Stairway to Forever (28 page)

A few spears were hurled after him, but the flights of the shafts were short, none of them intended to strike or flesh in the Seos-bull. The herd-guards leaped and cavorted in an almost-dance of victory, they shouted and shrieked and screamed in their guttural language, anything to relieve the tension and express their patent relief at being spared a combat which, had it been well and truly joined, would assuredly have resulted in the messy deaths of more than one boy or man and the crippling or injury of others. Full-grown wild aurochs of either sex never died easily, the butcher-bill for the hunters was always high, and not a one of the herd-guards was so young or inexperienced to not be fully aware of the grim facts.

The girl half-reclined atop a high rock that was the point of a narrow peninsula of bank jutting out into the stream. The gathering of edibles was usually good in the stream bed and along its banks up here, above the falls, but the crystalline water that flowed over and among the rocks was icy-toothed cold, telling of the high-mountain snows that spawned the stream, despite its meandering journey across the sun-dappled high plains, and so, periodically, she always found it necessary to find a place to sit or lie in the warm sunlight until the feeling was come back into her feet and legs and the skin of them was no longer all ridges and puckers.

She might have not suffered from the cold in the warmer, deeper waters below the falls, but there she would have been in danger from the water-dragons, which toothy, ever-hungry monsters now and again swam up from the sea to sometimes take their bloody toll of bathers—young and old and of both sexes— despite the best efforts of the priest-chief, the regular sacrifices of goats and all the prayers of the gods of their tribe and of this land.

Besides, her revered father often remarked on how much more tender were the greens from upstream, how much tastier were the shelled creatures she expertly plucked from among the rocks, and pleasing her tall, strong, powerful and wise father was of paramount importance to her, for it was through his loins that she and all her siblings were distant descendents of true gods.

The gathering had not been too good, this day— only some dozen of the shelled water—creatures and even them not so large as many a one she had taken hereabouts in times past, though a fair amount of tender sprouts of various greens—but she had lucked onto a something that she knew was certain to bring

a broad smile to show through her father's thick, sun-yellow beard.

The round, smooth rock was about as large as her two clenched fists together and might have passed for only another, stream-bed rock had not a small chip been sometime broken from off one end to show the white stone within—very fine-grained and about the hue of the fat from a mountain-sheep. Her father already owned two axes shod with this incredibly hard and tough and long-wearing stone; he treasured them as he treasured little else, and she knew that he was sure to be inordinately pleased to gain the wherewithal to fashion another.

On impulse, she sat up and looked down into the water at the side of her perch, hoping to see yet another of the rare stones, but the rocks seemed all alike and she ended staring at, studying her own reflection in the relatively still pool.

Sighing, she shook her head of thick, black hair. She had always wished that she could have looked more like her father, as did some of her sisters and brothers, and less like her mother—who had been taken in war against a clan of nomads who had tried to seize and hold tribal lands, pushing up with their herds from the southwest, years ago.

All the warriors of the scattered settlements had gathered under the priest-chiefs and had met the invaders on the plain nearest the sea. After a daylong battle, most of the male aliens lay speared or axe-hacked and dead on that plain, with dust settling on their wide-staring-brown eyes and their black, oiled, curly beards. Then the priest-chiefs and their still-hale warriors liad descended on the camp of goat-hair tents, pitilessly slain the old, the infirm and the ugly, then taken the remainder for slaves or concubines or, in the case of the prettiest, more biddable young women, wives.

The girl's sire had taken two attractive sisters and, though one had died in childbirth after a few years, he still felt well served, for he had by then had three sons and a daughter out of her, while her sister still remained healthy and fecund, throwing another child every couple of years as a woman of any value should.

She was just upon the point of arising and descending from the rock back into the knee-deep water to work her way back downstream when she noticed movement in the woods that came almost down to the edge of the stream-bank opposite her and she froze, for wild beasts often came to the stream to drink. She had seen the tracks of their hooves and pads imprinted in sand and mud and atop flat rocks, but seldom the beasts themselves, for most of them moved by night. And she had no slightest desire to meet one of them here and now, armed with only a small cutting-stone and a couple of scraping-stones, especially not one that looked so big as what was on the move through the gloomy shadows under those trees.

The Seos-Fitz-bull knew in its hybrid mind that the spearmen would not pursue him, follow after him, for their responsibility was to the herd and it was their assigned duty to stay nearby it, protect it and keep it from straying beyond easy protection. Of course, they would most likely put hunters on his trail, soon or late, for his huge body represented much meat, fat, horn, sinew, hide and other very valuable items, but by the time the hunters got around to undertaking the tracking of this particular bull ox, he would no longer be in existence in his current form.

