Liberator Of Jedd Part 5

Blade made a stick calendar and notched the days on it. His crude bow worked well enough at short range and he fletched his arrows with the obovate leaves of a tree he could not name. He made a spear and hardened the point in fire. He killed two more of the giant hares and an igua.n.a.like creature, a miniature dragon whose belly flesh , the only part he could eat, tasted like chicken. In three days of trekking through the interminable dark forest he did not see a single bird. There was always the silence, vast and brooding, broken only by the sound of his pa.s.sage, of his footsteps on the springy underma.s.s of needles and leaves and rotten vines.

He built large fires every night and slept in trees, binding himself into a crotch or fork with vines so he would not tumble down.

Always the terrain rose in a gradual slant. A rough calculation told him that he had climbed some three thousand feet since leaving the cliff rim.

On the morning of the fourth day he was awakened by a harsh cawing, similar to that of crows in H-Dimension, but louder and more abrasive. He stretched and groaned as he cut away the vines binding him, there was no comfortable way to sleep in a tree, and searched for the source of the strange noises.

Birds!

Gulls. Or gull-like, for they were huge and had transparent leathery wings and cruel hooked beaks One of them was carrying a fair-sized fish in its beak. They circled over him, apparently aware of his presence and not liking it, raucous in their disapproval. Blade thumbed his nose at them and cooked breakfast. Thoughtfully. Gulls meant a fairly large body of water. That could mean people, of some sort, and that meant danger. That day he traveled with more caution than usual.

About mid-afternoon he came to a path. Long disused, overgrown, faintly traced, but definitely a path. His caution increased. He lay in the brush for half an hour before venturing onto the path and stepping up his pace. The going was infinitely easier.

The path dipped suddenly into a long, narrow and dark ravine. As he traversed it, noting that it was his first descent since the trip began, he also noticed that the forest was beginning to thin out. When he emerged from the ravine, climbing again, the path made an abrupt right-angle turn and he saw the barrow, or tumulus, about a mile ahead. And saw what stood atop it.

The gulls had long since left him. Blade approached the high mound, covered with weeds and gra.s.s, with an arrow notched to his bow and his spear and knife ready. For this barrow, and the towering stone figure atop it, was definitely the work of men. Intelligent men. Engineering men. At a hundred yards he paused and contemplated it.

The idol, or statue, was some two hundred feet high. The great pillars of the legs, of cunningly worked stone, stood wide astride and the stone arms were crossed on the gigantic chest. The body faced Blade; the head looked away from him.

He made a wide circle around the mound and the idol, moving quietly and on the alert, and got into position to see the face of the thing. A chill traced down his spine. The stone visage still bore traces of paint, scarlet and blue, and the great empty eyes glared at him. It was a grotesque, a combination of skull and devil mask and something else he could not identify, an eerie and terrifying ethos of its own. Blade did not like the thing, nor his own reaction to it. He shook his fist at it and moved in closer. With each step the silence of centuries closed in on him, silence that was palpable, had weight and substance.

Blade strode between the colossal legs. In one foot, near the big toe, was a black rectangle. A door. Blade slung his bow over his shoulder and, with his knife and spear ready, stepped into semidarkness. He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and sniffed about. After a moment he relaxed. Nothing but the musty, dusty smell of slow decay. There was nothing here. Nothing but the rotten detritus of the years.

The inside of the foot was a chamber of brick, the stonework was only facing, from which the mortar had fallen in great chunks. In the heel was another door leading to a flight of twisting stone steps that climbed steeply upward. Blade started to climb.

On the first landing he found the first skeleton. Bones so rotted by time that when he touched a thighbone it crumbled to dust at his touch. Blade contemplated the thing. His a.s.sociation with Lord Leighton had been long enough, and Blade was a good student when he chose, to inform him that these bones had once been a human being as he knew them. The skull was that of modern man.

"What happened?"

Blade asked the question as he edged around the bones and began to climb again. There were four more such landings before he reached the top, and on each was a skeleton. Just bones. No weapons, no jewelry or adornments, only bones.

