Читать книгу The Lost World MEGAPACK® - Lin Carter - Страница 56

CHAPTER 12

I FIND A FRIEND

Treading water furiously, I reached up and snatched the automatic from between my teeth. I had been so briefly immersed beneath the waves, that it seemed unlikely to me that the gunpowder could have become too wet for the gun to fire; but I was about to find out—

Pointing swiftly, I fired in the very face of the monster reptile.

It was a lucky shot, and caught the plesiosaur full in one glaring eye. That eye vanished in a splatter of snaky gore; braking with a backwards flip of his flippers, the sea monster gave voice to a piercing screech of fury and pain, and, turning, dived beneath the waves again to assuage his hurt in the cool depths.

His plunge had overturned the canoe from which I had just dived into the sea. A floundering form broke the waves, arms waving wildly. I recognized him—it was Hurok, the one Neanderthal more friendly and chivalrous than his fellows, the warrior who had cut my hands free. He sank with a gurgle and I knew at once that he was unable to swim.

I shall never quite be able to explain my next action, even to myself; but it all happened so swiftly that rational thought played little part in the decision, which I reached by sheerest instinct.

I waited until he rose floundering and roaring to the surface again. Then I swam over to him and knocked him senseless with a good hard right to the jaw!

Well, there was nothing else to do: in his mindless terror, a drowning man will get a stranglehold on a would-be rescuer and drag him down to death with him.

Then I turned the unconscious Apeman over until he was floating on his back. Catching his heavy jaw in the crook of my arm, I struck out for shore as best I could. I have always been a good swimmer, but that was the most grueling ordeal any swimmer could ever have endured. Not only was I encumbered by my breeches and boots—but the Apeman I was towing along must have tipped the scales at three hundred pounds, dead weight. Also, I could scarcely breathe, with my automatic still clenched between my teeth.

How I ever made it to the shore is something I have not quite decided, myself. Suffice it to say that, after an interminable battle with the slimy waves of that steamy sea, I found myself lying face down in wet, sticky sand, with the undertow of the sea pulling at my legs as if trying stubbornly to suck me back into the clutch of the waves again.

Not far off, Hurok lay like a dead thing.

I lurched to my knees, dragged myself and the Apeman farther on up the beach, before collapsing again.

Then, utterly exhausted, I slept.

* * * *

When I awoke, I rolled over onto my back and squinted up into the sun, trying to estimate exactly how much time had elapsed while I had been unconscious. Then I remembered, ruefully, that here in Zanthodon there was no sun, and it was forever impossible to measure time. I could have slept an hour or a year, for all that I could ascertain from the heavens.

My clothes were dry, however, and so was my hair; so it would seem I had slumbered for at least two or three hours. I sat up, stiffly, and looked around me.

Hurok squatted on his hams, hairy arms propped on hairy knees, regarding me with a fathomless expression on his homely visage.

I grabbed for my gun, then drew back my fingers sheepishly. For the Neanderthal man had not moved nor flinched.

Neither did he say a word.

I looked beyond him, sniffing the air. A tantalizing aroma of cooked meat drifted on the sea wind.

A hole had been scraped in the sand of the beach. Therein a pile of driftwood had been touched afire, and the carcasses of two plucked seafowl had been spitted on sticks and were toasting over the snapping flames. I had not known there were actual birds in Zanthodon until that moment, but the pile of feathers was unmistakable.

“Why did you not attack me and slay me while I slept, Hurok?” I asked curiously. “For I have been given to understand that there is perpetual war between your kind and my own.”

“Hurok does not know,” he said in his slow, deep voice, and within his murky little eyes a gleam of thoughtfulness flickered. Then, after a moment, he attempted a question of his own.

“Why did you save Hurok from the death-of-water?”

I shook my head with a helpless grin. “I’m not entirely sure! I guess, because you cut my hands free just before I jumped, and gave me a chance to fight for survival…why did you do that, anyway?”

He shrugged, a ponderous heaving of furry shoulders, but said nothing. His long gaze was steady upon me, and there was some unreadable emotion in his dull gaze.

“How did you slay the yith?” he asked after a time. “It was like thunder from the sky. Are you sujat, Black Hair? Hurok thought you merely a panjan, but no panjan commands the thunder…”

I understood the meaning of panjan, which was what the Apeman called the Cro-Magnons: the word meant something like “Smooth-skin.” The plural was panjani. But sujat was a word new to me, and I was eager to add it to my growing vocabulary.

Hurok shrugged helplessly when I asked him to define the word, and searched for a way to describe what the term meant.

“The great beasts are sometimes sujat,” he said in his slow, dull way. “And storm and flood and fire.

Sometimes when Hurok sleeps he enters the sujat country…”

I gathered that the word was used for all inexplicable and mysterious phenomena, especially the convulsions of nature, but also dreams, if that is what he meant by his nocturnal journeys.

In other words, the supernatural! He had asked me if I were a ghost, a devil; or, perhaps, a god.

I sat up and began removing my boots to pour the sea water out of them. I set them near the fire to dry out.

“In the first place, old fellow, I doubt if I killed the plesiosaurus. I knocked out an eye, merely wounding him. But anyway, I am certainly no god.”

“How did Black Hair do it, then?” he demanded, reasonably. I showed him the automatic.

