20 The Teeth of the Mountain
All her clubs were in the rucksack at the side of the road. Could she climb down the bank, grab a club, and start swinging before the Shons swarmed over her?
Not a chance. Tompa’s heart raced, threatening a return of mindless panic.
The Shons didn’t say or do anything, just stared at her while she stared back. They looked less like warriors than war refugees. Their tunics were smudged and tattered, the dirt covering their faces was marked with lines where sweat had trickled down, and their drooping posture suggested exhaustion rather than aggression.
Screw that thought. Shons never looked fearsome, not like Klicks did, but their looks were deceptive. A bunch of them working together were terrifying indeed.
Beside her, she heard Roussel stirring. She glanced at him sharply, hoping he wasn’t going to do something masculine and utterly foolish, but he just stood there as though waiting for her to take the lead.
“Umph,” the Shons grunted in perfect unison. As one, they raised their arms toward the sky. They flipped and twisted their hands in an elaborately nonsensical pantomime that was, after a few seconds, accompanied by a soft, harmonized chant that accentuated certain of their motions. Then they finally made an understandable gesture, reaching back as though ready to throw spears at her. Grunting in harmony, they tossed the imaginary spears. Tompa had to steel herself to keep from ducking.
Beside her, Awmit reached out frantically as though catching one, two, three, all six spears. That startled her, though not as much as the guttural whoop he barked out or his abrupt leap off the ten-foot embankment. She winced, expecting him to re-injure his leg and be helpless against the pursuers, but he landed with surprising lightness on his good leg. The other six Shons closed in on him, maintaining their perfect arc as they moved. He edged forward to meet them.
“Awmit!” Tompa scrambled down the bank. She was in such a hurry that she slid the final yard. Quickly, she rose to a defensive crouch. Roussel was clambering down behind her, hopefully to fight the Shons rather than surprise her from behind; the skin on the back of her neck felt alive with dread.
Awmit attacked the newcomers, leaping at the middle of the arc, sacrificing himself for her, and it would hurt so goddamned much to lose him—
Two of the Shons caught him. Before she could take more than a step, the others crowded around, touching him and bursting into a cacophony of speech that her translator didn’t render. Still in the arms of the assailants, Awmit raised both arms and shouted, “Converts!”
Roussel landed on the road much more gracefully than she’d managed. “What does Awmit mean,” he whispered, “by converts?”
Still crouching, she shook her head angrily and stepped toward the throng.
None of the Shons paid her any attention. Awmit was touching each of the newcomers in turn, rubbing hands in what looked more like a celebration than a struggle.
Tompa was rising from her crouch as Roussel came to stand beside her. “What are converts?” he asked in a louder voice.
Awmit hopped out of the embrace of the newcomers and scurried to Tompa’s side, tugging at her blouse. “These ones weighed judiciously the vigor of graceful human’s defense and the power of Bez-Tattin’s support. Conversion to graceful human’s cause follows consequently.”
She stared at the Shons. They quieted under her gaze and went back to an arc formation. “Are you saying we have new allies?”
“Agree excitedly.”
As one, the six Shons turned away from her. They all went to their hands and knees, raising their backsides. If they were human, she’d guess they were inviting her to kick them. She was tempted. “What are you doing that for?” she asked them.
They didn’t answer. Either they didn’t have translators, or they were pretending not to understand.
Awmit spoke up. “Those ones present repentantly the choice to chastise with the foot in payment for earlier stupidity and malice.”
“He means,” Roussel said, “you can kick their butts if you want to.”
Tompa clenched her teeth. She’d known Awmit longer and had more experience with the contortions of his language, and furthermore the Shon was her friend, not his. “If you bend over,” she said to Roussel, “I’ll do it.”
“Oh, I have no doubt of that.”
Tompa sighed and looked at Awmit. “I don’t trust them.”
“Graceful human feels negatively the beneficent prook-nah of these ones? The pursuers divined the obvious transformation and subjected derisively these ones to hardships and contempt, driving unrestingly the apostates in front of the herd. Eight converts died mushily, consequent to falling under the toes of the herd.”
