For some reason the assault steadied Trevor. He got to his feet and
took the club out of the girl's hands, regretting the gun that was
buried under a ton of rock on the other side of the mountains.
"Keep behind me," he said. "Watch my back."
She stared at him strangely, but there was no time for questions. They
began to run together toward the badland. It seemed a long way off. The
lizards screamed and hissed above them. Trevor hefted the club. It was
about the size and weight of a baseball bat. He had once been very good
at baseball.
"They're coming," said the girl.
"Lie down flat," he told her, and went on, more slowly. She dropped
behind him in the grass, her fingers closing over a fragment of stone.
The wide wings whistled down.
Trevor braced himself. He could see the evil eyes, yellow and bright as
the golden collars, and the brilliant flash of the sun-stones against
the jetty scales of the head. They were attacking together, but at
different angles, so that he could not face them both.
He chose the one that was going to reach him first, and waited. He
let it get close, very close, diving swiftly with its scarlet tongue
forking out of its hissing mouth and its sharp claws spread. Then he
swung the club with all his might.
It connected. He felt something break. The creature screamed, and then
the force of its dive carried it on into him and he lost his footing
in a welter of thrashing wings and floundering body. He fell, and the
second lizard was on him.
The girl rose. In three long strides she reached him and flung herself
upon the back of the scaly thing that ravaged him. He saw her trying to
pin it to the ground, hammering methodically at its head with the stone.
He kicked off the wounded one. He had broken its neck, but it was in
no hurry to die. He caught up the club and presently the second brute
was dead. Trevor found it quite easy to pick up the sun-stone.
He held it in his hand, a strange, tawny, jewel-like thing, with a
scrap of bone still clinging to it. It glinted with inner fires, deep
and subtle, and an answering spark of wild excitement was kindled in
Trevor from the very touch and feel of it, so that he forgot where he
was or what he was doing, forgot everything but the eerie crystal that
gleamed against his palm.
It was more than a jewel, more even than wealth, that he held there. It
was hope and success and a new life.
He had thrown years away prospecting the bitter Mercurian wastes. This
trip had been his last gamble, and it had ended with his ship gone, his
quest finished, and nothing to look forward to even if he did get back
safely, but to become one of the penniless, aging planet-drifters he'd
always pitied.
Now all that was changed. This single stone would let him go back to
Earth a winner and not a failure. It would pay off all the dreary,
lonesome, hazardous years. It would....
It would do so many things if he could get out of this God-forsaken
valley with it! _If!_
The girl had got her breath again. Now she said urgently, "Come!
They're getting near!"
Trevor's senses, bemused by the sun-stone, registered only vaguely the
external stimuli of sight and sound. The riders had come closer. The
beasts they rode were taller and slighter than horses. They were not
hoofed, but clawed. They had narrow, vicious-looking heads with spiny
crests that stood up erect and arrogant. They came fast, carrying their
riders lightly.
The men were still too far away to distinguish features, but even at
that distance Trevor sensed something peculiar about their faces,
something unnatural. They wore splendid harness, and their half-clad
bodies were bronzed, but not nearly so deeply as the girl's.
The girl shook him furiously, stirring him out of his dream. "Do
you want to be taken alive? Before, the beasts would have torn us
apart, and that is quickly over. But we killed the hawks, don't you
understand? Now they will take us alive!"
He did not understand in the least, but her obvious preference for a
very nasty death instead of capture made him find reserves of strength
he thought he had lost in the underground river. There was also the
matter of the sun-stone. If they caught him with it they would want it
back.
Clutching the precious thing he turned with the girl and ran.
* * * * *
The lava bed was beginning to catch the sun now. The splintered rock
showed through, bleak and ugly. The badland and the defile beyond
seemed like an entrance into hell, but it did offer shelter of a sort
if they could make it.
The drumming of padded feet behind was loud in his ears. He glanced
over his shoulder, once. He could see the faces of the huntsmen now.
They were not good faces, in either feature or expression, and he saw
the thing about them that he had noticed before, the unnatural thing.
In the center of each forehead, above the eyes, a sun-stone was set
into flesh and bone.
First the hawk-lizards, and now these....
Trevor's heart contracted with an icy pang. These men were human, as
human as himself, and yet they were not. They were alien and wicked and
altogether terrifying, and he began to understand why the girl did not
wish to come alive into their hands.
Fleet, implacable, the crested mounts with their strange riders were
sweeping in upon the two who fled. The leader took from about his
saddle a curved throwing stick and held it, poised. The sun-stone set
in his brow flashed like a third, and evil eye.
The lava and the fangs of rock shimmered in the light. Trevor yearned
toward them. The brown girl running before him seemed to shimmer also.
It hurt very much to breathe. He thought he could not go any farther.
But he did, and when the girl faltered he put his arm around her and
steadied her on.
He continued to keep an eye out behind him. He saw the curved stick
come hurtling toward him and he managed to let it go by. The others
were ready now as they came within range. It seemed to Trevor that
they were watching him with a peculiar intensity, as though they had
recognized him as a stranger and had almost forgotten the girl in their
desire to take him.
His bare feet trod on lava already growing hot under the sun. A spur
of basalt reared up and made a shield against the throwing sticks.
