Now he readied a new weapon, made the day before as he trudged across the scrubland and finished to reasonable perfection before he ate on the ledge he had found. It was a new weapon to him, or rather, for him, one he had only read about in Abbey books. Yet to humanity and throughout history, it was so old that it had no age. Three cords hung from his right hand; at the end of each was a rounded stone, tightly secured to its own cord of leather. The three strips of hide were joined at the base where his hand gripped them.
Suddenly, having stolen as close as he could in safety, he rose from a bush and hurled the device in a whirling motion at the startled animal’s legs.
He was amazed at his easy success, but not so much that he did not leap forward and brain the poor brute as it struggled to escape the twisted thongs which held the forelegs fast. His stone spike, reversed, was more than equal to the job. As he began the butchery, he stole more than one respectful glance at the crude bolas which lay beside him on the ground. Nor did he forget to give thanks to God.
Minutes later, he was loping back to his little hill, a full load of meat slung over his shoulder in the beast’s own hide. He had buried the remainder to avoid drawing scavengers, though he had little fear of daytime hunters in this remote wilderness.
The Metz priest relighted his small fire and, cutting as much of the meat as he could carry with ease into strips, began to smoke it. Meanwhile, he ate hugely, strength pouring into his wiry frame with each swallow. As he did, he contemplated the two curved, black horns he had dug free from the skull. They weighed little and he had no doubt he would find uses for them as well, though each was no longer than his forearm. Finishing his meal, he packed the meat in a new hide bag, swallowed the last of the murky water, and brushed out traces of his passing as best as he could. He also examined his sandals with care. Though scratched and scuffed, they were still very sound and had no need yet of patching or mending. Soon he was on his way again, threading a path through the bushes and scrub, once more with his face set to the distant West.
For four days the land rolled past him. The bush gave way slowly but surely to denser and taller vegetation, so that, though the terrain was still flat and open, it had now become a prairie interspersed with groves of trees and no longer even semi-desert. Water appeared, first in the form of rare pools, then as shallow, muddy streams, winding here and there in sandy beds. The land was rising too, hardly more than an inch a mile, but steadily and constantly.
Hiero saw no sign whatsoever of any human activity. The camp on the tiny ledge was the only sign that human beings had ever been in the land at all. It was hard to realize the truth of his teachings in the Republic’s classrooms and remember that all of this vast country had teemed with people millennia ago—so many people that his whole nation would have been lost and unnoticed among them. Not for the first time, he mused on the mighty past and the awful changes brought by The Death. Whatever its sins thousands of years before, humanity had paid an awful price; the fires of the atom and the scourges of the plagues had exacted a toll beyond conception. And this was what the Unclean wanted restored! He tightened his lips and vowed yet again that he would do whatever was possible to see that they did not succeed.
If human life was absent, animal life was certainly not. The Metz could have eaten at fresh kills three times a day, had he chosen. He could also have served as meat himself, had he not been constantly wary.
Antelope of many kinds now appeared, roaming in vast herds, some so large that he felt it wiser to skirt them. It seemed to be calving time for many varieties, and he had no wish to challenge the forests of horns, either those of the mothers or of the great males who guarded the rim of the herds. There were deer too, and they were in herds as well, though he saw only antlerless bucks at this season.
But there were other beasts totally unfamiliar to him. Some were small, but others were so huge that he gave them the widest berth possible. One gathering of giants recalled the great thing that had blundered through his jungle camp on the journey south, months before. They had great trunks sprouting from their huge brown heads, vast pillarlike legs, and mouths with great, curving, ivory tusks. Along the increasing streams he saw other beasts, smooth-skinned, with heads prolonged into enormous snouts, in bulk no less than the other kind, though with shorter legs. All seemed to be more or less peaceful plant eaters, and he took care to disturb none of them. Once in the distance he saw a group of animals leaping with tremendous bounds of their long hind legs and realized they must be some variety of hopper, perhaps the ancestral type of his lost mount, Segi. He thought sadly of Segi and Klootz, then put the thought behind him. He could not bear to think of Luchare and he needed all his strength of purpose to proceed, knowing that every league took her and her country farther and farther away.
Around and about these thousands of plant eaters, there prowled and lurked the carnivores. Again and again, Hiero had to take to a handy tree and, on one occasion, to fight for his perch on the tree itself. This was when a tawny, catlike beast, as big as he was, followed him into the branches in one flowing bound. A smashing blow with the stone spike, glancing off its flat skull, left it half-stunned and bleeding at the tree’s foot. From thence it limped off, snarling, in search of easier prey.
In this encounter he had been lucky, however. Some of the meat eaters were of a bulk far beyond his strength to battle. There was a far larger cat, with a short bobtail and striped spine of black and gold, so huge it could attack all but the most enormous of the herbivores. It had gigantic fangs, protruding well below the lower jaw, and seemed to haunt the watercourses. Hiero grew very wary indeed about drinking and filling his water bag. There were also wolves, big beasts very much like those of the Northland, but lighter and ruddier in color, and a host of smaller, jackal-like hunters as well. These and most of the other killers were, fortunately, nocturnal to a degree; though they made the night ring with their wild screams and roars, by then Hiero was careful to be high in a tree fork, selected well in advance by sunset.
It was true that he could have stopped and made himself better weapons than he now carried, but somehow he did not want to stop at all. Some compulsion, very faint at first and growing only by almost imperceptible degrees, made him want to travel as fast as he could, stopping only when absolutely necessary. He killed such small beasts as were on his line of march and lighted fires only to smoke the barest minimum of parched meat. He had commenced moving more to the south than he had planned, but he seemed to brush the thought aside, when it occurred to him, as being somehow unimportant. Ever so faintly, beyond his blurred abilities to recognize, a control had been set on his movements. Yet it never interfered with day-to-day business, and he was in no other way less alert and ready for what came.
On the sixth day after leaving the hillock where he had seen the ash, he topped a ridge somewhat more lofty than any he had observed in the days before. There, far to the southwest, was a distant line of blue. It could only be hills, and the sight sent a thrill through him. These were the hills of his dream a week back, though he did not consciously recall either them or the dream itself. How beautiful they looked and how desirable! He must go there and see them, must walk their slopes and forested heights. This wish, now imbedded in his mind, was no bar to his ultimate purpose. The fact that he was, in truth, straying away from the line to the west and north he had planned for himself days earlier simply did not register in his conscious thoughts at all. Lightly and delicately, the fisher had laid the lure, and the fish swam forward, unknowing.