“A man!” one of them grunted, frowning.
And: “An idiot!” said another. “I very nearly put a bolt in him!”
Shaitan read their expressions, their lips, in part their minds. Their words fitted readily with everything else he saw, so that he understood much of their language from the start. As they came forward to peer at him in the firelight, the last of them queried nervously, “A madman? Do you think so?”
And the second: “What else? Up here in the night on his own, naked under the stars.” And to Shaitan, coldly, “Who are you?”
Smiling his sardonic smile, he answered, “I am what I am.”
“And your name?”
“Shaitan!” Because finally he remembered it.
“Well, Shaitan,” the first of the three chuckled, but not unkindly, “you’ll excuse me for saying so, but it seems to me you’re a bit daft!”
“You think I’m … demented?” He looked at them, and down at himself. “But if I am mad—a harmless idiot—then why do you point your weapons?”
At that the second man again spoke up, saying: “Because “idiot” and “harmless” don’t necessarily coincide, that’s why. Down on the levels, in the camp of Heinar Hagi, we’ve one such “idiot” who works for his living—and Janni Nunov lugs boulders which I can’t even budge!”
Moving artlessly so as to disarm them, Shaitan approached their fire, hunched down and fed a stick to the fitful flames. The three put up their weapons and approached him again, and he pretended not to study them where he warmed his hands. It seemed they had no leader with them but were equals. One was short, squat and bearded; the next of medium height, sturdy, heavy-jawed; the last young and wiry, whose mind seemed entirely innocent. But since they likewise studied him, Shaitan kept his scarlet eyes half-shuttered and gazed mainly into the fire. The red would be taken for reflected firelight.
And finally the squat one, Dezmir Babeni, mused, “You’re soft and pale, whoever you are! For all that you’re a big ‘un and strong, you haven’t known much of hard work. What’s your tribe?”
Shaitan shook his head.
The muscular, prognathous Klaus Luncani wanted to know: “Why are you naked? Were you set upon? Ah, there are too many wild ones in the mountains these days, loners who’d kill a man just for his good leather belt!”
Again Shaitan shook his head, and shrugged.
But the young and wiry one, Vidra Gogosita, opened a pack and took out a long leather jacket, which he draped over Shaitan’s shoulders by the fire. It was an old jacket but comfortable. And he said, “The nights are cold. A man—even a fool—shouldn’t go naked on the hillside!”
And Shaitan smiled and nodded, and thought: Of the three, he alone shall live—but only as my thrall For he is sensitive, wherefore his agonies in my service will be that much sharper! A “fool” has willed it… so be it. But out loud he said, “I thank you. But of myself … I wish I could tell you more. Alas, I can’t remember.” It was mainly the truth.
“Set upon, aye,” Klaus Luncani grunted, as if it were now decided beyond all doubt. “By outcasts in the mountains. Clubbed on the head, all memory flown. Stole his clothes, they did. A man who hunts alone risks much!”
Dezmir Babeni moved closer, went to touch Shaitan’s head, perhaps discover a wound there. Shaitan put up a hand to ward him off. “No! There is … a pain.”
Dezmir nodded, and left it at that.
The matter seemed to be settled: Shaitan was obviously the victim of thieves. He was lucky they’d spared his life.
“Well, and Dezmir’s right about one thing,” Klaus Luncani offered Shaitan a chunk of cheese and a bit of coarse bread. “You certainly look big and strong enough! You’ll live, I’m sure.”
Alas, but you won’t, Shaitan thought, looking at the food in Luncani’s outstretched hand. It was execrable stuff and he shook his head. “I … I killed a creature,” he lied, “for its flesh. It wasn’t long ago. I’m not hungry.”
“A creature?” This was young Vidra Gogosita.
“With horns, curving back. Like this.” And Shaitan used his long slender hands to demonstrate. “A small one, but sweet…” Though you will be far sweeter.
“A goat,” said Dezmir Babeni. “A kid, anyway. Huh! Why, it seems he’s had better luck than all of us together!”
“A …goat, yes,” Shaitan slowly repeated him, with a hand to his forehead, to indicate gradually returning memory.
