THE WRATH OF THE CLANS
Nelson dreamed strangely in his stuporous sleep, dreams of thought-voices that his mind could hear, of forms moving around him, of, finally, a stunning, thunderous wave of force that rolled upon him.
He was overwhelmed by it, carried by it over the sheer brink of the world. He was falling into an awesome, howling gulf that was outside space and time, was falling, falling-
A strange shock stopped his fall. And then he became dimly aware that sensation was returning to him, that he was awaking.
"Is all well with you, Asha?" Nelson heard a thought-voice ask.
"All is well — and I am glad to have awaked from my sleep!" He heard the eager answering thought. That was strange. The question had been answered by Asha, yet he was Asha the wolf-at least he dwelt in the wolfs body.
Or did he?
Nelson suddenly realized that half his sense-perceptions were gone, that he could no longer scent anything at all. His body felt different. Not the tight, compact wolf-body to which he'd grown accustomed, but a long, gangling, awkward body—
Nelson, with an inarticulate cry, wrenched his eyelids open. But he knew what he would see before he looked down at himself. His hoarse wordless cry had been no wolf's howl but a human cry.
He looked down at the length of his own body again, sprawling in its dusty khaki uniform on a padded cot, still wearing its thought-crown. He moved arms and legs and they responded.
"I'm back," he whispered thickly.
"Yes," said a breathless voice. "You are back, Eric Nelson!"
He knew it for Nsharra's voice and he turned to look for her and looked full into the face of Asha the wolf. They lay side by side on two narrow cots — the wolf whose mind had slept so that a man could occupy his body — and the man.
Asha's body was dusty now, his hair matted with dried blood from wounds, his feet sore and bleeding. But his bright green eyes looked intelligently into Nelson's face. Nelson turned and looked up. Kree stood behind the cots, beside the big platinum mind-transference machine of the ancients.
"You brought me back into my own body while I slept?" Nelson said hoarsely.
"Yes," said Kree. "The force of the ancients stunned you in sleep so that you did not wake."
Nelson sat up. He felt strong, rested, fresh-and realized it was because his human body had lain here in coma for so long. Yet his human body now felt strange. He felt blinded and deafened by his loss of scent, felt slow, clumsy, awkward.
He sat up and saw that Nsharra stood at the foot of his cot. And that the four leaders of the great Clans were here — Tark and Hatha, the tiger and Ei. They were watching him.
"Death and danger walk toward Vruun on swift feet of flame," Kree was saying somberly. "Little time was left to give Asha back his body and return you to your body for judgment."
For judgment? That was why they had returned him to his humanity as doom drew close to Vrunn? Then the time had come.
Nelson stood up and faced them all. "I am ready," he said heavily.
"Tark and Ei have told us how you fought to save Barin — how you fought your friends," said Kree.
"They were not my friends, save one who is dead now," Nelson answered heavily. "I did not know, though, they were butchers."
"It seems you have learned much you did not know, outlander," said Kree. "You know now what it will be like for the Clans if the Humanites break the Brotherhood."
"Yes, I know that now," answered Eric Nelson sickly. Free children of the forest, hunted and slain and enslaved as in the outer world! Swift sentient folk of the Clans, crushed beneath a stupid human tyranny! He deserved what was coming—
"You are free to leave L'Lan," said Kree. Nelson stared, incredulous. "You're not going to kill me for what I've helped to do?"
Kree shook his head. "By your work last night, you redeemed the crime that you committed in ignorance. You can go."
Nelson looked at the Guardian, then around the watching leaders of the Clans.
"But I want to stay!" he cried. "I want to help you save the Brotherhood, to undo what I helped do here!"
Nsharra cried eagerly to her father, "Give him the chance! He will be loyal to us, I know!"
"He will be loyal," Tark's thought agreed. "And he knows the ways and weapons of the outlanders."
Kree's eyes searched Nelson's face, seemed to be searching his soul. Finally the Guardian spoke.
"So be it, outlander. Your help can be valuable in this hour of peril." He swung toward the others. "Clan-leaders, let the word run through all your Clans that this outlander fights on our side!"
"We shall see how he fights," growled the thought of Quorr the tiger.
Nelson felt the uplift of a queer buoyancy, as though an oppressive weight had been lifted from him. He knew, now. He knew that this Brotherhood that had at first seemed to his outer-world eyes so unnatural and alien was worth all sacrifices to preserve. He had learned that in the body of Asha the wolf.
And he felt strangely happy. For ten years he had fought the purposeless battles of warlords, first for adventure and then because he had no other profession. But this last battle was to be for a cause that he thought worth all he had to give.
Kree, as the Clan-leaders hurried out, led Nelson to a window that looked southward over Vruun.
"The hour comes fast upon us, outlander!"
Nelson was appalled by the spectacle. He realized now that hours had passed, for the sun was westering in a bloody, smoky murk. The whole southern sky was a wall of black smoke laced with livid flame — a wall that marched toward Vruun and was but a few miles distant. Only the forests west of the river were burning, but they were burning from the river to the western hills.
