John Norman (48 page)

But this would not come about for thousands of years. This was, and would remain for hundreds of generations, the time of the hunters. They were not yet dead. Gunther, Hamilton recalled, had conjectured, in a bare room in Rhodesia, under a dim light bulb, that perhaps the hunters were not dead; that perhaps they only slept, and might awake; Herjellsen had told her, Turn their eyes to the stars; but Herjellsen was mad; and she had not understood him. How could she turn their eyes to the stars; what could she do in such matters; she could do nothing; and why should man turn his eyes to the stars; the stars were far away; the journey was long and cold; Earth was the home of man; let him stay at home; let him be happy; there was much to do on Earth; one might always, sometime, look to the stars; do not think of the stars, for now. The hoe waits; the barley must be planted.

Hamilton recalled that the men of the Weasel People ate human flesh. She wondered if that was why the men of the Weasel People had killed so indiscriminately, to obtain food. It was a law of the Men that this not be done. This was one of the laws, Old Woman had told Hamilton, which had been made by Spear. He had made many laws. He was a giver of laws. Spear is a great man, had said Old Woman, though he had killed Drawer, whom Old Woman had loved, when he could no longer hunt, when he had grown blind and was old. But Hamilton did not think that the men of the Weasel People had killed so indiscriminately because they wished food. She had seen them. They had enjoyed themselves. It had given them pleasure. Hamilton supposed then that perhaps the men, her masters, though the thought made her shudder, were not too different. She supposed they, too, had their blood been aroused, in a similar situation, might have enjoyed killing, the ugly carnival of it, the sport; in all humans, she knew, there was a terribleness, the ecstasy of carnage, the joy of ferocity, the joy of the biting lion; but even then she did not think they, the Men, would have killed so indiscriminately, not the weak, the old, the females, for they were the Men; had they chosen to raid in the light, in a game of war, of intraspeciflc aggression, they might, she conjectured, have slain the males of the Dirt People had it pleased them to do so, had they offered resistance; but she thought rather they would prefer simply to make them grovel and while they knelt trembling, to tie their best women and take them away from them; it was not the killing that the Men would have wanted, for there was little honor in killing so miserable a foe, but the victory, the demonstration of their will, their dominance; “We are taking your women, and tying them and leading them away,” might have said Spear; “We want them and thus we are taking them.”; they would not have wanted the blood of the Dirt People, for they would have despised them, only their humiliation, and their best women; they would hate the Dirt People and would have, thus, enjoyed making their females their total slaves; and, too, Hamilton smiled to herself, and knew in the secret heart of her, the ancient heart, the heart in the blood of her, which had never been irradicated, not even by her studies or the civilization in which she had been raised, that the captive females, bound, led away, would have then, in spite of their superficial crying out, weeping, have experienced a strange, wild, surgent elation, knowing by the thongs that bound them that they were now the slave-brides of men mightier than those of their kind, that they were now, helpless, doomed to feel mighty arms about them, from which they could not escape, strong, rough hands on their pitching bodies, arrogantly forcing them to climax after climax; and that they would be forced to serve as rightless wenches; and would be forced, too, in time, to bear the children of their mighty masters, that the Men, that group, might increase and wax great. How eagerly, soon, in their thongs, being led to servitude and ravishment, they would have followed their masters, the hunters. Hamilton threw back her head and laughed. She knew herself, she, too, Hamilton, was a slave of the men. Her veneers of culture, the eroding crusts of her conditioning, the slimes, the sick varnishes, the cosmetics, the concealing, confining garments of an antigenetic, diseased civilization had been stripped from her. They had been stripped from her by a man called Tree, leaving her naked, and a female.