In a minute or two Trevor and the girl were hidden in a terrain of
such broken roughness as the man had seldom seen. It was as though
some demoniac giant had whipped the molten lava with a pudding-spoon,
cracking mountains with his free hand and tossing in the pieces. He
understood now why the girl had waited for daylight to make her break.
To attempt this passage in the dark would be suicidal.
He listened nervously for sounds of pursuit. He could not hear any, but
he remained uneasy, and when the girl flung herself down to rest, he
asked,
"Shouldn't we go farther? They might still come."
She did not answer him at once, beyond a shake of the head. He realized
that she was looking at him almost as intently as the riders had. It
was the first chance she had had to examine him, and she was making the
most of it. She noted the cut of his hair, the stubble of beard, the
color and texture of his skin, the rags of his shorts that were all he
had to cover him. Very carefully she noted them, and then she said in
an odd slow voice, as though she were thinking of something else,
"Mounted, the Korins are afraid of nothing. But afoot, and in here,
they are afraid of ambush. It has happened before. They can die, you
know, just the same as we do."
Her face, for all its youth, was not the face of a girl. It was a woman
who looked at Trevor, a woman who had already learned the happy, the
passionate, and the bitter things, who had lived with pain and fear and
knew better than to trust anyone but herself.
"You aren't one of us," she said.
"No. I came from beyond the mountains." He could not tell whether she
believed him or not. "Who, or what, are the Korins?"
"The lords of Korith," she answered, and began to tear strips from the
length of white linen cloth she wore twisted about her waist. "There
will be time to talk later. We still have far to go. Here, this will
stop the bleeding."
In silence they bound each other's wounds and started off again. If
Trevor had not been so unutterably weary, and the way so hard, he would
have been angry with the girl. And yet there was nothing really to be
angry about except that he sensed she was somehow suspicious of him.
Many times they had to stop and rest. Once he asked her, "Why were
they--the Korins--hunting you?"
"I was running away. Why were they hunting _you_?"
"Damned if I know. Accident, perhaps. I happened to be where their
hawks were flying."
The girl wore a chain of iron links around her neck, a solid chain with
no clasp, too small to be pulled over the head. From it hung a round
tag with a word stamped on it. Trevor took the tag in his hand.
"Galt," he read. "Is that your name?"
"My name is Jen. Galt is the Korin I belong to. He led the hunt." She
gave Trevor a look of fierce and challenging pride and said, as though
she were revealing a secret earldom, "I am a slave."
"How long have you been in the valley, Jen? You and I are the same
stock, speaking the same language. Earth stock. How does it happen, a
colony of this size that no one ever heard of?"
"It's been nearly three hundred years since the Landing," she answered.
"I have been told that for generations my people kept alive the hope
that a ship would come from Earth and release them from the Korins.
It never came. And, except by ship, there is no way in or out of the
valley."
Trevor glanced at her sharply. "I found a way in, all right, and I'm
beginning to wish I hadn't. And if there's no way out, where are we
going?"
"I don't know myself," said Jen, and rose. "But my man came this way,
and others before him."
She went on, and Trevor went with her. There was no place else to go.
The heat was unbearable, and they crept in the shadows of the rocks
wherever they could. They suffered from thirst, but there was no water.
The shoulder of purple basalt loomed impossibly tall before them, and
seemed never to grow nearer.
For most of the day they toiled across the lava bed, and at last, when
they had almost forgotten that they had ever dreamed of doing it, they
rounded the shoulder and came staggering out of the badland into a
narrow canyon that seemed like the scar of some cataclysmic wound in
the mountain.
Rock walls, raw and riven, rose out of sight on either side, the
twisted strata showing streaks of crimson and white and sullen ochre. A
little stream crawled in a stony bed, and not much grew beside it.
Jen and Trevor fell by the stream. And while they were still sprawled
on the moist gravel, lapping like dogs at the bitter water, men came
quietly from among the rocks and stood above them, holding weapons made
of stone.
* * * * *
Trevor got slowly to his feet. There were six of these armed men. Like
the girl, they wore loin cloths of white cotton, much frayed, and like
her they were burned almost black by a lifetime of exposure to a brutal
sun. They were all young, knotted and sinewy from hard labor, their
faces grim beyond their years. All bore upon their bodies the scars of
talons. And they looked at Trevor with a cold, strange look.
They knew Jen, or most of them did. She called them gladly by name, and
demanded, "Hugh. Where is Hugh?"
One of them nodded toward the farther wall. "Up there in the caves.
He's all right. Who is this man, Jen?"
She turned to study Trevor.
"I don't know. They were hunting him, too. He came to help me. I
couldn't have escaped without him. He killed the hawks. But...." She
hesitated, choosing her words carefully. "He says he came from beyond
the mountains. He knows of Earth and speaks our tongue. And when he
killed the hawks he smashed the skull of one and took the sun-stone."
All six started at that. And the tallest of them, a young man with a
face as bleak and craggy as the rocks around them, came toward Trevor.
"Why did you take the sun-stone?" he asked. His voice held an ugly edge.
Trevor stared at him. "Why the devil do you suppose? Because it's
valuable."