Although the periphery of this wood was of the

same thorny brush as the copse out on the plain where Ehra-leopard had killed the doe, within, it was true temperate forest—mixed deciduous and evergreen trees such as oak, maple, ash, pine, larch, walnut, elm and chestnut. Once under the shade of the huge-boled old trees, the bull's hooves sank fetlocks-deep into a mold of damp, dead leaves, wherein a host of insects, worms, mice and shrews crawled and scuttled about their daily lives. Squirrels chattered and scolded from the trunks and limbs of the trees and a vast profusion of multihued birds occupied every level and flew through the air between those levels. Without exception, the denizens of the forest ignored the interloping bull, knowing that they had nothing to fear from him so long as they kept from beneath his big hooves.

Unable to take a direct route to the enticing smell of the water because of the erratic placement of the trees, the bull still continued to veer in that general direction and, at last, even his nearsighted eyes could detect the sheen of sun on a stream. Pacing slowly and deliberately out from the shady concealment of the forest, the bull waded out into the stream and dipped his mighty head down to drink of the clear, cold water, ignoring the cloud of insects that came swarming from every direction to buzz and drone about him.

But no truly wild beast survived long without being always on the alert for danger in all its forms and not even this created facsimile of a wild ox was or could properly be an exception to the universal rule; therefore, when the bull, even as he drank up the water, heard the ghost of a sound, sensed a flicker of motion above and to his right-front, he abruptly brought his dripping muzzle up, snorting, one hoof unconsciously pawing at the water-rounded cobbles that covered the streambed.

On the point of bellowing his awful challenge, the Seos-bull caught sight of the creature above him, atop the rock. Even with the lack of color perception, he could identify the young woman as a stunning beauty of a human female. So much, in fact, did the observance of her lissome form attract and arouse the man within the bull that the hybrid mind let slip its control of the creation it inhabited and first small, then larger and even larger portions of it began to slip away, slough off into the current to be borne away downstream, an unexpected feast for the water creatures, large and small.

As for the girl, crouched upon the rock with her baskets of gatherings, the cold, trembling, whimpering fear of the great, deadly and known-vicious wild ox rapidly became lost in a degree of awe that left her unable to move when she witnessed the quick transformation from beast into a tall, fair young man, resembling in so many ways her god-descended sire. In the inchoate turmoil that her mind was become, she knew that this could be, must be, none save one of the true gods.

The last of the short-lived bull-creation dropped off into the stream, Seos waded through the icy water to the side of the rock, lifted himself into the air to its top and stood on the sun warmed surface, devouring the recumbent girl's toothsome young body with his eyes.

THE MANY WORLDS OF

MELISSA SCOTT

Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 1986

THE KINDLY ONES: "An ambitious novel of the world Orestes. This large, inhabited moon is governed by five Kinships whose society operates on a code of honor so strict that transgressors are declared legally 'dead' and are prevented from having any contact with the 'living.' . . . Scott is a writer to watch."— Publishers Weekly. A Main Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club.

65351-2 •384 pp. • $2.95

The "Silence Leigh" Trilogy FIVE-TWELFTHS OF HEAVEN (Book I): "Melissa Scott postulates a universe where technology interferes with magic. . . . The whole plot is one of space ships, space wars, and alien planets—not a unicorn or a dragon to be seen anywhere. Scott's space drive and description of space piloting alone would mark her as an expert in the melding of the [SF and fantasy] genres; this is the stuff of which 'sense of wonder' is made."— Locus

55952-4 • 352 pp. • $2.95

SILENCE IN SOLITUDE (Book II): [Scott is] a voice you should seek out and read at every opportunity." —OtherRealms. 65699-7 • 324 pp. • $2.95

THE EMPRESS OF EARTH (Book III):

65364-4 • 352 pp. • $3.50

A CHOICE OF DESTINIES: "Melissa Scott [is] one of science fiction's most talented newcomers. . . . The greatest delight of all is finding out how she managed to write a historical novel that could legitimately have spaceships on the cover ... a marvelous gift for any fan."— Baltimore Sun 65563-9 • 320 pp. • $2.95

THE GAME BEYOND: "An exciting interstellar empire novel with a great deal of political intrigue and colorful interplanetary travel."— Locus

55918-4*352 pp. • $2.95

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