She closed her eyes, and felt the forest breeze on her body. She imagined returning to Tree, and the joy of being taken in his arms, and carried to the recesses of his cave, and being hurled to the furs in its shadows and him bending over her, and, first, swiftly, knotting about her neck the necklace of the Men, the thongs, claws and shells and then, that done, unhesitantly and ruthlessly inflicting the might, the power, of his will on her beauty; she smiled to herself, thinking, if only to prolong her pleasure, of trying to resist him; how amusing he would find that; then, when he tired of her game, he would force her to yield herself, regardless of her will, totally to him; he would rip from her what control he had, until then, permitted her to retain, and, in torrents of sensation, she would find herself then his shrieking prize, and nothing more. Hamilton stumbled. She was weak. She felt fevered. The diet and the exhaustion of the village of the Dirt People told upon her. Her eyes suddenly failed to focus. A strange smell came to her nostrils. She turned about, suddenly, startled. On the trail, behind her, some ten yards away, was a short, broad, squat, thick-legged shape. The eyes were large, the chin receding, the hair like greased string, black. It was a woman, a mature female, of the Ugly People. She carried a bone, a femur.

Hamilton backed away from her, her hand out. The woman did not approach her.

A large hand, immensely strong, closed on the back of Hamilton’s neck. It was like a vise. She felt the thumb and fingertips, like blunt gouges, deep in her neck; she could not move her head, or turn; the woman approached her; then she felt herself, a captive, turned about; she looked into the broad, heavy face of a male of the Ugly People; it was the first of the males of the species she had seen; the face was incredibly broad and swarthy, the eyes, black, large, set back, beneath heavy brows, the chin receding; the face, powerful, seemed, at once to her, simian and intelligent; it frightened her; he was short legged, round-shouldered, long armed; he was only five and a half feet in height but his body, not fat, was heavy and thick, heavy boned and deep chested; it weighed nearly three hundred pounds; he was not human; be was of the Ugly People; she whimpered; she felt herself, by the back of her neck, lifted from her feet, as a small, sleek animal might be lifted; the arm which lifted her was long, longer than that of a human, and much heavier; the bones within she knew could be as large as twice the width of the comparable human bone; a gorilla might have lifted her as did the male of the Ugly People; then he put her to her feet, bent partly over; he regarded her head, which had been shaved by the Dirt People, with interest. He turned to the woman and together they spoke. Hamilton would have found it difficult to repeat the sounds. It was swift, their speech, and it was not human. “Please,” wept Hamilton. Then he took her, by the back of the neck, to the side of the trail. He put her head down across a rock, holding it there. Her left cheek pressed hard against the rock; his left hand, by the back of the neck, held her in place. She saw the woman regarding her; too, she saw the face of the man regarding her. In their faces she saw disgust. “Please!” she wept. She understood, trembling, that they found her repulsive. In the right hand of the male was a stone ax, its head bound with leather, hafted in a stout shaft, a foot in length. “I will do anything,” she cried. “Don’t hurt me!” But she saw only disgust in their faces. “No!” she cried. “Please, no!” She wept. “I will serve your pleasure,” she cried. “I will lay for you! Turtle will kick for you!” She slipped from English to the language of the Men, both unintelligible to her captors. Sick, she realized that the one shield, her sex, her beauty, which might protect her from death at the hands of human males was now of no avail. The leopard had its claws, the hawk its wings, the deer its fleetness, the human male his strength, the human female her beauty; but the beauty of the human female was useless save against the masculine predators of her own species; it might disarm a human male, he being moved to keep her as his slave, should she beg piteously enough, and perform instinctual servile submission behaviors, tears, smiles, grovelings, mouth and hand caresses, rather than slaying her, but against a male of the Ugly People the very lineaments of her beauty, her slender, lovely legged, subtle voluptuousness, so different from that of his own females, she could see, produced only repulsion. “No!” she cried. “Please!” The ax lifted. Her head was pressed down on the rock; the huge hand held her by the neck; she could not move. “Please, no!” she cried. The head of the ax, in falling, with the strength of the male of the Ugly People, she knew, would dash through her skull, like a hammer through an egg, the stone striking even against the stone on which her head was held. “Please, no!” she wept. The ax, she knew, was at the height of its arc. “No!” she cried. “No!”

Suddenly, piercing, shrill, she heard, fierce, imperative, a cry. And a head thrust itself between her and the ax. She felt a girl’s arms about her. The ax lowered, slowly. The fingers of the great hand removed themselves from her neck. Hamilton felt Ugly Girl kiss her. “Ugly Girl,” she wept, then lost consciousness.