“It’ll all come back in time,” said Klaus Luncani, making a bed for himself in a triangle of boulders a short distance from the fire. “But listen, we’ve been hard at it for most of the day—though there’s only a couple of piglets in our bag to prove it! So now we’ll catch a little sleep. A sight safer than climbing in the dark, for sure! A few hours, that’s all, until the moon’s up again; then it’s back down to the levels and the camp of our leader, Heinar Hagi.”
Dezmir Babeni took it up. “You’d do well to come with us, Shaitan, as you’ve nothing better in mind. Oh, you’re a strange one, to be sure: tall and pale, with your brains all shaken up in that handsome head of yours. No memory to mention, nor even a tribe to claim you. But the Szgany Hagi have taken in a few strays in their time. So … what do you say?”
Shaitan looked up at him, and in that same moment Babeni was struck by the way the fire lit in his eyes. But Shaitan was quick to turn away again, gazing into the glowing embers as before. And: “Get your sleep, all of you,” he told them. “I shall likewise sleep. And later … we’ll see what we’ll see.”
Babeni shrugged, walked off a little way and trampled a bed of bracken for himself; he lay down, pulled a blanket over his lower half, snorted once or twice and fell silent. In his nest of boulders, Klaus Luncani was already snoring. But the youngest of the three, Vidra Gogosita, simply seated himself by the fire, close to Shaitan.
“I’ll not sleep,” he said, “but keep watch. It’s my turn. You, however, would do well to get your head down. There’s a blanket I can throw over you.”
Shaitan nodded, and in a low voice answered, “In a little while.”
Aye, in a very little while …
Of the rest:
Vidra remembered very little, and all of it ill-defined, unclear in a mind which had rapidly succumbed to the hypnotic allure of Shaitan. He remembered talking to the—man?—and the feeling of drowsiness, lethargy that had crept over his limbs, his mind, his will.
There was something about a face (but not Shaitan’s handsome face, surely?) which had changed hideously to a bestial, nightmare mask with the forked tongue and dripping fangs of a snake. The face’s approach … a blowhole stench, of sulphur? … and a pain, like the hot sting of a wasp where the artery pulsed in Vidra’s neck … no, two wasps, stinging him there, inches apart. And Shaitan’s crooning, and his kisses where he sought to suck the stings from—
Vidra came awake with a small cry, seemingly in answer to some other’s cry. He was cold and cramped in all his limbs, his neck stiff and caked with a great scab … of blood? His dream!
… Not a dream?
He lurched to his feet, stumbling in the ashes at the edge of the fire. But where was his strength? He was dizzy, staggering, weak as water! And tangibly present in his mind—indeed visibly present, burning behind the night scenes which his eyes showed to him—were other eyes, like malignant crimson scars on his soul. Which was precisely what they were. And something was looking at him through those windows on his mind, smiling at him sardonically, leering at him.
The moon was up, arcing over the mountains; the fire was out except in its heart; a ground mist lay all about, writhing where it lapped the scrubby hillside, filled the small hollows, twined in the roots of bracken and heather. No owls hooted, nor wolves sang, nor any earthly or human sounds at all. But in the shadows over there … something slobbered!
That was where Dezmir had made a bed in the bracken, and Vidra lurched in that direction. But here on his right, the triangle of boulders which sheltered Klaus and gave
him protection; his legs were sticking out even now, where the mist lapped about them. Vidra stooped, went to grab Klaus’s ankle and shake him awake. Before he could do so, the extended foot gave a massive start, trembled violently, flopped loosely and was still.
Vidra’s flesh crept. He jerked upright, took two staggering paces down the length of Klaus’s prone body to the cluster of boulders, leaned on them to look down on his sleeping friend—and saw that he wasn’t merely sleeping. Not any longer.
For someone or something had taken a huge and impossibly heavy rock, levered it up over the top of the three embedded stones, and let it fall squarely on Klaus’s face! Its roughly circular rim entirely obscured the area where his head would be, and in the flooding moonlight it seemed that a tarry substance seeped or was squeezed out from beneath. But Vidra Gogosita knew that the moonlight lied: it wasn’t black but red.