"That fire will be here in a few hours and Sloan and Van Voss and the Humanites will come after it!" Nelson exclaimed.
Kree nodded. "But we hope to stop it. The men of Vruun have labored all day to cut a fire-break from the river to the western hills."
"No mere fire-break will stop that!" Nelson told him emphatically. "It will jump it. You've got to start a backfire."
"Use fire as a defense against fire?" Kree looked worried. "The Clans would not like it. They hate all fire."
"Either that or the blaze will come into Vruun tonight!" Nelson warned.
Kree said reluctantly, "I will go with you and give the order."
As they turned, Nelson found Nsharra handing two heavy service pistols to him. He recognized them as his own and Lefty's.
"Less than twenty shots," he muttered, as he belted on the guns. "And Sloan and Van Voss will have submachine-guns and will have trained some of the Humanites to use grenades."
"But your experience of war will be valuable to us," Kree told him. "We know little of war in L'Lan. Our swords have only been used at long intervals to repel out-land tribes who sought to enter."
"I go with you, father!" cried Nsharra, her eyes dark and stormy with excitement.
Kree shook his head. "Nsharra, if aught befalls me, you alone remain to rally the Brotherhood. You must remain in Vruun."
Eric Nelson went out of the Hall of Clans with the Guardian into a thickening, ominous dusk. Smoke was rolling ever more densely from the south, blotting out the sunset. The air was bitter with it.
Tark ran up to them, the Hairy One's eyes blazing. "The fighters of the Clans are already on their way in the forest! Two of the Hoofed Ones wait for you!" _
Nelson leaped on the back of one of the excited horses as Kree too mounted. They rode southward out of Vruun.
The sun had gone down behind smoke-veils as though afraid, and darkness was thickening westward. But southward it was like a dreadful new dawn over the forest, the whole sky there blood-red, immense.
Nelson, as he rode with Kree along a red-lit forest aisle beside the wide, dark-flowing river, heard the Clans moving through the forest with them, and heard their thought-cry.
Gather, O ye of the Brotherhood! Gather to the south, my brothers, for soon we fight — and die!
The woods were full of running shadows. Shaking red light fell on gray backs and striped backs and struck fire from eyes that were already like blown coals in the darkness and shone white on gleaming, snicking teeth.
The ground shook to the trampling thunder of hoofs as Hatha's Clan went by, great stallions, their loose manes whipped like banners on the wind of their going. Some of them bore men of Vruun, armed for battle. And above the treetops in the bloody glare, the wide-winged eagles looped and swung.
There rose the terrific call of Tark beside them and it was answered. A tiger roared and another, sending their deep rolling coughs to echo from the hillsides. And the sons of Hatha lifted their wild neighing on the night.
Roll call! Roll call of the Clans!
Nelson's throat contracted and the warrior in him was shaken by a strange emotion. He heard the thought-cry of a lithe gray wolf-shape that ran in close to Tark and Kree and himself.
"Outlander, we go together this time! Good hunting!"
With a weird feeling, Nelson recognized that running wolf-shape as the one which for a time had been his own.
"Good hunting, Asha!"
They came to the fire-break that the men of Vruun had labored all day to hew across the forest, and Nelson groaned inwardly.
This ragged hundred-foot lane, cut at such labor from the woods, would never stop the cyclone of flame raging up from the south.
"We must start our backfire going from the south side of this lane, and keep it from jumping back across!" he told Kree. "And there's little time!"
The whole night a few miles ahead was now a sky-high chaos of smoke and flame. The red glare lit the hosts of human and beast warriors now pouring here from the north.
"Fire to stop fire, my brothers!" Kree's thought called, from his steed. "It must be your task to prevent it from jumping back."
They did not like it, Nelson saw. The blood-mad excitement of the Clans checked briefly with something that was close to fear. But they had the courage to face what was to them the supremely dreaded thing.
"Fire to stop fire!" flared Tark. "Let it begin!"
Nelson had dismounted. Now he hastily supervised the men Kree deputed to the task of starting the backfire. Their torches kindled the dry brush like tinder all along the southern edge of their fire-lane. Dry cedar and fir blazed up and the edge of the lane became a new wall of fire moving back south toward that mightier oncoming wall.
But moving slowly, slowly! The wind was against them, Nelson realized. Blazing leaves and twigs began to whirl across the lane, to dance with joyous wickedness over the narrow gap.
"Stamp the fire-sparks out where they fall!" Hatha's thought called. "Help the man-Clan, Hoofed Ones!"
Nelson, half stifled by smoke, sweating, labored with the men of Vruun and the Hoofed Ones, beating out each dangerous spark. And Kree sat his mount in the shaking red glow, his mind reaching out to steady the excited, jumpy Clans.
"Wait, brothers! Soon our fire will have conquered the fire of our enemies and then we shall seek them out!"
Nelson, laboring with the men of Vruun to stamp out the sparks that came across, felt that the south wind was a living thing, a malignant demon that delighted in hurling fire across the gap.
