So, thus I found myself, Dray Prescot, walking on my bare feet toward the eastern coast of Turismond. If I fail to mention the broad-bladed hunting knife sheathed onto the belt behind my right hip it is merely because a knife in that position has been my constant companion from the time I first stepped aboard a seventy-four.
In my long life I have handled many weapons and grown skilled in the use of weapons wholly strange to an Earthman. Armor in its right and proper place has also been of importance to me. Yet, however much I grow used to any one sword or rapier in particular, one special bow, I have never chained myself and my fortunes to just one single weapon. Many weapons have been presented to me, I have bought large numbers, and taken quantities from dead foemen; if I were to lose all this gaudy arsenal I would feel annoyance — an annoyance not, for instance, that I had lost this one particular Krozair long sword presented to me by Pur Zenkiren, but annoyance over the loss of any weapon in the midst of dangers. The man who wishes to be an adventuring fighting-man had best not lock his fortune to one brand alone. Fate is all too often ready to snatch it from him, and seldom ready to offer it back — as I had snatched back my sword from Umgar Stro after I had snapped his backbone.
And with this goes the corollary that the true fighting-man can fight with whatever weapons come into his hands.
The twin suns of Antares passed across the sky, the smaller green Genodras now leading the giant red Zim, so that at the second sunset the land took on the tincture of rusted iron, a broad wash of orange and brown and crimson with the last few streaks and streamers of green pulsing through that ruby sky. Ahead the Owlarh Waste stretched in dust and thorn-ivy and prickly scrub. Finding safe anchorage for the night was not overly difficult and by the time Genodras reappeared ahead of me with its filaments of lacy green patterning the sky ahead and painting out the last stars I was well on my first leg of the day’s journey. There had been a noticeable lack of interference from the people of Cherwangtung and this could be explained in a number of ways, perhaps the best of these being Sosie’s comment when I had left that the wild white men tended to lay up during the day and roam only at night. I was not naive enough to believe they had spotted me and, remembering what I had done to their war party, were afraid to approach me. They might well have been; but that way lies arrogance, psychosis, self-delusion, and eventual destruction.
The land here in the Owlarh Waste was poor and getting worse as I tramped eastward. Arkasson was a town muchly cut off from the world, tending its own circle of farms and minding its own business. The problem facing me soon would be water. Dust kicked up at the unwary tread, behooving me to walk carefully. Leem prowled here, so Sosie had said, raiding into the farms if the fences were left unrepaired, at other times subsisting on the rabbit-like animals burrowing into the plain — animals on which I, too, must depend for food.
I had less concern that I might meet risslaca — of which there are innumerable varieties. The overlords of Magdag placed a bronze risslaca beneath the beaks of their swifters where the wales met. They more often than not took the fancy of using a mythical risslaca, a great lizard-dragon with fangs and forked tongue. Those that I had previously encountered during my runs ashore when I was fighting my way up as a swifter commander on the inner sea, the Eye of the World, had been impressive enough, saurian monsters, cold-blooded, fanged and clawed, armored with plate and scale, chilly of eye. Nath, Zolta, and I had fought our quota in defending Sanurkazz’s southern boundaries. That all seemed a long time ago to me, now.[2]
As you may well imagine, having encountered dinosaurs in the flesh on Kregen, I have, whenever the opportunity offered, studied the dinosaurs of our Earth. They form a subject for study that fascinates everyone, from the school child to the paleontologist. Just why this is so can be explained glibly — or with much psychological insight. I had the idea of trying to trace any comparisons, any parallels, between the long-gone saurian kings of the Earth and the very present flesh and blood risslaca of Kregen. There were, of course, many points of similarity. Equally, risslaca existed — had chased me and been slain — that were unlike anything that we know stalked the Earth at the end of the mid Mesozoic Era, the Jurassic Period, all of one hundred and forty million years ago.
Many were quite dumb. Many emitted shrieks like bursting boilers. Many hunted by eye. Many hunted by scent.
It was a trio of the latter who picked me up toward the middle of the afternoon, when I had entered an area where the ground, although still poor, offered perfect conditions for fern growth. A river had wandered athwart my path and I had crossed it and carried on. The ferns grew in lush profusion. I felt the hunter’s itch between my shoulder blades. The light from the twin suns burned down, orange and jade, shafts of sunlight striking down between the great ferns. The foliage curved over me. The unending stalks towered above. I walked very lightly, turning and twisting my head, and I had strung my bow with that practiced ease that Seg Segutorio exemplified best. I carried the longbow in my hand, an arrow nocked. Walking thus lightly and alertly through the green and golden glory of the ferns with the jade and orange light falling all about me I came to a swampy area that I must bypass. Here and there the water gleamed like bronze. A wall moved before me. That wall rippled with scaled muscle. Blotches of color — amber, jade, jet — camouflaged the risslaca against the crowding ferns. I saw a narrow head greedily gulping ferns and the drooping leaves of the bristle-topped sickly trees that grew palm-like around the fringes of the water. A serpentine neck curled around. The head lifted from the ferns and cocked so that one eye could regard — not me! The eye looked coldly back down the twisted trail up which I had walked. The three killers were there. They padded up on their three-toed feet — and I saw the first toe of each hind foot carried the long scythe-bladed claw, razor-sharp, that distinguished our Earthly deinonychus. The light from the twin suns of Antares fell luridly across their arrogantly gold and ebony-banded scales. Ten feet long, were the killers; seventy feet at least the camarasaurus-like herbivore. And I stood between them.
The rudder-like tails of the deinonychus risslacas extended stiffly backward. Those long-curved scythe-claws caught the gleam of suns-light and glittered with deadly power. With explosive, incredible ferocity, the three killers sprang.
CHAPTER THREE
With reflexive action so fast the movement was completed before I saw the first risslaca’s hind legs leave the ground the black feathers drew back to my ear, the last extra urge of muscle snapped out as the bow bent, my fingers released the arrow, and the shaft loosed.
So fast had I reacted, my aim exact, that thereby I was nearly killed. For I had not expected the incredible jumping power of the reptile. It sailed up into the air, its tail rigidly extended backward, its body straightening into the upright position that would enable those slashing blades on its feet to slice me to the backbone. I have seen kangaroos in Australia, larger than these risslacas, leap fantastic distances. The dinosaurs were no sluggish, lethargic movers; they were agile, rapid, deadly — and these were killers.
The risslaca leaped above my point of aim. The arrow skewered past its belly and struck deeply into the junction of tail and body.
Sosie had given me a selection of arrows, so that I had the alternatives of the thin armor-piercing bodkin, the body punching pile, the broad meat-cleaving barb, or the utility arrowheaded point. Against what I had fancied would be after me for supper I had chosen the great barbed meat-slicing head. This slashed its way through the scale and flesh of the risslaca, gouging deeply. Chance had driven that arrow with deadly precision.