He reached the top landing. A door led into the inner skull of the idol. It had been of wood, so rotted now that when he approached, the slight vibration caused the wood to turn to powder and fall away. He gazed into the chamber beyond, at the stone altar.

Atop the altar were two skeletons, bones now linked in their long death. He did not need to be an expert to know that the slighter set of bones had belonged to a woman and the larger bones over her were those of a man. In what weird, perhaps s.e.xual, ceremony had they died so? He shrugged and went about his exploring.

Scattered about the chamber were three more altars, smaller and in the form of lecterns. On each one was a ma.s.sive book of yellowed parchment or vellum bound in hide. He touched a page and it vanished in powder. He bent to scan the strange cuneiform scribble, so faded that only by looking at it slantwise and using the light refraction could he discern traces of ink. At last he turned away. This mystery he would never solve.

Once again the crying of the gulls startled him. Blade went to one of the hollow eyes and peered out. Nothing. He went to the other eye and saw it: a lake. A greenish-blue soupbowl of a lake, not more than two miles away. The birds were circling over it, crying, and now and again diving for fish. Blade paid no attention to the birds. There were huts in the lake. Thatched and wattled huts on stilts, each with a landing platform built around it. Gray smoke curled from several of the huts. Women, bare-breasted and wearing skins to cover their genitals, worked at various ch.o.r.es. One was pounding a clublike stick into a large bowl. Pestle and mortar. Grain. Flour. Blade nodded. These lake people were certainly a cut above Ogar's tribe, though far down the scale from the men who had built the idol from which he now spied. And they were dangerous.

Blade spent the remainder of the afternoon, while the light lasted, studying the lake village. He did not like what he saw.

The lake people, from what he could see at his far vantage, were not true men. Lord L would have labeled them apemen. Pithecanthropus. Yet they walked like men, had weapons of stone and wood, used fire and had built the stilted huts in the lake. They built round, cuplike boats of withes and mud and used them to scuttle between the huts and the sh.o.r.e. And they were cultivators! Around the edges of the lake was a narrow littoral of cultivated fields extending to the edge of the forest. Perhaps half a mile.

The lake people used slaves in the fields. And scarecrows to keep the gulls away from the crops. Blade did not at first grasp the nature of the scarecrows, nor feel any particular pity for the slaves. When he did understand it he decided, then and there, to stay well away from the lake. These were a cruel and brutish people. More intelligent than Ogar, hence more to be feared.

More than once that day he wished for a pair of powerful binoculars. His own vision was superhuman, as near to 10-10 as is possible, but he fretted at details he sensed he was missing. Yet by concentrating on the strip of plowed land closest to him he managed well enough. And redoubled his determination not to go near the lake.

Half the slaves working in that near field were women. Some old, some young, all naked and all being whipped incessantly by apemen overseers. The male slaves were whipped only infrequently or not at all. This in itself puzzled Blade, but still more puzzling was the fact that the slaves were definitely of a higher species. They were devoid of body hair, smooth-skinned and well formed, true men, and yet they were in slavery to the shambling apeman. Lord L, when he emptied Blade's memory file at the end of this journey, would be surprised. The higher species, then, did not always triumph.

The scarecrows were the dead bodies of slaves. The watching Blade saw one of the grisly things come into being. A female slave faltered at her work, stumbled and fell, and an apeman immediately began to beat her. She could not get up. Another apeman joined the first and began to use his knout, the heavy whip the apemen carried. Blade made a wry face. He expected such horrors in Dimension X, yet it was not a pretty thing to watch. What followed was worse.

The apemen stopped beating the slave. One bent over her and made signs to indicate she was dead. The other apeman dropped his whip and fell on her still-warm flesh, attacking her s.e.xually. When he had finished, the other apeman did the same. Blade cursed them, then chided himself. He had not yet adapted fully enough if his emotions could be so involved. He must do better, adapt more and faster. Home Dimension rules did not apply out here.

The body of the female slave was dragged to a post set in the ground and tied to it with withes. This task completed, the apemen went back to beating their female charges. Only now and then did a male slave receive a blow.

