The two captors, with their captives, left the flaming fields, approaching the compound.
A man, in torn woolen tunic, fled toward them. A hunter seemed to rise from the ground before him. He, with a sweeping, horizontal blow of his ax, caught the running figure in the gut; the man stopped, bent over, retching unable to move; then the ax fell again, striking him down. A woman’s scream came from the compound. The man who had struck the running figure walked over to greet the captors. They spoke, while more screaming came from the burning compound. A sheep, bleating, ran past. The leashes of Hamilton and the girl cut from the altar were tied together, forming a single leash with double collar. This the man who had struck the running figure took in his fist, he subordinate to the two others, holding it in the center. The three men then approached the compound, the two captors in the lead, he who had struck the running man a step behind, holding the leash of the two female captives, naked.
The stockade, and the huts within, were burning. Almost at the gate, two more of the Dirt People fled outward. One was a woman, who was struck down from behind by a hunter within. She reeled against the palings, the back of her head bloodied, and stumbled into the darkness and fell. The second was a man. The first captor tripped him, and he rolled sprawling in the dirt; as he tried to climb to his feet the ax of the second captor struck him frontally, and he fell heavily, forward, into the dirt. Four sheep, bleating in terror, one with flaming fleece, hurried out of the compound.
Hamilton and the girl, her leash-mate, were dragged within the compound.
On a stake in the compound was the head of he who had been the leader of the Dirt People.
The gate was opened, widely. The work of the men of the Weasel People had been easier than they had anticipated, for the tall, gaunt man, in taking Hamilton from the compound, had left it open, that he might return silently. Yet this would, Hamilton knew, have made little difference. The men of the Weasel People would have, without great difficulty, scaled the palisade. A loop hurled over a pointed log and a swift climb, feet against the logs, would have brought them to the top, whence they might have leaped down to the dirt within. The palisade was effective against animals; it was not effective against men.
Hamilton turned her head away as she saw an older woman struck to the dirt.
From a hut, half burning, two men of the Weasel People dragged forth a man, throwing him to the dirt before them, then striking him six times with their axes. The flint of the axes of the men of the Weasel People, and their faces, sweaty, exhilarated, glowed in the reflection of the flames. Inside the compound it was almost as light as day, reminding Hamilton of the electric lights of the compound in Rhodesia, where she had been held captive. About the compound, in the dirt, lay several bodies, bloodied, their heads broken open. Before one wall four of the younger women of the Dirt People stood, huddled together; they were separated and thrust back against the wall; their clothing was cut from them; shuddering, they were inspected, closely, and felt; the leader of the Weasel People, the heavily built, bearded man, pointed to two of the women; immediately they were turned about, their hands tied behind their backs, and a rope put on their necks; they were dragged across the compound, to the post at which Hamilton, several days before, had been tied and whipped with switches; they were tied by their necks to this post; the leader turned his back on the other two women, who were not comely; Hamilton and the girl with her screamed with horror; then they turned away. From a storage pit, where she had hidden herself in the barley, another girl, caught in the grain, was forced to climb the ladder to the surface of the compound. She was stripped and bloody; there was grain on her body, stuck to the blood, and caught in her hair. The hunter who had found her followed her up the ladder. When she stood on the surface of the compound, she stood before the leader of the Weasel People. Proudly she threw back her head, shaking her hair, unafraid. He said a word and, as she stared angrily ahead, her hands were tied behind her back and then she was thrust, stumbling, to the post, where she, too, was fastened to it by the neck.
Suddenly Hamilton remembered Gunther, in the camp of the Weasel People, remarking to her that he surmised that such groups, so small, so isolated, which had initiated at this early date a form of herding, of agriculture, of metalwork, would not survive. His words, for the first time, now seemed weighty to her, rich with an insidious import she had not at first understood. Why had he brought her here? Why had he sold her to the Dirt People? It had puzzled her, for she had suspected, given the contempt in which he held her, his irritation with her intelligence, his scorn for her vulnerabilities, the profound, desperate needs of her female sexuality, which could turn her into a helpless slave in a man’s arms, that he would have kept her for himself, a despised love captive it might have pleased him, from time to time, to abuse and use for his pleasure; surely he would not have soon relinquished his title to the helpless, delicious slave who had once been the prim, reserved, formal, proud Dr. Brenda Hamilton? No, it was his intention to have her back, and he had never intended for the Dirt People to keep her. She had been brought here for another reason, to give him an opportunity to take reconnaissance of the compound of the Dirt People; under the pretext of selling two females he had studied the compound, its men, their numbers, the weapons, the land; oh, it had amused him, doubtless, to sell her as a nude slave, the once proud Dr. Hamilton, but that, pleasing though it might have been to him, had not satisfied the full intention of his plan; her sale had been a pretext, a diversion, to permit himself access to the compound and conduct the inquiries of his espionage. Hamilton knew then that she had been a dupe in the plans of the brilliant Gunther; she wondered if, in the stresses of the temporal translation, in his accession to power among the men of the Weasel People in his finding himself, with his rifle, almost a god in this wild country, he had gone insane. She recalled the throne on which he had seated himself, the robe of bearskin he had worn about his shoulders. In Rhodesia Gunther had been hard, brilliant, efficient, and, even then his genius had bordered on the fine line that separates incomparable intellect from madness, but he had been, clearly, sane; here, in this ancient, primitive time and country, she feared he had crossed the border into madness; what had the Dirt People done to him; had he seen fit to ventilate on them his hatred of diggers, his esteem of hunters; she recalled the violence, the force, with which, in Rhodesia he had once spoken to her of such things; the hunters are dead, he had said; but perhaps they are not dead, but only sleeping, he had suggested; perhaps they will come again; perhaps they will hunt again, he had seemed to feel, building ships and voyaging to stars, taking up again the hunt, that which gave meaning to man. But how, wondered Hamilton, could the hunters waken if they had not slept; one cannot attack the stars with ships of stone, and poles and logs; the world must change a thousand times before the fleets of steel ships could be built, before they could be launched for the systems of distant suns. It would be a contest between the hearth and the mountains, between barley and the call of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, Arcturus and the clouds of Andromeda. Turn their eyes to the stars, had said Herjellsen, who was mad, mad. Hamilton could do nothing. And Gunther, she feared, had gone mad, too. It was wrong to kill the Dirt People. They had not harmed him. The Men would not have injured them, though they would, in all likelihood, have avoided them, or, if they wished, taken their stock, or one or two of their women. The Weasel People, she recalled, fed on human flesh. She wondered if Gunther, in his hatred for diggers, had gone insane.