Stalking the Nightmare Part 13

And the final trophy.

But if the visitor was particularly trustworthy, and if they had all taken several stingarees too many, and if the visitor wheedled properly, the Trottersmen might just tell him the story behind that gruesome trophy.

The story of Nathaniel Derr's last kill. And of his visit to the planet Ristable.

The day, like all the days since he had arrived on Ristable, was too placid for Derr. Had the planet sported thirty-two kilometer an hour gales, or freezing snowstorms, or unbearable heat as in the veldt... then he would have gladly suffered, and even reveled in it. Discomfort was the hunter's environment.

But this baby-bath of a world was serene, and calm, and unflurried.

Nathaniel Derr did not care to have his hunter status challenged, even by the climate.

He stared out of the slowly-moving half-track truck, watching the waist-high, unbroken plain of dull russet gra.s.s whisper past. He felt the faint stirring of the winds as they ruffled his thick, gray hair.

Derr was a big man: big of chest, big of hand. Big even in the way he watched, and the way he fondled the stet-rifle. As though he had been born with the gun grafted to him.

His eyes had the tell-tale wrinkles around them that labeled him a watcher. In a stand of gra.s.s, in the bush, or waiting for a flight of mallards to honk overhead, he was a watcher. Again, there was something else, less simple, in his face.

A hunter's face...

... but something else, too...

"Hey, you!" he yelled over the noise of the truck's antique water-piston engine. The nut-brown native who drove the half-track paid no attention. The truck made too much noise. Derr yelled again, louder: "Hey, you! Dummy!"

The native's oblong head turned slightly; he inclined an ear; Derr yelled, "What is this we're going to?"

The native's voice was deep and throaty, a typical Ristabite tone. "Ristable, shasir Derr." Nothing more. He turned back to the driving.

Derr let his heavy features settle down into a frown. The word "ristable" seemed to mean many things on this planet. First, it meant "home," the name of the world; and now it was the name of a ceremony or something he was about to attend. He had heard it used several other ways during the past week.

Nathaniel Derr turned his thoughts inward as the half-track rolled over the gra.s.sland. The past week; he dwelled on it sequentially.

When he had applied to the Mercantile System for super-cargo pa.s.sage on a liner out to the stars, he had hoped for bigger hunts, better kills, finer trophies. But though it had cost him more for this one trip than all the safaris he had staged on Earth--and they were many, many--so far his appet.i.te had only been whetted. The szlygor he had bagged on Haggadore was a puny thing... even though it had gutted three of his bearers before he'd gotten the 50.50 charge into the beast's brain. The prestosaur was big, but too c.u.mbersome to have been any real threat. The ferrl-cat and the deeler had been the roughest. The deeler was more an asp than a spider, but had exhibited the deadliest traits of both before he had slit its hood with his vibroblade. The ferrl-cat had dropped from a feathery-leafed tree on Yawmac; and it was proof indeed that Derr's age had not diminished his strength, for he had strangled the fearsome yellow feline. Even so, the vibrant surge of the maximum kill had been absent. Perhaps he had expected too much.

But Ristable was just too dead, too boring, too unexciting.

The planet was old; so ancient; all mountains had long since flattened away; undisturbed gra.s.sland swayed from one end of the single great continent to the other. The natives were simple, uncomplicated agrarian folk, who just happened to thresh from their gra.s.ses a sweet flour much enjoyed by gourmets on a hundred worlds, and worth all the plasteel hoes and rakes the merc-ships could trade.

So here he was on Ristable, where the rubble of the glorious ancient cities lay at the edges of the gra.s.slands, slowly dissolving into the land from which they had come.

The past week had been one of utter boredom, while the natives went about their haggling, the merc-ship'screw stretched and mildly leched, and the big red sun, Say to, burned its way across the sky.

No hunting, too much sleeping, and a growing disgust of the slothful natives. It was true they were anxious to learn about civilization--take the driver of this half-track--but though they mimicked the Earthmen's ways, still they were farmers, slow and dull. He had watched them all week, tending their farms, having community feasts, and taking care of the animals that lived out on the plains.

In fact, today had been the first break in the monotony. Nerrows, the captain of the merc-ship, had come to him that morning, and offered him a chance to see a "ristable."

"I thought that was the name of the planet?" Derr had said, pulling on his bush-boots.

Nerrows had thumbed his cap back on his crew cut head, and his slim face had broken lightly in a smile.

"When these people come up with a good word, they don't let it go easily. Yeah, that's right. The planet is Ristable, but so are the animals out there." He jerked a thumb at the gra.s.slands lying beyond the hut." And so is the ceremony they have once a week... ristable, that is."

Derr had perked up sharply. "What ceremony?"

Nerrows smiled again, and said, "You know what the word 'ristable' means in this usage? I didn't think so; it means, literally, 'Kill Day. ' Want to take it in? The ship won't be unsaddled here more than a couple days, so you'd better take in all you can."