About this time Blade noticed one of the female slaves, young and, insofar as he could make out at the distance, quite pretty, quietly edging away from the other slaves. Step by step, yard by yard, she sidled toward the bordering forest. Blade, and he had to grin at himself for it, found he was holding his breath and wishing her luck.

Had the apemen overseers not been so engrossed in their maltreatment of the dead woman, the girl would never have had a chance. As it was she was discovered while she was still a hundred yards from the forest. One of the apemen saw her, let out a guttural scream of rage and bounded toward her. The young female slave screamed in turn and began to run.

The apeman was faster. He covered the ground in ludicrous fashion, awkward and with a leaping and lunging gait, but he covered it. The girl ran with her mouth open, screaming in terror, her slim legs and arms pumping, knowing what awaited her if caught.

Blade found Blade excitedly talking to Blade: "Come on, come on, girl! Run, d.a.m.n it. Run!"

She was doing her best, but the ground was rough, recently gouged with sharp plowsticks, and she fell. The apeman screamed in angry triumph and struck at her with his knout. She rolled to her feet, eluded the blows and took off again for the forest. Blade felt his heart beat as fast as her own.

Another apeman, with the angle in his favor, was trying to cut her off before she could get into the forest. He lunged at her and, as she pulled away, Blade saw blood crimson her naked shoulder and breast. The apeman lunged again, and again she eluded him, still running, still trying.

Blade felt his heart swell within him. He wanted her to make it. How he wanted her to make it!

The slave reached the dark sanctuary of the forest and plunged in. But Blade shook his head gloomily. For a moment there he had thought she had a chance, but in the tangled forest, impeded by trees and creeper vines and undergrowth, the apemen would surely overtake her. They were burly brutes, as strong as gorillas, and better equipped to make their way in such a wilderness.

Blade was wrong. He stared as the apemen stopped short of the forest's edge. They peered into the trees and made signs and chattered to each other, but they did not venture any closer to the trees. Slowly, making gestures of hate and rage, they backed off. Blade smiled and understood, at least in part. The apemen were afraid of the forest. Deathly afraid of it. Taboo!

He wished the young slave well, though he did not think highly of her chances. The forest had its own terrors. He studied the dark vista where she had entered. Not a twig stirred.

While the light lasted he watched the apemen. As the sun sank from view the slaves, male and female, were rounded up and herded into basket boats and transferred to a stilt hut larger than the rest. Men and women were shoved into the hut together, guards posted, and food brought by other male slaves who appeared to be trustees. Blade watched one of these trustees, his ch.o.r.es dispatched, return in a boat to one of the huts and be greeted there by an apewoman. So that was it. There was a shortage of apemen and the male slaves, under certain conditions, were acceptable as mates. He pondered this as he prepared for sleep. No matter the dimension, s.e.x always found a way.

Blade slept in the skull chamber that night, soundly and undisturbed, and as the gulls began their hoa.r.s.e crying with the first light he was on his way. He made a wide circle around the lake, staying deep in the forest, finding water where he could and noting that the terrain once again began to slant upward.

The forest began to thicken again. The giant hares on which he had been depending for food suddenly vanished. All that day he did not see one of the creatures. He still had a pouch full of meat and did not worry too much, especially as he found a natural salt lick, a saline spring bubbling from a rock and evaporating to leave coa.r.s.e salt lying on the ground. Blade concealed himself in a thicket and waited patiently.

The wait was long, but in the end he was not disappointed. He was careful to remain downwind and, after three hours, a tiny deer left cover and timidly approached the salt lick. Blade, who was in truth getting a bit tired of hare, watched with great interest. The creature was not much bigger than a large cat, with a dun hide and darkish yellow rosettes. The ears were mule-like, it had no antlers and, instead of hooves, it had three toes on each foot. Blade cared nothing for all this. What did the flesh taste like? he wondered.

