She moved slowly enough to learn the terrain as she traveled. Rocks, plains, grassland; a waterfall to be circled. She found fish of interesting flavor before she would have had to turn back.
Farther upstream, things began to turn weird. There were intermittent droning sounds. Chemical tastes in the water and smells on the wind: tar and hot metal and burning, unfamiliar plants, pulverized wood. Her progress slowed even farther. She kept to rocky terrain or crawled along the bottom where the river ran deep and fast. Sounds of an alien environment might cover her enemy’s approach. Her enemy must come. She would find Mama; she could be watching her now; she would come like a meteor across terrain she knew like the inside of her mouth. Mama’s life would depend on also knowing the terrain.
There was a cliff of hard rock, and softer rock below, and caverns the river had chewed below the waterline. One of the caverns became her base. Life was plentiful, foraging was easy; she might wait here for the enemy, for a time.
She found things pecking on dry ground. They tried to run (badly), they tried to fly (badly). She ate them all. There were bones all through the meat, and half of it was indigestible feathery stuff.
On another day she saw something far bigger flying too far away to smell. It veered away before she could study it. If she could catch something like that, the meat would surely sustain her until her quarry must come to deal with an invader.
The next day something came at her across the water.
First there was a humming. Mama was a good distance from the water, and her mouth was full of blood and feathers. She looked for insects swarming. If she found the nest she would eat it whole…
But the swarm sound was louder now, and too uniform, and there were no dark clouds that could be insects. Something strange, in unfamiliar terrain. Mama made for the water, not yet fast but already wary.
The humming was louder as she reached the water.
It came around a bend upstream. She couldn’t see the intruder’s shape; it was too distant yet. But it moved on the water, not through it. Moved fast.
Finally. Mama’s eyes were above the water. The snorkel between her eyes drew air; her lungs heaved. There was rage in her, and something else: sphincter muscles relaxed back of her neck, speed began dripping into her blood, and her entire body began to fizz. The vulnerable snorkel withdrew into her head. She watched the intruder come—not quite toward her, she hadn’t been seen yet—then why was the intruder already fast?
But Mama was fast now, and she moved.
This was her territory now. She knew it that well, she had been here that long. Mine. She too was almost above the water as she reached the intruder. She struck from the side. For a bare instant she knew that she had won.
Skin with a thin taste, a taste like metal but not as strong, ruptured on impact and tore in her jaws. No meaty texture, no taste of blood. Not won: lost! Tricked! And where was her enemy?
The metallic skin filled with water and began to sink. Confusing tastes drifted in its wake. Things thrashed the water in slow motion, beasts caught between fighters. She ignored them. Where was her rival?
Still fast, Mama streaked for her cave before she could be blindsided. At the underwater mouth she turned. She couldn’t be attacked now except from the front.
Now there was time. Mama lifted her eyes above the water and watched two beasts thrashing. If meat were suddenly snatched beneath the surface, she would know that her enemy was below. But the prey were swept downstream, thrashing, trying to reach the river’s edge. They reached shore unmolested, and scrambled from the water unmolested.
Mama had been tricked. She had bitten something, but it wasn’t meat, and where was her enemy?
There! Just like the other, it skimmed across the water, almost toward her. It swerved away as Mama streaked toward it. The intruder was fully on speed, and young. Mama thought. She herself had never moved so fast…but its turn was too slow. She was on it, and her teeth closed with terrible strength—
On thin, tough, tasteless skin, and flesh that ruptured and bone that broke—fragile bone, prey blood, prey meat, with no taste of speed. Not at all the flesh of her own kind, and she’d been tricked again!
She had barely slowed. She kept moving, fleeing the site of her kill, curving toward safety, sliding across the bucking surface of the water. Where is my enemy? Where?
Behind her, meat thrashed in the water, then subsided. More prey was climbing the cliff, unmolested, and that was hardly surprising. In the middle of a duel one does not pause to dine.
How may I lure my enemy?
