Killbird

animals. Two bearskins awaited me, awaited to decorate and make warm the floor of my hidehouse for my pairmate. A tawny lion stalked me, making the stubble of hair which was growing on my neck crawl with warning, but my shouts scared the animal away. I made note of him, for not since my father's father had a member of the family killed a lion. Killing a lion was on the same order of bravery as collecting a necklace of dragon's guts and almost as dangerous, for my father's father told tales of a lion killing two men while bearing five arrows in his body, one so near his heart that blood pumped out as he moved. I first sensed danger when I came down a long, sloping hillside, moving cautiously through the trees, which were decreasing in size. I felt it begin to tingle in my chest, and then I bared my belly and wiped away the sweat and I could feel it better, a little warning tingle which made my heart pound. I moved back and came down another way, a mile distant from my first approach to the valley's bottom, and the tingle was so faint I went forward. There, where the tingle originated, I saw a heap of rubble, the stones and strangeness which gave home to the spirits which warned with a tingle in the chest and belly, and I felt very much alone. There was a stream and then a hill. Beyond the hill, I thought, I could see the deadly flats, and that would be the limit of my travel, for no man goes down into the flats and returns. I climbed the hill, picking my steps with the unconscious silence of the hunter, careful of loose stones. I peeked over the top of the hill and saw a valley stretching before me. I felt no danger. I stood and started walking down the hill and almost stumbled over the bleached white bones of a deer. A jangle of alarm was in my head, and I fell to the ground, rolling quickly to shelter behind a large rock. Cautiously I looked out, and not a dozen steps away there was another pile of bleached bones. «When you see the white bones of death…» My blood pumped. My face burned. Inch by inch, rock by rock, I eased my way down the hillside. There could be no mistake. The white bones of death were everywhere, some of them old, some so old they were nothing more than white ash. There were no freshly killed animals. Either the dragon had depopulated the area of wildlife or the survivors had learned, through experience, not to walk on that deadly hillside. Knowing that I had never faced such danger, not even when I stood alone with only my longbow against the giant black bear, I rested, feeling the sun warm my back, willing my heart to stop its wild poundings. My mind did things of its own. I yearned for a running mate, a friend, such as Logan's Teetom, even a Teetom, who in my hour of loneliness could say, «You can do it, Eban. You can do it.» Oh, gods of man, I had been alone so long, so long. When my father failed to return from the hunt and there came a report that he had last been seen heading toward the far hills where there were dragons, I was but a bare-assed learner, running free through the camp, permitted to snatch food from any fire, treated with the sometimes amused but always fond tolerance of all. I mourned for my father, but even then, having been on my first hunt, I had my hardax, and with my father dead, I was the man. I told my mother not to weep, for she had her man. And then the curse came and darkened my skull and nothing that Seer of Things Unseen could do would cause it to go away, and was it grief for my father or shame for me which caused my mother to weaken, to spend her days lying in the hide-house sighing, weeping, and then burning with the fever? I had never had anyone, since then. Life, of course, is God's most precious gift, so even an accursed one was sacred, but there were the taunts from my contemporaries, the laughter behind my back. When it became evident that I was to be different in other ways the shame of it pushed me into myself. I set up my hidehouse, legacy of my father, on the far fringe of the family area, went my solitary way, and in my desperation and unhappiness took chances, bracing the fierce bear, nearly dying in his clutch as his great heart pumped out his life just in time to keep his carnal-smelling maw from closing over my head. Soon, however, they did not taunt me. Although striking a fellow man is punishable, certain games, tests of strength, are encouraged; and soon I was able to handle my peers with an ease which caused mutterings. It was no test at all to pin Logan, or Young Pallas, or even the hulking Yorerie to the ground in a wrestling match. In games of skill and endurance I excelled, running faster than the swiftest, able to trot for endless hours to bring a deer to bay and then, his giant carcass dragging to the ground, to carry the animal back to camp to turn him over to the family of Yorerie the Butcher for preparation and sharing. My longbow was two hands longer than even the longbow of the family head, Strongarm, and only the respect which I owed to our family head prevented me, in hand games, from besting the Strongarm himself. But I was and had always been alone. There was only one bright spot in my life, and that was in the form of a sunny- faced prewoman, Yuree, who, perhaps in pity at first, came to me and talked to me. She was so beautiful, her body short and round and soft, her skull gleaming and oiled, her wide eyes alert as the eyes of a frightened female deer. Even as a child she knew her powers, sending me to the top of the tallest fruit tree to toss down the ripest fruits with no more authority than her smile. «Eban,» I