Then the pain became too great to fight, and Hiero fainted.
During the following hours, he woke at random intervals, sometimes hot, sometimes chilled with unnatural cold. Tightly bound with dirty cloths, he lay in some strange thing that creaked, swayed, and stank. He wondered idly if he were on a ship, but it did not seem important. He tried weakly to use the mind touch, but nothing happened, and he knew without conscious consideration that he had lost it. Just as he had been robbed of his physical freedom, his mental strength had been despoiled. All sense of time and distance seemed lacking, too, and he had no idea of where or when this was. He dimly remembered being fed some vile broth. He dimly knew it was drugged, but he had no power to resist; he swallowed whatever they gave him, half in a coma. The strange, savage faces he glimpsed at times meant no more to him than any other elements of a seemingly endless nightmare. At times it seemed dark, at others light, but that did not seem important.
Then there was a sudden, hideous chorus of shrieks, followed by a wild discordance of meaningless cries, vibrations, and movements. The thing which carried him lurched violently, and a vast weight fell upon him. Some of his wrappings were torn in the convulsive motions of the weight. For seconds, pain shot through his legs. Instinctively, he kicked as hard as he could, some faint surge of adrenaline coming to his aid, and he found himself almost free of the weight. His eyes were covered, and he could see nothing. His hands were bound, but he could loose them…
Don’t loose them! Lie quiet, the inmost voice of his being warned. It is death to move.
He heard quick, almost furtive movements and the sounds of metal scraping and leather creaking. A voice muttered nearby and was answered by another farther off. There was a thudding as of beasts moving fast, then silence. Still he lay motionless, his tired mind intent only on making no sound. Presently, without knowing he had done so, he fell asleep.
When he awakened, he was hungry and thirsty, but not unreasonably so. His legs seemed free, though not his hands, and some cloth binding still covered his eyes. It was an easy matter to pull away the rag with which his eyes had been shrouded, even with bound hands. He gazed about, blinking in the light of the afternoon sun. He was lying in a hollow, under some low, scrubby bushes. Some large object pressed against his face, looming high over him and obscuring his vision. An already strong smell of decomposition informed him that it had been some animal. He was also tangled in a mesh of what seemed to be canvas and leather.
He lay quiet for a bit and listened. There was a light breeze playing through the bush above him, but the only other sound he could hear was a cackling, gabbling noise which came and went, sometimes rising to a squawk, then dying down again. He had no difficulty in identifying the voices of scavenger birds and he realized he must be lying in a place of death.
His mind was clearing rapidly now. He examined his hands. They were not bound with chains or leather thongs, as he had feared, but only with strips of cotton rag. Evidently his captors had feared no serious effort to escape.
It was no trouble to free himself. Then he pulled himself up over the dead beast whose body had sheltered him.
Five dead, gray kaws, the common beast of burden of D’alwah and the far South, lay about a small clearing. He was peering over the corpse of a sixth, and the broken-off shaft of an arrow an inch from his face was sufficient explanation of its death. Four absolutely naked men, their bodies in contorted attitudes, lay mingled with the dead cattle. Everything had been stripped from the dead, save for the battered harness of his own mount—for such he realized it must have been. He had been carried in some kind of crude canvas and leather litter on its broad back.
A flock of small, black vultures with oily, naked heads were tearing at the dead men. They looked up alertly as his head appeared, then took wing to settle in nearby bushes. Nothing else moved, and the only sound was the muted cackle of the scavengers.
Forcing his mind to throw off its dullness, he tried to reason out what must have happened.
The four men, and perhaps others, were taking him somewhere, walking alongside the kaws. They were ambushed, probably at dusk or even at night. His beast had died instantly, almost, but luckily had not fallen quite on top of him. The attackers’ hasty search had missed him, sheltered in the wreckage of his litter and almost covered by the kaw’s body. The ambushers had been in a hurry, probably afraid of discovery and pursuit, and they had decamped hastily after stripping the dead of everything they could find and use.
Hiero’s legs were as long unused as his head, but he staggered to the middle of the clearing. The croaking of the birds had grown louder, but they did not take wing as he surveyed the scene at closer range.
The dead men were unknown to him. He did not like what he saw of them, particularly since he was now sure they had been his late captors or guards. Even allowing for the agonies of death, they were unprepossessing, being small and of a sallow white color. Their long hair was also pale, and they were clean-shaven, with narrow eyes and protuberant jaws. They somehow did not appear to be creatures of daylight. He wondered who they were and where they had been taking him.
Staring at the landscape of thorn scrub about him in the waning afternoon sun, he forced his dormant training to come back to him, despite his spinning head. Slowly at first, he began to search for anything which might be useful. No weapons lay about, though he was sure there had been plenty of them when the attack came. Indeed, nothing lay about except the corpses. Aside from missing him, the attackers had done a most complete job of plunder. Even the arrows had been retrieved, save for the stub buried in his kaw. There was nothing he could use and no clue to either his captors or those who had slain them.
Other than worn leather shorts and sandals in which he found himself dressed, he had absolutely nothing.
He was just beginning to examine the tracks which littered the clearing, finding only the rough marks of booted feet and some hoof prints of kaws, when the carrion birds fell silent, then lifted from the bushes. From, a remote distance to the east, there came the faint note of a questing horn.
Hiero stood frozen. The birds had flown off low over the thorny scrub, not high in a flock, for which he was grateful. He did not know who had sounded that horn, but as far as he was concerned, this empty waste held nothing but foes. And they might have marked the birds rising.
Again the horn sounded, a solitary call. This time it was answered from the south and the north, though both calls were far off and still well to the east of his position. There had been at least four horns, he estimated, well spaced, signaling position and future movement. Someone had been driving in a long line, looking for something. For what, if not for him?
Hardly thinking, his reflexes taking over, aided by years of training, the Metz stooped and seized a dead branch of thorn bush that was covered with small leaves. Quickly he erased all traces of his presence from the dry earth. Then he began to run slowly to the west, keeping to gravel where he could; when that was not possible, he brushed the ground gently to blot his tracks.
He ran for what he estimated was half an hour, maintaining constant awareness of where he trod. Behind him, the horns still called. The distance seemed the same as when he had first heard them, indicating that the pursuit was moving at roughly the same speed as he was.
The sun was now sinking fast ahead of him, and it showed him that the scrub was thinning out. There were more patches of sand and pebble underfoot now, and both the bush and the sparse, wiry grass had almost disappeared. The color of the earth itself had changed from a sandy brown to a bluish gray.