FOREST DANGER
He had slept for a time but he had dreamed and the dreams were full of terror. He woke suddenly as a man wakes from nightmare, with a start and a cry, and the howling sound of his own wolf-voice reminded him that the nightmare was reality.
He lay alone in the depths of the nighted forest and suffered as few men have suffered since the beginning of the world. Then, gradually, when he found that he was not going to die or go mad, the mind of Eric Nelson began to function again.
Nelson had lived a long time in the wild places of the world. He had spent years on the ragged edge of death and his inner fiber had been hammered into toughness. After the first black wave of horror passed it became a point of pride with him. He would not break. He would not give in and let himself be whipped by anything Kree and his people could do to him.
Again Nelson was conscious of the strange linking of his mind with another mind. Almost without his knowing it, the night and the forest had become familiar. He had spent many nights in the woods but never before had he had this intimate kinship with them. The forest was alive, teeming with its own secret business, and to the new Eric Nelson the secrets were all an open book, infinitely fascinating.
His keen ears told him of the motion of the grasses, the stirring of the trees, the rush of distant water in a streambed. Somewhere near him a mouse scuttered across a dry leaf and above him he could hear plainly the squeaking of a bat and the sound its leathery wings made on the air. Far away down the valley a deer went crashing through a deadfall and behind it rose the deep hunting cry of a tiger.
Eric Nelson felt the sweet taut thrill of excitement that passed through his borrowed body. He was hungry. The wind brought him news. He drew it in through quivering nostrils, rich and tangled and throbbing scents, the breath of the forest that was his mother because it had been Asha's mother.
He rose and stretched himself, wincing and grunting because he was very sore. Then he stepped out into the moonlight and stood with his head up, turning it slowly to quarter the wind, his nose twitching.
Downwind it was all a blank, but upwind a small pack of wolves was driving a buck. They were going away from him, and he must remember to stay clear. The tiger had killed. Down by the stream a band of Hoofed Ones had come to drink, and there were deer with them.
He would not run a deer. The whole forest would know of it. He would be content with a rabbit. Grim determination steeled Nelson's mind. He was going to Anshan and somehow he would bring Barin back to Vruun. But in the meantime they had made him a wolf. Very well, he would be a wolf.
The distant hunting call of the pack moaned and wailed down the valley. His throat quivered to answer it but he kept silent. Then, like a lean gray wraith in the splashing silver moonlight, he loped away south, toward Anshan.
At first it was difficult to move, but as his stiff body warmed and loosened he forgot his hunger in the delight of going. His man-body had been a pretty good one. It was tough and lithe and quicker than most. But it was a dull, clumsy thing compared to the one he had now.
The body of Asha was sensitively alive, from the bottoms of its padded paws to the tip of its nose. Every nerve and muscle worked to a hair-trigger reflex. It could thread its way like a lightning-flash through a thicket of brush and never so much as stir a leaf. It could stop stock-still without a quiver and it could soar over a deadfall like an arrow going home. And it could run. Gods of the forest, how it could run!
Nelson had known that when they drove him out of Vruun. But there had been no pleasure in running then. Now he sped down the open ridges for the sheer joy of it, rushing through the pools of moonlight, whirling and pouncing, playing delightedly with the shadows.
Hysteria, Nelson thought. Bravado, reaction against fear. But why not? Why not?
He crept upwind upon a little band of deer feeding by a pond. For a time he lay in the long grass and watched them, slender lovely things with their moist black noses and great eyes. A tall buck and two does and a fawn. The rich sweet odor of them made his mouth water.
Presently he rose and walked boldly out into the clearing. They lifted their heads and froze, staring at him-fleet-limbed children of flight and fear. Then they snorted the wolf-taint out of their nostrils and were gone.
He went to the pool and drank. His reflection looked up at him from the moonlit water, and he ran his tongue over his teeth and glared back wolf-eyed at himself.
He went southward again, ever southward toward An-shan, and he found no rabbits. He began to be aware that the game was moving. Time and again he crossed the new trails of deer and smaller beasts, all drifting westward. Word had gone through the forest that even the true beasts who were not of the Brotherhood could understand, and they were moving on both sides of the river, back to the barrier cliffs, leaving the forest to the Clans.
The wind, which had been blowing steadily from the south, dropped and then died altogether. Nelson felt a strange muffling of his senses then. It was like being partly blind and deaf because he could no longer tell what was happening upwind. He moved with increased caution and he was hungry, very hungry.
