He did know that it had been no thrown fist that had hit him, but something used as a weapon - a length of wood, perhaps.
He listened for a second longer, translating the sounds around him into that mental picture he now remembered being taught to form. Amanda had cleared away all who had come close to her and was now nearly at the farther door out of the room. The ones not still engaged in trying to reach her were feeling around, trying to find him - evidently under the assumption that whoever hit him had knocked him unconscious.
Then he was on his feet again, a portion of his attention continually updating the picture from the sounds he heard and looking for a pattern in the actions of his attackers. There was always a pattern, made up in separate parts by those who were ready and willing to come to grips, followed by those who would become willing once the combat began, and those who only wanted to hang around the edges safely until the prey had been secured by the strongest of their group and it was safe to pile on, shouting as if they had been in the action from the beginning.
Now he was ready to move through them to join Amanda. This time, he met what he had expected. About thirty seconds of contact were enough to satisfy him now that the group which had jumped them was no more than a dozen adults, of which only four or five were daring enough to offer real threats.
Almost as soon as the deduction was completed in the back of his head, the three full-effort fighters he had encountered on his way to the door were either all put aside or bypassed. Amanda, his ears told him, had already gone through the farther exit. He followed her, and his ears told him those they had left behind did not follow.
Amanda's soft whistle asked if he was all right. He whistled back, went toward the sound she had made, and they came together. "No problem," messaged Amanda's fingers, tapping his cheek. "We can go on with no more trouble now. Follow me."
She led him farther through the darkness and they emerged after a bit into an area of no shadows at all, just as the clouds thinned slightly overhead, and he was able to see that they were now outside the walls of the ruined villa. "Some illegal farmers, I think. A family or families who came out to work their field at night," said Amanda in a normal voice. "They didn't have the slightest idea who we might be, except that in these clothes we obviously weren't garrison soldiers and there might be something in our sacks that could be used by them." "So those were some of the native Exotics - after only two years?" Hal demanded. A sudden suspicion stirred in him. "Did you know they were there, when you led me into that place?" "No," she said, "but it was likely we'd run into some like that along the way."
She did not elaborate, and his unspoken question was answered. There had been a reason she had wanted him to experience that particular type of "new" Exotic, so different from what she had promised to show him, back at the Encyclopedia. He tucked the fact away. Her reasons would become apparent soon enough. "Now," she said, as they emerged from the shell of the building into the moonlight. Across a ruined level area that must once have been either a lawn or garden, the surrounding trees made a semicircle of darkness, with a gap and the hint of what might have been a road or path curving off to the left to be lost in them. "We go this way."
She led into the woods to the right of the path. "A driveway, once," she said. "It'll connect with the road a few dozen meters over. But we'd better stay off the road proper. We'll just travel alongside it, and we ought to be within an easy day's walk of the city you saw on the screen - Porphyry's its name. We won't make it before sun-up. When daylight comes we'll have to be careful in our travel and avoid reaching the town at the wrong time of day."
It was a not unpleasant walk by moonlight, for the cloud cover soon thinned to nothingness, and disappeared completely shortly after that, they moved easily under Sofia, the more brilliant of Kultis's moons.
The moonlight revealed, but also hid things. Almost it was possible for Hal to imagine that there had been no changes since he had been there last, and this illusion persisted except when they would come upon the shell of some sad-looking, wrecked and burned-out habitation. In the bright but colorless light, these remains of what had once been homes seemed almost magically capable of summoning up in Hal a memory of the lightness and beauty that the Exotics had put into their habitations. As if they wrapped around themselves now the ghosts of the beauty with which the Exotics had always seemed to try to make up for the abstractness of the philosophy that was their obsession as one of the three largest and most successful of the Younger Worlds' Splinter Cultures.
There were the noises of night birds, and some insects, and other stirrings, but no sounds of large creatures. The Exotics had not imported the genetic starter material for variform animals of any size, beyond what was necessary for the ecology, except for some domestic animals. Their philosophy looked askance at the keeping of pets, and most of the things they couldn't do themselves, they were wealthy enough to buy machinery to do, or to hire off-planet workers-animals were not needed except for the stock of the dairy farms or sheep ranches.
The total effect of the night, the different darktime sounds and the soft, scented air, gave Hal a feeling of dreamy unreality which was still underlaid with his return to unhappiness, and only partially affected by the growing headache from the blow to the side of his head. He had been lucky, at that, he thought, even as he automatically began to exert some of the physical self-disciplines he had been taught in both his childhoods. His efforts were not as much to get rid of the pain, as to put it off to one side, mentally, so that it could be ignored by the normal workings of his body and mind. A little farther forward and it would have come against his temple, where that much of a blow, even from a length of tree limb, could-
He woke suddenly to the potential of what he was feeling and stopped walking suddenly. Amanda checked herself in midstride beside him. "What is it?" she asked. "I took a hit on the head, back there," he said. "Something more than someone's fist. Maybe a staff or a club of wood. I didn't think too much of it until just now-" "Sit down," said Amanda. "Let me take a look."
He dropped into a sitting position, cross-legged on the earth below him, and was rewarded by a new shock of pain in his head at his body's impact with the ground. "Right side of my head," he said.
Amanda's fingers went among his hair, parting it as she bent over him. "This moonlight's bright enough so I ought to be able to see... "
She found something by his sudden feel of her touch - a cut, at least. "No noticeable swelling about the scalp," she said, "but it's the swelling inside the skull we've got to worry about. Did it feel as if it might be enough to cause a concussion? What can you tell about it from the inside? How hard were you hit?" "I couldn't tell you - it dazed me a bit," he said, "for maybe a dozen seconds, no more. It didn't knock me off my feet. I remember dropping deliberately and rolling away from the action. Now... "
He probed his own sensations for information. It was ironic, here on this world, that the techniques he was using were as much Exotic as Dorsai. The two Splinter Cultures had been on a parallel track in these matters, and when they realized it, information had been freely passed back and forth between them. Basically, there was much the body could tell the mind that drove it, if the mind could discipline itself to listen along ancient pathways of nerve and instinct.
He sat motionless, inwardly listening in this fashion. Amanda sat beside him. After a bit, he spoke. "No," he said, "I don't think fluid's going to accumulate in the brain, at least to any point where pressure on the brain by the skull is going to cause real trouble. But I think I'd better stop, and not try to travel any more for the rest of the night." "Absolutely," said Amanda. She looked around. "We're out of sight of the road. Lie back. I'll make you a bed of twigs and large leaves, and you can shift to that when it's ready."