Hamilton opened her eyes. Her body stiffened, but she was held. She half lay, and was half sitting; Ugly Girl’s arm was about her shoulders, holding her up. She felt a gourd, broken, brimmed with water, held to her lips. She drank. She tried to pull away from Ugly Girl but could not do so. Ugly Girl, with the strength of her people, was much stronger than she. Then she drank again. Hamilton half lay, half sat, held by Ugly Girl, on a shelf of rock, on boughs. Hamilton moved her legs. She looked upon her ankles. They were free of leather capture shackles. Her hand went to her throat, half expecting to find a tether upon it. But she was not secured in any way. “Thank you,” she whispered to Ugly Girl, in the language of the Men. Ugly Girl grimaced, trying to imitate the smile of the Men. Ugly Girl withdrew the gourd, and withdrew her arm from about Hamilton. Hamilton drew her legs beneath her, on the shelf of rock. She was clothed. She wore a rough garment of crudely scraped skin, chewed and beaten. It covered her breasts, and body. The garment was too large for her, for the bodies of the women of the Ugly People are broader than those of the women of the Men; it was belted at the waist with a hide rope. On one of the short women of the Ugly People it would have fallen below the knees; on Hamilton, who was taller, it did not reach her knees.

Hamilton must have looked frightened, for Ugly Girl made soft clucking noises to her, to pacify her.

Hamilton looked out the wide mouth of the shallow cave. She could see brush, trees.

She could escape!

She reached out again for the gourd of water. Ugly Girl handed it to her, and, again Hamilton drank.

On the other side of the cave, squatting down, was the woman of the Ugly People. She was moving hide string through two pieces of leather, sewing. The large, widely set eyes looked up at Hamilton, curiously. Near her, standing against the other side of the cave, was a small boy, his head almost a fifth the size of his broad body; he was roundshouldered, long-armed; his jaw was receded; his hair had been cut with stone from his face; he might have been eight years of age.

He pointed at Hamilton, and said a word. Ugly Girl laughed. Hamilton felt uneasy.

The mother seemed to assent to what the boy had said. She, too, repeated the word, and looked down, smiling, to return to her sewing.

Hamilton tried to say the word. It was hard for her to pronounce.

Ugly Girl laughed at her miserable effort. It made Hamilton angry that Ugly Girl, in her stupidity, should laugh at one who was human.

Hamilton looked again to the wide mouth of the cave.