“I remember seeing a group of Shons running ahead of the herd yesterday,” Roussel interjected. “I wondered what it was all about.”
She spun to confront him. “You expect me to take your word for it?”
Roussel’s eyes narrowed at the vehemence of her attack, though he responded in a mild tone. “I’m coming to expect very little of you, Tompa. But in this case, don’t take my word for it. Take Awmit’s.”
Tompa glared at him for a moment before heaving another sigh and turning to face Awmit. The physical stuff—climbing, running, killing—was so much easier than making decisions or dealing with people. She flung her hand toward the six alien rumps, still poised at kicking height. “Could they be pretending?”
“This one comprehends negatively.”
“You know, faking this conversion so they can kill me.”
Awmit scratched his chest slowly, as though in thought. “Fake convincingly prook-nah?” He looked at the newcomers and stopped scratching. “In this one’s world, such capability exists solitarily in the mind sewers of excessive pretzels.”
“Excessive pretzels?” Roussel asked.
“Flap-haps,” Tompa answered. “Like you.”
“Oh.” He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “But what’s a flap-hap?”
Tompa ignored him.
“This one comprehends belatedly,” Awmit said in a rush. “Graceful human distrusts unpleasantly Dante human consequent to human ability of faking prook-nah!” He cocked his head far to one side as he stared suspiciously at Dante. “Living distrustingly as a human must be sad and lonely. This one prefers emphatically existing as Shon.”
Tompa blinked back sudden moistness in her eyes. This little alien, whom she’d known for just two days, understood her life better than any of the gordos on the Vance would ever bother to do. She hoped Roussel would keep his damn mouth shut, because she wasn’t sure she could respond without a catch in her voice.
While she was collecting herself, Awmit nudged the backside of the nearest Shon with his foot. The Shon looked over its shoulder, then bent its forehead to the ground. Awmit nudged the next Shon. “Truth shines, graceful human, that these ones exist straightforwardly as females incompetent of human insanity.”
They were female? The difference wasn’t obvious—at least not to Tompa. After last night, though, she had no doubt that Awmit knew exactly what he was talking about.
She flicked a glance at Roussel. He was staring at her as though waiting for her decision about the converts. Why was he being so damned passive? Was he certain she’d make the wrong decision? She wished she knew what he wanted her to do so she could do the opposite.
She peered down the road. The converts must have skipped third sleep to catch up to her, but the rest of the herd wouldn’t be far behind. Looking at no one in particular, she muttered, “Let’s get out of here.”
She headed up the road at full speed, but stopped to look back toward the others. “Awmit, tell them to stay behind us. Way behind.”
To her dismay, Roussel kept with her while Awmit stayed behind with the newcomers. That gave her another reason to dislike them, because they’d appropriated the only person she trusted.
She kept up the fast pace even when, after fifteen minutes, the road grew steeper. At one place the r
oad disappeared; in its place was a fifty-foot wide gully. The near side of the gully was a short drop down a sandy bank but the far side was higher, and climbing out of the gully was like climbing a sand dune. Roussel went more quickly than she did, and at the top he extended an arm to help her. She slapped him away, and in the process slid halfway back down. Nonetheless, she eventually made it up without his help.
Atop the sandy rise she paused to catch her breath. Awmit and the other Shons were in a clump a hundred yard back, moving with the surprising speed that their short legs were capable of. Their arms were draped all over each other. It took Tompa a moment to realize that they were helping two of the slower or injured newcomers keep up. The thought that they might help Awmit if his leg started bothering him again made her feel almost tolerant—though at the same time she wished he would need her, instead.
And of course that was crazy. She was investing too much emotion in the old coot. Better to stop thinking about Awmit and instead rebuild her moat. When she was young, she loved reading stories about knights and castles, and sometimes imagined herself as a beleaguered princess inside a nice, safe moat. Now that she thought about it, the Navy had been a kind of moat, too. Filled, unfortunately, with alligators.
“Shon society,” Roussel said, “places few restrictions on sexual behavior.”
Tompa scowled at him, the alligator with the meanest teeth, and resumed hiking.
He walked beside her. “Last night while you were sleeping, I asked Awmit a lot of questions, trying to figure out how that could be.”
