Killbird

scrape away my hair on face and skull, and Mar laughed at me. I did not dare tell her that I was thinking of paying a visit to the people, perhaps not my own, but one of the families allied with Stoneskull. There was a problem, but it was not an immediate one. I would have two young ones for pairmating in the future. That, I told myself, was my reason for thinking of people. The life of ease and plenty was making me soft, and I grew irritable and restless. After the nights started getting shorter, but winter still held the mountains under a fine snow accumulation, I told Mar that I would hunt. She, too, was spoiled, by having me with her at all times. I told her that it was the duty of a man to hunt and that the hunt, especially in the winter, meant that I would be gone for more than one day. She wailed, but I was firm. I have to admit that I was ready, after spending one night in the open, in the cold, shivering in my sleepskin with a fire to cheer me, to go back to the comfort of the always-warm cave. I did not yield to the temptation, however. I made one trip around my valley and saw that all was well. The deer were wintering as well as could be expected. There were no large predators in my valley, so the only enemy the deer had to survive was winter itself. I determined to make a scout outside the valley and spent several days making a wide circle around, up hill and down valley, always on the alert, once or twice coming up on my valley's protective hills merely to test the alertness of the guardian dragons. They never failed to show me that they were eternally watchful. I found a bear's den on a mountainside, smelling it out by the escape of air from a vent, and toyed with the idea of making Mar a gift of a bearskin. However, I knew from folklore that sometimes bears sleep two in a cave, and I didn't feel it wise to try to take on two angry bears. Bears are very ill-natured, when they're awakened in the midst of their winter's sleep. I was pleased by the beauty and the plenty of our mountains. The dragons of my hills had kept man far away, so that for at least two or three days' march on any side of my valley there was nothing but the wild and unpeopled forest, streams frozen under their winter blankets, swimmer dams, the signs of many deer, the winter nests of climbers and the tracks of more than one lion. There were no dragons save those which guarded my valley, and they were no danger as long as one did not try to enter the valley over the hills but came in and out through the dragon's hole. My loneliness was emphasized by the quiet of winter, the vastness of the mountains, and the total absence of my fellow man. And I thought ahead to the time when Egan and Margan would come of age. I dreamed of having four, even five fine premen asking for my daughter. From where would they come? Here around my valley was an ideal range for an entire family, several families, and there were no men and would be none when my children came of age. As I lay in my sleepskins with a cheery fire going I saw an ugly vision, my two children inbreeding to produce the footless horror I had seen, so long ago, on the plains of the inbreeders. With new determination, I marched quickly back to the valley, where I was greeted with joy by Mar. I told her my decision. I would venture forth into the lands of man and tell of the wonders of our mountains. I would sing the praises of that unspoiled and unhunted country. When man came, with me as guide, we would be friends, but not a part of the family, and then when the children were of age there would be pairmates for them. I would set out immediately and return with the spring thaws. «You will not leave me alone,» she said. «I will go with you.» «And carry two infants through the winter snows?» «Then we will wait for the thaw and go together,» she said. At first I thought to strike her for defying me, but we had a special relationship, Mar and I, engendered by our having none other save ourselves. We were alone in a vast and deserted range by ourselves, and I concluded that it was not female arrogance for her to dispute my plans, merely a dependence upon me as I depended upon her. Had she women to keep her company I would have gone. So I went back to the game. It was fascinating in a way. I was quite good at it. I knew the symbols for all the numbers, and on one cold and stormy day with a norther blowing outside and a blizzard of snow making visibility less than the length of my arms, I mastered a concept which the eye had been pressing on me for a long time. I learned that the symbols did not halt and become senseless after reaching the number of fingers on two hands, but that the double slash mark meant ten and one and not two and that by adding a symbol after the slash mark denoting one, the value of the symbol became ten and two, ten and three and on up. Then, just as I felt smug at having mastered that part of the game, the eye came with a new concept which puzzled me. By the addition of a small symbol, +, between two symbols the numbers took on a new meaning, and when I learned, finally, that 2 + 2 is 4, the game took on a complexity which bored Mar and left her playing with our babies while I spent more and more time sitting in the chair pushing symbols on the flat surface to get the eye to react. Then the game was almost ruined when, without warning, the eye made a strange noise. I had been playing happily, using the + symbol and doing well, and suddenly the eye changed, a color glowed in it, and there appeared a picture on the eye much like a