Yet he saw, through smoke-stung, half-blinded eyes, that the backfire was steadily if slowly creeping south. Soon it would have scorched a belt across which the giant flame-storm could not leap.
And then with a harsh, screaming cry, Ei winged down through the rolling smoke and sparks.
"The Humanites and the two outlanders come down the river, floating upon rafts!" cried the eagle's thought. "They are swinging in to land behind you!"
Appalled, Eric Nelson suddenly realized that that would be Nick Sloan's strategy, that it was the only possible strategy for him. Rafts that would carry the Humanite warriors would have been simple to build and with them the river became a safe highway to Vruun for Sloan and his forces, a safe road behind and past the fire-storm.
And Sloan, seeing them setting their backfire here, would try to swing around and catch them from behind, trap them between his forces and their fire.
"To the river!" Nelson cried. "If they land behind us we're lost! Ei, lead the way!"
"This way, Clan-brothers!" flashed the eagle's thought as he soared up again on thunderous wings.
Nelson had leaped on Hatha's back. Riding beside Kree back through the red-lit forest toward the river-edge, he sensed the wild relief of the Clans pouring to the fight around him.
Fire they hated, inaction they hated, but now at last their chance to come to grips with the destroyers had come. Beasts and mounted men, they crashed through brush and trees to the edge of the red-lit river just as the first of a score of long crude rafts, loaded with warriors, was poled ashore. Nelson saw that some of the Humanites carried webbing sacks of grenades.
He shouted, "Charge them! Rush them in the shallows! You Hoofed Ones — ride them down!"
Hatha laid his ears back and ran straight for the water. Nelson clung to his mane, his gun out, firing. Behind him, in a terrible resistless rush, the Clans swept into battle and even the red thundering flowers of the grenades could not stop them.
In the brush of the banks, on the rocky shore, in the water, men and beasts crashed together, screamed and died, and the river was the color of blood under the flame-lit sky.
Squealing, kicking, plunging, Hatha raged through the thick of the fight and took Nelson with him. Nelson caught a glimpse of Sloan and Van Voss, on rafts out in the river, willing to let Shan Kar's men bear the brunt of the fight. They fondled submachine-guns but could not use them, the two forces were so entangled.
The men of Vruun rode up and down the beaches, their swords flashing, and where their horses were killed under them they fought on foot, locked breast to breast with their erstwhile brothers of Anshan.
Great striped bodies leaped and rolled and clawed, and everywhere the gray wolves ran, slashing, slaying. Eagles swooped and struck their talons home. Bodies fell on the stones and lay heaped in the shallows and the clans and the men of Anshan fought on over them, the horses' hoofs ringing on the mail of the fallen men.
"Hai-ooo!" came the blood-chilling killing-cry of Tark, a gray demon gone mad with battle.
Nelson, clinging to Hatha's back as the stallion crashed and whirled in the crazy fight, glimpsed a white-faced Humanite warrior stabbing upward with his sword.
He shot, and glimpsed the man's face drive in. But another Humanite had seized the instant to rush in at him, sword gleaming. A gray thunderbolt flew from behind Nelson at the new attacker, aiming for the throat.
"Asha, look out!" Nelson sent his warning thought as he saw the dog-wolf's staggering opponent drop sword and whip out a dagger.
Even as he flung himself off Hatha into the shallow water to help he saw the dagger rip the dog-wolf's ribs. And then the Humanite sprawled in the water, his throat a pumping red gash.
Asha staggered, slipped. Fading flare of green eyes shone up at Nelson as he reached the wolf. He heard the dying thought
"Good hunting, broth—"
"They flee!" came the wild, raging thought-cry of Quorr. "Kill, before they escape!"
The Humanites, what was left of those who had landed, were wildly pushing their rafts back into the river, back into the deeper water.
Nelson heard Nick Sloan's cool sharp voice cut in across the din, from the rafts farther out.
"Pull back! That's enough!"
The fighters of the Clans, blood-mad, were balked, could not follow into that deeper water. But as the fight momentarily slackened thus, past Nelson pushed Kree.
The Guardian stood outlined in the suddenly brighter glow of distant firelight, his hand raised as his voice rolled out onto the river.
"Men of Anshan, will you destroy all L'Lan in blood and fire? Wrath of the ancients, wrath of the Cavern, fall upon you if you follow this road farther!"
"Kree, get back!" yelled Nelson, leaping forward.
He was too late. The burst of submachine-gun fire that came from out there on the rafts was brutally, contemptuously short. Kree clutched his breast and went down in the water. And Nelson heard Nick Sloan's voice from out there.
"Good shooting, Piet!"
A mad cry, a cry that was a thought and a howl and a scream of fury, went through the Clans.
"The Guardian is slain!"
Nelson, turning to drag Kree's body ashore, felt his heart check as he saw why the firelight was suddenly brighter now. The forest between them and their firebreak was a wall of flame, marching southward toward them.
"Our backfire has jumped the gap while we fought here!" he cried. "We can't stop it now — Vruun is doomed!"