She’d be damned if she would chat with him about sex. She kept her gaze straight ahead, watching for uneven paving stones.
But Roussel was unfazed by her silence. “On earth, society creates rules and taboos to subdue man’s animal nature. I used to know more about the theories, but I do remember that unbridled sexuality is one of the animal activities posing the biggest threat to the social order. Hence all the taboos.”
Tompa walked faster. The damned roach kept up easily.
“I think,” he said, “that sex must not threaten Shon society. My theory is that the continuation of the herd is what matters, not the continuation of the individual’s genes, so Shons aren’t as jealous and competitive about sex as humans are. It simply doesn’t need to be regulated very much. A low-status guy like Awmit isn’t likely to form a life bond, but he can partake in the herd-bonding orgies that occur every half year or so. Children that result are raised communally, by the herd.”
The road was passing through a shallow, canyon-like stretch with banks on both sides that had eroded badly. Just ahead, the path narrowed to single file. Tompa stopped to let Roussel go first. She followed him slowly, letting the distance between them grow and trying to ignore his monologue on orgies and sex. Men!
The respite was brief, though, because the road soon widened. He stopped and waited for her, then fell into step beside her.
“I asked Awmit about marriage.” Roussel chuckled. “That caused five minutes of confusion, because the translator couldn’t deal with the word. I had to describe the concept in a roundabout way. It seems the Shons have a rough equivalent to marriage, except that it’s a group commitment involving between six and dozens of people. Individuals come and go, but the dwarain—which can also refer to any group from a business to a political party—might exist for centuries.” He paused, as though expecting an answer. “Don’t you think that’s interesting?”
She pointed ahead. “Look, the sun’s coming up.”
After a moment, Roussel said, “I’ll take that for a ‘no.’”
They emerged from the canyon to a more typical stretch where the road hugged the edge of the slope. Until now, Tompa hadn’t noticed that the sun here was different, but the orange semicircle peeping over the edge of the distant ocean was larger and redder than any earthly sunrise. Hulking shadows had spread across the lowlands, giving the island a depth and reality that had been washed out by yesterday’s harsh daylight. Something stirred inside her. Life in the narrow canyons of Manhattan and the closed confines of the Vance hadn’t prepared her for such broad horizons. Only once, as a reckless kid, had she walked to the top of a really tall skyscraper. Without elevators such jaunts were hot and arduous—and dangerous, too, because top floors were the haunts of fiercely anti-social types.
The view of the island was breathtaking, a landscape more stunning than anything man had ever devised. The mountain was huge, and equally spectacular. Neither mountain nor island would notice whether she lived or died, but they would endure as they always had. For some reason, that was comforting.
Perhaps Roussel felt it, too. Without the need for discussion, they both slowed to a stop. “There’s a whole world full of questions out there,” he said in a quiet voice.
Tompa made a rude sound and resumed walking. “It’s full of Shons, too, trying to kill me.”
“Don’t forget the Klicks,” he added. “They’re the most deadly of all.”
“Go to hell.”
They walked in silence after that, reaching the eighth sharboo-cria in a mere twenty minutes. Little more than a chimney-like pile of rocks and part of a wall were visible among bulbous, ankle-high plants she hadn’t seen before. Reaching the sharboo-cria so quickly was encouraging, because if the clearings were closer together as you approached the summit—and that made sense for some reason she couldn’t put into words—then they might reach the temple earlier than she’d hoped.
But she tried not to let hope blossom too quickly, because premature hope could be as lethal as despair. She readjusted the rucksack on her back, glanced at Roussel without meeting his gaze, and started climbing again. She hiked past the sharboo-cria without stopping.
After a few more minutes, something grey and slithery, like a rat, ran from a hole in the road cut and disappeared down another hole between paving stones.
“That’s the first animal I’ve seen on this island,” Roussel commented. “No, I forgot. There were a few birds and animals in the ruined city.”
Tompa grunted.