Scarcely in control of his limbs—choking, unable to cry out by reason of his gulping, the dryness of his throat—the youth went flailing through the sentient mist to where Dezmir Babeni lay in the bracken. “Dezmir!” he finally forced a warning croak. “Dez …”
“... mir?”
For Dezmir’s blanket had been thrown aside, and over him now Vidra’s own long jacket, which his mother had begged him to bring with him. Except the jacket seemed alive, humped and mobile, fluttering like some huge black bat fallen to earth!
Vidra reeled, cried out! And the jacket, and what it contained, flowed upright, stood up and faced him. Shaitan—but no longer handsome, indeed barely human—his monstrous metamorphic face scarlet from gorged blood! And the slimy, alien mist pouring off him like sweat, and billowing out from under his borrowed leather jacket!
Then … Shaitan’s talon of a hand reaching out to grip the youth’s arm and steady him, and Vidra knowing for certain the source of those eyes in his mind; knowing, too, the terrible truth of his dream. After that: what else could he do but crumple to his knees before his new master? In any case, his legs no longer had the strength to hold him up. No, for the strength would come later.
And Shaitan’s burning eyes gazing down upon him, and the monster’s voice a clotted gurgle as he said, “My ways may seem very strange at first, though in the end you’ll gladly embrace them. Only tell me, did I hear you calling for Dezmir Babeni? Well, his blood is still hot, vital, if you are … ready for that?”
And then, with perhaps a trace of disappointment, “Ah, a pity. For I see that you are not…”
The climb down to Sunside’s levels on the fringe of the forest took four hours. By then most of the Szgany Hagi’s lesser campfires were out, and many of the folk asleep in their makeshift tents of animal hide. But the night watch kept a central fire blazing, and when they were not patrolling the perimeter they gathered beside it to talk. There was, too, a little lamplight issuing from the flap doors of several of the larger tents.
Typically, the tents of the single men formed an evenly spaced outer perimeter: a barrier against intruders or marauders, though in these settled times that was unlikely. A few animals were tethered inside this loose outer circle, or left to graze in corrals roped off between the trees. The larger, family tents stood towards the middle of the camp, with the fire marking the very centre.
There were several carts, a few of which were covered over with stretched skins, the largest being Heinar Hagi’s caravan. Though the trails around the borders of the tribe’s foothills and forest territories were scarcely better than rutted tracks, still it seemed only decent and right to Heinar—as leader or “king” of his three-hundred-strong band—to jolt along behind snorting beasts rather than haul a small cart or travois like the rest.
As for “beating the bounds” of his enclave: it was either that or have some other Szgany group move in and settle on it. Only by constantly measuring his acreage, patrolling its borders, and every mile or so posting his sigil (a highly stylized face, with a turned down mouth and one eye painted over with a black patch), could Heinar ever hope to hold on to it for his and the tribe’s descendants. The perimeter of these territories was perhaps thirty-six miles, all of which Heinar guarded jealously. It was the same for most bands and tribes, so that in this respect they had been travellers—indeed, Szgany—right from the new beginning.
But not all of the tribe of Heinar Hagi was on the move. Eastward, in honeycombed cliffs in the roots of the mountains, were caves which housed almost a third of his people. They had sheltered there ever since the holocaust, and there would stay. Likewise in the south, at the edge of the forest where it gave way to grasslands and finally the desert: fifty pioneers of the Szgany Hagi, tending their crops where they’d built permanent homes among the trees. Since both of these locations were on Heinar’s roughly triangular route, he looked forward eagerly to sojourning first in the woodlands camp, then at the caves.
As his people grew and expanded, so they would build more towns around the perimeter of Heinar’s lands, safely enclosing them. Finally he might be able to settle and live out the rest of his days untroubled by thoughts of land-thieves—except by then Heinar himself would likely be no more, but his sons and their sons would reap the benefits.
These were his thoughts; and at a hundred campfires large and small, east and west all along the Sunside flank of the barrier range, a hundred leaders just like him thought them alike. And he sat at the central fire, chatting with members of the night watch, with a brew of herb tea simmering on its tripod.
