The captain looked bemused. “The best fertilizer, they tell me.”
“Ah, that's just it!” Derr waved the cigar melodramatically. “They've been winding up like that for centuries ... without once winning.”
“Don't they want to win?”
Derr looked perplexed for a moment, spread his hands. “From what I can tell, from what I was able to get out of the Headsman, they just don't know any other way. They've been doing it that way, just that way, since before they can remember, and they don't know why. I asked the Headsman, and he stared at me as if I'd asked him why he breathed.
“Then he answered that it was just the way things were; that's all.”
Nerrows scuffed his feet at the hard-packed floor of the hut. He looked up at Derr finally. “What's that got to do with you?”
“I got the permission of the Headsman to go into the cleared space, in place of a native; some week soon. He thought I was nuts, but he'll soon see how an Earthman fights!”
* * * *
For ten weeks Derr had watched them get mauled and bloodied and ripped and killed. Now, stripped to the waist, clad only in a breechclout, the ornately-carved bush-knife in his thick, square hand, Nathaniel Derr moved into the cleared space to face his first ristable.
The beast loped in from the grasslands almost immediately, passing between the natives lining the path without touching anyone. Strange how it seems to know what it's to fight, and not bother any others, he thought, hefting the razor-bladed weapon. Sweat had begun to stand out on his face, and the smooth handle of the knife felt slippery in his grip. He dried his hand on the breechclout, and took the knife again.
The ristable lumbered into the clearing, and Derr made note that it was not the one he had seen the week before last, nor the week before that, nor last week. Each week seemed to bring another beast—at some unknown, unbidden signal—ready to gore a nut-brown native with that deadly, alabaster horn.
Derr circled around the edge of the clearing, feeling the heat-stink of the natives behind him. The beast pawed and circled, too, as though uncertain.
Then it charged. It shot forward on six double-jointed legs, its tentacle clusters flailing, its head lowered, the breath snorting from its breather holes.
Derr spun out of the way. The beast pulled up short before it rammed the crowd.
It turned on him, staring with little red eyes.
Derr stared back, breath coming hot and fast. He felt good; he felt fine; he felt the kill coming. It was always like this.
The ristable lurched forward again, this time seeming to make a short, sharp, sidestepping movement; Derr had to be quick. He managed to twirl himself past the beast with only a scant millimeter between his flesh and that bone-white horn.
The ristable brought up sharply, stopped, turned, and glared at Derr.
This was the pojar, as the natives called it. The time to stop, the moment to sit down and be killed. So Derr sat down, in the manner he had seen the natives do it ... and oddly, the crowd exhaled with relief.
The ristable pawed, snorted, charged.
It came for him ... and suddenly Derr was up, thrusting himself from the dirt with the strength of his legs, and the ristable could not stop its movement, and it was past the spot where Derr had sat cross-legged, its horn tearing the air viciously where Derr's chest had been a moment before.
But Derr was not there to die.
He was whirling, clutching, and in a stride and a breath he was on the ristable's back; and the knife hand came up with a slash and the blood, and down with a thud and the blood, and back again with a rip and more blood, and three times more, till the ristable convulsed and tried to bellow, and tipped over, the legs failing in precision step.
Derr leaped free as the ristable collapsed to the dirt. He watched in silence and power, the awe and fury of the triumphant hunter flowing in him like red, rich wine; watched as his trophy bled to death on the sand.
It died soon enough.
Then the natives seized him.
“Hold it! Stop! What are you doing? I won, I killed the thing ... I showed you how to do it ... let me go!” But they had him tightly by the arms and the waist, without word and without expression. They started to take him away, back to the village.
He struggled and screamed, and had they not taken the blade from him he would no doubt have slashed them. But he was powerless, and screamed that he had done them a favor, showed them how to kill the ristable.
Then when they had him tied in the hut at the edge of the village, the Headsman told him...
“You have killed the ristable. You will die.”
As simply as that. No question, no comment, no appeal, he was to die. The night came all too soon.
* * * *
When the moons were high overhead he called for the Headsman. He called, and the Headsman thought it was for a final wish, a boon. But it was not, for this was not a Ristabite: this was the Earthman who had not known the way of it, who had killed the god ristable.
“Look,” Derr tried to be calm and logical, “tell me why I'm to die. I don't know. Can't you see, if I'm to die, I have a right to know why!”
So the Headsman drew from tribal legend, from memories buried so deeply they were feelings in the blood without literal word or meaning, but were simply “the way of it.”
And this was it ... this was the secret behind it, that wasn't really a secret at all, but just the way of it:
Who the ruler, and who the ruled [the Headsman said]? Take the blood in your veins. How do you know that at one time the blood might not have been the dominant life form of Earth, ruling its physical bodies, using them as tools. Then, as time and eons passed, the blood turned its thoughts to other things, maintaining the bodies merely as habitations.
It could be so ... if the blood ruled you, and not you the blood, it could be so [the Headsman said]. The last thing you would do, under any circumstances: the spilling of blood. Don't you wince when you bleed, when you cut yourself, and you rush to bandage yourself? What if it were so, and you had lost the racial memory that said I am ruled by my blood ... but still you would know the way of it.
That was how it was on Ristable. At one time the bulls, the ristable beasts, ruled the natives. They built the cities with what were now atrophied tentacles. Then as eons passed, they turned to higher things; and allowed their bodies to graze in the fields; and let the natives feed them; and let the cities rot into themselves.
As time passed, the memories passed—oh, it was a long time; long enough for the mountains of Ristable to sink into grasslands—and eventually the natives had no recollection of what they had been, not even considering themselves ruled, so long and so buried was it. Then they took care of the ristables, and one last vestige of caste remained, for the bulls accepted sacrifices. The natives went to die ... and one a week was put beneath the sod ... and that was the way of it.
So deep and so inbred, that there was not even a conscious thought of it; that was simply the way of it.
But here was a stupid Earthman who had not known the way of it. He had won. He had killed a god, a ruler, deeper than any rule that ever existed...
That was the secret that Derr learned; the secret that was not even a secret really: just the way of it.
“So if there is anything I can grant,” said the Headsman in true sorrow, for he bore this Earthman no malice, “just tell it.”
And Nathaniel Derr, the great white hunter from Earth, thought about it.
Finally, as they untied him, taking him to the cleared area outside the village where he had killed the god ruler, the final twist came to him. Then he made his request, knowing the Mercantile Ship would come months too late, and there was nothing to be done.