picture drawn by a child in the sand with a stick, the straight-line representation of a man with arms out-flung, five fingers on each hand. And as I mused and wondered what form the game was now taking, the eye made noise. I leaped back and could not make any sense out of the sound. It was strangely human but grating to my ears, low, full. I stayed away from the chair for a while, and then, hoping that the numbers game would be played, went back. The stick man appeared and the sound came. I pushed at the flat surface and nothing happened, and then I noticed that there was a series of pictures now on my flat surface. A man. A tree, other things, and under each picture there were little lines much like the symbols for numbers, but different. And then there appeared on the eye the little lines under the picture of the man and the sound came again. I listened carefully. The sound repeated. I called Mar. «Listen,» I said. «I do not like the game,» she said. «Just listen.» «Man, man, man'—the eye was making sound, in a deep, full, resonating sound which was vaguely human but not like the pleasantly high voices of our people. «It is saying 'man,' « I said. «And there is the picture of a man.» I looked at the flat surface. The picture of the man was glowing, and I pushed it. The picture on the eye changed. There was a tree, and the deep voice was saying, « 'Tree, tree, tree.' « Yes, as my ears grew accustomed to it and my fright faded, it was speaking, the eye. I pushed the tree symbol, and a new game was born. There seemed to be an endless supply of pictures. Cloud. Rain. Bear. Tree. Stream. Woman. Child. And the voice of the eye repeated each endlessly until I silenced it by pushing the picture on the flat surface, and after days of this, with winter clinging even though spring was near, the game changed slightly, going over the familiar pictures but not showing me the picture on the flat surface but, instead, giving me only the little symbols, which I concluded, meant the object just as the symbols could mean numbers. I had trouble remembering, but the eye repeated and repeated, and then we were doing games like Man + Woman = Child. I liked the one which went Tree + Rain + Sun = Fruit. As the days lengthened and the snow melted in our valley and the stream was swollen with the melt runoff, I deserted the game, save for periods at night, and watched my valley come to life. There was still snow on the heights, and the nights were quite chill. My son, Egan, named for my father, had shown signs of being ill. It was an illness for which I could see no reason. He ate well, taking milk from Mar's full breasts and, in addition, eating food which Mar chewed for him, but he was not growing as rapidly as Margan, the girl. And he cried often, a weak and protesting cry which tore at my heart, for nothing I could do, nothing I could bring down by my prayers, seemed to help him. Thus, my journey into the range of man was delayed. Thinking that the food from the magic cave might not be good for my son, I hunted and Mar chewed freshly cooked meat for my son and fed him. There seemed to be a slight improvement, and so our lives went back to almost normal, except that we could not bring ourselves to desert the comforts of our cave, for as the days warmed, there was a pleasant coolness inside. In the evenings I would play the game, and there was always something new. We started a new kind of game, the eye and I, and I laughed, for I knew more than the eye. The eye showed, in pictures like the pictures drawn in the sand by a child, how to make a stone ax. I had made stone axes when I was a child, so I laughed. Then the eye showed how to make a longbow, one step at a time, and I nodded in agreement. How to make fire by the spinning stick and the thong of leather? Ha. Any child knew that. But a house built of logs? Very interesting. I saw immediately the advantages of that. Thick walls to keep out the cold. A roof formed of saplings and sod. Yes. I could see that. I punched the symbol for the log house again and again until I had the process learned, and I practiced, cutting trees and notching them and putting them together into a square. How much I could teach my fellow men had I the chance. I became interested in the eye's showing of how to make pottery and was intrigued when the eye added something new. By forming a small cave of stone and chinking the holes with clay and building a fire inside to burn to glowing embers, the clay pots were made harder. I forced Mar to watch, and we tried, and the pots we made were almost as hard as dragonskin and much prettier than those which were hardened merely by putting them into the embers of a campfire. With so much knowledge, I was bursting to tell it. In spite of Egan's continued weakness, we packed and left our valley through the dragon hole. I was still undecided. Mar favored a trip to the nearest range of a family, there to try to form an alliance, but I kept thinking of my home, of the Valley of Clean Waters, and wondering if any of my old—friends—were alive. And although it was far, I set my trail to the northeastward. To Mar's disgust, I kept our hair scraped. She wailed and complained that the sun burned her bare scalp, but I could see, as we began to encounter families, that it was wise, for we were welcomed. I submitted my son to the eyes of the wise old women of each family as we journeyed, had many prayers, fed him many potions, but he was still weak and frail, while Margan seemed to thrive on travel. I found man to be much the same everywhere in the mountains.