He came down to the edge of a wide shallow stream and suddenly, with a flying clatter of hoofs, a dappled mare and her foal came splashing across the fiord and up the low bank beside him.
"Greetings, Hairy One," came the mare's thought, She stopped to blow and, through Asha's wolf-senses, Nelson could smell the fear on her. The little inky-black foal whickered and pushed his head against his mother's flanks, his long ridiculous legs planted far apart and trembling. Both of them were streaked with sweat. "You have run far, oh Sister," said Nelson, through Asha's mind.
"North from Anshan," answered the mare, and shivered. She nosed the foal's thin neck tenderly and added, "I could not come before because of him."
"Anshan?" said Nelson. "I go toward there now."
"I know. The Clans are gathering for war." The rolling eyes of the mare showed white in the moonlight, "There is death in the forest, Hairy One! There is death in the valley of L'Lan!"
And the little black foal started. With lifted head and rolling eyes in imitation of his mother, he echoed, "Death! Death! Death!" His tiny hoofs made a rattling sound on the stones.
"Hush, little one," whispered the mare and stroked his quivering neck. "What do you know of death?"
"I have smelled it," said the foal. "Red in the wind." His nostrils showed pink as they flared to his frightened breathing.
"I pastured on the slopes above Anshan," the mare told Nelson, "because my mate was taken by the Humanites and I wanted to be near him. The foal was born there. There was killing in the valley below us. The outlanders had come with their new fire-weapons and many of the Brotherhood were killed."
"Death," said the foal again, and whinnied like a child crying. "I am afraid."
Nelson reassured with his thought. "You're safe now, little one. There is no death here."
But there would be, Nelson knew. Sooner or later the fire-weapons would bring death to the gates of Vruun and the little foal, if he lived, would one day be bitted and shod and bridled, broken to bear the weight of man.
Looking at them there in the moonlight, Nelson was aware of a strange revulsion at that thought, as though they had been his own kind, enslaved and toiling in chains.
The mare's gentle thought came into his mind.
"Take care, Hairy One, if you go toward Anshan. Shan Kar and the outlanders have cleared the forest edges of our scouts, and their weapons guard the city well."
Then she turned to the foal. "Come, little fleet one. Only a little farther, and then you can rest"
He watched them go, the dappled mare with her flowing mane and tail, a graceful shape of silver in the moonlight, her ink-black foal rocking along beside her. Light feet that had never known the weight of iron shoes, proud high heads that had never bent to the curb and the cutting bit.
Nelson had always liked horses as a man likes them. Treat them well, take pride in them, feed and groom them and occasionally drop the old phrase, "That horse is almost human!"
But these of Hatha's Clan were different. By whatever unholy alchemy the thing had been done, these horses were human in intelligence. He remembered the bitter pride of the captive Hoofed Ones in Anshan, when he had ridden out with Tark and Lefty and Shan Kar on their ill-starred mission.
He turned slowly to cross the stream but he did it mechanically, because he had been headed that way before. Nelson's mind had been jarred and some gate had opened between it and the subconscious mind of the wolf. He remembered Kree's words, "Asha's instincts, memories, latent knowledges —"
Memories.
He had been too occupied before with his own terror and his own rage and, after that, the miracle of new and alien sensation. But now a whole spate of memories stored away in Asha's mind broke loose and flooded into Nelson's. They were not the simple memories of an animal but, in their own strange way, as human as his own.
Cubs rolling in the sun-warmed grass, the newness of the world, the lessons, the first hunt, the first kill, the first sight of Vruun's glittering towers, the entering of the young wolf into the full rights of the pack. Little details, tastes and smells and thoughts and dreams. Yes, dreams, akin to those of the boy Eric Nelson lying under his green Ohio trees, half asleep in the summer stillness.
But these were only the ripples on the broad deep river of Asha's mind. Below them ran strong the currents that bound the individual to the Clan and the Clan to the Brotherhood. In the flashing glimpse of Asha's past Nelson saw a whole new way of life, where intelligent beings had adjusted themselves to a society that was at once as simple as Eden and as complex as modern New York.
A society in which the five great clans-man and wolf, horse and tiger and eagle-lived in perfect equality without even thinking about it, just as in Nelson's own world different races of men lived together and accepted it as natural. A society with its own laws, that forbade murder and theft and governed the rights of the hunt, and in which loyalty was freely given. A sort of freemasonry that was in very reality a brotherhood.
They were not perfect, these creatures of the clans. Some of the memory-flashes gave Nelson a jolt of fear and others made him laugh at the spectacle of foolishness. Again he felt contempt because he had seen cowardice or the theft of another's kill. But their very imperfections made them the more human.
