She stood and I lashed her wrists tightly together behillc her back.
It was then that the announcement was heard. It swept like oil, aflame in the wind, through the crowds of the thing Men looked at one another. Many grasped their weapons more tightly.
“A Kur,” it was said, “One of the Kurii, would address the assembly of the thing!”
The girl looked at me, pulling against the fiber that bound her wrists. “Have her delivered to the tent of Thorgeir of Ax Glacier,” I told the presiding official. “Tell him that she is a gift to him from Tarl Red Hair.”
“It will be done,” said the official. He signaled two burly thralls, each of whom seized her by one arm.
“Deliver her to the tent of Thorgeir of Ax Glacier,” he told them. “Tell him that she is a gift to him from Tarl Red-Hair.”
The girl was turned about, each of the thralls holding one of her arms. She looked once over her shoulder. Then, between the thralls, moaning, crying out, stumbling, a gift being delivered, she was thrust toward the tent of he who was known at the thing as Thorgeir of Ax Glacier.
My eyes and those of the official who had presided at the archery contest met.
“Let us hasten to the place of the assembly,” he said. Together we hurried from the field where I had won the talmit in archery, and a girl, to the place of the assembly.
Chapter 11 The Torvaldsberg
It lifted its head.
It stood on the small hill, sloping above the assembly field. This hill was set with stones, rather in the manner of t~rraces. On these stones, set in semicircular lines, like terraces, stood high men and minor jarls, and rune-priests, and the guard of Svein Blue Tooth. Just below the top of the small hill, cut into the hill, there was a level, stone-paved platform, some twelve feet by twelve feet in dimension.
On this platform stood Svein Blue Tooth, with two high men, officers, lieutenants, to the jarL.
The thing, its head lifted, surveyed the assembly of free men. The pupils of its eyes, in the sunlight, were extremely small and black. They were like points in the yellowish green cornea. I knew that, in darkness, they could swell, like dark moons, to fill almost the entire optic orifice, some three or four inches in width. Evolution, on some distant, perhaps vanished world, had adapted this life form for both diurnial and nocturnal hunting. Doubtless, like the cat, it hunted when hungry, and its efficient visual capacities, like those of the cats, meant that there was no time of the day or night when it might not be feared. Its head was approximately the width of the chest of a large man. It had a flat snout, with wide nostrils. Its ears were large, and pointed. They lifted from the side of its head, listening, and then lay back against the furred sides ofthe head. Kurii, I had been told, usually, in meeting men, laid the ears back against the sides of their heads, to increase their resemblance to humans. The ears are often laid back, also, incidentally, in hostility or anger, and, always, in its attacks. It is apparently physiologically impossible for a Kur to attack without its shoulders hunching, its claws emerging, and its ears lying back against the head. The nostrils of the beast drank in what information it wished, as they, like its eyes, surveyed the throng. The trailing capacities of the Kurii are not as superb as those of the sleen, but they were reputed to be the equal of those of larls. The hearing, similarly, is acute. Again it is equated with that of the larl, and not the sharply-sensed sleen. There was little doubt that the day vision of the Kurii was equivalent to that of men, if not superior, and the night vision, of course, was infinitely superior; their sense of smell, too, of course, was inccmparably superior to that of men, and their sense of hearing as well. Moreover, they, like men, were rational. Like men, they were a single-brained organism, limited by a spinal column. Their intelligence, by Priest-Kings, though the brain was much larger, was rated as equivalent to that of men, ar.d showed similar random distributions throughout gene pools. What made them such dreaded foes was not so much their intelligence or, on the steel worlds, their technological capacities, as their aggressiveness, their persistence their emotional commitments, their need to populate and expa nd, their innate savagery. The beast was approximalely nine feet in height; I conjectured its weight in the neighborhood of eight or nine hundred pounds. Interestingly, Priest-Kings, who are not visually oriented organisms, find little difference between Kurii and men. To me this seems preposterous, for ones so wiseas Priest-Kings, but, in spite of its obvious falsity, Priest-Kings regard the Kurii and men as rather sirnilar, almost equivalent species. One difference they do remark between the human and the Kur, and that is that the human, commonly, has an inhibition against killing. This inhibition the Kur lacks.
“Fellow rational creatures!” called the Kur. It was difficult at first to understand it. It was horrifying, too. Suppose that, at some zoo, the tiger, in its cage, should look at you, and, in its rumbles, its snarls, its growls, its half roars, you should be able, to your horror, to detect crude approximatlons of the phonemes of your native tongue, and you should hear it speaking to you, looking at you, uttering intelligible sentences. I shuddered.
“Fellow rational creatures!” called the Kur.
The Kur has two rows of fangs. Its mouth is large enough to take into it the head of a full-grown man. Its canines, in the front row of fangs, top and bottom, are long. When it closes its mouth the upper two canines project over the lower lip and jaw. Its tongue is long and dark, the interior of its mouth reddish.
“Men of Torvaldsland,” it called, “I speak to you.”
Behind the Kur, to one side, stood two other Kurii. They, like the first, were fearsome creatures. Each carried a wide, round shield, of iron, some four feet in diameter. Each, too, carried a great, double-bladed iron ax, which, from blade tip to blade tip, was some two feet in width. The handle of the ax was of carved, green needle wood, round, some four inches in diameter. The axes were some seven or eight feet in height. The speaker was not armed, save by the natural ferocity of his species. As he spoke, his claws were retracted. About his left arm, which was some seven feet in length, was a spiral golden armlet. It was his only adornment. The two Kurii behind him, each, had a golden pendant hangingfrom the bottom of each ear. The prehensile paws, or hands, of the Kurii are six-digited and multiple jointed. The legs are thick and short. In spite of the shortness of the legs the Kur can, when it wishes, by utilizing its upper appendages, in the manner of a prairie simian, like the baboon, move vvith great rapidity. It becomes, in running, what is, in effect, a four-footed animal. It has the erect posture, permitting brain development and facilitating acute binocular vision, of a biped. This posture, too, of course, greatly increases the scanning range of the visual sensors. But, too, its anatomy permits it to function, in flight and attack, much as a four-legged beast. For short distances it can outrun a fullgrown tarsk. It is also said to possess great stamina, but of this I am much less certain. Few animals, which have not been trained, have, or need, stamina. An exception would be pack hunters, like the wolves or hunting dogs of Earth.
“We come in peace,” said the Kur.
The men of Torvaldsland, in the assembly field, looked to one another.
“Let us kill them” I heard one whisper to another.
“In the north, in the snows,” said the Kur, “there is gathering of my kind.”
The men stirred uneasily. I listened intently.I knew that Kurii did not, for the most part, inhabit areas frequented by men. On the other hand, the Kurii on the platform, and other Kurii I had encountered, had been darkfurred, either brownish, or brownish red or black. I wondered if it were only the darker furred Kurii that roamed southward. But if these Kurii on the platform were snowadapted, their fur did not suggest this. I wondered if they might be from the steel ships, either recently, or within too few generations for a snow-adaption pattern to have been developed. If the Kurii were sufficiently successful, of course, there would be no particular likelihood of evolution selecting for snow adaption. Too, it could be that, in summer, the Kurii shed white fur and developed, in effect, a summer coat. Still I regarded it unlikely that these Kurii were from as far north as his words might suggest.