Sergeant felt an odd conflict of emotions in this human. It must have been strong to register with him. He continued speaking to her in an attempt to steady her, asking the question which another kzin would find of the greatest importance and which he assumed mattered to monkeys equally.
“You have human Name?”
“Leonie.”
“What does it mean?”
“Lion.”
“What is lion?”
“A cat. A big, ferocious cat.”
“Is that a joke?”
“No. We used to think cats were beautiful…”
He recognized the emphatic human past tense but did not pursue the matter. Something had evidently happened to make them change their minds.
“Truce now,” he said.
“Yes, truce now. I find I do not want to die in this stinking hole. Does our truce hold into the next cave?”
“No sense if it does not.”
“I suggest it holds until we both agree to end it. Your Rank and your Sire's Honor as your Word.”
“Yes. And yours.”
“Yes. If you trust a monkey.”
“You could have killed me already. I trust.”
“Markham told us kzinti keep their word when it is solemnly given, usually.”
“Usually. But do not trust too much.”
“The main tunnel seems blocked,” she said. “There are others. We should go before the morlocks return. But we cannot move the kitten. Broken legs. Marrow get into blood. Die.”
“She is kzin. She is female but she is brave. Other Heroes will get her. Or she will die like kzin.”
“We could move her slowly and carefully into a shallow hole. It may kill her but it is a chance we must take. Then with your Hero's strength you could move a big rock across the entrance. Too big for Morlocks to move easily.”
“Then, if we die, Heroes not find her. She starve. She die.” He realized with an odd feeling that he had just said “we” to a monkey—a feral, at that.
“It would not be a perfect seal. Just to delay the morlocks getting to her. If we die she can scream and alert other kzin when they come. But I suggest we hurry. This is not the place for us to be caught by the morlocks in our turn.”
The tunnel she led him through was long and winding. At certain places he saw that something—humans, he guessed—had widened it. With the human going ahead he did not fear wires.
There was the tunnel mouth. He poised to leap.
“No! There!” she pointed. He could not see it but guessed there was a wire. “There!” Putting his life in the monkey's hands, he charged, bursting out through a curtain of straw stalactites and a lacy stone shawl, sending crystal fragments flying.
The great cave had far fewer lights now, only a few swirls and flashes of beams and glow-lamps from a single source, a high place beside one of the cave streams. It formed a natural amphitheater, and Sergeant had briefly noted it previously. But he could see the swift dark shapes of morlocks attacking from the roof and through the stalagmite groves. And there were two very distinct sets of voices coming from the single patch of the lights.
“Listen,” Leonie said. “It sounds as if human and kzinti have made a truce there, too.”
“Urrr. Should turn up lights. Blind morlocks.”
“More likely to blind themselves if they do. Morlocks don't like light but have thick eyelids. I think with most cave lights, they can close eyes and simply stay in total dark. Need very bright light to drive away.”
“You know lot about morlocks. Urrr.”
“I've dissected them. I told you I was a student of life once.”
“We join companions. Come.”
They got most of the way to the amphitheatre before the morlocks rushed them. They came from above and behind, piling on the human female first. She snarled and screamed in a way that reminded him she was named for a cat. He turned and saw she was fighting, but giving ground. There were too many morlocks for her. He screamed and leaped into the fight.
Now it was the morlocks who were giving ground. Or rather, dying where they stood. There was a trail of the things dead and dying behind him, but as he advanced alone into the thick of them he was being outflanked. In a moment, he knew, he would be surrounded. He began to back away. Then he stumbled over a torn, writhing body, slipped in the blood now covering the cave floor, and fell. As he tried to rise morlocks leaped onto his shoulders from behind, biting at his throat.
“Drop, Tabby!” he heard the human female. Thoughts too fast to describe as he clawed and fought. “Tabby” was a nursery word humans used sometimes for kzinti, though not in their hearing. Was she cursing him to his death?
“Drop,” she cried again, and this, he just recognized, in the imperative tense of the Heroes' Tongue. It was the same warning Trooper had given him previously. He threw himself forward and the female struck with her ratchet knife, sending the morlocks flying in pieces.
“Back! We can still hold them!” Back they went side by side, slashing with knife and claws, a dozen slow steps or so, into the little amphitheater. There stood two of his Heroes, aided by two more doubled-up wounded, surrounded but fighting still, another Hero badly wounded or dead, and three humans, also injured, but two of these still fighting with beam rifles and knives. Most of the beam rifles had yellow lights glowing on their stocks. He saw Platoon Officer's valuable deep-radar set lying smashed to pieces. No human would carry that off, anyway, he thought.
A single male human stood in the largest gap in the palisade of stalagmites and columns, fighting too many morlocks, its movements painfully slow to the kzin. An exhausted beam rifle lay beside it. Its ratchet knife still howled, but the human needed both arms to hold it: Even for a human it was doing badly. Its arms, even by human standards, looked skinny. Its hair was pale, either yellow or white with age. Sergeant leaped into the breach beside it, rampant and slashing. The morlocks fell back from the kzin's berserker assault, and there was a pause.
“We underestimated them,” this human said in Wunderlander when it had ceased respiring violently. “They are more numerous and intelligent than we thought. Also,” he added, “they are well-motivated.” Its hair was yellow, he saw, not the white of a really old monkey. But it was not strong. Sergeant was sizing it up as the Morlocks came again.
They came in waves, inflicted a little more damage on the defenders each time, caused more ammunition to be expended, and then drew back. There was a bombardment of missiles from the roof. One badly injured Hero lost control and hobbled, shrieking and howling, out of the perimeter into the darkness after them. He did not return. A little later another followed. Falling rocks accounted for the other two and also for one of the injured humans. The female human ran from place to place, firing one of the rifles. Perhaps from a distance it would create the illusion of a greater number of defenders, but he doubted it. Sergeant left the male human to hold the breach in one lull while he dragged and lifted some larger stone fragments onto the tops of broken stalagmite stumps in an effort to make a sheltering roof. It did not last long. Occasionally his ears picked up sounds of other fighting far away. He lost track of time, and was amazed when his timepiece told him a day and a night had passed. The dead humans provided monkey meat, though he tried to eat it out of the other humans' sight in the interests of holding together the fragile alliance that seemed to have evolved. Once after this, knowing he must conserve his strength, he even slept. If the humans took advantage of this to kill him, so be it.
He was again amazed to find how long a time had passed when he awoke. The Morlocks had not attacked, and the humans, he noticed, had not killed him. In other times of lull the humans slept.
At times they tried the lamps at high strength, but they seemed of little use: the Morlocks did not like the light but they simply dodged away in the stalagmite forest or were lost in the shifting shadows.