Her body, subtly, tensed. She was, concealing the intent, readying herself to dart for the opening. Ugly Girl, smiling, put her hand gently on Hamilton’s knee. She shook her head. Hamilton angrily brushed aside Ugly Girl’s hand. Then Hamilton looked away, as though to consider other parts of the cave. Ugly Girl stepped back. Hamilton swung her legs over the side of the shelf. Then, suddenly, Hamilton sprang to her feet and darted toward the opening. She stopped suddenly, almost losing her balance, some feet before the opening, for, at that moment, in the opening, appeared the short, broad frame of the male of the Ugly People. Hamilton, terrified, stepped back, retreating from him. In his hand he held the short ax, so mighty, yet more shortly handled than the axes of the Men. On his left shoulder, steadied there, by his left hand, was the body of a deer. He did not raise the ax against Hamilton, but regarded her, puzzled. Hamilton backed from him. Then, against her back, she felt the shelf of rock. But yesterday this brute, without a thought, save for the intercession of Ugly Girl, would have crushed her head between a rock and the blade of his ax. He looked at her. Hamilton approached him, submissively, looking down, and knelt before him, the monster, putting her head to the stone, desperate to pacify him, in her femaleness to make obeisance to the male in him, to be pleasing to him, to plead with him for her life. She, a human female, kissed the stone before the feet of the short, mighty male of the Ugly People. Then, timidly, trying to smile, she looked up. She was startled. He was regarding her, stupidly. The males of the Men, she knew, expected and demanded, thereby triggering and releasing, complete subservience behavior in their females; they produced stimulus situations in which her blood instincts had no choice but to bare themselves, detonating the fantastic psychophysiological reflex, or response, of female submission to the aggressive, mightier animal, the male. Cringing and smiling in a female, she knew, warded off male wrath; it indicated with her body that, if she should be spared, she would be his work object and his sexual pleasure-object. But the male of the Ugly People looked at her, puzzled. Then she realized that the males of the Ugly People did not relate to their females as did the males of the Men. They were of a different species. She rose to her feet, and backed away from him. He did not approach her. He looked to his own woman. Suddenly Hamilton felt contempt for him. He was a male. Yet he did not make her his slave. He could do so, if he wanted, but he did not do so. Hamilton felt emotions of both relief, for she did not wish to be the slave of the monster, and irritation, and frustration, for, triggered by fear, her slave reflex had not been satisfied. Too, suddenly, almost unaccountably in her mind, she despised the male of the Ugly People. He was strong, stronger even than most of the human males doubtless, but yet, too, so weak, so stupid. She saw, in his broad back, as he squatted near his woman, and threw the deer down to the floor of the cave, both weakness and strength. His woman rubbed her nose along the side of his neck, and he grunted and thrust his head to her shoulder. Hamilton stood back, her arms folded, her feet widely spread. She held the male of the Ugly People in contempt. She did not feel then he was a true male. He is weak, she thought. This kind will not survive. They are too weak to survive. The male, she thought, irritably, who does not make his female his slave, either cannot do so, and is a weakling, or is a fool. If I were a male, she thought, I would make my females slaves, the pretty, weak, lovely little things! Since when, in nature, does the strong not dominate the weak? Since the weak have crippled the strong, she told herself, thereby denying the strong their birthright, and, inadvertently, in the same act, to their own frustration, depriving themselves of theirs as well, the opportunity to join in that contest in which, in any normal situation, she will meet her defeat, that contest which, if truly carried out, must terminate with her conquest, her joyful, abject surrender to the will, the absolute domination, of the mightier animal, the male. She realized then that male dominance has little to do, directly, with physical strength, though it is customarily linked with it. An extremely strong man, physically, she recognized, could be, and sometimes was, a psychological weakling, emasculated and petty, unable to satisfy complete dimensions of a female’s nature; sometimes such men even prided themselves on this form of impotence; sometimes, Hamilton suspected, such men, out of hostility and spite, and self-hatred, and hatred for women, refused to recognize the desperate wants of their lovers, scorning them for the realities of their genetic nature; refusing to respond to the most obvious, most desperate and profound unspoken pleas; and should the woman repudiate her conditionings, cast aside her guilts, and, humiliating herself, shamelessly beg, “Dominate me!” such men, frightened, knowing themselves unable to fulfill her needs, might laugh at her, thus ventilating hysterical anxiety, or pretend not to understand, or look upon her strangely, and deny her, thus making her miserable, making her suffer, in a culturally approved form of sadism; the female is not, Hamilton conjectured, simply a physical organism, but a psychophysical organism, and her blood needs for submission to a male express themselves beautifully in the totality of her response, not only in the weakening of her body, its secretions, its heightened sensitivity, its helplessness, its readiness, but in her psychic vulnerability, helplessly willing, waiting for him to impress his will upon her, to command her; she is eager to be made a mere instrument of his pleasure, eager to be subjected to his will, eager to be ruthlessly, uncompromisingly, dominated, eager to be, should he have the courage, literally the slave girl of a master; and should she be fortunate, it is just that which, perhaps to a thrill of horror, she finds herself to be. Once Hamilton had attempted to make aggressive love to Tree. He had struck her, bringing blood to her mouth. “Lie still, and endure,” he had told her. “I will tell you when to touch and caress.” “Yes, Master,” she had whispered. Few men, Hamilton thought, are strong enough to satisfy the slave in a woman. Few women, she thought, though all wish to be stripped and subdued, are fortunate enough to find a Master. Across thousands of years, remote from her own time, in an age of peril and barbarism, she had found hers, a hunter called Tree.