Her hands cooled his head, she tried to drag him out of range, but he lay gasping and telling her to leave him.
‘Stop!’ shouted a voice. The whole war seemed to give pause. ‘Retreat!’ commanded the voice swiftly. And as Sim watched, lying upon his side, his comrades turned and fled back toward home.
‘The sun is coming, our time is up!’ He saw their muscled backs, their moving, tensing, flickering legs go up and down.
The dead were left upon the field. The wounded cried for help. But there was no time for the wounded. There was only time for swift men to run the gauntlet home and, their lungs aching and raw with heated air, burst into their tunnels before the sun burnt and killed them.
The sun!
Sim saw another figure racing toward him. It was Chion! Lyte was helping Sim to his feet, whispering helpfully to him. ‘Can you walk?’ she asked. And he groaned and said, ‘I think so.’ ‘Walk then,’ she said. ‘Walk slowly, and then faster and faster. We’ll make it. Walk slowly, start carefully. We’ll make it. I know we will.’
Sim got to his feet, stood swaying. Chion raced up, a strange expression cutting lines in his cheeks, his eyes shining with battle. Pushing Lyte abruptly aside he seized upon a rock and dealt Sim a jolting blow upon his ankle that laid wide the flesh. All of this was done quite silently.
Now he stood back, still not speaking, grinning like an animal from the night mountains, his chest panting in and out, looking from the thing he had done, to Lyte, and back. He got his breath. ‘He’ll never make it.’ He nodded at Sim. ‘We’ll have to leave him here. Come along. Lyte.’
Lyte, like a cat-animal, sprang upon Chion, searching for his eyes, shrieking through her exposed, hard-pressed teeth. Her fingers stroked great bloody furrows down Chion’s arms and again, instantly, down his neck.
Chion, with an oath, sprang away from her. She hurled a rock at him. Grunting, he let it miss him, then ran off a few yards. ‘Fool!’ he cried, turning to scorn her. ‘Come along with me. Sim will be dead in a few minutes. Come along!’
Lyte turned her back on him. ‘I will go if you carry me.’
Chion’s face changed. His eyes lost their gleaming. ‘There is no time. We would both die if I carried you.’
Lyte looked through and beyond him. ‘Carry me, then, for that’s how I wish it to be.’
Without another word, glancing fearfully at the sun, Chion fled. His footsteps sped away and vanished from hearing. ‘May he fall and break his neck, whispered Lyte, savagely glaring at his form as it skirted a ravine. She returned to Sim. ‘Can you walk?’
Agonies of pain shot up his leg from the wounded ankle. He nodded ironically. ‘We could make it to the cave in two hours, walking. I have an idea, Lyte. Carry me.’ And he smiled with the grim joke.
She took his arm. ‘Nevertheless we’ll walk. Come.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re staying here.’
‘But why?’
‘We came to seek a home here. If we walk we will die. I would rather die here. How much time have we?’
Together they measured the sun. ‘A few minutes,’ she said, her voice flat and dull. She held close to him.
The black rocks of the cliff were paling into deep purples and browns as the sun began to flood the world.
What a fool he was! He should have stayed and worked with Dienc, and thought and dreamed.
With the sinews of his neck standing out defiantly he bellowed upward at the cliff holes.
‘Send me down one man to do battle!’
Silence. His voice echoed from the cliff. The air was warm.
‘It’s no use,’ said Lyte. ‘They’ll pay no attention.’
He shouted again. ‘Hear me!’ He stood with his weight on his good foot, his injured left leg throbbing and pulsating with pain. He shook a fist. ‘Send down a warrior who is no coward! I will not turn and run home! I have come to fight a fair fight! Send a man who will fight for the right to his cave! Him I will surely kill!’
More silence. A wave of heat passed over the land, receded.
‘Oh, surely,’ mocked Sim, hands on naked hips, head back, mouth wide, ‘surely there’s one among you not afraid to fight a cripple!’ Silence. ‘No?’ Silence.
‘Then I have miscalculated you. I’m wrong. I’ll stand here, then, until the sun shucks the flesh off my bone in black scraps, and call you the filthy names you deserve.’
He got an answer.
‘I do not like being called names,’ replied a man’s voice.
Sim leaned forward, forgetting his crippled foot.
