“Lethii,” she said, pointing to herself.
Uncertainly Brannon touched his chest. “Brannon.”
She repeated it. “Brannon.” She grinned at him.
He grinned back.
That was the beginning.
He stayed there three weeks, among the Nurillins. He discovered that there were perhaps three thousand of them, no more; once, they had had great cities throughout Cutwold, but that had been many thousands of years before, and the jungle had long since reclaimed them.
The girl named Lethii was his guide. She nursed him to health, kept constant company with him when he was well enough to walk, taught him the language. It was a smooth and flowing language, not difficult to learn.
“The toads are our steeds,” she told him one day. “My people trained them long ago to respond to our commands. When I heard you screaming for help I was bewildered, for I knew the toads never attacked any of us.”
“I didn’t know I was screaming,” Brannon said.
“You were. The touch of a toad’s tongue is agony. I heard your voice and saw you, and knew that the toads had attacked you because you were—not of us.”
Brannon nodded, “And I never will be.”
But at times during the weeks that passed he thought he had become one of them. He learned the Nurillin history—how they had been great once, and now were dying away, and how when the Terran scout ships had come the Nurillins had realized the planet was no longer theirs, and had moved off into the jungle to hide and wait for the end.
He felt himself growing a strange sort of love for the girl Lethii—not a sexual sort of love, for that was impossible and even inconceivable between their species and his, but something else just as real. Brannon had never felt that sort of emotion again.
He met others, and came to know them—Darhuing, master of the curious Nurillin musical instruments; Vroyain, whose subtle and complex poetry bewildered and troubled Brannon. Mirchod, the hunter, who showed Brannon many ways of the jungle he had not known before.
But Brannon sensed strain in the village, finally, when he knew the people well enough to understand them. And so when six weeks had passed he said to Lethii, “I’m well now. I’ll have to rejoin my people.”
“Will you come back?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll come back.”
He came back twice more—once half a year later, once a year after that. They had welcomed him gladly, had grieved at his leave-taking.
Now a year and a half had slipped by since the last visit, and Brannon was returning once again. But this time he was bringing death.
Above the tent a bird shrieked, the long low wail of a dawnbird, and Brannon realized night had gone. He had dreamed of the Nurillins. He had remembered the three visits past, the visits now to be blotted out by bloodshed.
He got to his feet and stood looking down at the ten sleepers.
It was possible to kill them all, one by one, as they slept. No one would find them. Brannon would return alone, and no one would question him. The Nurillins would remain untroubled where they dwelt.
He shook his head.
His decision had been made; he would abide by it. He nudged Murdoch. The dark-faced man blinked and was awake in an instant, staring up at Brannon.
“Time to get up,” Brannon said. “It’s dawn. You can’t sleep all day.”
Murdoch got to his feet, nodding. “Time to get up,” he repeated loudly. “Everybody up!”
The hunters awoke, grumbling and complaining.
“Will we reach the Nurillins today, Mr. Brannon?” asked Saul Marshall’s wife. “I’m stiff all over from sleeping on the ground.”
“Did you sleep?” said Mrs. Damon. “I couldn’t. I was up every moment of the night. Those birds, and the animals I kept hearing—!”
“Yes,” said Rhawn’s wife. “I hope we’ll get there today. Another night sleeping out would really be too much.”
Brannon very carefully erased the scowl of contempt before it had fully formed on his face. He said, “There’s a very good chance we may get there before nightfall tonight. If all of you hurry up, that is. We’re not getting any closer while we sit around in camp.”
It was a telling point. Breakfast was perfunctory, just a handful of food-tabs and a once-over with a molecular rinse. Within an hour, the camp had been broken up, the plastic tent dissolved, the equipment repacked and reshouldered.
While Brannon waited for the Damons and the Rhawns to ready themselves for the day’s march, he walked over to Murdoch, who was talking with Marya Llewellyn.
She looked incredibly fresh and lovely, as if she had slept in a germicidal incubator all night rather than in a jungle tent. Her skimpy clothes were barely creased.
“Well?” Brannon asked. “Am I taking you the right way?”
Murdoch glared at him. “We trust you, Brannon. You don’t have to act this way about it.”
“You trust me? You didn’t yesterday.”
“Marya says you’re leading us toward the Nurillins. Well, you ought to be. We’re paying you enough.”
Brannon glanced at Marya Llewellyn. “Are you from Earth, Mrs. Llewellyn?”
“Originally. I live on Vega VII now.”
That explained the deep tan, the air of health. “Have you done much hunting before?” Brannon asked.
“Mrs. Llewellyn has been on four hunting tours of mine,” Murdoch said. “In fact, she met her husband on a tour. We were hunting in the Djibnar system then.” He grinned at her, and she returned the grin. Brannon wondered whether any sort of relationship existed between these two besides that of hunter and hunt director. Probably, he thought. Not that it mattered any to him.
“We’re ready,” Mrs. Damon called cheerily.
Brannon turned. She was plump, good-natured looking. A grandmotherly type. Out here, hunting intelligent beings? He shrugged. Strange kill-lusts lay beneath placid exteriors; he had found that out long before. He wondered how much these people were paying Murdoch for the privilege of committing legal murder. Thousands, probably.
Brannon surveyed the group of them. Only big Napoli was a familiar type: he was a legitimate sportsman, as could be seen by the way he handled his gear and himself in the jungle. As for the rest of them, these hunters, they were a cross-section—but they all shared one characteristic. All had a curious intent glint in their eyes. The glint of killers. The glint of people who had come halfway across the galaxy to cleanse their minds and souls by emptying the chambers of their guns into the innocent golden bodies of the Nurillins.
He moistened his lips. “Let’s go,” he said crisply. “There’s a lot of hiking yet ahead.”
There wasn’t much doubt in Brannon’s mind that he would reach the Nurillins’ village safely with his ten charges. The half-comprehended sense that had been with him so long guided him through the thick jungle.
Sometimes stray thoughts popped into his mind: a man named Murdoch will come to you this morning and offer you a job.
Other times, it would be more subtle: a shadowy wordless feeling that to take a given path would be unwise, that danger lurked somewhere.
Still other times he felt nothing at all. Fortunately this happened infrequently.
Brannon knew without knowing that the party would reach the Nurillin village on time. It was only a matter of picking one foot up and slogging it back down a yard further ahead, of mechanically marching on and on and on through the endless jungle that made up so much of the planet Cutwold.
Overhead Caveer climbed toward noon height, sending down cascades of golden-green radiance. Rhawn’s wife asked once, “How soon will we be out of this dreadful jungle?”