Of Men and Monsters Read online

  They stood there silently as he came up, their spears still at the ready, not going down in welcome. "Eric the Eye," he repeated, puzzled. "I've made my Theft, but something happened to the—"

  His voice trailed off, as Stephen came up to him, his face grim, his powerful muscles taut. The band captain shoved a spear point hard against Eric's chest. "Don't move," he warned. "Barney. John. Tie him up."

  His spears taken from him, his arms bound securely behind his back by the thongs of his own knapsack, Eric was pushed and prodded into the great central burrow of Man-kind.

  The place was almost unrecognizable.

  Under the direction of Ottilie, the Chieftain's First Wife, a horde of women—what seemed at first like the entire membership of the Female Society—was setting up a platform in front of the Royal Mound. With the great scarcity of any building materials that Man-kind suffered from, a construction of this sort was startling and unusual, yet there was something about it that awoke highly unpleasant memories in Eric's mind. But he was pulled from place to place too fast and there were too many other unprecedented things going on for him to be able to identify the memory properly.

  Two women who were accredited members of the Female Society were not working under Ottilie's direction, he noticed. Bound hand and foot, they were lying against the far wall of the great central burrow. They were both covered with blood and showed every sign of having undergone prolonged and most vicious torture. He judged them to be barely this side of death.

  As he was jerked past, he recognized them.,They were the two wives of Thomas the Trap-Smasher.

  Just wait until his uncle got back: someone would really pay for this, he thought, more in absolute amazement than horror. He had the feeling that he must keep the horror away at all costs—once let it in and it would soak through his thoughts right into the memory he was trying to avoid.

  The place was full of armed men, running back and forth from their band captains to unknown destinations in the outlying corridors. Between them and around them, scuttled the children, fetching and carrying raw materials for the hard-working women. There was a steady buzz of commands in the air—"Go to—," "Bring some more—," "Hurry with the—," —that mingled with the smell of many people whose pores were sweating urgency. And it wasn't just sweat that he smelled, Eric realized as he was dragged before the Royal Mound: it was anger, the anger and fear of all Man-kind.

  Franklin the Father of Many Thieves stood on the mound, carrying unaccustomed spears in his fat hands, talking rapidly to a group of warriors, band captains and—yes, actually!—Strangers. Even now, Eric found he could still be astonished.

  Strangers in the very midst of Man-kind! Walking around freely and bearing arms!

  As the chief caught sight of Eric, his face broke into a loose-skinned smile. He nudged a Stranger beside him and pointed at the prisoner.

  "That's him," he said. "That's the nephew. The one that asked for the thus category Theft. Now we've got them all.'

  The Stranger didn't smile. He looked briefly at Eric and turned away. "I'm glad you think so. From our point of view, you've just got one more."

  Franklin's smile faded to an uncertain grin. "Well, you know what I mean. And the damned fool came back by himself. It saved us a lot of trouble, I mean, didn't it?" Receiving no answer, he shrugged. He gestured with flabby imperiousness at Eric's guards. "You know where to put him. We'll be ready for them pretty soon."

  Again the point of a spear stabbed into Eric's back, and he was forced forward across the central space to a small burrow entrance. Before he could reach it, however, he heard Franklin the Father of Many Thieves call out to Man-kind: "There goes Eric, my people. Eric the Only. Now we've got them all."

  For a moment, the activity stopped and seemed to focus on him. Eric shivered as a low, drawn-out grunt of viciousness and hatred arose everywhere, but most of all from the women.

  Someone ran up to him. Harriet the History-Teller. The girl's face was absolutely contorted. She reached up to the crown of her head and pulled out the long pin held in place by a few knotted scarlet hairs. About her face and neck the hair danced like flames.

  "You Alien-Sciencer!" she shrieked, driving the pin straight at his eyes. "You filthy, filthy Alien-Sciencer!". Eric whipped his head to one side, she was back at him in a moment. His guards leaped at the girl and grappled with her, but she was able to get in a ripping slash that opened up almost all of his right cheek before they drove her away.

