He looked down. Odd, there was no flat white surface below him. Instead, there was—there was another cage! He was merely being transferred!
Eric sighed out his relief gustily. He was about to replace the spears, but just then the rope lowered him into the exact center of the cage and withdrew from his back. He looked about, examining the place.
The spears he held were what saved his life when the naked girl came at him.
PART III
Counselors For Their Wisdom
18
She had dropped into it, still hanging from the rope, the cage had appeared empty. Once on his feet and master of his own, motions, he had begun to turn about leisurely. And then that swift, determined patter behind him, a little softer than it should sound when a warrior ran …
Eric whirled, a careful smile on his face, the beginnings of a peaceful greeting on his lips. And he found himself unable to speak.
Because there was a girl charging at him, a stark naked girl with a great mass of light brown hair that spiraled down in one direction to her shoulders and then in the other direction to her hips. And there was a spear in her hands, quite a heavy spear with the longest point Eric had ever seen. The point was aimed at his belly. The girl was coming fast.
Pure reflex. Eric realized that he had parried the spear upward with one of his own spears.
The girl drew back a pace, set herself and lunged again. Again Eric knocked it away but barely: he felt it go past his throat by half a handsbreadth.
Again she came back. again he parried, again and again and again. He felt as if his mind were giving way—this was like a nightmare you had back in the burrows after a full meal and a big celebration. How could a woman be carrying a weapon? How could a woman be attacking a-warrior in direct combat?
She was not going to give up. She was absolutely set on killing him, that was certain. Her eyes were narrowed intently and a red bit of her tongue projected thoughtfully from a corner of her mouth. She held the spear tightly, looked him over for a vulnerable, undefended area, then lunged once more. Eric, using his spear as a club, warded off the thrust.
How could he stop her? He couldn’t counterattack—there was the danger of hurting or killing the girl. Alien-Science or Ancestor-Science, whatever you believed in, you always accepted as axiomatic that a nubile woman, a woman of child-bearing age, was untouchable with a deadly weapon, was automatically holy. A warrior who killed such a one ceased to be human: even if he were a chief, his tribe would declare him outlaw.
But she was liable to get through his guard sooner or later. And he couldn’t try to take the spear away from her. He’d have to let go of his own spears in order to do that, and the moment be stopped parrying her thrusts she’d run him through.
Meanwhile, all he could do was protect himself. And she was so damned determined! They were both breathing heavily to the rhythm of weapon hitting against weapon. Eric jumped as the girl’s long spearpoint missed his eyes infinitesimally.
“Almost got me that time,” he muttered.
The girl stopped in the middle of a lunge. She teetered a moment, barely holding her balance, staring at him with widened eyes.
“What did you say?” she breathed. “You said something.”
Eric stared back, wondering if she were insane. Should he take the chance now, while her mind was busy with some unexpected problem, should he drop his spears, leap at her and try to take her weapon away?
“Yes, I said something,” he told her, watching the spear in her hands carefully. “So what?”
She lowered the spear and stepped back a few paces, strain going out of her face. “I mean you can talk. You have a language.”
“Of course I have a language,” Eric said irritably. “What the hell do you think I am—a Wild Man?”
The girl answered by flinging her spear aside and dropping to the floor of the cage. She lowered her head to her knees and rocked herself back and forth.
Eric walked away and retrieved the spear. He slung it, along with his own weapons. When he came back to the girl, she was sobbing. And, puzzled as he was, it was evident to him that the sobs were relief and not pain or sorrow.
He waited. Now that she was disarmed, he could afford to be patient. If she turned out to be crazy after all, he’d have to decide what to do with her. Sharing a cage with nobody but a murderous lunatic was a very disagreeable prospect. On the other hand, even a crazy woman was still sacrosanct…
She stopped crying finally and wiped her eyes with the back of one arm. Then she leaned back, locked her arms behind her head and grinned at him cheerfully. Eric felt more disturbed than ever. This was a real odd one.
“Do you know,” she said, “that’s exactly what I thought you were. A Wild Man.”
Eric was astounded. “Me?”
“You. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so.”
He looked around the cage. There was nobody else in it. This girl was a lunatic beyond any doubt.
She had followed his glance. She chuckled and nodded. “No, I’m not referring to anyone in the cage. I’m referring to that fellow up there. He thought you were a Wild Man too.”
Eric looked up along the line of her pointing thumb. The Monster who had brought him still stared down into the cage, the enormous purple eyes unwinking, the prehensile pink tentacles perfectly still. “Why? Why should he—it—think I’m a Wild Man? Why should you?”
A part of him was deeply outraged. To be mistaken for the mythic, terror-inspiring Wild Men—that was too much! You frightened naughty children with stories about hordes of semihuman, hairy creatures who had sunk below the level of language, below the level of weapon and artifact, who had lost, long auld lang synes ago, the universal burrow taboo against cannibalism. You hazed gagling young apprentice warriors with tales of vast, ravaging mobs that came out of nowhere and fought your spears with teeth and nails, mobs that fought not for victory, for territory or for women, but for the ripped-off arms and bloody, broken haunches of their antagonists. And when you asked an older warrior how could there really be such a thing as Wild Men, since nobody you knew had ever seen them, he told you that they were a plague peculiar to the back burrows. Wild Men, he would tell you as he himself had been told by the warriors under whom he had studied, Wild Men did not live in Monster territory and they did not live in the burrows. They lived in another place entirely, a place called the Outside. And when you asked him to explain or describe this Outside, he’d shrug and say, “Well, the Outside is a place where the Wild Men live.” You’d go away, proud of your maturity for having at last realized that Wild Men were strictly horror-story stuff, as improbable as any of the other burrow legends of lurking creatures: the blood-sucking Draculas, the packs of vicious police dogs, the bug-eyed men from Mars, and, worst of all, the oil-seeking wildcats who drilled for all eternity from one burrow to another.
But Wild Men were not merely the stuff of legend; they were the material of curses and opprobium. A severely retarded child might be called a Wild Man, as might a warrior who disobeyed his band leader or a woman who was expelled from the Female Society. When someone in the tribe perpetrated a particularly ugly crime and managed to escape to distant burrows before punishment, you said: “May the Wild Men get him. He belongs with them.” A Wild Man was anyone who had failed the test of humankind.
But what right did this girl have to pass such a judgment on him? She couldn’t possibly know that his own people had declared him outlaw. And she herself—look at her!—a woman in Monster territory where no woman had a legitimate reason to be—she was a fine one to go around insulting people.