A huge man appeared in a cave mouth on the third level.
‘Come down,’ urged Sim. ‘Come down, fat one, and kill me.’
The man scowled seriously at his opponent a moment, then lumbered slowly down the path, his hands empty of any weapons. Immediately every cave above clustered with heads. An audience for this drama.
The man approached Sim. ‘We will fight by the rules, if you know them.’
‘I’ll learn as we go,’ replied Sim.
This pleased the man and he looked at Sim warily, but not unkindly. ‘This much I will tell you,’ offered the man generously. ‘If you die, I will give your mate shelter and she will live as she pleases, because she is the wife of a good man.’
Sim nodded swiftly. ‘I am ready,’ he said.
‘The rules are simple. We do not touch each other, save with stones. The stones and the sun will do either of us in. Now is the time—’
VIII
A tip of the sun showed on the horizon. ‘My name is Nhoj,’ said Sim’s enemy, casually taking up a handful of pebbles and stones, weighing them. Sim did likewise. He was hungry. He had not eaten for many minutes. Hunger was the curse of this planet’s peoples—a perpetual demanding of empty stomachs for more, more food.
His blood flushed weakly, shot tinglingly through veins in jolting throbs of heat and pressure, his rib cage shoved out, went in, shoved out again, impatiently.
‘Now!’ roared the three hundred watchers from the cliffs. ‘Now!’ they clamored, the men and women and children balanced, in turmoil on the ledges. ‘Now! Begin!’
As if at a cue, the sun arose. It smote them a blow as with a flat, sizzling stone. The two men staggered under the molten impact, sweat broke from their naked thighs and loins, under their arms and on their faces was a glaze like fine glass.
Nhoj shifted his huge weight and looked at the sun as if in no hurry to fight. Then, silently, with no warning, he snapped out a pebble with a startling trigger-flick of thumb and forefinger. It caught Sim flat on the cheek, staggered him back, so that a rocket of unbearable pain climbed up his crippled foot and burst into nervous explosion at the pit of his stomach. He tasted blood from his bleeding cheek.
Nhoj moved serenely. Three more flicks of his magical hands and three tiny, seemingly harmless bits of stone flew like whistling birds. Each of them found a target, slammed it. The nerve centers of Sim’s body!
One hit his stomach so that ten hours’ eating almost slid up his throat. A second got his forehead, a third his neck. He collapsed to the boiling sand. His knee made a wrenching sound on the hard earth. His face was colorless and his eyes, squeezed tight, were pushing tears out from the hot, quivering lids. But even as he had fallen he had let loose, with wild force, his handful of stones!
The stones purred in the air. One of them, and only one, struck Nhoj. Upon the left eyeball. Nhoj moaned and laid his hands in the next instant to his shattered eye.
Sim choked out a bitter, sighing laugh. This much triumph he had.
The eye of his opponent. It would give him…Time, Oh, Gods, he thought, his stomach retching sickly, fighting for breath, this is a world of Time. Give me a little more, just a trifle!
Nhoj, one-eyed, weaving with pain, pelted the writhing body of Sim, but his aim was off now, the stones flew to one side or if they struck at all they were weak and spent and lifeless.
Sim forced himself half erect. From the corners of his eyes he saw Lyte, waiting, staring at him, her lips breathing words of encouragement and hope. He was bathed in sweat, as if a rain spray had showered him down.
The sun was now fully over the horizon. You could smell it. Stones glinted like mirrors, the sand began to roil and bubble. Illusions sprang up everywhere in the valley. Instead of one warrior Nhoj he was confronted by a dozen, each in an upright position, preparing to launch another missile. A dozen irregular warriors who shimmered in the golden menace of day, like bronze gongs smitten, quivered in one vision!
Sim was breathing desperately. His nostrils flared and sucked and his mouth drank thirstily of flame instead of oxygen. His lungs took fire like silk torches and his body was consumed. The sweat spilled from his pores to be instantly evaporated.
He felt himself shriveling, shriveling in on himself, he imagined himself looking like his father, old, sunken, slight, withered! Where was the sand? Could he move? Yes. The world wriggled under him, but now he was on his feet.
There would be no more fighting.
A murmur from the cliff told this. The sunburnt faces of the high audience gaped and jeered and shouted encouragement to their warrior. ‘Stand