Derr stood up, smoothing out his hunt-jacket, slipping into it, sealing it shut. "Is it safe? They won't try to lynch me for observing the secret ceremony, or anything?"

Nerrows waved away the worried comment. "Safest planet on our route. These people haven't had wars since before man was born. You're completely safe, Derr."

The hunter clapped the captain on his thin shoulders, wondering inwardly how such a scrawny sample could get to be a merc-ship officer... he'd never make it where it counted... as a hunter. "Okay, Captain, thanks a lot. Got someone who can direct me out there?"

Derr tapped the native again. "How much farther?"

The native's h.o.r.n.y shoulders bobbed. "Ten, 'leven k'lometer, shasir Derr. Big ristable today."

Derr pulled a black cigar from the cartridge ring, one of ten in a broken row across his jacket. He lit it. Drew deeply. He never kept extra cartridges in the rings; if he hadn't bagged his quarry by the time the stet-rifle was empty, Derr felt he deserved to die. That was his philosophy. He drew down on the black cigar, let a heavy cloud of smoke billow up over his head.

The ancient water-piston half-track rolled steadily out into the gra.s.slands.

They pa.s.sed a pile of rubble; Derr recognized it as another of the lost cities. The faintly pink columns rose spiraling, then broke with ragged abruptness. Strangely-pyramidal structures split down the middle. Carved figures with smashed noses, broken arms, shattered forms... forms which could not be understood... humanoid or something else?

As they came abreast of the ruined city with huge clumps of gra.s.s growing up in its middle, Derr crossed his legs in the back seat, and he said, "Those cities, who made them?"

The native shrugged. "Don't know. Ristable."

Ristable again.

The half-track pa.s.sed walking natives, heading toward a plume of gray smoke that twisted out of the gra.s.slands ahead. Eventually, they drew up on the edge of a widely-cleared dirt area. Surrounded by the waist-high russet gra.s.s on all sides, it was like a bald spot on someone's head. The dirt was packed solid and hard with the footprints of a hundred thousand bare feet. The smoke rose from a large bonfire used to summon the natives. Even as Derr watched, the crowd that had already gathered swelled at the edges.

Strangely enough, a path quite wide and straight leading out to the gra.s.slands was left in the circle of natives.

"What's that?" Derr asked the driver, motioning to the circle, to the path, to the Ristabites watching at nothing. The native motioned him to silence and Derr realized, for the first time, that there wasn't a sound in the crowd.

The natives, male and female, children and old dark-brown crones, stood silently, shifting their feet, watching, but not speaking.

"Come on, boy, open up!" Derr prodded the native angrily. "What's this whole thing... what's that path there... ?"

The native spun around, looked at Derr for a moment in annoyance and open anger, and then vaulted out of the halftrack. In a moment he was lost in the crowd.

Derr had no other choice: he slung the stet-rifle over his shoulder, and slid up onto the rollbar between the driver's cab and the back seat, getting a better view of what was happening.

What was happening, as he settled himself, was that a medium-sized animal--the ones taken care of by the natives, and labeled, inevitably, ristables--was loping in from the gra.s.slands; on six double-jointed legs.

It was the size of a large horse, or a small black bear. It was dull gray in color, mottled with whitish spots along the underbelly. Its chest was ma.s.sive. It was built as an allosaurus might have been. Smooth front that rose straight up to a triangular skull with huge, pocketed eyes set forward on each side of the head. The back sloped sharply at forty-five degrees, ending in a h.o.r.n.y tail. The head was darker gray, and had one gigantic unicorn-like horn protruding from a s.p.a.ce midway between the eyes. No... as Derr watched it coming closer, he saw that the horn was not single; there was a smaller, less apparent horn stuck down near the base of the larger one. The beast also had two groups of vestigial tentacles, appearing to be six or eight to a cl.u.s.ter; one on either side of its body, halfway up the ma.s.sive neck.

This was a ristable. As everything was ristable.

The beast charged down the path between the natives, much like a bull entering the Plaza de Toros, and stopped in the center, its little red eyes glaring, the two front paws clopping at the dirt, leaving furrows.

Abruptly, a native stepped out of the crowd, and removed all his clothing--little enough to begin with--and called to the animal (Derr continued to think of it as a bull, for no good reason, except this seemed to be a bullfight), clapping his hands, stamping his feet.

Bullfight. Derr thought. This is more like it. Then he thought, Ristable. Kill Day.

The native moved slowly, letting the beast edge in on him. It pawed the ground, and snorted through a pair of breather holes below the horns. Then the native leaped in the air, and chanted something unintelligible. As he came down in the dirt, the animal moved sharply. and charged across the cleared s.p.a.ce. People in its line of attack stepped back quickly; and the native leaped agilely out of the way.

It went that way for over an hour.

The ristable charged, and the native leaped out of its path.