My enemy’s territory, my enemy’s prey: Challenge!
At the shore was injured prey, dying. Two more prey were climbing the cliff, characteristically clumsy. The enemy must regard these as hers. Mama planned her move, and then—
Challenge. Mama charged across the water, straight at the feebly moving prey. Her jaw clamped on its hind leg. She dived beneath the froth, released the meat at once and swam for her life. Three seconds later she surfaced far downstream, to watch her enemy come to reclaim stolen meat.
The corpse tumbled unmolested. Her enemy was too clever, far too clever for one so young.
Of the two other prey, one had disappeared. The last was halfway up the cliff.
Mama studied the cliff. It wasn’t sheer, but the thought of being stranded there while something came at her was one she rejected at once…and retrieved, and toyed with.
She could see most of the cliff, and no danger showed there. Her enemy might be in the water or at the top of the cliffs. She never doubted it was watching.
There were footholds along the cliff. Take any path too fast and she might be stranded in midair, falling toward waiting jaws. Motionless in white froth, with only her eyes showing, Mama chose her path.
Then she moved. Across the seething water. Up along cracks in the rock, now quick, now slow, dancing her route, ready to face death with her footing firm. In seconds she was halfway up the cliff, poised on a ledge above live prey.
Challenge. Come and get what’s yours!
• • •
Carolyn watched the sun rise below. Noon yesterday she had ridden out of the closing mist, moving southwest, uphill and toward the glacier, riding until nightfall. She’d led the horses all night. It was a mistake. While trudging uphill and trying to report her position she’d dropped the comcard and stepped on it. The horse she led stepped on it as well. Now it didn’t work. No one knew where she was. Maybe they’d send a Skeeter to look for her. Maybe they wouldn’t. She couldn’t go back to the Colony—
Southwest and uphill. He’s said southwest and uphill. They’d look for her there, and it was the safest place she could find.
Again the sun rose in blue brilliance, but today it rose over a sea of mist. Clouds had rolled in from the sea; they covered the Colony like a lid, with a great contoured thunderhead for a handle.
Carolyn and the horses were well to the north and west of Cadmann’s feudal stronghold, and that, too, was hidden.
The land had flattened out like a tilted table. A line of horses trotted uphill with White Lightnin’ at their head.
The horses were all yearlings or younger. Even White Lightnin’ wasn’t all that big; but Carolyn was small. The horse carried her easily.
She fumed as she rode. They didn’t want me with them! Cadmann Weyland is off fighting Ragnarok with his picked crew, and I’m not in it. They wanted Phyllis, perfect Phyllis, but not me. Not worth fighting with, not worth fighting for—Yet she wasn’t truly unhappy with Cadmann’s decision. Where would she have wanted to be? At the Colony, waiting for the grendels to swarm? Aboard Geographic while the air grew stale and the Minervas failed to arrive? She had quite another reason for her anger.
Anger held back the fear.
Carolyn had never been on a horse until long after she reached Avalon. She’d tended the colts, and grown used to them, and learned that they were skittish, balky, untrustworthy. If Carolyn lost control of herself, if she scream
ed at a colt or swatted it, it remembered; it shied from her next time. She had learned to control herself around horses.
Around people…well, people were more complex, and they talked to each other. Word had spread.
Once she had known how to steer people where she wanted them. Once she had been Zack’s second in command. Without Ruth behind him, Zack would have been working for Carolyn! Though he would still have been part of Geographic’s crew, the best of the best.
Hibernation Instability had merely touched Carolyn, but it had left Zack alone.
And of course Phyllis. Nothing ever stuck to Phyllis. She had Hendrick, she could have had Cadmann, everybody knew it. Phyllis could fall into a mountain of horse manure and come out with roses in her hair.
I’m still smart. Smarter than she is! But I get scared. And that thought was frightening too. She took deep breaths and looked back—
The mist was coming after her in a cloud like a breaking wave, and there were grendels in the mist. She could see lightning flashes in the tops of the clouds. Rain. The grendels love it. Maybe they won’t come out.
