The racoon-face moved away as the man came closer, but he was going sideways and so still could get between him and the ladder if he wished. Then the racoon-face moved closer and raised the spear, and the man had to defend himself. He hated to let loose of the tomahawk, but if he kept it, it would not be much of a weapon against the spear. His sole chance was in getting the creature before he came close enough to stab him with the assegai. He threw the tomahawk with all the force he could summon up in his frozen body. And, as luck, not skill, had it, the edge of the tomahawk hit the racoon-face in his neck. He fell backward and lay on his back.
There was a yell from the spectators, which by now included almost all the warriors. Even the man could tell that the cat-people were yelling with triumph and the racoon-people with despair. The racoon-faces raced for the ladders in a body, throwing their spears and tomahawks to one side. A few made it over the palisades, but most were stabbed or hatcheted in the back before they got to the ladders or while on the ladders. A few prisoners were taken.
It was only then that the man realised that this racoon-face had not intended to use the spear against him either. He had raised the spear merely to cast it to one side, as if in submission. But the tomahawk had been on its way then. Reality was no tape recorder to be played over again, spliced, or demagnetised.
The Siamese cat-people crowded around him, though they did not come close enough to touch him. They got down on their knees and waddled toward the man, their hands held out. Their weapons lay on the ground behind them. Their faces held strange expressions; the fur and the round, black, wet noses and the widely separated, long, sharp teeth and the eyes, exactly like those of a cat's, made their expressions unreadable. But their attitudes expressed awe, fear and adoration. Whatever their expressions, they evidently did not mean harm to him.
The flames behind him grew brighter, and he saw the eyes of some of them glow. The irises were shaped like narrow leaves against the glare behind him.
One came closer and reached out a hand to touch him. The hand was, apart from being furry, human-like. It had four fingers and nails, not claws. The thumb was opposable.
He felt the tips of the fingers on his thigh, and that touch seemed to poke a hole through his defences. The night sky, the burning buildings, the log palisades, the bodies of brown and white-and-black-tailed
creatures, and, now, the glowing eyes and small faces of children and females looking out of huts. Everything whirled. Around and around. The creature on his knees before the man shouted with terror and tried to scramble backward on his knees. The man fell, striking his shoulder, and lay on the ground while everything galloped by. The one fixed object was the black tip of the thing's tail, which lay before his eyes. It twitched and twitched, and then it grew big and black, and everything was black and silent.
Light and sound returned. He was on his back on soft furs and some soft substance beneath the furs. Above him was a low ceiling with smoke-blackened beams and dark figurines in wood, tasselled with fur, hanging from strips of leather attached to the ceiling. The room, about twenty feet by thirty, was crowded with the Siamese cat creatures. Those nearest his bed were males, but a moment later a female came through an aisle opened for her by the males. She was about five feet tall and had fully rounded breasts beneath the fur and small hairless areas around the nipples. She wore triple-looped beads of large blue stones around the neck and furry wristbands from which dangled little stone figurines. Her enormous eyes were a deep blue that reminded him of the eyes of a beautiful seal point Siamese his sister had once owned.
The males wore beads and breastplates made out of bone, and wristlets and anklets with little figurines or geometric figures, and several had feathered bonnets which could have been worn by chiefs in a Western movie. Only a few were armed, and these seemed to be more ceremonial than utilitarian, judging from their decorations and their lightness.
The female bent over him and said something. He had not expected to understand her, nor did he. The language was not even identifiable as belonging to any of the great language families. There was nothing Germanic or Slavic or Semitic or Chinese or Bantu about it. If it reminded him of anything, it was of the soft-voweled Polynesian language but without glottal stops. Later, when his ear became finer tuned, he heard glottal stops, but these did not mean anything, as they would have in Polynesian. They were as functionless as stops in English.
Her teeth were those of a carnivore, but her breath was sweet. The tongue looked as if it would be as rough as a cat's. Despite her genuinely alien appearance, he found himself thinking of her as beautiful. But then he had always thought that the Siamese cat was a weird and beautiful creature.
He got up on his elbow and started to sit up. His knife, caked with blood, was by his side. The female backed away and the males behind her pressed into each other to draw away also. They murmured in awed tones.
He sat for a moment, his hands gripping the edges of the bed. Actually, he was not on a bed but on a pile of furs inside a niche in the wall. There were no windows, but light came from two open doors at the far wall and from several torches burning in stands fixed to the walls. Outside the door was a mob of males and some females and children. The babies — cubs? kittens? — were very 'cute' with their big black pointed ears, round heads, and great eyes. Their tails were not as dark as the adults.
He got to his feet and for a second was dizzy and then became clear-headed. At that moment, a new aisle opened, and another female came through it. She carried a big clay bowl with painted geometric symbols on its side and a soup of meat and vegetables inside. The odour was very appetising, although not identifiable. He accepted the bowl and the wooden utensil, which was a spoon on one end and a two-tined fork on the other. The soup was rich and delicious, and the chunks of meat tasted like deer or antelope. For a second, he had a vision of a racoon- man having provided the meat, but he decided that he was too hungry to think about that. Despite the somewhat unnerving silence and the intent gazes of the assembly, he ate all the soup. The female then took the bowl away, and everybody stood around as if they were waiting for him to make the next move.
He walked to the nearest door, an aisle opening for him. The sun had just cleared the hills to the east. He had been out for a long time, especially when he considered that it must have been just from the shock of finding himself in such frightening and unfamiliar surroundings.
Now that he was thinking more clearly. where was he? Where in hell was he?
The hills and the trees that he could see in the distance looked as if they belonged to the region around Syracuse. But that was all that was familiar.
The great hall was only half-burned, and the other buildings that he had expected to be nothing but ashes were only half-burned, too. The ground around them was still wet from the rain which had put the flames out.
Aside from the tremendous log hall, the interior of the palisaded village looked like a seventeenth century Onondaga settlement with its long houses. The ladders and the corpses were gone. A few wooden cages near the hall held about a dozen racoon-people.
The gates to the palisade were open, showing fields of corn and other plants outside. Females were working in them while younger children ran about and the older worked with their mothers. Armed males stood guard by the fields; others were on high watchtowers placed well outside the fields and also within the palisade.
The sun and the blue sky were those that he had known all his life.
The catmen evidently expected him to do something. He hoped that he was not going to do something that would change their awe into hostility. He was completely bewildered, and he might have gone mad if he had not had a thick bedrock of pragmatism in his nature.
The only way would be to learn the language.
He indicated the female whom he had first seen, the one who reminded him of his sister's Siamese cat. He pointed to himself and said, 'Ulysses Singing Bear.'
She looked at him. The others murmured and shifted uneasily.
'Ulysses Singing Bear,' he said.
She smiled or at least opened her mouth widely. A scary smile. Those teeth could take a big chunk out of him with one bite. Not that they were as relatively large as those of a house cat. They were small, really, and the canines were only slightly longer than the other teeth. But they were so sharp.
She said something, and he repeated his name. It was evident that she was trying to repeat the words, though she may not have guessed that he was saying his name.
After a while, she was able to say, 'Wurisa Asiingagna Wapiira.'
That was as close as she could come to mastering English sounds.
He shrugged. It was up to him to adapt. He would learn their language.