He pointed toward the distant shore, where a dark, speckled smudge surrounded a bay. “I wandered around those ruins when I first came out of the cavern. Hard to imagine cities could exist in such a desolate place.” He was silent for several seconds. “I wonder if the climate changed. That seems a more likely explanation than an eruption, but climates don’t change quickly. It would mean the civilization on this island is old. Older than anything on earth.”
Tompa knew nothing of climate changes or eruptions. She gave the summit of the volcano a worried glance, then gave a wide berth to the hole where the creature had disappeared. She’d always had a middle-of-the night fear that rats would nibble on her while she slept.
After another five minutes of silent, fast hiking, Roussel said, “If my mind worked better, I’d have thought of this sooner, but maybe someone has gone upslope, preparing to ambush us the way the plant food gang hoped to do. Klicks are fantastic rock climbers.”
Tompa studied the slope, frowning. Right here it appeared relatively smooth and even, with a scattering of the low, bulbous plants and half a dozen black crags that punctured the smoothness like knife blades stabbing from the far side of a wound. Volcanic eruptions, Roussel’s maleness, Kalikinikis attacking from above—she’d didn’t need extra things to worry about.
“A mile ahead,” Roussel continued, “there’s a promontory that’s sixty feet higher than the surroundings. From there I could probably see if anyone is taking the high road, so to speak. Maybe I should detour up there. What do you think?”
Why was he asking her permission, like she was his mother? “If the detour would get you out of my sight for a while, I think it’s a great idea.”
“Okay, then.” As he walked, he adjusted his rucksack’s position. “Two miles beyond the promontory the road’s been wiped out by a major landslide. If I walk fast, I should be able to cut across the slope and meet you at the landslide.”
Tompa
nodded without speaking.
Undeterred by her silence, Roussel continued, “The reason I know so much about the island is because I have map data from the Vance’s orbital photographs in my implant.”
“You obviously knew where they’d be taking me.” One thing she was willing to talk about was his being guilty of handing her over to the Shons.
“No. We didn’t know anything about the kind of trial you’d get, although Carolyn didn’t tell me that.”
Tompa had no idea who Carolyn was, and she didn’t care enough to ask.
“I didn’t know you’d have to face trial by combat,” Roussel continued. “When I found out, I came after you. I have orders to take care of you. Of course I also have orders to—”
“To what?”
“Never mind.”
“You are so flickin’ exasperating, you know that?” Tompa walked faster, but he kept pace without even breathing hard. After a couple minutes, she asked, “If you didn’t know about this island ahead of time, why do you have the maps in your head?”
“They downloaded them to me through my mumbler.”
Startled, she stared at him. “You mean you’re in contact with the Navy?”
“Not at this moment. I told them about finding the Klick with the pod-loogs, though. The connection is hit-or-miss because we don’t have any planet-based relay radios.”
“You’re spying on me for the Navy?”
“No.” Roussel jerked his thumb at the floating camera that followed them. “That thing is spying on you, not me.”
Tompa digested his information in silence. No matter how he tried to distract her, the fact remained that he was indeed spying on her. This gordo was full of unpleasant surprises.
When they rounded a curve in the road, she saw that a rockslide had covered all of the road except for a strip a yard or so wide along the outside edge, which bordered a steep cliff. The rocks of the cliff were fractured into a jumble of sharp ledges and spires, as though the mountain were baring its teeth at her.
“This isn’t the landslide I was telling you about,” Roussel said. “That one destroyed two point eight miles of road, and it’ll be hard to get around. Bad spot for the Shons to catch us.”
His words reminded her about Awmit. She looked back, but the twisting road blocked her view. She looked at the rockslide up ahead. It might be small compared to the one he mentioned, but it would nonetheless force her to the outside edge of the pavement for a hundred yards or so. Falling would be bad; even if the height wasn’t enough to kill, the teeth of the cliff would. She hid her anxiety as she began to skirt the slide, being careful not to look down. Roussel followed close behind her.
Maybe talking would get her mind off the death that loomed a step to her left. “You started to say you have other orders regarding me. What are they?”
Roussel’s only answer was an ominous silence.
Oh, shit. She stopped and faced him. “What,” she repeated, “are your other orders?”
