Читать книгу Sword of Gimshai - Joseph W. Musgrave - Страница 3

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SHEENA lay unmoving on the bed of fragrant grasses, her hands clasped behind her blonde head. A gentle southeast wind blowing through the open door of the tree house touched her with caressing fingers, whispered of a jungle long awake and busy.

But this morning the murmurous jungle noises held no interest for Sheena. A feeling of oppression and loneliness had gripped her from the moment of her awakening.

A dozen times since sun-up her pet ape, Chim, had left his noisy pursuits in nearby tree tops to peer worriedly in the door at a mistress who would lie abed on such a wonderful day. Similarly, in the clearing below, the great elephant, Tamba, stirred restlessly, impatient and puzzled because the girl he looked upon as his own private pet hadn't appeared for the ceremony of swimming, eating, and playing over which he regularly presided.

For the first time, though, her animal friends weren't enough. The usual joy she took in teasing, rough-housing and lecturing them was gone. Even the familiar, deep cough of the powerful, black-maned lion, Sabor, coming at intervals from across the river failed to excite Sheena. She had raised Sabor from a cub, and though he would wander away for days at a time, he always came back, as he was doing this morning after an eight-day prowl, to dog her footsteps for a time and cause trouble with the other pets through his dangerous jealousy.

The jungle girl had probed without success for some explanation of her depression. She knew that black men often were sick and for a time she wondered if that could be her trouble, though the only illness she had ever known was the stomach ache from eating too enthusiastically of unripe fruit.

She had been laid up a few times with hurts suffered in life and death battles with jungle beasts, but her feelings on those occasions were totally different from the way she felt now.

Sheena's hair was blonde and long, her eyes a deep and startling blue, her full lips as richly red as sunstruck rubies. Her skin was tanned a soft, golden hue and she had the proud, lithe carriage of a truly beautiful woman.

And yet actually Sheena had no understanding of beauty in the terms a civilized woman thinks of it. Her body was pleasing to her, yes, because in its firm, supple sleekness and sculptured lines, she recognized the same qualities she admired in the great cats and the arrow-swift antelope.

But as to whether she was attractive to men never entered her mind. That basic feminine criterion of looks, the response of the male, was a yardstick as yet unknown to her, for up to now Sheena had never known a man of her own kind.

When she was younger the indistinct faces of a white man and woman sometimes had come to her in her dreams, faces that were familiar and yet somehow beyond the reach of her memory. Her earliest memories were of the Abamas, over whom the old witch woman of the tribe, N'bid Ela, had predicted that Sheena would one day rule. To prepare her for that task, N'bid Ela had taken her into the jungle and brought her up apart from the black children as though she were a high priestess in training. But for many moons now, N'bid Ela had been dead and a great, lost loneliness grew in Sheena.

Formerly, there had been no blacks in Sheena's section of the jungle, for the Abamas lived five suns to the south and they continued to obey the dead witch-woman's taboo against invading Sheena's privacy. "She will come to you when she is ready," N'bid Ela had said.

But five moons ago the warlike Bambala had come suddenly from the north and settled near her. In her first encounter with them, Sheena had barely escaped capture. Since then, the blacks had made sporadic attempts to hunt her down. Not wanting to cause a tribal war, Sheena hadn't told the Abamas of her trouble, and more recently now, the Bambala had left her alone and she had noticed that on one of those infrequent occasions when she encountered a hunter, it was the black who turned and fled.

BUT Sheena did not think of these things now as she lay despondently on her bed of grasses. She thought of little except that life was no longer good and exciting.

In the clearing below the treehouse, the elephant, Tamba, trumpeted impatiently for her. Hardly had the ear-splitting noises of his summons died away when her pet ape, Chim, landed with a loud thump in the door of the house, scampered across the floor and thrust his wizened, old-man's face close to hers.

Chim chattered softly, sympathetically to her at first. Then getting no response, he fell silent, peered more intently with his little button eyes. He turned away heartbrokenly, making sad sounds in his throat as he plodded toward the door.

"Oh, all right," Sheena muttered wearily. "I'll get up if it will calm you wild dingos down. By the red eyes of Gimshai, why can't you and Tamba tend to your own business for one day and leave me alone?"

The jungle girl spoke the rapid, musical speech of the Abamas. At the sound of her voice, Chim whirled, an almost human look of delight wreathing his black little face. He began to bound up and down like a rubber ball, chattering with wild animation.

Sheena stood up, smoothing and straightening her leopard skin shorts and halter. She took her sheathed knife from a wall peg, belted it on. Then she picked up a full quiver of arrows, fastened it and a bow so they rested comfortably between her shoulderblades. She scowled at the ape, and then with sudden animal quickness, she mimicked him exactly, even to the sound of his voice.

The ape froze, his mouth open, his head inclined forward so that he peered at her like an old man looking over the top of his glasses. Then shrieking with pleasure, he turned and whipped through the door, as if meaning to tell Tamba, the elephant, of the wonderful joke.

