The Buttoned Sky Part 12

Revel ran on. His feet thudded on rock, slithered on gra.s.s, shuffled through the mire of a narrow swampland. Here trees slashed at him, there a woodchuck sprang out of his path and made him stumble with sudden panic. His chest labored, drawing in air; his legs pumped and ached.

Then he came to a river.

It was some ten yards broad, with a swift current. He said to Jerran, "If we can make headway against that current, land up-stream on the other side, we may have a chance."

The runty yellow man shook his head. "Look up," he gasped. Above them soared a score of globes, plainly marking their position for the gentry.

"The filthy schemers," growled Revel. "The foul cheats! They call this a game, yet 'tis as easy for them as it would be to shoot at us in a small sealed room!" He bent down. "Get on my back, little one." Jerran climbed on, and Revel grasped his legs, told him to hang tight around his neck, and leaped into the river.

Only thirty feet across, it was yet quite deep, and Revel sank like a dropped rock. When the water above his head was so opaque that he could not distinguish anything save a dull mirky lightness, he struck out downstream. For a full minute he swam with the current, then began to rise, Jerran clinging weakly to his neck. The Mink thanked his...o...b..--no, not them, but whatever brought him luck--that he was one of the few ruckers who had taught himself to swim....

He had gone farther by swimming than he might have running, for the current was like a demon with a thousand legs, all speeding it on and carrying him with it. His head lifted clear of the waters in the center of the stream, and Jerran behind him broke into coughs and gurgles.

Revel looked for globes, and saw them upriver, lifting and falling uncertainly. He said, "Take a breath!" did so himself, and sank again.

This time he stayed under for the s.p.a.ce he could have counted fifty, then rose again near the far bank.

He was among trees, birch and poplar and evergreen, that grew to the water's brink. He struggled ash.o.r.e, carrying a limp Jerran, and fell with his burden beneath a single giant oak, which sheltered him from the b.u.t.toned, all-seeing sky.

"Rest a while, Jerran. We've put plenty of distance behind us."

Yet when he stood up and gave his friend a hand, five minutes later, he could already hear the baying of hounds.

A touch of panic threaded down his spine--not the panic that flared and died when a woodchuck startled him, but the panic of any hunted creature who, do what he may, still hears the pursuers close behind him. The sound of the howls told him the dogs had crossed the river. He looked up, but saw no orbs. No dog scents a man two miles off. Who had betrayed them? Or were the gentry presuming that they must have crossed?

He broke trail for Jerran through a section that a great bear would have found hard going, all vines and tough saplings and snake holes that sunk beneath his sandaled feet. His body was by this time a hatched network of pain and scarlet stripes, oozing blood.

He had expected the ma.s.s of impeding vegetation to be a thin patch at best, but it went on and on, and the trees thinned so that the sky was open above them. It was a matter of time only till the globes spotted him. The hounds were louder. Once he heard the shout of a man, thin and high in the distance.

At last he was on solid, uncluttered ground again. He looked down at his skin, wondering if it would ever be smooth and whole again. His body had been gouged, gashed, torn, disfigured.

"Va-yoo hallo! Va-yoo hallo-lo-lo-lo-lo!" The terrible cry rang behind him, and turning, he saw two hors.e.m.e.n cresting a hill to the side of the patch of bad ground.

Then it dawned on him how they had been followed; for behind the stallioned squires rose the hills, which bordered the straight hunting course, and on them showed small dots of color, the keen-eyed watchers of the gentry. No matter where he ran on this long narrow coursing ground, there would be eyes upon him.

At least the ravening dogs were not nearby. He picked up Jerran, tucked him under one arm, and dashed for the shelter of the evergreen woods before him. The hoofs of the horses pounded behind. He dodged in among the pines, and the mournful call lifted--"Gone to earth! Go-ho-hon to earth!"

"d.a.m.n you, put me down!" rasped Jerran. "Am I a child, to be carted like this?" Revel dropped him. They skittered from tree to tree, and then a charging horse was on them, and Jerran was rolling aside, bleating with fear of the hoofs, while Revel turned and stood foursquare in the path.

As the stallion all but touched him, he jumped aside, jumped back, so that the head of the beast pa.s.sed him but the rider was struck and clutched and hurled from his saddle, losing his trumpet-gun as he fell.

The Mink was sitting astride him before he could bounce up, and two ruthless hands took him by the throat and tore out his jugular. The second rider at that instant drew rein behind them, and lifted his own gun for a quick shot.

Jerran hurled a rock. It took the squire on the head, spilled him out of his saddle, and the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.

"Two guns, by Orbs!" crowed Revel, gathering them up. "And two horses!"

He put a foot into the stirrup of the second one, but it shied madly at the touch of a b.l.o.o.d.y, naked man; dashed forward, startling the other, and together they vanished among the trees. "h.e.l.l!" said Jerran, taking one of the guns; "nothing gained but two bullets, Mink."

"Two bullets is two more slain squires. Come on!"

