The Man-Kzin Wars 02

Kzin with pompous dignity. “This the priesthood has decided.”

“You are the leader?”

“First among equals,” said the high priest with a smirk that said he believed in no equals.

“While this tribe slept,” Locklear said loudly, hoping to gain some support, “a mighty Kzin warrior came here. I call him Scarface. I return in peace to see him, and to warn you that others who look like me may soon return. They wish you harm, but I do not. Would you take me to Scarface?”

He could not decipher the murmurs, but he knew amusement when he saw it. The high priest stepped forward, untied the rope, handed it to the nearest of the husky males who stood behind the priests. “He would see the mighty hunter who had new ideas,” he said. “Take him to see that hero, so that he will fully appreciate the situation. Then bring him back to the ceremony post.”

With that, the high priest turned his back and, followed by the other priests, walked away. The dozens of other Kzinti hurried off, carefully avoiding any backward glances. Locklear said, to the huge specimen tugging on his neck rope, “I cannot walk quickly with hands behind my back.”

“Then you must learn,” rumbled the big Kzin, and lashed out with a foot that propelled Locklear forward. I think he pulled that punch, Locklear thought. Kept his claws retracted, at least. The Kzin led him silently from the village and along a path until hidden by foliage. Then, “You are the Rockear,” he said, slowing. “I am (something as unpronounceable as most Kzin names),” he added, neither friendly nor unfriendly. He began untying Locklear's hands with, “I must kill you if you run, and I will. But I am no priest,” he said, as if that explained his willingness to ease a captive's walking.

“You are a stalwart,” Locklear said. “May I call you that?”

“As long as you can,” the big Kzin said, leading the way again. “I voted to my priest to let you live, and teach us. So did most heroes of my group.”

Uh-huh; they have priests instead of senators. But this smells like the old American system before direct elections. “Your priest is not bound to vote as you say?” A derisive snort was his answer, and he persisted. “Do you vote your priests in?”

“Yes. For life,” said Stalwart, explaining everything.

“So they pretend to listen, but they do as they like,” Locklear said.

A grunt, perhaps of admission or of scorn. “It was always thus,” said Stalwart, and found that Locklear could trot, now. Another half-hour found them moving across a broad veldt, and Locklear saw the scars of a grass fire before he realized he was in familiar surroundings. Stalwart led the way to a rise and then stopped, pointing toward the jungle. “There,” he said, “is your scarfaced friend.”

Locklear looked in vain, then back at Stalwart. “He must be blending in with the ferns. You people do that very—”

“The highest tree. What remains of him is there.”

And then Locklear saw the flying creatures he had called “batowls,” tiny mites at a distance of two hundred meters, picking at tatters of something that hung in a net from the highest tree in the region. “Oh, my God! Won't he die there?”

“He is dead already. He underwent the long ceremony,” said Stalwart, “many days past, with wounds that killed slowly.”

Locklear's glare was incriminating: “I suppose you voted against that, too?”

“That, and the sacrifice of the palace prret in days past,” said the Kzin.

Blinking away tears, for Scarface had truly been a cat of his word, Locklear said, “Those prret. One of them was Scarface's mate when I left. Is she up there, too?”

For what it was worth, the big Kzin could not meet his gaze. “Drowning is the dishonorable punishment for females,” he said, pointing back toward Kzersatz's long shallow lake. “The priesthood never avoids tradition, and she lies beneath the water. Another prret with kittens was permitted to rejoin the tribe. She chose to be shunned instead. Now and then, we see her. It is treason to speak against the priesthood, and I will not.”

Locklear squeezed his eyes shut; blinked; turned away from the hideous sight hanging from that distant tree as scavengers picked at its bones. “And I hoped to help your tribe! A pox on all your houses,” he said to no one in particular. He did not speak to the Kzin again, but they did not hurry as Stalwart led the way back to the village.

The only speaking Locklear did was to the comm set in his ear, shoving its pushbutton switch. The Kzin looked back at him in curiosity once or twice, but now he was speaking Interworld, and perhaps Stalwart thought he was singing a death song.

In a way, it was true — though not a song of his own death, if he could help it. “Locklear calling the Anthony Wayne,” he said, and paused.

He heard the voice of Grace Agostinho reply, “Recording.”

“They've caught me already, and they intend to kill me. I don't much like you bastards, but at least you're human. I don't care how many of the male tabbies you bag; when they start torturing me I won't be any further use to you.”

Again, Grace's voice replied in his ear: “Recording.”

Now with a terrible suspicion, Locklear said, “Is anybody there? If you're monitoring me live, say 'monitoring.'”

His comm set, in Grace's voice, only said, “Recording.”

Locklear flicked off the switch and began to walk even more slowly, until Stalwart tugged hard on the leash. Any Kzin who cared to look, as they re-entered the village, would have seen a little man bereft of hope. He did not complain when Stalwart retied his hands, nor even when another Kzin marched him away and fairly flung him into a tiny hut near the edge of the village. Eventually they flung a bloody hunk of some recent kill into his hut, but it was raw and, with his hands tied behind him, he could not have held it to his mouth.

Nor could he toggle his comm set, assuming it would carry past the roof thatch. He had not said he would be in the village, and they would very likely kill him along with everybody else in the village when they came. If they came.

He felt as though he would drown in cold waves of despair. A vicious priesthood had killed his friends and, even if he escaped for a time, he would be hunted down by the galaxy's most pitiless hunters. And if his own kind rescued him, they might cheerfully beat him to death trying to learn a secret he had already divulged. And even the gentle Neanderthalers hated him, now.

Why not just give up? I don't know why, he admitted to himself, and began to search for something to help him fray the thongs at his wrists. He finally chose a rough-barked post, sitting down in front of it and staring toward the Kzin male whose lower legs he could see beneath the door matting.

He rubbed until his wrists were as raw as that meat lying in the dust before him. Then he rubbed until his muscles refused to continue, his arms cramping horribly. By that time it was dark, and he kept falling into an exhausted, fitful sleep, starting to scratch at his bonds every time a cramp woke him. The fifth time he awoke, it was to the sounds of scratching again. And a soft, distant call outside, which his guard answered just as softly. It took Locklear a moment to realize that those scratching noises were not being made by him.

* * *

The scratching became louder, filling him with a dread of the unknown in the utter blackness of the Kzersatz night. Then he heard a scrabble of clods tumbling to the earthen floor. Low, urgent, in the fitz-rowr of a female Kzin: “Rockear, quickly! Help widen this hole!”

He wanted to shout, remembering Boots, the new mother of two who had scorned her tribe; but he whispered hoarsely: “Boots?”

An even more familiar voice than that of Boots. “She is entertaining your guard. Hurry!”

“Kit! I can't, my hands are tied,” he groaned. “Kit, they said you were drowned.”

“Idiots,” said the familiar voice, panting as she worked. A very faint glow preceded the indomitable Kit, who had a modern Kzin beltpac and used its glowlamp for brief moments. Without slowing her frantic pace, she said softly, “They built a walkway into the lake and dropped me from it. But my mate, your friend Scarface, knew what they intended. He told me to breathe many times just before I fell. With all the stones weighting me down, I simply walked on the bottom, between the pilings and untied the stones beneath the planks near shore.”