Sheena came out on the small platform which served as a porch for the treehouse. Two purple and gold virini birds whirred upward from a nearby branch to the harsh scolding of a parrot. Ten yards away in a great slanting column of sunlight, a cloud of butterflies wheeled in an endless, dizzying dance.

The jungle girl looked down through the gently swaying pattern of branches to where Tamba, with ponderous solemnity, was scratching his tough hide against a tree. At the edge of the platform lay a coiled length of liana, one end of which was tied to a heavy branch.

With a sigh, Sheena nudged the rope into space with her foot. She leaned over, caught the vine with her hands, and swung off the platform, The swift, sure agility with which she shimmied down the liana bespoke an unusual strength for a woman.

As her feet touched the ground, the elephant was waiting for her. Tamba looked down at her from his great height, shifting his ears like mammoth fans. Then he snaked his trunk about her, and lifting her, swung toward the river twenty yards away.

"No, no, Tamba," she protested irritably. "Let me down. I don't want to go swimming this morning."

The bull was at the edge of the water before he realized Sheena was in earnest. He set her down, peered at her with the remarkably intelligent eyes of his kind, seemingly trying to discover what was wrong.

His look gave Sheena a twinge of conscience, and trying to hide that fact even from herself, she turned away, stared stiffly downstream. She immediately gave an exasperated grunt. Her glance had lighted on a heavy, black-maned figure carefully working its way over the river by using a low limb as a bridge. It was Sabor, the lion, coming to make more trouble for her.

"I'm not going to put up with it," she said fiercely. "What do these animals think I am, a slave?"

With a toss of her chin, she started across the clearing toward the jungle. She heard Tamba shift his feet, knew he was considering following her. Off to her right, Chim came somersaulting out of a tree, landed on his feet and scampered to catch her.

"Leave me alone!" she cried. And suddenly she was running, fleeing from her animal friends as though devils pursued her.

She sped into the cloaking green underbrush, careless of the branches lashing at her. She ran on and on, halting only when her breath began coming in hard gasps.

When she stopped and collected herself, she felt foolish and ashamed. She shook her blonde head, a momentary wetness in her eyes. What was wrong with her? Had she somehow caught the strange madness which sometimes came upon animals, driving them off to live in the bush alone, nursing a crazed anger against the whole jungle?

SHEENA glanced around to get her bearings. She hadn't paid any heed to the course she was taking and was surprised now to find how far outside her usual hunting ground she had gone. Though there certainly never had been any agreement made between them, there was a vague line of demarcation between her own range and that of the Bambala. The blacks themselves had more or less drawn the imaginary line in the past few months and seldom penetrated beyond it.

Ordinarily, Sheena would have turned back immediately to the safety of her own lands, but in her mood today she didn't care about danger or anything else. She sat down heavily on a fallen tree and put her head in her hands.

The sun crept to nearly midway in the sky before the jungle girl finally got up. A hunger pain knifed through her, reminding her she hadn't eaten that day. She was still standing indecisively, when an errant breeze brought her the scent of ripening fruit.

In her life in the jungle, her sense of smell had become almost as keen as an animal's. She went straight to the stand of trees, heavy with large blue-skinned plums. When the taste of the plums palled, she wandered on to some nut trees and finally topped off her effortless meal with a yellow panyanox pear.

Just as she threw away the pear core, Sheena heard a distant, echoing roar like a small blast of thunder. The sound was a completely new one to her and she listened, frowning. Then twice more the muted thunder came, seeming to roll close along the ground.

Abruptly, all about her the jungle was listening. The small rustlings in the underbrush, so faint and continuous that one grew almost oblivious of them, suddenly stilled. The harsh voices of the parrots, the trilling, liquid notes of the song birds ceased in one velvet clap of silence.

The forest listened, weighing the danger in the alien sound. Then as the noise blasted thrice again and still nothing happened, like a music box slowly beginning to play, the activity of the little creatures resumed. The strange thunder was ignored and then forgotten by each animal or fowl the moment it decided it personally wasn't threatened.

But because of that odd, restless quirk in the human mind, call it a thirst for knowledge, or insatiable curiosity, or a plain contrary urge to meddle, Sheena reacted quite differently from the jungle animals. What did this new and different sound mean? What caused it? Could it be there was something in the jungle she didn't know about?

Eyes bright with interest, Sheena began running in the direction of the continuing blasts of noise. She moved with an antelope's grace, seeming to pick the quickest and easiest path by instinct. There was no resemblance between the flashing drive of her long, beautifully modeled legs and that knock-kneed, ridiculously aimless attempt of a civilized woman to run.

In a matter of minutes, she came to a broad trail burrowing like a dimly-lit tunnel through the choking growth of trees, shrubs and vines. It was one of the ancient elephant tracks which serve as the highways of Africa. The echoing blasts were very close now and coming rapidly closer to her.

She started to step out on the trail, but her ears picked up the sound of pounding feet. She drew back out of sight, and sensing for the first time that she might be running headlong into danger, she leaped high, caught a limb and drew herself up into a tree. She found a perch in the middle branches, where she commanded a clear view of the trail but would be hidden from sight herself so long as she lay flat in a nest of vines.