When he shut his mental eyes and looked only at their minds, Nelson was forced at last to realize the truth without reservation. The creatures of the Clans were no more beasts than he. Less, he was forced to admit, for he had killed for money, whereas the Brotherhood killed only for food. And he had killed men, whereas the Brotherhood killed only the deer and the rabbit.
Quite suddenly it did not seem strange at all to Nelson that he was trotting on four legs through the forest. The intimate contact with Asha's mind had dissolved that strangeness. It seemed no more to him now than if he had put on a foreign dress. He was at home.
Abruptly a hare bolted in front of him. He caught it in easy bounds and broke its back and fed.
It was then that the gray brothers of the pack came upon him, drifting silently between the trees from the east. He had no wind to warn him and his hunger had betrayed him into carelessness. He started up from his half-eaten kill and would have run, only that the leader, an old gray dog-wolf who lacked an eye, uttered a thought to him.
"Finish your kill, young one. There is not that much haste."
The old wolf sat down, his tongue lolling out. "Besides, we have run far, from the hills above Mreela. We would rest."
Through Asha's eyes, Nelson saw that these were lean and ragged wolves from an outlying tribe that ranged the upper levels. They did not know him, did not know that he was outlaw.
He finished his meal in gulps, crunching down the last sweet bones. Then he licked his lips and waited. The long wailing Hai-oo! of the Clan-call rose across the river and was answered and answered again.
The old wolf told him, "We go toward Anshan to watch."
"I, too."
"Then go with us, young one."
He could not get away from them without arousing suspicion. He must join them now, and later see what was best to do.
The lean gray shapes rose, ten of them, long-fanged hunters of the barren heights, full of a quivering excitement. Almost, Nelson felt as he ran that he was really Asha, running with his own kind.
But he was not. His kind, Nelson's kind, lay in wait at Anshan with machine-guns and grenades.
When the first light of dawn began to pale in the sky, he and the pack were miles southward. He started to drift away from the upland pack. He would be safer now alone. He must find some place to lie up until it was dark again before he made his attempt to enter Anshan. By night he had one chance in a hundred of succeeding without being shot on sight as a spy from Vruun. By day he had none.
Nelson would have slipped safely away as he planned had not the dawn wind risen and betrayed him.
He was lagging behind the others, watching his chance to slide off into the brush, when from downwind came a sudden barking cry and with it a mental call— "Ho, brothers! There is a stranger with you!"
The whole of the upland pack turned and faced Nelson, instantly suspicious. Before he could run, wolves were all about him, Wolves from Vruun, whose minds spoke in chorus like one great curse.
"Asha!”
Nelson wheeled and leaped clean over the old dog-wolf, breaking for the shelter of the brush.
Behind him, as it had in Vruun, the mental shout went baying through the trees.
"Asha is outlaw! Drive him, brothers! Drive him from the forest!"
Then the pack was after him in full cry and the call was echoing all across the valley, tossed from one pack to another and picked up and carried on until it burst from the hillsides in a wailing malediction.
"Outlaw!"
Once again Nelson ran, belly-down and straining. Ahead of him lay the open plains around Anshan, and in them lay death. Desperately he swerved and dodged and circled, but the wolves of the Clan drove and drove him without mercy. There was no escape.
The forest began to thin. In the distance between the trees he could see the open flatness of the plain. Far out upon it Anshan burned like a great jewel in its setting of green forest by the river.
He crouched, trapped and desperate, tried to think.
Abruptly, overhead, he heard the whistling thunder of great wings and leaped up snarling. Then he saw that it was Ei and he heard Ei's mind speaking to him with urgent swiftness.
"This way, outlander! You can dodge the pack if you do as I order."
He could do no worse than obey.
The eagle swooped skyward again, where he could see the movements of the whole pack, and sent his guarded thought down to Nelson.
"Run hard this way, outlander! Now. Into the pool. Swim, swim quickly, upstream. Stay in the water, the wind is with you. Now! Under the overhang of the bank there and crouch still — still!"
Nelson crouched, wet and shivering, half submerged, and heard the pack swing past him and go on. Presently Ei swooped down and perched on a nearby rock. Nelson crawled out where it was drier and lay panting.
"We will wait," the eagle told him, and composed himself.
Nelson studied the other. Finally he sent a questioning thought. "I don't understand. Why should you come to help me?"
And Ei answered, "Nsharra sent me."