remembered her saying, as I lay behind the rock and let my eyes cover the ground in front of me, counting the bleached piles of bones which, it seemed, grew more numerous further down the slope, «what will you do when I come of age?» «I don't know,» I mumbled, not daring to think that I, the freak, the accursed one, could presume to ask for her. «Oh, you pain me,» she said. «Will you not ask for me?» «Yuree,» I said, finding it hard to breath. «Do I dare think you'd want me to ask?» «Of course, silly,» she said, with a teasing smile. «Not that I promise to choose you.» «It will be honor enough to be allowed to ask,» I said. «But the daughter of the family head could not be pairmate to a haired one.» «Oh, pooh,» she said. «We'll have Seer burn it off.» I wore the blisters for days, after I tried to burn away my curse myself. And now I could feel the summer sun doing it's work on my partially exposed scalp, the hair being by now about a finger long and tawny like the hide of a lion. And was that a noise from below? And so it was only Yuree with whom I could talk, share my shame, my dreams. When she would sneak away from her hidehouse on a spring night and lie in my arms and allow me to touch her lips with mine, to do all those wonderful and blood-rousing things which prepeople are allowed, her skirt or loincloth tucked securely between her legs to mark the only off-bounds area, I dared to think of it, of her in my hidehouse, with me bringing her the spoils of the hunt, for I was, truly, Eban, son of Egan the Hunter. «I will dress you in lion skins,» I said. «Oh, will you?» she breathed, her voice made low and funny by my kisses on her bared torso. «Oh, will you?» «For you I will gather a necklace of dragon guts,» I promised. Ha. I had not remembered that. Was that a sign? So long ago I had promised her. Oh, gods of man, it was. It was a sign. I was the favored one. She had remembered, and the multicolored thing hanging from her father's hidehouse was the sign that it was, actually, unbelievably, Eban who was the favorite. At that moment I was ready to slay two dragons, three dragons, a dozen dragons, to festoon my Yuree in gaudy and lovely guts. And at that moment I heard a noise behind me and turned to see a tawny shape move swiftly from cover to cover. So it was not only the possibility of a dragon before me. There was the lion behind me, having tracked me, stalked me. It was a tight situation. If I moved, the dragon's teeth would come spitting to kill me. If I remained behind the rock, I would end up with four manweights of lion on my back. Keeping in shelter, I strung my finest arrow, tipped in dragonskin, to my bow, put my hardax atop the rock ready for use, rolled to my back so that I could watch. The lion was silent, but I caught a glimpse of him as he moved closer. His intentions were clear. I considered running for it, back up the slope, but he was above me and I was at a disadvantage. The game continued for a long, hot, sweaty period during which the sun moved perceptibly. I listened for sounds from below, for sounds of the dragon. There was nothing. Only the sun and the buzz of insects and the loose rock which rolled down toward me just before the lion coughed, leaped, made his charge, arching high to come down at me from up the slope, his tawny hide shining against the sky. I loosed my best and most deadly arrow and reached for the hardax even as he was airborne, and then he was descending, claws showing from his pads, and my arrow lodged ineffectively in his haunch. In that swift and instant moment of action I wondered if my father had died thus, at the claws and fangs of a lion instead of in a spitting storm of dragon's teeth. So I was to die, mauled and maimed, food for the lion of the mountains. But then there was a terrible sound, even as the lion began his descent, and I saw his body seem to pause in midair and the life run out of him with blood springing from his head, and then I was rolling to keep his vast weight from landing atop me and he was beside me, jerking out his life. A sound such as I'd never heard before, a wail of ghostly anguish, high- pitched, whining, came from below. There was a rumble, a hard clanking sound. Oh, gods of man. I took one moment to make sure the lion was dead. He looked intact, with only his head damaged, pulped, bloody, but the hide excellent with only the one arrow hole in the flank. I retrieved my arrow and lay beside the dead animal, admiring his magnificent coloring, the powerful and now useless muscles, the yellowish and deadly teeth exposed in a death's-head grin. The sound from below came to a halt. From directly below there was the bellow of a dragon's voice, and teeth swept up the slope, making leaves dance and fall and sending a shower of dust into my eyes as they struck against the rock which protected me. More frightened than I'd ever been, I waited for the deadly rain to cease. It was said that very old dragons had long since spit out all their teeth and had only their deadly eyes. This, then, was not one of them, although all dragons are ancient. Silence. I lay there, forcing myself to review everything I'd ever heard around the campfires on the subject of dragons. By the will of God, dragons did not breed. God help man if they did. By the will of God, dragons stayed on their dragon paths, beaten into hardness by the eternity of their vigilance, for dragons were God's first creations, were on earth before God made man from the fresh, red bones of a bear and made him walk upright, as the bear does on occasion. What else did I know? The range of the