I waited another suitable interval and then I, again, took Ubar of the Skies downward. Again I hovered among terrified Kinyanpi, my amrs folded. Let them consider what medicine such a fow might possess.
I then, regally, imeriously, pointed to the chieftain of the Kinyanpi, he most pominent among them, he next to the bearer of the feathered staff, the battle staff.
He shook his head, wildly. I then, with a sweeping gesture, pointed to the east, that direction from which they had come. Wildly he turned his tarn and, crying out, followed by his men, fled.
'Quickly!' I cried to Cuwignaka, Canka, Hci and the others. 'Back to Council Rock!'
Soldiers ad established a hold on the eastern ledges of Council Rock, to which they had been climbing, those ledges opposite those above the trail, up which, slowly, medicine drums beating, medicine men dancing about the beasts, the porcession of Yellow Knives, a few minutes ago, had begun its climb. Behind the soldiers who attained the ledge other soldiers, roped together, clambered upward. The eastern face of Council Rock seemed covered with men and ropes.
Then tarns, screaming, talons racking, wings beating, hurtled among the startled soldiers on the ledge, seizing and tearing at them, blasts of wind even from the wings forcing some back over the edge. The defenders leaped foward. We landed our tarns among a litter of bodies, red and white, on the ledge.
I looked down, at the ropes men, not yet to the top. 'Let those with tarns, who lost women and children at the summer camp, attend to these,' I said.
In a moment tarns had swept again from the ledge and then, seizing ropes and men in talons, at the very rock face itself, dragged and dangling, screaming men from teh sheer surface; ropes and men, tangled, were pulled away from the surface; ropes and men, torn loose from the hand and footholds, unsupported, sped twisting and turning to the rocks below.
I raced across the top of Council Rock, men behind me. The Yellow Knives, on the western side of Council Rock, prevented by the mountain from knowing what had occured in the air to the east, and on the eastern faces of the rock, singing their medicine, their hearing throbbing with the beat of drums, had not disisted in their porcession to the summit; they had continued to ascent the trail.
'You are done!' cried Iwoso. 'You are finished!' Roped to the post she was, she, too, was ignorant of the developments to the east.
Yellow Knives were not twenty-five feet below me, on the trail. In their lead surrounded by medicine men, beating on drums and dancing, were Sardak and Kog, and five others of the Kurii. I also saw, prominent among the Yellow Knives, Alfred, with soldiers, and a Yellow Knife I recognized as the third of the war chiefs who had been at the summer camp. He had not taken part, as far as I knew, in the earlier actions. It was his intention, however, I gathered, to participate in the anticipated resolution of the siege, in his forces' climactic victory.
Before resistance had crumbled at the appearance of the Kurii.
Even now the barricade at the summit was deserted.
Some fifty to seventy feet from the barricade the procession stopped.
The drums stopped. The medicine men stopped dancing. They drew back.
Kog and Sardak came forward, followed by the others.
The barricade was no longer empty. Atop it, on the logs and stakes, the wind moving in its fur, stood a gigantic Kur.
Yellow Knives crowded back against one another, uneasily. They looked to Kog and Sardak, but these beasts, standing as though stunned, or electrified, on the stony trial, were oblivious of them.
The Kur on the barricade distended its nostrils, drinking scent.
Sarkad stepped forward. He reared upright, increasing his scanning range. He moved his tentaclelike fingers on his chest, which gesture, I think, is a displacement activity. Some claim it has the function of cleaning the claws.
The ears of the beast on the barricade, one half torn away, flattened themselves against the side of the head.
Sardak's ears, too, lay back.
I saw that the claws of the rear appendages, or feet, of the monster on the barricade, had emerged. So, too, I noted, had those of Sardak.
The beasts did not speak to one another. Words were not necessary.
Swiftly, moving with incredible grace and lightness for its bulk, the beast on the barricade descended to the trail.
Sardak, the two rings of reddish alloy on his left wrist, advanced to meet it.
They stopped, some ten feet from one another, alone facing one another on the trail, between the barricade and the other beasts and Yellow Knives.
They then began, keeping very low, on all fours, to circle one another.
Occasionally one would reach out, or snarl, or make a sudden movement, but not charging, to see the response of the other. Fangs were bared.
The hair on the back of my neck rose. Was it like this, I wondered, in the ancient days of the Kurii, long before the steel worlds, long before, even, the development of their technology. Is it like this, I wondered, even today, in the steel ships, in the 'killings.'
Then the two beasts, as though they had satisfied themselves, squatted down, their hind legs under them, facing one another. To a superficial observer, they might ahve seemed somnolent. But I could sense the ripple of muscle, the tingle of nerve, beneath the fur in those mighty bodies. They were somnolent as a gun is somnolent, one with a finger tensed, poised, upon its trigger.
Suddenly, as one, both beasts leapt at one another, and seemed, grappling, biting and tearing, claws raking, almost as if they were a single, blurred animal cutting and tearing at its own body. There was a scraching of claws on the stony trail. They rolled and tore at one another and blood, from drenced fur, marked the stone, leaving the pattern of the fur.
They then backed away from one another again, and again began to circle.
It had been no more than a passage at arms.
Again they sprang towards one another and again, sometimes, thier movements were so rapid, turning and grappling, biting and tearing, that I could not even follow them. The energy and speed of such beats is awesome.
Then they had again separated.
The medicine men of the Yellow Knives looked at one another, frightened. There was blood on the rock. Such things, then, could bleed.
Zarendargar, Half-Ear, my friend, had then, I suspected, made his determinations. I do not think Sardak understood this, at the time.
I lifted an arrow to the string of my bow.
Once more the beasts charged and met with fierce impact. Then Zarendargar was behind Sardak. Sardak flung his head back, to close the space between the skull and the vertebrae, his eyes like wild moons, but it was too late. The massive jaws of Zarendargar, inch by inch, Sardak held in his arms, forced the head forward. Then with a sound of tearing muscle and skin, and crushed bone, Zarendargar's jaws closed. Men watched, horrified, as Zarendargar, holding it by the neck, it half bitten through, in his jaws, shook the body, fiercely. He then flung it from him and leaped up and down, scratching at his chest. He flung his head up to the sun and howled his victory. For a moment or two the body on the rock still bled, the movements of te heart marked in the gouts of fluid that surged over the fur. The head lay askew, to one side, held by vessels and skin. Zarendargar screamed and leaped onthe stone, and, scatching, climbed a bit up the rock face from teh trail, and then, fell back, and leaped again. The sun and sky were again saluted by the victory cry of the Kur. There was blood and fur at his mouth. I could see the double row of fangs, streaked with red, the long, dark dongue emergent like a serpent from the spittle and blood, the foam, of the kill. Kurii, I reminded myself, are not men.
Yellow Knives shrank back.
Zarendargar then lifted the body of Sardak in his hands and held it over his head. The arm of Sardak, with its two rings of reddish alloy, hung limp. The head hung a foot from the body. Then Zarendargar flung the body from the trial, down, down, onto the rocks below.
I loosedned the arrow from my bow into the heart of Kog. He stiffened, the feathers almost lost in the fur, and then fell.