  "Leave something for the rest of us," one of His guards pleaded the cause of reason as he strolled back to Eric. "After all, he belongs to the whole of Man-kind."

  "He does not!" she yelled. "He belongs to me most of all. I was going to mate with him when he returned from his Theft, wasn't I, Mother?"

  "There wasn't anything official," Eric heard Rita the Record-Keeper admonishing as he tried to stanch the flow of blood by bringing his shoulder up and pressing it against the wound. "There couldn't be anything official about it until he'd achieved manhood. So you'll just have to wait your turn, Harriet darling—you'll have to wait until your elders are finished with him. There'll be plenty left for you."

  "There won't be," the girl pouted. "I know what you're like. There won't be hardly anything left."

  Eric was shoved at the small burrow entrance again. The moment he was inside it, one of his guards planted a foot in his back, knocking the breath out of him. The kick propelled him forward, staggering wildly for balance, until he smashed into the opposite wall. As he fell, unable to use his arms to cushion himself, he heard laughter behind him in the great central burrow. He rolled on his side dirtily. There was a fresh flow of blood coming down from his cheek.

  This wasn't the homecoming he'd imagined after his Theft—not in the slightest! What was going on?

  He knew where he was. A tiny, blind-alley burrow off Man-kind's major meeting place, a sort of little vault used mostly for storage. Excess food and goods stolen from Monster territory were kept here until there was enough accumulated for a trading expedition to the back burrows. Occasionally, also, a male Stranger, taken prisoner in battle, might be held in this place until Man-kind found out if his tribe valued him enough to pay anything substantial for his recovery.

  And if they didn't .. .

  Eric remembered the unusual structure that the women had been building near the Royal Mound—and shivered. The memory that he'd suppressed had now come alive in his mind. And it fitted with the way Harriet had acted and with what her mother, Rita the Record-Keeper, had said.

  They couldn't be planning that for him! He was a member of Man-kind, almost a full warrior. They didn't even do that to Strangers captured in battle—not normal Strangers. A warrior was always respected as a warrior: at the worst, he deserved a decent execution, quietly done. Except for— Except for

  "No!" he screamed. "No!"

  The single guard who'd been left on duty at the entrance turned around and regarded him humorously.

  "Oh, yes," he said. "Oh, definitely yes! We're going to have a lot of fun with both of you as soon as the women say they're ready." He nodded with ominous, emphatic slowness and turned back to miss none of the preparations.

  Both of you? For the first time, Eric looked around the little storage burrow. The place was almost empty of goods, but off to one side, in the light of his forehead glow lamp (how proud he had been when it had been bestowed on him at the doorway to Monster territory!) he now saw another man lying against the wall.

  His uncle.

  Eric brought his knees up and wriggled rapidly over to him. It was a painful business: his belly and sides were not calloused and inured to the rough burrow floor like his feet. But what did a few scratches, more or less, matter any more?

  The Trap-Smasher was barely conscious. He had been severely handled, and he looked almost as bad as his wives. There was a thick crust of dried blood on his hair: the haft of a spear, Eric guessed, had all but cracked his head open. And in several places on his body, his righ
t shoulder, just above his left hip, deep in his thigh, were the oozing craters of serious spear wounds.

  "Uncle Thomas," Eric urged. "What happened? Who did this to you?"

  The wounded man opened his eyes and shuddered. He looked around stupidly as if he had expected to find the walls talking to him. And his powerful arms struggled with the knots that held them firmly behind his back. When he finally located Eric, he smiled.

  It was a bad thing to do. Someone had also smashed in most of his front teeth.

  "Hello, Eric," he mumbled. "What a fight, eh? How did the rest of the band do—anybody get away?"

  "I don't know. That's what I'm asking you! I came back from my Theft—you were gone—the band was gone. I got here, and everyone's crazy! There are Strangers out there, walking around with weapons in our burrows. Who are they?"