Then, close by, on the perimeter …
… The familiar half-growl, half-cough of a wolf!—one of the camp’s wolves, it must be. None of the wild grey ones would ever stray so close to such a large body of men. Heinar looked up, his brow furrowing, his good eye glinting in firelight. His men picked up their crossbows; the fire crackled; they all listened to the night.
There came fresh sounds: of a voice raised in challenge, and of another answering with a gasp, a sob! Heinar believed he knew that second voice. He started to his feet and snapped, “Who’s still out?”
“The lads you sent into the forest and down to the river, all are safely back,” one of his men answered. “If these are ours at all, they can only be Klaus, Dezmir and Vidra.”
“Aye,” Heinar gave a curt nod of agreement. “That was Vidra’s voice just then, for sure. But what ails the lad?” No one ventured to answer; they would find out soon enough.
A party of three entered the clearing: a watchman with his wolf, ushering two others ahead of him. The two came stumbling, dishevelled, apparently exhausted. Heinar recognized only one of them—Vidra Gogosita.
“Heinar!” the youth cried. “Heinar!”
“What is it?” Heinar demanded, as Vidra all but collapsed in his arms. “What’s happened? Where’s Klaus and Dezmir? And who’s this?”
“Klaus … Dezmir …” Vidra babbled unashamedly. “Both … both of them … dead! In the hills.”
“What?” Heinar gasped. “Dead, you say? How?”
“We were … were set upon, ambushed!” Vidra appeared to make an effort, pulled himself together. “Outlaws! They came out of the twilight. And I’d be dead too, if not … if not for … for this one. He … fought them off, saved my life. His name is … is … is …” But he could say no more; his eyes rolled up; he sagged in Heinar’s arms.
The stranger swayed, began to topple. Eager hands caught him, lowered him to a prone position. The fire lit strangely in his eyes as they slowly closed. And his voice was a sigh, trailing into silence as he told them:
“My name … is Shaitan.”
II
At first, all had been chaos in the camp of Heinar Hagi.
For almost an hour Heinar and his men, and various women, had chased about, doing their best to care for and see to the immediate needs of young Vidra Gogosita and the stranger he’d brought into the camp, the man called Shaitan.
Vidra’s mother, the slender but voluble widow Gogosita, had been first on the scene; she had been awake, waiting in her small tent for her on
ly son’s return from the mountains. Hearing something of the excitement, and sensing the sudden tension, the horror creeping in the night, she’d gone to the campfire of her own accord. And when first she’d seen her boy stretched out like that—such a weeping and wailing! But … Vidra was alive, merely exhausted and sleeping! And how she’d cradled the youth in her arms then, while the men told her what little they knew of the tale. And the endless blessings she’d heaped on the tall pale stranger who had saved her son’s life: Shaitan, who lay there close at hand, as in a coma, absorbing all he could of these people and their ways.
Then they had sent for the grown-up daughter of Dezmir Babeni, lovely Maria; at first she could not accept the fact of her father’s death, so that she looked in vain for his face among the men. And finally her grief, strong but silent, when at last she went to sit alone, rock herself and weep. And the wife and sons of Klaus Luncani, all dazed and staggering from the impact of this unexpected, unacceptable news. So that the traditional peace and quiet of the campfire had been quickly transformed into a scene of tragedy, grief, trauma.
No one felt the Szgany Hagi’s loss more than Heinar himself. He couldn’t face the weeping women; giving instructions for the welfare of the survivors of this atrocity, he retired to his bed. He would be up and about at intervals through the long, forty-hours night, of course, but long before sunup he would lead a search party into the foothills, to recover the bodies of the dead. And if by any chance they should stumble on a party of loners or outcasts up there … But Heinar knew that the odds were all against it.
Meanwhile, the widow Gogosita had had her son carried to their tent where she watched over him. The badly bruised flesh of his neck was puffy, lacerated, probably infected. His fever was high and he tossed and turned, moaning in his sleep. As for what he moaned: they were things of blackest nightmare, resulting no doubt from what he’d experienced in the hills.