When the deer had had its fill of salt and left, Blade followed it at a distance. He soon found tracks, well worn, beaten smooth over the years by the little three-toed beasts. He came suddenly on a herd of them grazing off to one side. They bounded out of sight in an instant, but Blade did not mind. Their traces were everywhere. His food problem was solved for the immediate future.

It was an hour before sunset when he first knew he was being followed.

Had it not been for the eternal brooding silence he would have missed it. He paused for a breather or, as he admitted, a loafing period, for he had by now fully recovered his strength and replaced the blood drained by the leeches. But it was his habit, while in Dimension X, to pause every now and then and conceal himself to watch and listen.

The sound came from somewhere behind him, on the deer trace, and it was very faint and did not come again. Whoever had made the sound was nearly as expert as Blade himself at moving through the forest. Yet a stone had been dislodged. It rolled and struck another stone. That was all Blade needed.

Whether or not he was in view of the follower he had no way of knowing. He presumed that he was and feigned ignorance. He continued on his way, halting now and then to study the deer tracks while listening and studying his back trail without appearing to. Nothing. The sound did not come again. Yet he was still being followed. The watcher was still there.

As night fell he built his fire. He made snares of vines and saplings and placed them up and down the path with great ostentation, wanting the spy to see them. As full darkness closed down, Blade left his fire and, vanishing like a shadow into the shadows, constructed two larger snares on either side of the path. He put himself in the watcher's place and knew that he would not approach along the path; he would circle out into the forest and come in from the side.

He cooked his meat longer than usual that night, holding it out of the fire so the faint breeze would carry the savory smell to the unknown lurker. He built two more smaller fires, each at a point where the trace led into the clearing and left it. He kept his weapons with him and was careful not to sit with his back to the forest. And he waited.

Hours pa.s.sed. Blade pretended to doze between his fires, his hands never far from his weapons. Then it came.

First the snapping crackle of the bent young tree he had used as a spring, a whistling sibilance as it was triggered. A m.u.f.fled scream. Blade s.n.a.t.c.hed a torch from the edge of the fire and ran toward the sound, spear under his arm and stone knife in his hand. He had caught something.

She was well and fairly caught. The thick vine clutched her by shapely ankles as she dangled five feet off the ground, head down. Naked. It was the female slave whom he had watched escape from the apemen. Blade held the torch high and moved in for a closer inspection. She screamed at him, spat and, as helpless as she was, tried to claw his face with her nails. Blade moved back a pace or two. The girl was as wild as any animal. And terrified out of her wits. Now that Blade had her he did not know exactly what to do with her.

For the moment he did nothing. He stared at her, neither smiling nor scowling, feigning more bewilderment than he actually felt. She had escaped, she was traveling, ergo, she must be going someplace, must have a destination. She was of this Dimension X, as poor Ogar had been, so perhaps she could take his place as a guide and mentor. If he could tame her and gain her trust.

He continued to stare, saying nothing. The girl stopped her struggles and stared back at him. In her wild disheveled way, upside down and stark naked, a fact of which she did not seem aware, she was beautiful. Her teeth were white and even, lovely even when she snarled at him, and he could visualize what her ma.s.s of thick, dark hair might be like when it was clean and free of burrs and leaves. She was young, certainly in her teens, and here again he could see beauty beneath the matted grime that now caked her regular features. Her eyes, narrowed at him and glittering green in the torchlight, were well s.p.a.ced under luxuriant dark brows. Her superb b.r.e.a.s.t.s, even as she dangled in this undignified position, did not droop or flop. They were as round and firm and plump as partridges on the wing, with only the tiny red nipples flaccid and inert. Her body, deep-tanned by constant exposure to the sun, was smooth and hairless.

At that moment the breeze backed around a point or so. Blade stepped back a pace and sniffed at it, her odor was that of musky female secretions, natural, not subject to the lavage of H-Dimension antiseptics. He sniffed again and felt desire rise in him. And knew that he was, at last, fully adapted to this particular X-Dimension.

The caught girl said, "Who are you? Why did you trap me like this? You are not one of them."

Blade gave her a tentative smile. "I'm not? Who is them?

