“You’ve never seen anything like the burrows of the Aaron People,” his uncle was mumbling, as if what his hands had just done was no concern of the rest of him. ” And neither have I, though I’ve listened to the tales. Some of the tales—some of the tales—”
“He won’t last long now,” Sarah the Sickness-Healer commented. “We’ll have to have our fun with the boy.” All you do, Walter the Weapon-Seeker had said, is tear off a pinch with your fingers. Then spit on it and throw it. Throw it as fast and as far as you can.
He couldn’t use his fingers. But he leaned down to the red fragment and picked it up with his teeth. He brought his tongue against the strange soft substance, lashing. saliva into it. And simultaneously he kicked at the burrow floor with curved toes, straightening his legs, jerking his thighs and body upward. Unable to use his arms for balance, he tottered erect and turned, swaying, to face the leaders of his people.
After you spit on it, throw it fast. As fast and as far as’ you can.
“I don’t know what he’s doing,” someone said, “but I don’t like it. Let me through.”
Stephen the Strong-Armed stepped ahead of the group and lifted a heavy spear, ready for throwing.
Eric shut his eyes, bent his head far back on his neck and took a deep, deep breath. Then he snapped his head forward, flipping his tongue hard against the object in his mouth. He forced out his breath so abruptly that the exhalation became a wild, barking cough.
The soft little mass flew out of his mouth, and he opened his eyes to watch its course. For a moment, he was unable to find it anywhere; then he located it by the odd expression on Stephen’s face and the fearful upward roll of his eyes.
There was a little red splotch in the middle of the band captain’s forehead.
What was supposed to happen, he wondered? He had followed directions as well as he could under the circumstances, but he had no idea what the scarlet stain, made loose and moist by his saliva, was supposed to accomplish. He watched it, hoping and waiting.
Then Stephen the Strong-Armed brought his free hand up slowly to wipe the stuff off. Eric stopped hoping. Nothing was going to happen.
Strangers, he had begun to think despairingly, that’s what comes of trusting Strangers—
The blast of sound was so tremendous that for a moment he thought the roof of the burrow had fallen in. He was slammed backward against the wall and fell as if he’ d been walloped with a spear haft. He remembered the cough with which he’d expelled the bit of red blob from his mouth. Had there been a delayed echo to his cough, a gigantic, ear-splitting echo?
He lifted his head from the floor finally, when the reverberations in the little storage burrow had rumbled into a comparative silence. Someone was screaming. Someone was screaming over and over again.
It was Sarah. She was looking at Stephen the Strong-Armed from the rear. She had been standing directly behind him. Now she was staring at him and screaming in sharp steady bursts.
Her mouth was open so wide that it seemed she was about to tear her jaws apart. And with each scream she lifted her arm rigidly and pointed to the back of Stephen’s neck. She kept lifting her arm and pointing as if she wanted everyone present to know beyond the least doubt why and how she came to be screaming.
Stephen the Strong-Armed had no head. His body ended at the neck, and flaps of skin fell down to his chest in an irregular wavy pattern. A fountain of blood bubbled and spurted where his head had been. His body still stood upright, feet planted wide apart in a good warrior’s stance, one arm holding the spear ready for action and the other congealed in its upward motion to wipe the red blob away. It stood, incredibly straight and tall and alive.
Suddenly, it fell apart.
First the spear slid slowly forward out of the right hand and clattered to the floor. Then the arms began to fall loosely to the sagging knees and the entire great, brawny body slumped as if its bones had left it. It dropped aimlessly to the floor, an arm poking out here, a leg twisting out there, in a pattern as meaningless as if an oddly shaped bag of skin had been flung to one side of the burrow.
It continued to twitch for a moment or two, as the bubbling fountain of blood turned into a sluggishly flowing river. At last it lay still, a motionless heap of limbs and torso. Of the missing head there was no trace anywhere.
Sarah the Sickness-Healer stopped screaming and turned, shaking, to her companions. Their protruding eyes left the body on the floor.
Then they all reacted at once.
They yelled madly, wildly, fearfully, as if they were a chorus and she the conductor. Still bellowing, they made for the narrow entrance behind them. They got through in a pushing, punching scramble that at one point looked like a composite monster with dozens of arms, legs and swinging, naked breasts. They carried the guard outside with them, and with them, too, they carried their panic, screaming it into existence all along the great central burrow.
For a little while, Eric could hear feet pounding into the distant corridors. Then there was quiet. There was quiet everywhere, except for Thomas the Trap-Smasher’s interminable mumbling.
Eric forced himself upright again. He was unable to imagine what had happened. That red blob—the Stranger, Walter, had said it was a weapon, but it didn’t operate like any weapon he had ever in his life heard of. Except possibly in the times of the ancestors: the ancestors were supposed to have had things which could blow an object apart and leave no trace. But this was an alien artifact, a possession of the Monsters which Walter the Weapon-Seeker had somehow found and appropriated. What was it? How had it exploded the head of Stephen the Strong-Armed?
A lot of it still lay in his knapsack. Meanwhile, he had his chance; It might not last long; he had no idea when the panic might subside and a patrol of warriors be sent back to investigate. He stepped carefully across the red stream flowing from the fallen man’s neck. Squatting down in front of the dropped spear, he managed to get a grip on it with his bound hands and rose, holding it awkwardly behind him.
No time to cut his bonds. Not here.
“Uncle Thomas,” he called. “We can get away. We have a chance now. Come on, get up!”
The wounded band captain stared up at him without comprehension. “—corridors like you’ve never seen or imagined,” he continued in a low monotone. “Glow lamps that aren’t on foreheads. Corridors filled with glow lamps. Corridors and corridors and corridors—”
For a moment, Eric considered. The man would be a heavy liability in fast travel. But he couldn’t desert him. This was his last surviving relative, the only person who didn’t consider him an outlaw and a thing. And, shattered as he was, also still his captain.
“Get up!” he said again. “Thomas the Trap-Smasher, get up! That’s an order, a warrior’s order. Get up!”
As he’d hoped, his uncle responded to the old command. He managed to get his legs under his body, and strained against them, but it was no use. He didn’t have the energy to rise.
Casting apprehensive looks over his shoulder at the entrance to the storage burrow, Eric ran to the struggling man. Working backward, he managed to get one end of the spear under the crook of his uncle’s arm. Then, using his own hip as a fulcrum, he levered hard at the other end.
It was painful, slippery work, since he couldn’t bring all of his muscles into play and it was difficult to see what he was doing. In between efforts, he gasped out orders to “Get up, get up, get up, damn you!” At last the end of the spear went all the way down. His uncle was on his feet, staggering, but at least on his feet.