  Thomas the Trap-Smasher's eyes had slowly darkened. They were fully in focus now, and long threads of agony swam in them. "Strangers?" he asked in a low voice. "Yes, there were Strangers fighting in Stephen the Strong-Armed's band. Fighting against us. That chief of ours—Franklin—he got in touch with Strangers after we left. They compared notes: they must have been working together, been in touch with each other, for a long time. Man-kind, Strangers, what difference does it make when their lousy Ancestor-Science is threatened? I should have remembered."

  "What?" Eric begged. "What should you have remembered?"

  "That's the way they put down Alien-Science in the other rising, long ago. A chief's a chief; he's got more in common with another chief—even a chief of Strangers—than with his own people. You attack Ancestor-Science, and you're attacking their power as chiefs. They'll work together then. They'll give each other men, weapons, information—they'll do everything they can against the common enemy. Against the only people who really want to hit back at the Monsters. I should have remembered! Damn it all," the Trap-Smasher groaned through his refined mouth, "I saw that the chief and Ottilie were suspicious. I should have realized how they were going, to handle it. They were going to call in Strangers, exchange information—and unite against us!"

  Eric stared at his uncle, dimly understanding. Just as there was a secret organization of Alien-Sciencers that cut across tribal boundaries, so there was a tacit, rarely used understanding among the chiefs, based on the Ancestor-Science religion that was the main prep of their power. And the power of the leaders of the Female Society, come to think of it. All special privileges were derived from their knowledge of Ancestor-Science: take that away from them, and they'd be ordinary women with no more magical abilities than was necessary to tell edible food from Monster poison.

  Grunting with pain, Thomas the Trap-Smasher wormed his way up to a sitting position against the wall. He kept shaking his head as if to jar recollection loose.

  "They came up to us," he said heavily, "Stephen the Strong-Armed and his band came up to us just after you'd gone into Monster territory. A band from Man-kind with a message from the chief—who suspected anything? They might be coming to tell us that the home burrows. were under attack by Strangers. Strangers!" he gave a barking laugh, and some blood splashed out of his mouth. "They had Strangers with them, hidden all the way behind in the corridors. Mobs and mobs of Strangers."

  Eric began to visualize what had happened.

  "Then, when they were among us, when most of us had re-slung our spears, they hit us. Eric, they hit us real good. They had us so much by surprise that they didn't even need outside help. I don't think there was much left of us by the time the Strangers came running up. I was down, fighting with my bare hands—and so was the rest of the band. The Strangers did the mopping up. I didn't see "most of it—somebody handed me one hell of a wallop—I never expected to wake up alive." His voice got even lower and huskier. "I'd have been lucky not to."

  The Trap-Smasher's chest heaved: a strange, long noise came out of it. "They brought me back here. My wives—they were working on my wives. Those bitches from the Female Society—Ottilie, Rita—this part of it is their business—they had my wives pegged out and they worked on them in front of me. I was blanking out and coming to, blanking out and coming to: I was conscious while they—"

  He dropped to a bloody mumble again, his head falling forward loosely. His voice became clear for a moment, but not entirely rational. "They were good women," he muttered. "Both of them. Good, good girls. And they loved me. They had their chance to become more important—a dozen times Franklin must have offered to impregnate them, and they turned him down every time. They loved me, they really loved me."

  Eric almost sobbed himself. He'd had little to do with them once he'd reached the age of the warrior initiate, but in his childhood, they'd given him all the mother love he ever remembered. They'd cuffed him and caressed him and wiped his nose. They'd told him stories and taught him the catechism of the Ancestor Science. Neither had sons of his age who had survived the various plagues and the Monster-inflicted calamities that periodically swept through Man-kind's burrows. He'd been lucky: he'd received much of the care and affection that their own sons might have enjoyed.

  Their fidelity to the Trap-Smasher had been a constant source of astonishment in Man-kind. It had cost them more than the large, healthy litters for which the chief had a well-proven capacity: such eccentric, almost non-womanly behavior had inevitably denied them the high positions in the Female Society they would otherwise have enjoyed.