The evergreens gave out shortly, and they were in a valley channeled by sluggish rivulets and grown with noxious weeds and clumps of coa.r.s.e gra.s.s. Some distance away, a priest walked slowly, head bent, his double scalp lock flopping down over the radiant blue-green robe. Above him, apparently in communion with him, hung a golden globe.

Revel shifted his gun up and took aim at the orb. He must risk a shot, rather than a G.o.d's exposure of his whereabouts. The priest looked up, saw him, yipped in surprise, and the orb shot up ten feet just as Revel fired.

One bullet wasted. Jerran fired as the echoes of the Mink's shot racketed away, and the priest crumpled in on himself, a glittering sack of dead meat.

"You fool!" said Revel, with a brief, pithy anger. "The man I could have stabbed or broken in two. The sphere is beyond us now." It was slanting up an invisible incline, faster than he had ever seen one travel before.

"Come on," he snarled. "We've got to travel!" He threw away the useless gun and ran for his life.

Behind him, to left and then to right, rose the calls. Hoofs thundered, dogs baying out afresh as they sighted their quarry, and the valley filled with sound and horses, dogs and men. Over and over the calls rang, and the air above the fugitives was filled with watching G.o.ds.

Revel ran as he had never believed he could run, and the calls, the calls, the calls beat upon his eardrums....

CHAPTER X

The pretty daughter of the squire, She gallops down the hill; The blood of gentry pounds so fierce, 'Tis like to make her ill!

Thinks she, I've come to see his death, The man who did me shame!

And then she spies him limping there, All stripped and torn and lame....

--Ruck's Ballad of the Mink

The squire was clad in a sky-blue velvet coat, long and loose with a row of big silver b.u.t.tons down the front, a cabbage rose on each flared lapel, a thick fall of silver lace over an olive-green weskit, lime breeches in white calf boots. His blunderbuss was tilted carelessly up over one crooked elbow, for he trusted to the iron-shod hoofs of his hunting stallion to smash the rebel into the muck of the valley. He was a portly, floridly handsome man of some thirty summers, and he would not live to see the sun rise again.

Revel turned at bay. He was just under the overhang of a short cliff, on his right hand a swamp, on his left a pack of approaching hounds, and before him the squire on his upreared horse. He had just boosted Jerran up to the cliff's edge, and the little man was scrambling away, calling to him to follow; but there was no purchase for his fingers, and the thing was too high to jump, at least in the brief moment he had. So he was brought to bay.

The Mink drew his daggers, his fangs of Ewyo's more or less generous bestowal. The horse poised an instant before bringing its mallet-hoofs down on his head, and Revel leaped in and thrust--hands together, knuckles pressed tight, so that the blades drove deep into the flesh just below the rib cage of the stallion, their points not two inches apart. Revel jerked them apart and out, and the horse contorted and writhed together in a thrashing heap and came down, its blood hissing out from a foot-long gash. The squire, unable to realize what was happening, fell sideways on top of the Mink, who stabbed upward blindly as he rolled away from the dying horse. The squire took one dagger in the groin of his spotless lime breeches, the other just under a silver b.u.t.ton above his heart. The world shut out for him in pain and terror and a loud, broken screech.

Revel fought out of the tangle of limbs and crumpled corpse, shot to his feet in time to meet the charge of a pair of slavering hounds. He knew he was done now, there was no more running for the Mink, and he cursed his fate even as he blessed whatever power had sent him so many gentry to be pulled down with him. The dogs leaped, one died in mid-air and the other carried him down once more, its lean teeth snapping off a patch of hide and muscle from his shoulder as its guts poured free of its body through a frantically-given wound. Revel was up again, shaking himself, grappling with a third hound whose knowledge of men made it wary of his blades. It hauled away as he slashed at it, lunged for his throat, caught an ear instead, and coughed out its life as it was flung over his shoulder in time for him to run the next dog through the skull as it sailed at him.

He was bleeding like a punctured sack of wine, though the wounds were far from mortal. One ear lobe was gone, his left shoulder felt as though it had been scalded by boiling pitch, and his whole frame was stiffening somewhat from the myriad tiny cuts it had received. Revel was in his glory, although he counted his life in seconds now. The whole pack was not in the valley, these four dogs had not run with it, and only men remained. Yet above were the orbs, to take a hand if he should prove too mighty for the gentry's handling.

A squire galloped up, jumped from his saddle and came at the Mink. Revel blinked blood from his eyes.

"Rosk!" he said, grinning. Now the G.o.ds were kind!

The lean-jawed squire halted twenty feet away, presenting his gun to the Mink's breast. "A fine fox," he said admiringly, "a d.a.m.ned fine fox, but too vicious for the hounds. Die, Mink!"

"d.a.m.ned if I will," said Revel, flinging himself forward and down. The gun roared harmlessly as Rosk, startled, tugged on the trigger. Revel went up to stab for the man's belly, but a warning tremor of the ground gave him pause; a stallion was thundering down on him from the left. He flicked a glance at it. A great roan, with the Lady Nirea up, and coming straight for him.

She would run him down? He bared angry teeth--but she was going to miss him! She was galloping between him and Rosk! She was....

_She was stretching down a hand to him, her face twisted with hope and fear and--friendship!_