Then, when Derr was convinced it would go on this way till darkness... the dance changed. Radically.

The native settled down cross-legged in the dirt, and clasped his hands to his chest. He settled down, and the bull charged, He settled down... and...

Great G.o.d! thought Derr in horror, he's sitting there, letting it gore him. He's...

Then it was over, and they carried the native away, as the ristable loped back down the path to the gra.s.sland.

There was no reaction from the crowd: no dismay, no applause, no notice taken.

Derr slipped back into the half-track, bewildered; and sometime later, though Derr was unaware of it, the driver came back to the truck, stared at him silently for a few seconds, then vaulted over the low door, and started the engine.

Derr stirred slightly as the half-track rolled away from the cleared s.p.a.ce. His tracker's mind registered that the dirt was of a darker hue than when they had arrived; and that the rest of the natives were walking swiftly back toward the village... carrying something sodden; but he seemed to be far lost in thought.

The half-track pa.s.sed the natives, and arrived in town an hour before the sodden cargo was brought in and laid to rest alongside hundreds of previous loads filling identical graves.

"I'm not going on with you, Nerrows." Derr said.

"You know we'll be heading out--Artemis, Shoista, Lalook, Coastal II--and we won't be able to pick you up for almost three months," He stared at Derr with annoyance.

"I know that."

"Then why do you want to stay'?"

"There's a trophy here I want."

Nerrows's eyes slitted down. "Watch that stuff, Derr. "

"No, no, nothing like that, The ristable."

"You mean the animal out there in the fields, the one they go fight every week?"

Derr nodded, checked the stet-rifle, though he was not going hunting for a while yet. "That's it. But there's something important these natives don't know about that creature."

"Yeah? What?"

"How to kill it."

"What are you talking about?"

Derr settled back on the cot, looked at Nerrows carefully. "1 talked to some of the natives when I got back yesterday from that ceremony. They go out every week to fight the ristable."

"So?"

"They always lose. "

"Always?"

"Every d.a.m.ned time. They haven't won a bout with those beasts for as long as they can remember. Do you know that they plant their dead in rows of two hundred?"

The captain nodded. "Yes, I've noticed that."

Derr pulled a cigar loose, lit it, smiled grimly. "But there's something you didn't know... namely, they plant rows on top of rows. What's out there now," he waved at the native cemetery, "is the five-hundredth generation, or something like that. They've been fighting the ristables, dying regularly, and being planted for time beyond memory. "

The captain looked bemused. "The best fertilizer, they tell me."

"Ah, that's just it!" Derr waved the cigar melodramatically. "They've been winding up like that for centuries...

without once winning."

"Don't they want to win?"

Derr looked perplexed for a moment, spread his hands. "From what I can tell, from what I was able to get out of the Headsman, they just don't know any other way. They've been doing it that way, just that way, since before they can remember, and they don't know why. I asked the Headsman, and he stared at me as if I'd asked him why hebreathed.

"Then he answered that it was just the way things were; that's all."

Nerrows scuffed his feet at the hard-packed floor of the hut. He looked up at Derr finally. "What's that got to do with you?"

"I got the permission of the Headsman to go into the cleared s.p.a.ce, in place of a native some week soon. He thought I was nuts, but he'll soon see how an Earthman fights!"

For ten weeks Derr had watched them get mauled and bloodied and ripped and killed. Now, stripped to the waist, clad only in a breechclout, the ornately-carved bush-knife in his thick, square hand, Nathaniel Derr moved into the cleared s.p.a.ce to face his first ristable.

The beast loped in from the gra.s.slands almost immediately, pa.s.sing between the natives lining the path without touching anyone. Strange how it seems to know what it's to. fight, and not bother any others, he thought, hefting the razor-bladed weapon. Sweat had begun to stand out on his face, and the smooth handle of the knife felt slippery to his grip. He dried his hand on the breechclout, and took the knife again.

The ristable lumbered into the clearing, and Derr made note that it was not the one he had seen the week before last, nor the week bef)re that, nor last week. Each week seemed to bring another beast--at some unknown, unbidden signal--ready to gore a nut-brown native with that deadly, alabaster horn.

Derr circled around the edge of the clearing, feeling the heat-stink of the natives behind him. The beast pawed and circled, too, as though uncertain.

Then it charged. It shot forward on six double-jointed legs, its tentacle cl.u.s.ters flailing, its head lowered, the breath snorting from its breather holes.

Derr spun out of the way. The beast pulled up short before it rammed the crowd.

It turned on him, staring with little red eyes.

Derr stared back, breath coming hot and fast. He felt good; he felt fine; he felt the kill coming. It was always like this.

The ristable lurched forward again, this time seeming to make a short, sharp, sidestepping movement; Derr had to be quick. He managed to twirl himself past the beast with only a scant millimeter between his flesh and that bone-white horn.

The ristable brought up sharply, stopped, turned, and glared at Derr.