She frowned and stabbed her finger in the direction they had come from that day. "Them. The hairy people. The beastmen. You are certainly not one of them. And you are not one of us."

He smiled again and advanced a pace. She showed her teeth but did not attempt to claw him with her nails.

"Who," said Elade, "is us? Who are you?"

For a long moment, she studied him. Her snarl faded and became a half smile, a cautious smile. "You really do not know?"

He was patient. "If I knew I would not have to ask."

Her smile grew. "Cut me down then and I will tell you. But I find it very strange that you do not know a Jedd when you see one. We have lived in this country as long as the world has been. Now you come, a stranger such as I have never seen before, and say that you have never heard of us. But cut me down first. Your snare is hurting my legs."

Blade pondered it. She was only a girl, a naked girl without a weapon. There was no possible danger. He severed the vine and let her fall to the ground, all the while conscious that beneath his scanty loincloth of animal skin he was excited. He had adapted, all right! He was surging with want of her, with raw animal l.u.s.t for her body. In a cooler moment he would have known and admitted the cause, Lord L's megavitamin therapy, but now he only wanted to penetrate her, then and there, and send his seed bursting into her.

He might have fallen atop her then and there, forced her, willing or not, had she not been too quick for him. She broke her fall with her hands, did a swift somersault, and had the caught vine nearly off her feet before he divined her intentions and sprang. She had one foot out of the loop and was running when he caught the end of the trailing vine and tripped her up. She fell with a crash into matted undergrowth and twisted to meet him, once again spitting and fighting like a wildcat. He hauled her rudely back by the leg. She raked his big chest with nails like talons. Blade, his ardor blunted for the time being, lost patience and clouted her alongside the head. Not too hard.

While she was unconscious he bound her with vines, then carried her back to the fires and dumped her on the ground. She was still out cold. Blade went back to roasting his supper, seemingly indifferent but watching her from a corner of his eye. When her eyes flickered open he gave her a few moments to recover, then he began to speak without looking directly at her.

"I will speak first," he told her. "Then you will speak. I am master here and so it shall be while we remain together. That is understood?"

She nodded sulkily. "That is understood. You are master."

"Good. What is your name?"

"I am called Ooma."

"I see. Ooma. You said you were a Jedd, what is a Jedd? What does the word mean?"

She stared at the meat he was roasting. She licked her lips and dribble ran from the corners of her well-shaped mouth. "I starve. I will not talk until I am fed. You have meat. Give me some. I have not had meat in all the year I was a captive of the beastmen."

Blade gave her a hard look. He dangled a piece of meat before her, then ate it slowly while she watched and drooled. Her eyes hated him.

"You will talk first, Ooma. Then you will have meat. Or you will not talk and shall have nothing at all." Blade shrugged his big shoulders and smiled at her. "I do not care if you eat. It is nothing to me. I have plenty."

She struggled against the vines binding her. Beneath the facial grime she was crimson with rage. Blade calmly speared a new hunk of meat and began to roast it.

Ooma said, "You are master. I will talk. But if you do not keep your promise and give me meat I will wait until you sleep and kill you. I promise it."

He smiled sweetly at her. "And I promise you meat. I do not break my word. You will find that out, my girl. Now, what is a Jedd?"

"I am a Jedd. Jedd means mountain. And we are called Jedds because we are mountain people. Our Empress, a very old woman who is dying now, is the Jeddock."

"Ah," said Richard Blade softly, "an Empress? Tell me about that, tell me about the Jeddock."

This, he thought, was more like it. Ooma could lead him out of the forest to something resembling civilization as he knew and understood it. Mountain people. An Empress. He listened with great attention, careful not to miss a word. When she had finished he untied her hands and gave her meat. She tore at it with cries of pleasure, gobbling and stuffing herself while the succulent juices dribbled down her chin. When she could eat no more she lay back, rubbing her belly and belching, and watching him with a new look in her green eyes.

"Who are you?" she demanded. "I have told you of myself and my people, what of you and your people? You are bigger and much stronger than the men of Jedd and much more handsome. You must come from a far place to be so different. Tell me."

