Shannach—the Last
Copyright© 2024 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 4
He had to drag Jen. Her face had gone utterly blank.
In the next minute he realized that they would never reach the rocks, and that there was no chance, none at all. Back from the winged whirl that was driving the humans, two of the hawks came darting at them.
Trevor swung Jen behind him and hoped fiercely that he could get another neck between his hands before they pulled him down.
The dark shadows flashed down. He could see the sun-stones glittering in their heads. They struck straight at him...
But at the last split second they swerved away.
Trevor waited. They came back again, very fast, but this time it was at Jen they struck, and not at him.
He got her behind him again in time. And once more the hawks checked their strike.
The truth dawned on Trevor. The hawks were deliberately refraining from hurting him.
“Whoever gives them their orders, the Korins or that Other, doesn’t want me hurt!”
He caught up Jen in his arms and started to run again toward the rocks.
Instantly the hawks struck at Jen. He could not swing her clear in time. Blood ran from the long claw-marks they left in her smooth, tanned shoulders.
Jen cried out. Trevor hesitated. He tried again for the rocks, and Jen moaned as a swift scaly head snapped at her neck.
So that’s it, Trevor thought furiously. I’m not to be hurt, but they can drive me through Jen.
And they could, too. He would never get Jen to the concealment of the rocks alive, with those two wide-winged shadows tearing at her. He had to go the way they wanted or they would leave her as they had left Hugh.
“All right!” Trevor yelled savagely at the circling demons. “Let her alone! I’ll go where you want.”
He turned, still carrying Jen, plodding after the other slaves who were being herded down the canyon.
All that day the black hawks drove the humans down the watercourse, around the shoulder of basalt and out onto the naked sun-seared lava bed. Some of them dropped and lay where they were, and no effort of the hawks could move them on again. Much of the time Trevor carried Jen. Part of the time he dragged her. For long vague periods he had no idea what he did.
He was in a daze in which only his hatred still was vivid, when he felt Jen pulled away from him. He struggled, and was held—and he looked up to see a ring of mounted men around him. Korins on their crested beasts, the sun-stones glittering in their brows.
They looked down at Trevor, curious, speculative, hostile, their otherwise undistinguished human faces made strangely evil and other-worldly by the winking stones.
“You come with us to the city,” one of them said curtly to Trevor. “That woman goes with the other slaves.”
Trevor glared up at him. “Why me, to the city?”
The Korin raised his riding whip threateningly. “Do as you’re ordered! Mount!”
Trevor saw that a slave had brought a saddled beast to him and was holding it, not looking either at him or the Korins.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”
He mounted and sat waiting, his eyes bright with the hatred that burned in him, bright as blown coals. They formed a circle around him and the leader gave a word. They galloped off toward the distant city.
Trevor must have dozed as he rode, for suddenly it was sunset, and they were approaching the city.
Seeing it as he had before, far off and with nothing to measure it against but the overtopping titan peaks, it had seemed no more than a city built of rock. Now he was close to it. Black shadows lay on it, and on the valley, but half way up the opposite mountain wall the light still blazed, reflected downward on the shallow sky, so that everything seemed to float in some curious dimension between night and day, Trevor stared, shut his eyes, and stared again.
The size was wrong.
He looked quickly at the Korins, with the eerie feeling that he might have shrunk to child-size as he slept. But they had not changed—at least, relative to himself. He turned back to the city, trying to force it into perspective.
It rose up starkly from the level plain. There was no gradual guttering out into suburbs, no softening down to garden villas or rows of cottages. It leaped up like a cliff and began, solemn, massive, squat, and ugly. The buildings were square, set stiffly along a square front. They were not tall. Most of them were only one story high. And yet Trevor felt dwarfed by them, as he had never felt dwarfed by the mightiest of Earth’s skyscrapers. It was an unnatural feeling, and one that made him curiously afraid.
There were no walls or gateways, no roads leading in. One minute the beasts padded on the grass of the open plain. The next, their claws were clicking on a stone pave and the buildings closed them in, hulking, graceless, looking sullen and forlorn in the shadowed light. There was no sound in them anywhere, no gleaming of lamps in the black embrasures of cavernous doors. The last furious glare of the hidden sun seeped down from the high peaks and stained their upper walls, and they were old—half as old, Trevor thought, as the peaks themselves.
It was the window embrasures, the doors, and the steps that led up to them that made Trevor understand suddenly what was wrong. And the latent fear that had been in him sprang to full growth. The city, and the buildings in it, the steps and the doors and the height of the windows, were perfectly in proportion, perfectly normal—if the people who lived there were twenty feet high.
He turned to the Korins. “You never built this place. Who built it?”
The one called Galt, who was nearest him, snarled, “Quiet, slave!”
Trevor looked at him, and at the other Korins. Something about their faces and the way they rode along the darkening empty street told him they too were afraid.
He said, “You, the Korins, the lordly demi-gods who ride about and send your hawks to hunt and slay—you’re more afraid of your master than the slaves are of you!”
They turned toward him pallid faces that burned with hatred.
He remembered how that other had gripped his brain back in the canyon. He remembered how it had felt. He understood many things now.
He asked, “How does it feel to be enslaved, Korins? Not just enslaved in body, but in mind and soul?”
Galt turned like a striking snake. But the blow never fell. The upraised hand with the heavy whip suddenly checked, and then sank down again. Only the eyes of the Korin glowed with a baleful helplessness under the winking sun-stone.
Trevor laughed without humor. “It wants me alive. I guess I’m safe, then. I guess I could tell you what I think of you. You’re still convicts, aren’t you? After three hundred years. No wonder you hate the slaves.”
Not the same convicts, of course. The sun-stones didn’t give longevity. Trevor knew how the Korins propagated, stealing women from among the slaves, keeping the male children and killing the female. He laughed again.
“It isn’t such a good life after all, is it, being a Korin? Even hunting and killing can’t take the taste out of your mouths. No wonder you hate the others! They’re enslaved, all right, but they’re not owned.”
They would have liked to kill him but they could not. They were forbidden. Trevor looked at them, in the last pale flicker of the afterglow. The jewels and the splendid harness, the bridles of the beasts heavy with gold, the weapons—they looked foolish now, like the paper crowns and glass beads that children deck themselves with when they pretend to be kings. These were not lords and masters. These were only little men, and slaves. And the sun-stones were a badge of shame.
The cavalcade passed on. Empty streets, empty houses with windows too high for human eyes to look through and steps too tall for human legs to climb. Full dark, and the first stunning crash of thunder, the first blaze of lightning between the cliffs. The mounts were hurrying now, almost galloping to beat the lightning and the scalding rain.
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