His features twisted in the most uncomfortable, flap-happy way that she’d yet seen on him. He looked like a kid caught in a lie, trying hard to fabricate a story.
But he wasn’t a kid. He was a dangerous, unpredictable man who towered a foot and a half over her. Tompa was acutely aware of the precipice with its rock spears eager to impale her. She wished she’d confronted him somewhere else. Anywhere else. She tried edging back from him, but that was dangerous too, because the pavement was littered with loose stones that could trip her to her death.
Roussel’s face finally settled into a guilty expression. He didn’t meet her gaze as he said, “Carolyn Schneider ordered me to kill you.”
Tompa cringed back from him. Ambassador Schneider? The woman who’d given her the comb?
He looked her in the eye. “I figure I won’t have to do it if you don’t cause any more damage. But I forgot to ask Carolyn exactly what she meant by damage.”
Oh, God. She couldn’t just stand here, facing a man who was threatening to kill her—yet she couldn’t back away from him in safety and she didn’t dare turn her back on him. She took a deep breath. “Roussel,” she said as calmly as possible, “look at me.” His disturbed gaze had wandered away from her, but now returned.
“Yes.” He nodded.
Now that she had his attention, she didn’t know what to say that would drive the haunted look from his eyes and return him to a more predictable normalcy.
He ran a hand through his hair and then looked down with wide eyes, as though noticing for the first time that he stood at the edge of a dangerous, hundred-foot cliff. His Adam’s apple bobbed.
“It’s okay,” Tompa said. She felt back with one foot, then took half a step. “It’s okay.”
“Really?”
Using his first name might help—but suddenly she couldn’t remember it. Though she thought furiously, her mind remained blank until she recalled Awmit talking to him about sex in the middle of the night. “Everything’s okay, Dante human.”
She hadn’t intended to use the Shon’s nickname. He might take offense.
But Roussel laughed. “You’re amazing.” He reached toward her face. When she flinched, he slowed his movement as though giving her time to pull away. She didn’t dare.
He brushed a hair away from her forehead, his fingers barely grazing her skin. “Tompa, I . . . I admire you so much.”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. A breeze blew the hair back onto her forehead. Before he could move to brush it away again, she said, “You admire me?”
Roussel nodded. “This morning, when you were screaming, I thought you’d cracked under the strain. Yet a few minutes later you were composed and determined. Very few men, let alone women, could have survived this trial for so long. And you’re doing it right after a horrible head injury. My head got hurt and I’ve never been half the man I was. You get hurt and you act like a Navy hero in a movie. You’re even trying to keep me from being scared of the heights.”
That wasn’t what she’d been trying to do, but she didn’t contradict him.
“I admire you,” he added, “but I don’t like you. You’re mean to me.”
A rat-like creature ran up one of the spires. It perched there with long toes wrapped around the rocky tooth, watching the two of them without fear. The balloon camera whirred as it floated lower, apparently trying to include the creature in the foreground of the pictures it was sending around this planet.
“Tompa,” Roussel said, “may I kiss you?”
Oh, shit.
Her mind raced. Could she hurl him from the cliff while he was trying to kiss her? Or would she fall with him? Would letting him kill her be any worse than kissing him?
He was staring at her. She had to answer. “Well, uh, not here.” She fluttered a hand toward the creature and the deadly cliff.
“I understand.”
“I’m turning around now,” she announced.
“Okay.”
Slowly, so as not to startle him, she turned. It was all she could do to keep from sprinting away, but she knew she’d never be able to outrun him. His footsteps sounded loud behind her. When he kicked a pebble against her leg by accident, she jumped so fearfully that she nearly stumbled headfirst off the cliff.
After an eternity, she reached the relative safety of the road past the landslide. She hitched up her rucksack and tried to resume her fast pace, but Roussel stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.
“My kiss,” he said from behind her.
Tompa stared straight ahead, searching for an escape route. She’d almost welcome a pack of Shons charging down the slope. Where were the murderers now that she needed them? But the mountainside was peaceful except for the whir of the camera’s propellers, a gentle breeze in her ears, and the unrelenting pressure of Roussel’s hand on her shoulder.
Slowly, guided by his hand, she turned to face him.