A dark figure sprinted around a far curve in the path. A second later, two more runners burst into view. Then a whole clot of jostling, clawing bodies was pouring around the turn.

Sheena's eyes narrowed, her body suddenly taut. As the blacks swept closer along the shadowed dimness of the trail, she realized they were strange tribesmen, not the Bambala, her enemies. They were obviously terror-stricken, each man fighting to get ahead of the others.

None of them had the look of warriors, though the three men in the lead were armed with spears and shields. Most of the natives had heavy packs strapped on their backs, and as they ran, they were tearing free of the carrying straps and letting the packs shatter on the ground. Out of sight around the turn, the explosions were sounding sharper and clearer now, each blast shocking the fleeing natives to greater speed.

Sheena couldn't imagine what horror the panting, straining natives fled from. Then, abruptly, when the stampeding blacks were no more than a short spear throw away from both sides of the trail erupted the dread Bambala war cry, "Babalo Aka N'Koto!"

That frenzied cry repeated over and over with hysterical shrillness brought back to Sheena in a rush of memory that grim morning when they first tried to capture her, swarming out of ambush, a hundred jackals against one unarmed woman. But in her they had met a raging, tearing leopard instead of a fear-stricken victim. And on that day Sheena had killed for the first time, had written in Bambala blood the first lines of the legend of the warrior-queen which month to month from that time on was to grow more fabulous.

"Blood for N'Koto!" Blood for the evil god of the Bambala! Blood for that hideous, swollen idol before which the Bambala groveled and prayed before they went out to hunt down innocent, helpless victims.

Sheena snarled like an angry cat, her lips shearing back to reveal bared teeth. Out of the underbrush along the trail, the Bambala swept in two great waves. The ambush had been perfectly planned. At point-blank range they hammered their spears into their prey, and then ripping free their swords, they charged in to complete their grisly work.

As the painted warriors fell upon the terrorized bearers, Sheena's hand darted to her bow. All thought of her own safety was gone. Rage, red and flaming, seared over her. It was but the work of a moment to tug loose the slip-knot securing the bow across her shoulders.

With the flashing speed that comes from long practice, she snapped the bow-string taut, She leaped upright on the limb, as perfectly balanced as though her feet rested on solid ground. With nerveless precision, the jungle girl began feeding arrows into the tightly packed attackers.

A Bambala warrior threw up his arms, and screaming, dropped to his knees. Another pitched forward and was trampled underfoot. Two more collapsed suddenly like puppets whose strings have been cut. The fifth bent double, an arrow hammered completely through his middle, and began to run in circles like a dog with his tail on fire.

Sheena had concentrated her fire on the Bambala nearest to her, those blocking the flight of the bearers. When she knocked those five men out of the uneven battle, it was like stabbing a knife into a water-filled bladder. The crazed bearers who had survived the initial onslaught came spurting through the opening she had created. In a blind, heedless stampede they drove out of the trap and flung off at all angles into the forest.

The mass of Bambala splintered apart, groups of three to five warriors taking out after each of the frightened human rabbits. The attackers were raging more wildly than ever, now that an easy slaughter had turned into a difficult chase.

But the warriors nearest those men dropped by Sheena's arrows didn't join the pursuit. Some of them had seen the arrows rip into their fellows, and jabbering excitedly, they pointed out to the others that the attack had come from a new, hidden foe.

Then one of them, considering the angle at which the arrows had struck, suddenly spotted Sheena standing wide-legged high up on a swaying limb. He stabbed his finger at the slim, white figure outlined against the deep green leaves.

"Tioto Nomi!" he cried. "The Forest Woman!"

A low, hoarse, shivering sound, like the rush of wind through a deep gorge, broke from the Bambala. There was fear in that sound, and hatred, too. This was the woman they had hunted innumerable times without success. For all their numbers, all their weapons, all their wiles, she made fools of them.

Clearly, no mere woman would be able to outwit warriors. And there were other things that showed she was no ordinary flesh and blood human. For instance, hadn't she been seen talking with fierce jungle beasts, or hunting and playing with them. She had demonstrated that she was immune to the curses and spells of the witch doctors, to the proven juju which would wither and kill a black man in a matter of days.

And yet at the same time, many happenings in the Bambala kraal, such as the unseasonal windstorm two moons ago which tore off the roofs of half the huts or the strange overnight invasion of snakes after the last rain, could only be attributed to the evil magic of someone like the Forest Woman. Surely, she was the spawn of demons, endowed with a powerful personal juju, else the jungle devils themselves would long ago have devoured her.

Fear does different things to different men. Most of the warriors were momentarily paralyzed, stunned by the knowledge that Sheena for the first time openly had invaded their lands and attacked them. But one squat, bull-chested native was galvanized into action.

"Save yourselves!" he screeched. "Strike before she kills us!"

He tugged a spear from the body of one of the murdered bearers, his eyes distended, his mouth a rubbery, gaping hole. He ran forward two steps, hefting the spear for the cast.