Blade would as lief remained silent, evaluating the information she had given him, but he needed her and wanted to keep her happy. He told his story, sticking as close to truth as was possible under the circ.u.mstances and keeping it simple. Ooma was not likely to grasp much about Home Dimension.

He pointed through a break in the trees at a full moon. Blood red and exactly at the zenith. "I come from another world, Ooma. Not that one, but a world much like it. I came by magic, in the time it takes you to draw a breath, though the distance in days of travel is more than all the leaves on all the trees in this forest. Do you understand?"

"No." She scowled at him. "You lie to me. And you do not yet tell me your name, if you have one."

"I do not lie," he said calmly. "I have magic of my own, which I may show you if we remain friends. As for my name, it is Blade. That is what you will call me, Blade. Blade master. Try it, Ooma. See how it sounds."

She frowned at him and showed her white teeth, but slowly she p.r.o.nounced the words: "B-la-de mas-ter. Blade master."

He nodded. "That is it. It has a good sound on your lips."

"I do not like it. It has a sharp and cruel sound. And I do not think I like you, even though you gave me meat. You look at me strangely and it frightens me. I know what is in your mind, Blade master, and it shall not be. I will never give myself to you."

She had a way of getting to the crux of things. Blade smiled. Though he still l.u.s.ted for her, he had himself under control now. It would be criminally foolish to hurt or offend this child. He needed her more than she needed him, though perhaps she did not realize it. He tried to placate her. Without surrendering his dominance.

"You will not take that tone with me," he said severely. "Listen. Do not fear me. I will not harm you. I will never touch you unless you wish to be touched. I want only for us to be friends, to help each other. You will guide me and answer all my questions and in return I shall take you safely back to your people." He indicated the brooding dark forest encompa.s.sing them. "You will never get back to your Jedds alone, Ooma. There are too many dangers."

For a moment, she gnawed at her red underlip with sparkling teeth, then nodded. "You are right. I will need you to get past the Api. If we get past them. They will probably kill and eat you and make a wh.o.r.e-slave of me, but I do not worry about that now. It is still four days' march before we reach the Api. So for now I will be your friend. You agree to this, Blade master?"

"Of course I agree. Have I not said I want to be friends!?"

"Then untie me. One friend does not keep another friend bound hand and foot. Or do they so in this world you say you come from?"

Blade chuckled. It was logical enough. "No," he admitted. "In my world real friends trust each other." No use mentioning that real friends were hard to come by and most friendship mere feigning. Things might be different in Dimension X, though he doubted it. He had discovered, at times to his sorrow and peril, that there were certain constants in all dimensions. This thought he could safely leave to the philosophers who might one day study Lord L's records. Blade had two objectives, survive and return.

He patted her sleek brown shoulder as he cut the vines binding her legs. "You are right, Ooma. I admit it and I set you free. And you need not be afraid of, "

She was faster than any cat. She had doubled and redoubled a length of vine into a heavy cord. She slashed him across the eyes with it. He instinctively fell back and in that instant she was gone out of the firelight and into the forest. Her mocking laugh floated back to him.

"Goodbye, Blade master. One think I know, they breed fools in your strange world."

He rubbed the welt over his eyes and cursed her briefly, then began to laugh at himself. She was right. He was a fool. She had conned him but good. It was what he got for underestimating her. The Jedd brain, it would appear, was as good as his own, if not so sophisticated.

At that moment there sounded, from far off in the depths of that immensity of forest, a high-pitched shriek, an animalistic gibber, that curdled Blade's blood and p.r.i.c.kled the hairs on his body. The awful sound was like nothing he had ever heard before, not even on Lord Leighton's tapes. There was terror and triumph in it and blood and death and the surging vibrato of life. Blade crouched by his fires and stared in the direction whence the sound came. Miles away. No direct threat to him. He smiled then, a covert smile and sly, and prepared for sleep. They would see.

He pretended sleep, his weapons close to his hand. And listened. Half an hour pa.s.sed. An hour. Then a faint sound in the undergrowth. He grinned.