  And now they were dead or dying, and their surviving babies had been apportioned to other women whose importance would thereby be substantially increased.

  "Tell me," he asked his uncle. "Why did the Female Society kill them? What did they do that was so awful?:'

  He saw that Thomas had lifted his head again and was staring at him. With pity. He felt his own body turn completely cold even before the Trap-Smasher spoke.

  "You still won't let yourself think about it? I don't blame you, Eric. But it's there. It's being prepared for us outside."

  "What?" Eric demanded, although a distant part of him had already worked out the terrible answer and knew what it was.

  "We've been declared outlaws, Eric. They say we're guilty of ultimate sacrilege against Ancestor-Science. We don't belong to Man-kind anymore—you, me, my family, my band. We're outside Man-kind, outside the law, outside religion. And you know what happens to outlaws, Eric, don't you? Anything goes. Anything."

  Ever since early childhood, Eric remembered looking forward to ceremonies of this sort. A Stranger would have been caught by one of the warrior bands, and it would be determined that he was an outlaw. Nine times out of ten, such a man was easy enough to identify—no one but an outlaw, for example, would be wandering the burrows by himself, without a band or at least a single companion, to guard his back. The tenth time, when there was the slightest doubt, a request for ransom to his people would make the prisoner's position clear. There would be a story of some unforgivable sacrilege, some particularly monstrous crime that could be punished by nothing but complete anathema and the revocation of all privileges as a human being. The man had escaped the punishment being prepared for him. Do with him as you will, his people would say: he is no longer one of us; he is the same as a

  Monster; he is something nonhuman so far as we are concerned.

  Then a sort of holiday would be declared. Out of the bits and pieces of lumber stolen from Monster territory and set aside by the women for this purpose, the members of the Female Society would erect a structure whose specifications had been handed down from mother to daughter for countless generations—all the way back to the ancestors who had built the Record Machines. It was called a Stage or a Theater, although Eric had also heard it referred to as The Scaffold. In any case, whatever its true name, most of the details concerning it were part of the secret lore of the Female Society and, as such, were no proper concern of males.

  One thing about it, however, everyone knew. On it would be enacted a moving religious drama: the ultimate triumph of humanity over the Monsters. For this, the
central character had to fulfill two requirements: he had to be an intelligent creature as the Monsters were, so that he could be made to suffer as some day Man-kind meant the Monsters to suffer; and he had to be nonhuman as the Monsters were, so that every drop of fear, resentment and hatred distilled by the enormous swaggering aliens could be poured out upon his flesh without any inhibition of compunction or fellow-feeling.

  For this purpose, outlaws were absolutely ideal since all agreed that such disgusting creatures had resigned their membership in the human race.

  When an outlaw was caught, work stopped in the burrows, and Man-kind's warrior bands were called home. It was a great time, a joyous time, a time of festival. Even the children—doing whatever they could to prepare for the glorious event, running errands for the laboring women, fetching refreshment for the stalwart, guarding men—even the children boasted to each other of how they would express their hatred upon this trapped representative of the nonhuman, this bound and shrieking protagonist of the utterly alien.

  Everyone had their chance. All, from the chief himself to the youngest child capable of reciting the catechism of Ancestor Science, all climbed in their turn upon the Stage —or Theater—or Scaffold—that the women had erected. All were thrilled to vent a portion of Man-kind's vengeance upon the creature who had been declared alien, as an earnest of what they would some day do collectively to the Monsters who had stolen their world.

  Sarah the Sickness-Healer had her turn early in the proceedings; thenceforth, she stood on the structure and carefully supervised the ceremony. It was her job to see that nobody went too far, that everyone had a fair and adequate turn, and that even at the end there was some life left in the victim. Because then, at the end, the structure had to be completely burned—along with its bloody occupant—as a symbol of how the Monsters must eventually be turned into ash and be blown away and vanish.