“One, is if we menace or seem to menace them: they strike back. It is perhaps only natural. We have nothing in common except life and death and a desire to occupy the same space; we cannot communicate, our species with their species. And so what else is there to do, if one strikes out at or seems likely to strike out at the other, except to strike back?
“I’ve said that this is natural. Not ‘good’—‘natural.’
“But there’s another level on which they interest themselves in us, Mother, and this seems to me less natural, in the sense that it is less inevitable. They sometimes use us for their sport.
The older woman’s face changed; in a low voice she said, “My child, you babble.”
Lors took a deep breath and shook his head. He seemed ten years older than the stripling who, a short while ago, had had no greater concern than hunting a deer or lying with a girl. The soft lines had gone from his face, his voice was deeper and harsher, his movements at the same time more cautious and more emphatic. “He isn’t babbling at all, Moma,” he said, straightforwardly. “We’ve all seen it. We can’t forget it. That’s what’s bothering your son, I’m afraid. Have you ever seen a cat playing with a mouse or with a very young rat? Is that really play? Isn’t it a kind of punishment, too? The cat gives pain and gets pleasure. And in the end, no matter how long it takes, the smaller creature dies.
“Well, that’s what we’ve seen the Devils doing. We’ve seen the dragons bring in men, one at a time, and the other dragons and the Kar-chee form a circle, do you see? Then begins the baiting, the sport, the play, the torture, call it whatever you want. The dragon picks up the man and tosses and worries him the way a dog might do with a rat. But the dragon is careful at first not to kill the man, as the cat is careful not to kill the mouse. It even drops the man and lets it try to escape. But there is no escape!
“The Kar-chee strike the man down when he tries to get away from the circle they’ve made around him. The Kar-chee drive the man back. And then the dragon begins to work on him again. Teeth and claw, claw and teeth… We’ve seen it; we’ve all seen it.”
Duro said, “We’ve seen it.”
Tom said, “Yes. We all saw it.”
And Rickar, in a low, low voice, grinding his teeth: “We saw it. We did see it. I saw it, too.”
The crowd groaned. Mother Nor moistened her lips. “If you all did, then there is no need for imagining or making believe, is there? But this is only another form of punishment, of the punishment the Devils inflict upon men for violating the practice of justice and equity. My husband would never say differently, of that I am sure.” She took her son by his arms. He looked at her now, his face still fixed in that dreadful grimace. “Rickar, tell me now—where is your father?”
“In Hell,” he said.
There was a long silence. “He followed us down, he and Lej, not to help me get out, but to see that I never got out. It was better, he thought, for me to die so that he could still say that he was right all along than for me to get out and prove that he was wrong all along—”
“No, Rickar. My son, no—”
“And then they were all aroused, all the Kar-chee Devils, and they started after us all, and we fled — we fled — my friends who’d risked their lives to save me — but they didn’t flee, Father and Lej didn’t flee, no, not they. They stayed behind, you know that? They stayed behind to preach a sermon to the Devils to tell the Devils how right they were and how wrong we were and they urged the Devils on after us—
“But the Devils didn’t take us! The Devils took them! And they screamed — and they screamed—and we could hear them screaming!”
And he threw back his head and he screamed himself, again and again and again, and then he pitched forward and fell upon his face with his eyes rolled up, and his mother knelt and gathered him in her arms and soothed him and cradled him and murmured, over and over again, “My son, my son… My son, my son…” She must have realized that she had lost her husband forever — and in his person not her husband alone but her leader, the guide of her life in its spiritual and communal aspects, the head of her people — and under circumstances the most crueclass="underline" cruel in the physical circumstances of her loss, and perhaps more cruel in that if his teachings were correct, as she had always implicitly believed, then he himself had been a sinner whom she had always deemed to be righteous, and, if his teachings had not been correct then he had lived and died in folly — and in a void and a chaos all his followers were now to find themselves.
And in the night the alarm was sounded and the cry arose. “Dragons! Dragons! Devils! Devils! Dragons! Dragons!” The people rose up from their slumber and their beds and heaped wood upon the fire and then, confused, in terror and concern, milled around, uncertain of anything except their own fear and the very uncertainty which perhaps terrified them as much.
Liam had not lain down. He and his friends had eaten and had then talked themselves to sleep. He awoke to find his knees wet with the sweat of his face and had a confused recollection of having thus fitfully slumbered, half-sitting, half-crouching. He was afterward never altogether sure if he had seen the dragons, there, at the perimeter of the camp, upreared and immense in the firelight and the moonlight; or if the image had been nothing else than a vision of the night, a creation of the obscurity and uncertain illumination, the dream from he had been ripped, the fears which pressed in and down upon him.
But the dragons had certainly been there. And they had flung their monstrous message into the enemy camp, the camp of men, and then retreated into the mists and darks from which they had come.
Message?
Messages!
Stones flung into an ant-heap were nothing in the creation of panic and swarming and fleeing compared to this. And to wonder. Liam saw the things as they came flying through the air and thudded upon the ground and bounced and flapped and then lay still; he saw this, but did not then in that split instant of fire-flickered and moon-silvered time see clearly enough to recognize it. It was not very long, though, before the ground was clear enough of people — screaming, maddened, gone off into the darkness — for him to venture out and over. And there he saw full clearly what was there, and for the first time in all this long sequence of events he felt something as close to guilt as he ever came to it. He had not felt it in Britland, leading his followers to (as he had thought) safety and the sea; he had not felt it in the raft, not even when famine and thirst and death had laid heavy hands upon it; but he felt something like it now—
“Gaspar…” It was Tom who spoke, in a stifled, sickened tone.
And Lors, his mouth stiff, made the second identification. “Lej, too…”
Duro said nothing. Rickar began to weep. Liam looked. He knew what he was seeing, and he knew immediately why he was seeing it. It had been his idea to flay the two dead Kar-chee and use their cortices for stalking-horses. The other Kar-chee had been intent on carrying away Rickar: true. But they had certainly been aware that two of their number had been slain by men. Yet neither then nor afterward had they seemed particularly concerned. And when that dreadful and strident Kar-chee alarm had been raised by the discovering one in the great cylindrical pit, he holding the flayed integument of one of the two over the rim of the ramp so that all the others could see, and when the shrill sound had come, repeating, echoing, prolonged, from (seemingly) everyone of the other Kar-chee there — when they had abandoned their works of repairs and poured upward in pursuit—