Until two hours later when he stopped to kill a small antelope, and drink its blood. Then his full belly started whispering for sleep, and his pulse thudded dully in his ears.
Crouched there over the dead buck, he caught the subtle whisper of one blade of grass sliding against another...
...and he turned with long knife in hand expecting a panther’s scream, fangs and claws—only to see Harkon rise up out of the ferns.
Gazda panted happily at this, pleased at his friend’s hunting skills, and pleased it was not a panther. For he had not heard her come so near.
“Gazda,” the night ape said, reaching out to stroke Harkon’s offered palm.
“Harkon,” she answered, before sliding her hand over her hairless skull. “I am hunting Bakwaniri.”
“I hunt the bone-faces,” the night ape answered. “Now they have taken men...” After his time with Ginny his language skills were so hard-pressed that unfamiliar concepts caught upon his tongue. “...apes like Gazda.”
Harkon grunted, startled by the ape-man’s response. He had learned to speak more of her language, though his own guttural speech intruded—but how? Who had taught him the words?
“I follow Bakwaniri that took a white man like you and a black man, one day past,” she said. “The Bakwaniri will eat them.”
Gazda understood some of her words that he had learned by reading their meaning in her mind. “Man” she had called him in the past.
“Gazda will kill the bone-faces before they eat,” the ape-man snarled, though Harkon listened to his words wide-eyed for some English had slipped in. “He will destroy the Bakwaniri.” Gazda bared his fangs and then gestured like he was biting and ripping flesh.
The huntress grinned, well aware of the ape-man’s appetites.
“Harkon cannot save her people from Bakwaniri by herself,” the huntress said, her eyes growing moist as she allowed herself to think of Anim.
Gazda’s expression softened and he hooted sadly for in his thoughts Harkon had appeared with a male infant in her arms.
“Gazda will kill Bakwaniri with Harkon,” he said, before lifting his head, panting and hooting joyfully. “Gazda can get the white ‘man’ and the black, and Harkon can get her son.”
“The Bakwaniri did not sleep or rest as I did, and have gone quickly east for many, many hours,” Harkon said, pointing. “They go to their lair beyond the river.”
The night ape looked into the east, and a shudder ran through the thick muscles on his shoulders and back. He would have to leave his own land to go there, a notion more daunting than the thought of facing a bone-face horde.
But he was King of the Apes, and the greatest killer in his tribe.
“We go!” Gazda shouted, running and jumping into the lowest branches before swinging quickly through the trees in the distance.
Harkon sighed, but started jogging at her greatest speed after him, favoring her right leg; its knee and ankle joints had become swollen during her chase of the Bakwaniri, and had forced her to find a place to rest and sleep.
It was also why she had fallen so far behind the masked hunters. She had hoped that they, too, would require sleep, but they had made use of sorcery to push through the night.
Harkon had been making her best speed ever since, but feared arriving at the Bakwaniri village too late to kill her foes or help, let alone have the strength left to accomplish the task.
Snarling at the pain in her leg, the huntress set a grueling pace for herself, and had just finished her first mile when Gazda swung down and landed softly on the path ahead. He quickly made signs encouraging her to travel in the trees like him.
She shook her head.
Gazda frowned and barked as he came close. He leaned his broad back against her chest and reached around to grab at her hands.
Harkon nodded reluctantly, understanding his intention. Gazda had not offered her any reason to fear him directly, but she had never been this close to him before, just as she had not been close to any man since first vowing revenge against the Bakwaniri.
The strength of Gazda’s fine white body was not lost to her, nor was his fearsome look, which Harkon had found agreeable.
Especially when he had visited her in dreams.
She barely had time to twist her spear in the straps that held her other gear over her spine, before Gazda hissed impatiently, grabbed her wrists and crossed them beneath his chin.
She wrapped her arms around the ape-man’s corded shoulders and neck, and in seconds, Gazda was running toward the nearest trees.
He leapt off the ground and clambered up the trunk until he reached the boughs, and soon swept Harkon higher and higher into the canopy where the night ape began to swing and leap through space from tree to vine and vine to tree.
Harkon had never experienced this kind of power before as slabs of muscle knotted beneath her arms, and iron sinews slid against her breasts, belly and thighs.
Indeed, the ape-man would be a useful ally to take against the Bakwaniri. Harkon had long suspected that some moment of fury would pit her alone against the cannibals, but with Gazda? Perhaps her mission would not end in her death after all.
As she thumped and rubbed against the ape-man’s body, she wondered if her dreams of him might also have a better end.
CHAPTER 24 – Salvation of Science
Virginia rose from Lilly’s bedside dabbing the tears from her face with a handkerchief.
“Dr. Van Resen, might I play some music for her?” she asked, desperation tightening her features as she indicated the phonograph at the foot of Mrs. Quarrie’s bed.
“Lilly needs rest,” the scientist said, shaking his head. “Music could tax her depleted mind, and might draw unwelcome attention to us.”
“Is there nothing we can do?” the governess groaned. “She refuses water and food...and struggles to remain conscious,”
“Yet, her ‘appearance’ continues to improve,” Van Resen answered, stepping quietly past her and pulling Lilly’s bedcovers aside.
The girl’s hair was thick and