The Colony might have vanished already in a sea of ravening miniature grendels. For all Carolyn could tell, the only earthly life on Avalon was herself and twenty horses. She found herself hoping with savage fervor that that irresponsible butterfly Carlos had made her pregnant before Sylvia took him.
The Geographic Society sent no woman who didn’t want babies, she thought. I’m locked into that. Preprogrammed. Hibernation Instability should have taken that too.
Thus far she had avoided water. She couldn’t do that forever. Horses could go a long way without food, but not without water. It shouldn’t be a problem. She was taking them toward the glacier that ran down the slope of Mucking Great Mountain. There would be streams and springs.
She looked down toward the edge of cloud…
She knew what it was as she reached for the binocular case. She was almost relieved. At this distance it looked like a black tadpole. Through the binoculars there was not much more detail: a mini-grendel, plump and streamlined, moving on quick, stubby legs. A meter long, she thought; not one of the big ones. Eyes watching her. How well could it see? It looked at her—
Binoculars. They’re lenses. The lenses in the dead grendels are strange. Distortable. Big. It could be seeing me as well as I see it.
“Charlie,” she said, as if naming a thing were the same as understanding it, controlling it. Her lips twitched toward a snarl. She lifted the harpoon gun high in the air. “Charlie, is it too late to negotiate?” The grendel watched.
She decided (working against her own well-understood tendency to hysteria) that there was no point in urging the horses to greater speed. Moving uphill, that trot was all they could manage. They hadn’t smelled anything yet.
The grendel seemed in no hurry.
It was out of the rain, with no water immediately ahead. There was every chance that it would give up.
She had been given a harpoon gun and four explosive harpoons. There were boulders on the plain, some huge. Carolyn thought of climbing a rock, sending the horses ahead, waiting for the grendel to pass. Her mind worked well enough unless she was pushed. But…to wait and wait, while the grendel watched her and considered…she would crack. She knew it.
Keep the horses moving. See what happened.
There were five grendels below Carolyn. Four were just clear of the mist; to the naked eye they were mere specks, wide apart and still separating.
“Charlie, do you know you’re being followed?” From left to right, she set names on the intruders: “Ayatollah, Khadafi, Jack, Son of Sam…” Too long. “Mareta.” Mareta Lupoff was the only single human being ever to set off a hydrogen bomb within a city.
Charlie was much too close: two hundred meters away, plodding along at a speed somewhat greater than the horses could manage.
The horses were holding up well, moving a little slower because they were tired. They hadn’t smelled anything yet. Carolyn kept them moving, but she kept watch too.
Twenty horses in a line, linked by rope. Should she free them from the rope? Let them fight their own war?
Grendels. Creatures of mystery and fear, and the more you learned, the more terrifying they were. Those four at the fog level…three? One must have turned back. Was it Jack?
They don’t cooperate. That’s not what Beowulf, excuse me, Weyland, would call a flanking action. It’s just grendels trying to stay away from each other. But that near one—Charlie’s almost close enough to shoot, and I bet I can guess what it wants.
Carolyn had listened, she wasn’t stupid, but it was hard to think of grendels as she. Picture Jack the Ripper or Muammar Khadafi as a woman: it was silly.
Those rock knobs had the look of boulders deposited by a glacier—intruders dropped on land scraped flat. That one a hundred meters ahead, twice her height: that would do.
When White Lightnin’ was alongside the boulder (and the near grendel was a hundred and fifty meters downslope), she dismounted. She took all four harpoons and the harpoon gun from the saddlebags. She slapped Lightnin’ to get her moving.
Lightnin’ didn’t move.
Patiently, with no overt sign of panic, Carolyn walked down to the end of the line (toward the grendel, toward Charlie). She shouted and slapped the trailing horse, Gorgeous George. The young stallion glared at her, but he moved. She slapped him again and, jogging ahead of him, repeated the slap on the next horse, who was already moving. The tail of the line moved; the wave moved forward; the grendel was a hundred meters distant and watching curiously. Carolyn reached the rock. The line of horses moved past her as she climbed. The grendel was seventy meters away.
