He returned to the bedroom and awoke Anana, telling her to rouse him in about an hour. She did so, and though he would have liked to sleep for the rest of the day and half the night, he forced himself to get up.
They ate some more food and packed more in a small basket. They set off through the woods, which were thick with trees but only moderately grown with underbrush. They came onto a trail which had been trampled by mammoths, as the tracks and droppings showed. They followed this, sensitive for the trumpetings or squealings of the big beasts. There were no flies or mosquitoes, but there was a variety of large beetles and other insects on which the birds fed.
Once, they heard a savage yowl. They stopped, then continued after it was not repeated. Both recognized the cry of the sabertooth.
"If this was the estate of your family, why did they keep the big dangerous beasts around?" he said.
"You should know that. The Lords like danger; it is the only spice of eternity. Immortality is nothing unless it can be taken away from you at any moment."
That was true. Only those who had immortality could appreciate that. But he wished, sometimes, that there were not so much spice. Lately, he did not seem to be getting enough rest, and his nerves were raw from the chafing of continuous peril.
"Do you think that anybody else would know about the gate in the boulder?"
"Nothing is sure," she replied. "But I do not think so. Why? Do you think that Urthona will know that we'll be going to the boulder?"
"It seems highly probable. Otherwise, he would have set up a trap for us at the summerhouse. I think that he may expect and want us to go to the boulder because he is also leading another toward the same place. It's to be a trysting place for us and our two enemies."
"You don't know that. It's just your highly suspicious mind believing that things are as you would arrange them if you were a Lord."
"Look who's calling who paranoid," he said, smiling. "Maybe you're right. But I've been through so much that I can hear the tumblers of other people's minds clicking."
He decided that Anana should handle the beamer and he would have his bow and arrows ready.
Near the edge of the clearing, Kickaha noted a slight swelling in the earth. It was about a quarter inch high and two inches wide, and it ran for several feet, then disappeared. He moved in a zigzagging path for several yards and finally found another swelling which described a small part of a very large circle before it disappeared, too.
He went back to Anana, who had been watching him with a puzzled expression.
"Do you know of any underground work done around here?" he said.
"No," she said. "Why?"
"Maybe an earthquake did it," he said and did not comment any more on the swelling.
The boulder was about the size of a one-bedroom bungalow and was set near the edge of a clearing. It was of red and black granite and had been transported here from the north along with thousands of other boulders to add variety to the landscape. It was about a hundred yards northeast of a tar pit. This pit, Kickaha realized, was the same size and in the same location as the tar pit in Hancock Park on Earth Number One.
They got down on their bellies and snaked slowly toward the boul-der. When they were within thirty yards of it, Kickaha crawled around until he was able to see all sides of the huge rock. Coming back, he said, "I didn't think he'd be dumb enough to hide behind it. But in it would be a good move. Or maybe he's out in the woods and waiting for us to open the gate because he's trapped it."
"If you're right and he's waiting for a third party to show..." She stopped and clutched his arm and said, "I saw someone! There!" She pointed across the clearing at the thick woods where the Los Angeles County Art Museum would have been if this had been Earth Number One. He looked but could see nothing.
"It was a man, I'm sure of that," she said. "A tall man. I think he was Red Orc!"
"See any weapon? A beamer?"
"No, I just got a glimpse, and then he was gone behind a tree." Kickaha began to get even more uneasy.
He watched the birds and noticed that a raven was cawing madly near where Anana thought she had seen Red Orc. Suddenly, the bird fell off its branch and was seen and heard no more, Kickaha grinned. The Lord had realized it might be giving him away and had shot it.
A hundred yards to their left near the edge of the tar pit, several bluejays screamed and swooped down again and again at something in the tall grass. Kickaha watched them, but in a minute a red fox trotted out of the grass and headed into the woods southward. The jays followed him.
With their departure, a relative quiet arrived. It was hot in the tall saw-bladed grass. Occasionally, a large insect buzzed nearby. Once, a shadow flashed by them, and Kickaha, looking upward, saw a dragon fly, shimmering golden-green, transparent copper-veined wings at least two feet from tip to tip, zooming by.
Now and then, a trumpeting floated to them and a wolf-like howl came from far beyond. And, once, a big bird high above screamed harshly.
Neither saw a sign of the man Anana had thought was Red Orc. Yet, he must be out there somewhere. He might even have spotted them and be crawling toward their hiding place. This caused Kickaha to move away from their position near the boulder. They did this very slowly so they would shake the tall grasses as unviolently as possible. When they had gotten under the trees at the edge of the clearing, he said, "We shouldn't stay together. I'm going to go back into the woods about fifty feet or so. I can get a better view."
He kissed her cheek and crawled off. After looking around, he decided to take a post behind a bush on a slight rise in the ground. There was a tree behind it which would hide him from anybody approaching in that direction. It also had the disadvantage that it could hide the approaching person from him, but he took the chance. And the small height gave him a better view while the bush hid him from those below. He could not see Anana even though he knew her exact position. Several times, the grasses moved just a little bit contrary to the direction of the breeze. If Orc or Urthona were watching, they would note this and perhaps...
He froze. The grass was bending, very slightly and slowly and at irregular intervals, about twenty yards to the right of Anana. There was no movement for what seemed like ten minutes, and then the grass bent again. It pointed toward Anana and moved back up gently, as if somebody were slowly releasing it. A few minutes later, it moved again.
Kickaha was absorbed in watching the progress of the person in the grass, but he did not allow it to distract him from observation elsewhere. During one of his many glances behind him, he saw a flash of white skin through the branches of a bush about sixty feet to his left. At first, he considered moving away from his position to another. But if he did so, he would very probably be seen by the newcomer. It was possible that he had been seen already. The best action just now was no action.
The sun slid on down the sky, and the shadows lengthened. The person creeping toward Anana moved rarely and very slowly but within an hour he was about twelve feet from her. Whether or not she knew it, Kickaha could not tell.
He removed the Horn from its case. And he placed the nock of an arrow in the string of the bow and waited. Again, the grass bent down toward Anana, and the person moved a foot closer.
Behind him, nothing showed except the flash of a bright blue-and-red bird swooping between two trees.
Presently, on the other side of the clearing, keeping close to the trees on its edge, a huge black wolf trotted. It stood at least four and a half feet high at the shoulder, and it could remove the leg of a man at the ankle bone with one bite. It was a dire wolf, extinct on Earth some ten thousand years, but plentiful on Jadawin's world and recreated in the Lords' biolabs for restocking of this area. The giant he-wolf trotted along as stealthily and vibrantly as a tiger, its red tongue hanging out like a flag after a heavy rain. It trotted warily but confidently along for twenty yards and then froze. For a few seconds, it turned its head to scan a quarter of the compass, and then it moved ahead, but crouchingly. Kickaha watched it, while keeping tabs on the persons unknown before and behind him-or tried to do so. Thus, he almost missed the quick action of the wolf.