with one hand,” Joe said. “Maybe it’s worth a try.”
Mary stood up, her lips compressed. “No dice, boys. These kids are bloodthirsty. I think they’d like to cut our throats. Why give them the brass ring?”
“What makes you so sure you’re right, Callahan?” Howard asked.
“Take a look,” she said tersely.
The four were advancing across the valley floor as cautiously as their predecessors. Mary looked closely. No, two of them were the same as the day before — the uninjured two, including the dark one with the look of disgust in his eyes.
There was nothing reassuring about their advance.
Howard said, “I still think it’s—”
With a shrill scream Stacey bounded to her feet, shouldering between Mary and Howard. Though she had always been careful on the ledge she ran down at reckless speed. Mary picked herself up off the floor.
“Stacey!” Howard called after her. “Stacey, darling!”
He started to go after her. Joe caught him, held him, said, “Shut up and we’ll see if your plan works. You couldn’t catch her in time anyway.”
They stood and watched the blond girl. This Stacey Murdock was grotesquely changed from the girl who had demanded that they get in touch with Daddy.
Her tan skin was scratched and torn, her hair dirty, her feet scarred by the rocks. She ran toward the four men, her hands outstretched. They heard her panting voice, her incoherent pleading. The lead man dropped sword and shield. Stacey ran to him. Mary saw the dark man make a move toward the lead man as though to object. But it was too late.
As Stacey ran toward the man’s arms he sidestepped her. As she ran by him he caught her blond hair, yanked her backward off her feet. She fell with the small of her back across his bent knee. With one arm across her throat, the other across her hips, he snapped her back like a brittle stick.
He stood up and Mary could see the look of revulsion on his face as though he had disliked touching her. Stacey lay grotesquely bent. The man nudged her with his foot and the four of them looked up at the cave mouth.
Howard Loomis gave an incoherent yell, grabbed the battle axe from the floor and was gone before either Mary or Joe could stop him.
Still yelling in rage and the lust to kill, Howard Loomis, ex-salesman of Briskies, charged the four helmeted warriors.
Mary’s throat tightened at the sight of his hopeless bravery.
By the pure fury of his attack he drove the two men back into their companions.
The slashing axe bounced off shield, rang off helmet, a bright arc in the morning light.
Three men dropped back. One of them faced Howard, parried his blows, waiting for the inevitable pause when Howard grew armweary.
With the short sword, as Howard’s axe sagged, he spitted him carefully through the middle, twisting the wide blade to let air into the wound.
Howard fell onto his face, toppled over onto his side. The swordsman looked triumphantly up at the cave mouth. As he did so, Howard, with one last convulsive effort of the axe he still clutched, hacked at the swordsman’s leg as one would hack at a tree. The axe severed muscle and tendon and artery.
“Good boy!” Joe whispered.
They staunched the flow of blood and one of them helped the injured man down the valley. The remaining two, the dark one and another one, stared up at the cave.