Forty. Twenty. Jesus, it was on speed. The horses screamed. Carolyn smelled it herself, a whiff on the wind, bestial and chemical both. She was halfway up the rock, and the grendel had reached the horses.
She set her back solidly against the rock and lifted the gun while…
Gorgeous George reared back on his hind legs, forelegs pawing the air, prepared to stamp holes in an enemy. A black torpedo shot under the forelegs and snapped at one of George’s ankles without ever slowing. George was yanked backward hard enough to snap the line that bound him. The grendel was behind the rock before Carolyn could fire. George fell downhill, tumbling, screaming, and his left hind leg was gone below the knee. Where was the grendel?
Coming up the rock behind her?
Carolyn jumped. She landed without breaking an ankle. She ran away from the rock, trying to see the rock and the horse both—
The grendel was downhill, dragging Gorgeous George. George was very much alive, screaming, thrashing. Carolyn aimed carefully and fired.
She’d have hit it. She would! Charlie must have seen something coming; she saw it shy. The harpoon exploded against George’s chest. It ripped the horse wide open. The grendel looked at her for the barest particle of an instant, then dodged behind the dying horse.
The other horses were on the run. Carolyn was reloading. Wait? Watch the grendel? But the horses couldn’t be left alone. She ran after them. If she scared them they’d keep running: fine, she’d catch them eventually.
But death was behind her, and she kept looking back. Where was the grendel? As fast as it moved, it could be anywhere.
The grendel was in no hurry. She was overheated, yes, but not to the point of distress. She was small, and had been on speed for less than half a minute.
The horse was not much fun. The grendel fed, trying to avoid tearing vitals for the moment; but the beast had stopped moving almost immediately.
The taste was far better than grendel meat.
Three of her siblings were in sight. They came in a line. Vectors of attraction and repulsion held them in position: fear of each other, fear of the one above them, smell of speed, mist of horse’s blood in the air. Hunger was winning.
Charlie tore into the horse. She ate with some haste now. When her belly was full to the point of pain, she ripped one
of the horse’s hind legs loose and moved uphill, dragging it with her tail. The other grendels closed in behind.
They would eat and grow strong. Let them. Perhaps they would fight. But they would not catch up. Meanwhile nineteen animals moved upslope with their alien guard to tend them. Well and good.
The horses were thinking about letting her catch up. Carolyn cursed the stupid animals in her mind; she didn’t have breath for more. Thirst was a fire in her throat. Her burning legs were ready to collapse, and her ride receded coyly before her.
The horses stumbled from time to time. She’d have to get those ropes off them if they were to have any chance to live.
They wheeled to the left. She followed.
The stream was a sudden surprise. It was small and pretty and it ran in graceful curves. She hadn’t seen it lower down. It might curve south and join the Amazon; it might seep into the water table and disappear. She could hear it bubbling now, and the thirst rose up in her like a grendel.
The horses lined up to drink. They didn’t flinch as she joined them. She had swallowed two cupped handfuls before she noticed how dirty the water was. She was downstream, and the horses had fouled the water.
She spat out the grit. Thirst was still there, but she took the time to free the horses from the line of ropes. Do everything slowly and carefully. Fool yourself into being calm. She patted their necks, she called them by name, she walked around and among them and knelt to drink clean water upstream. And saved her life thereby.
When her belly was a cold fullness, she stood and looked back.
Far down toward the edge of storm, a cloud of spray rose from the stream.
Something dark came out of it. Came fast. Charlie had gone for water first, but now he was on speed and coming for the horses. Carolyn stepped back behind a rock that was only hip high. Knelt. She concentrated on arming the harpoon gun. She didn’t lift her head until she was armed.
Just her eyes peeped over the rock.