“With this: it is a weapon of my people.” He looked it over gingerly, daring only to touch it with one horny forefinger.

“Your people must be mighty in war, if they go armed with weapons that smite down the great beasts with the force of thunderbolts,” he grunted.

I shrugged.

He gestured. “Let Black Hair share Hurok’s kill. Later, Hurok and Black Hair will speak on what to do next.”

* * * *

Barbecued archeopteryx tasted pretty good, I must admit: oh, sure, the outside was burnt black and the inside was dripping and raw, but hunger is the best sauce, and I had worked up a ravenous appetite, what with battling Neanderthal men and plesiosaurs.

While we silently munched our bird-steaks, I did a bit of thinking.

I was not entirely sure that I could trust the Apeman. My lucky shot at the monster reptile had impressed him mightily, and my inexplicable kindness in saving him from drowning had stirred to life within his savage breast some murky emotion akin to gratefulness, true. But how long these feelings would hold in check his natural instinct to kill or take captive a panjan was another question entirely, and one whose answer was mightily important to me. I resolved to trust Hurok only as far as I had to, and not to turn my back on him.

His feelings in regard to myself were unfathomable. He stolidly chewed down his kill, glancing at me from time to time with a somber, frowning gaze, as if trying to make up his mind about something.

And I had other things to worry about.

For instance—where were we?

The Apeman had rowed their dugouts about halfway between Kor and the mainland, before turning about to double back along the coast. In the confusion, I had not really paid any attention to which direction I was swimming.

Now…were we on the coast of the mainland of Zanthodon, with the Professor and Jorn the Hunter and the girl Darya perhaps only a mile or two away?

Or had I dragged us up on the shores of the island of Ganadol, and were we within earshot of the Apemen of Kor?

The answer to that question was terribly important. Summoning up my nerve, I asked Hurok his opinion.

He squinted in every direction, then slowly shook his head.

“Hurok sees nothing that he has seen before,” he grunted. “But there are parts of the island he does not know, and parts of the mainland he has never seen.”

“What, then, should we do?” I asked. “Which way should we travel?”

He shook his head again, helplessly.

“Hurok and Black Hair shall go forward until they meet either panjan or Drugar,” he suggested simply.

“Then they will know where they are.”

There was, after all, nothing else to do.

* * * *

And so began a very unlikely friendship! Hurok was no better than the average of his kind, but from some rare gene he had inherited traits toward fairness and a certain rough justice that gave us at least a common ground whereon to meet.

He had cut my wrists free on sheerest impulse, unwilling to see a brave warrior drown without being able at least to fight the waves or cling to the overturned canoe. And I had carried him to shore, because it was not in me to watch a man who had done me even a simple kindness drown while I stood idly by.

Neither of us really understood the other—a half million years of evolution loomed between his kind and my own, and that is a formidable barrier—but survival is something we both understood. And survival is easier with teamwork.

Alone in the jungle, he or I might have fallen prey to the first hungry monster or enemy tribe we encountered. Standing together, sharing the toils and the dangers of the wilderness, we doubled our chances of coming out of this experience with a whole skin.

And that was something both of us could understand.

But neither trusted the other overmuch; both remained wary, and a trifle suspicious.

“Let us take the remnants of the zomak with us, Black Hair,” suggested Hurok with a grunt, zomak being his word for the archaeopteryx. I agreed, so we packed the leftovers from our lunch by the simple expedient of rolling the scraps of archaeopteryx-steak in the broad, flat leaves of a primitive tree. These Hurok thrust within his one-piece hide garment while I looked over my own clothing with a sour eye.

My boots were still sodden and the sea water and various earlier immersions in the mud of the swamps had cracked the leather.

My khaki shirt was a collection of rags, so I ripped it off and flung it aside. My breeches were in slightly better condition and I thought it likely that something could be salvaged of them. Borrowing Hurok’s flint knife, I cut the legs away, turning them into a pair of shorts. Not bad, I thought, looking them over; and certain to be more comfortable in this steamy climate!

My boots were hopeless, though. Various immersions in swamp mud had cracked and blistered the leather, and a long soak in sea water had finished them off: using the knife again, I cut away the sodden leather, trimming them down to merely the soles and a few long thongs; from this I manufactured a pair of strong sandals.

Then we plunged into the brush and began our trek.

Neither of us quite trusted yet in the other’s friendship or trustworthiness. That would come, I supposed, with time. In the meanwhile, we kept our distance from each other, warily, keeping an eye peeled for treachery.

At least while we were awake. The time would come, as it soon did, when we would be too weary to do aught but sleep, and then we must trust each other.

In the timeless noonday of Zanthodon, the urge to rest comes upon you unpredictably. One moment you are plodding doggedly along; the next, you can hardly keep your eyes open. When this happened to Hurok and me, after some hours of striking down the coast (or was it up the coast?), we simply climbed the tallest of the nearer trees, tied ourselves to the trunk, straddled a branch with spread legs, and caught such sleep as we could in a position so confoundedly uncomfortable.

There was no use in worrying about whether Hurok was going to stab me in my sleep, I decided. I was so bone-weary I could keep my eyes open no longer, and if he was going to stab, he was going to stab.

He must have felt the same way, for we both fell to sleep and only awoke, some hours later, to find ourselves staring into the fanged and dripping jaws of a gigantic cat—

PART IV: APEMEN OF KOR