Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

The group consisted of one man and six women, at least one of whom appeared quite pregnant. Like us, they were dark-skinned and hairless, a condition that looked quite natural and normal to us now. All wore skirts of some reddish or black hair and all bore homemade bows and spears. Obviously from their manner they’d been observing us for some time, but they said nothing and made no move toward us when they showed themselves. They just stood there, looking hard at our little group. We, of course, looked back.

Finally I shrugged, put up my hands palms out. “We’re friends. We mean you no harm.”

For a while they made no response, and gave no indication that they understood my words, and I grew nervous that there might be some sort of language gap. No telling what sort of culture people raised in this wild would develop. But, finally, one of the women asked, “What tribe do you come from? Where are your tribal marks?”

“No tribe,” I responded, feeling relieved. “Or, say, rather, that we are our own tribe.”

“Outcasts,” one of the others hissed, in a tone that did not indicate approval.

“Not from a tribe,” I said quickly. “We escaped from the cities.”

They showed some surprise at that, the first real emotion Pd seen any of them display. I had never really dealt with a primitive group before, and I was winging it, hoping I wouldn’t put my foot in my mouth. Those weapons looked pretty grim. One of the women whispered to the one who appeared to be their leader, “The demons live in those places. It is a demon trick.”

The leader shrugged off the comment. “What do you wish here?”

“A tribe,” I responded, trying to get as much into the mind-set as I could. “A place to belong, to learn the ways of the world and the ways of a great tribe of people.”

That seemed to be the right response, because the leader nodded sagely to herself. She seemed to think it over, then made her decision—which, I noted, was final no matter what the others thought. “You will come with us. We are the People of the Rock. We will take you to our camp, where the Elders will decide.”

“That sounds good to us,” I told her, and, with that, they all turned and started back into the forest. I looked at the others, shrugged, and followed.

CHAPTER NINE The Demons of the Mount

They had not mentioned that they were several days from this camp of theirs, and that didn’t become apparent for some time. They allowed us to follow them, all right, but kept themselves apart, not talking to us any more than they had to and occasionally taking suspicious glances at us when they thought we weren’t looking. It was clear that, while a leader’s decision was absolute and to be obeyed, it didn’t mean you had to agree with it.

They carried sacks of some kind of skin, in which were various supplies, bows, extra spear points, that sort of thing, but no food. That they foraged for, much as we had, although they had a dietary element that we’d lacked to this point. They hunted vettas and tubros, and did it expertly, considering the primitiveness of their equipment. They could stake out a place silently for an hour or more, seemingly not moving at all. But when a vetta, for example, came close they would rise around it in a circle, tossing spears and shooting arrows with precision and lightning speed, bringing the panicked animal down. Then they would disembowl it with a different, even nastier sort of spear. The vettas, too, were Warden creatures, and you had to kill them quickly or repairs would begin.

Once they were sure the animal was dead they would skewer it on a couple of spears and carry it between two of them, the poles expertly balanced on their shoulders, until they came to a thermal pool. There, experts wielded stone axes in butchering the animal into various small parts which were then wrapped in leaves and cooked in the thermal pools. As one who had, at one time or another, eaten natural meat on frontier worlds, it wasn’t more than a curiosity to me, but to my three wives it was a sickening experience. Butchering an animal is not pretty, and none of the three had ever seen it done before or even thought about it. I had to work pretty hard to prevent them from showing their disgust.

“You have to have real guts,” I told them,like you did back in the escape. If they offer any to us, take it and eat it. You don’t have to like it, and you can be disgusted by it, but we need them.”

“I don’t know why we need anybody,” Ching protested. “We were doing pretty good, I think, and we were happy.”

“Vettas are happy until they’re caught and killed,” I retorted. “We’re more than animals, Ching. We’re human beings—and human beings have to grow and learn. That’s why we need them.”

We were offered some of the kill, after the rest had taken their pick of the best cuts, and I complimented them on their great skill as hunters—which also seemed to please them. I think they knew that my three city-dwelling companions were upset by the hunt and kill, and were vastly amused by their reactions as they tried to bite into the chunks of meat. Angi, whose motto seemed to be “I’ll try anything once” was the most successful; Bura ate as little as she thought she could get away with and looked extremely uncomfortable; Ching finally forced a mouthful down, but she just couldn’t conceal her disgust and refused to eat any more. I didn’t press her; I thought throwing up would be in the worst of taste.

I was relieved to see that our tribal hosts were taking things so well, and I began to suspect that some of them, at least, were neither as naive nor as ignorant as they pretended to be.

They had a ceremony at the end of the meal that seemed to have solemn religious overtones. Dead vetta would not keep; only the skin was savable, and you had to strip off the meat and bone from it completely and “cure” the skin in the thermal pool. When the host died, the Wardens began to die as well, and decomposition was swift. I had found this the case with fruit and berries, although not with cut wood and leaves. It was almost as if the Wardens were determined to keep a very clean, almost antiseptic, wilderness, yet knew enough to leave behind those that were useful to man.

The ceremony itself was interesting and, as usuz such rites, incomprehensible to me. It involved pray: chanting over the remains, with the leader eventualling what couldn’t be saved into the thermal pool manner of an offering, or sacrifice. I wanted very m know more about such ceremonies and beliefs, if c keep from stepping on toes, but didn’t dare ask righ There was time enough, for that later.

Two more days of travel to the northwest, we eluded some more hunting, lay the camp. On the w approached and actually crossed the tracks of our ok it brought a twinge of nostalgia to Bura, at least, ai tainly to Ohing.

The camp was far more than that Nestled up the mountains, invisible from anywhere on the beyond, it was in every sense a small city. A large of stones, some placed by humans, some natural, fi an area more than a kilometer in diameter insi “walls,” guarded the camp from the ground and fr‹ wind, although the roofless area inside was open to t ments. A small stone amphitheater was carved out rock floor in the center of the interior—with what training told me might be an altar at the bottom. T a fire pit dominated the place, but there were man cal small dwellings made of skin and supported by but temporary wooden beams all over. The bulk population was not below in the common yard, but actually within the sheer rock wall behind, in wl peared to be dozens of caves. They were all over th high and low, and there were no ladders—only well-worn hand- and footholds carved into the si the wall. Tribal members, however, scurried up and that wall and in and out of the caves as if they wer to it.

At the base of the cliff, at ground level was a cave, a bit larger than the others. Through obviously made channels, streams from the snow melt above down in small matched waterfalls to holding pools o sides of the camp. From there the water was for use within the compound or allowed to overflow and run off through outlets in the protective wall.

Angi, in particular, was impressed. “This is one hell of a job of civil engineering, mostly done by hand.”

“Remember, we’re not dealing with a long time period here,” I reminded her and the others as well. “The two Medusas were only really completely closed off to each other forty or fifty years ago. It’s entirely possible that some of the original pioneers are still alive here.

It was, in fact, this dichotomy between the inevitable pioneer resourcefulness and the primitive, religion- based lifestyle of these people that bothered me the most.

We were told to wait near the amphitheater, and we could only stand there and look around.

“How many people would you say live here?” I asked our engineer.