Dave Duncan - West of January

Inasmuch as the chariot was like anything else I had ever known, it resembled the baskets in which my mother and aunts had gathered roots—wide and flat-bottomed, with sides sloping outward. But those baskets had been rectangular, and while the chariot was squared off at the back, in front it was pointed with a long pole protruding there, the bowsprit. The sharp front is of no great advantage on land, but it does help when the chariot floats on water. These were all things I was to learn much later, like mast as the name of the vertical pole in the middle.

The chariot swung suddenly up the slope on which I stood, slowed, and then turned aside before it reached me, stopping with a final squeal and sway. Silence returned. The angel was sitting by the mast, peering at me from under his wide-brimmed hat.

He bent from sight and then straightened up. “Catch!” he shouted. His throw was a poor effort, and the missile landed several steps short of me, but it was a leather water bottle. I almost forgot my pain as I lurched over to grab it. Nothing in the entire world could have been more welcome. Few things in my life have matched the joy of that drink. I spilled water over my chest in my eagerness. I almost choked. In that climate there was no such thing as cool water, of course, but I could feel the wet relief running down inside me, all the way to my stomach.

By the time I lowered the half-empty bottle, suddenly nauseated, the chariot’s sails had disappeared and the angel was climbing down clumsily at the back. Then he waddled over to me with a flat-footed rolling gait, wiping his red face with a grubby cloth. In his other hand he held a club, a wooden blade on a long, thin metal handle.

“Thank you, sir,” I croaked.

He scowled, looking me up and down. “You did that deliberately, didn’t you?”

“Did what, sir?”

“I was watching. I saw it notice you and then lose you. I thought you were safe. Then you started to run.”

“I thought it would find my family. I hoped to turn it.”

“You’re a brainless little bastard!”

“Yes sir.”

He grunted and turned to look back the way he had come. “Your cute little pet will be along shortly. Keep still again, and let’s hope it goes right by us.”

And if it didn’t? Would he hit it with his club? He seemed strangely unworried.

“You can’t outrun it, sir? In your chariot?”

“Shut up!”

As he spoke, the tyrant came into view around a distant bend in the valley. I froze. The ground began to throb below the great feet as the monster approached, growing larger with a terrifying swiftness. It came straight for us, as if it would pass between us and the chariot. From the corner of my eye I saw the fearsome silver head against the sky when it passed behind the mast. This was its closest approach yet. A rank, animal stench stung my nostrils. It moved beyond my sight, and I dared not turn my head to follow.

I remember watching the set of three colored ribbons streaming in the wind at the top of the mast and wondering why that sort of movement did not attract the monster. Either it could ignore wind motion somehow, or else it saw moving objects well enough to know that ribbons were of no interest to it. Once again I was not even daring to blink. The angel was motionless also, near me but out of my view. I stared at mast and distant sky, and I trembled.

The death tread stopped.

Silence. Only the wind…

Roar! The noise was so close that I jumped.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” my companion snarled. That broke the spell. The tyrant and I moved at the same time. I turned, and it was so close that I had to bend my head and look upward. It was spinning around, its beady eyes glaring down at us in triumph, the great jaws opening. I clearly remember the wet ropes of spittle hanging from them.

The angel raised his club to his shoulder, but backward—the wooden part against his shoulder, the long metal handle pointing up at the monster’s head. Thunder! Startled, I lost my balance on my bad knee and fell in a sprawl of agony. More thunder.

A moment after I hit the ground, so did the tyrant, and the whole world seemed to bounce.

The angel said, “Fornicating vermin!”

In great agonizing spasms, I threw up all the water I had just drunk.

“WHAT IN THE NAME OF HEAVEN am I going to do with you?” the angel demanded.

He was holding a bloody ax over one shoulder. Under his other arm he clutched the tyrant’s two foreclaws—curved, pointed murder, like shearing sickles…trophies. The rest of the vast carcass lay as the death throes had left it, so close that I could watch the insects settling on its eyes.

I was sitting on the earth, still close to my damp patch of vomit, barely mobile at all. The angel had laid a wet compress on each of my knees, had washed the worst of my scrapes, and given me a rag to make bandages. He had produced smoked woollie meat for me to eat, and I had drained the water bottle.

I was feeling shaky and light-headed, more like a small herder, or even a toddler, than a bold and predatory loner. The world was turning out to be a much tougher place than I had expected.

To the angel I was obviously an unwelcome complication. All the time while ministering to me, he had muttered angrily under his breath. It was very foul breath—he stank. Everyone did, of course, but his sweat smelled different. Now his face bore a ferocious scowl.

“You have been very kind, sir.”

He spat. “You insult a herdmaster in front of his women. You provoke tyrants. Now you have mashed your knee. Your life expectancy is not very high, stupid.”

“Sir?”

“Oh, shut up!” He stumped back over to the chariot and tossed the foreclaws up into it. He wiped the ax on the grass and threw it in also. Then he turned around and glared at me, spreading his feet, folding fringed sleeves over the round white-haired belly that bulged through the front of his unbuttoned jerkin.

“I was going to make sure you found a water hole. That was all. Not for your sake, you understand!”

“No sir?”

“Shut up!”

“Yes sir.”

“For your father’s sake… Then I saw the tyrant, and I decided to let it have you. It would have been a mercy. But you had the sense to keep still. And then you deliberately provoked it!” He glared in angry silence for a while. “Do you know how slim your chances are?”

I shook my head, not understanding any of that.

“About one loner in thirty lives long enough to make his kill. You have no herd, no bow…” He bared his yellow teeth. “And it’s hopeless anyway—the sun is coming.”

“Sir?” I glanced uneasily up at the sun.

“You’re almost into High Summer! Dry water holes…no grass…cactus…tyrants… An entire herd wouldn’t save you.” He shook his head in exasperation. “Stupid little herdboy doesn’t understand.”

“Sir? What did you do to kill the tyrant?”

Again that yellow-toothed snarl. He pointed. “That’s a gun. Only angels have them. That’s why people are nice to us.”

I had thought it was because angels helped people.

He was a strange man. I had very little experience with men, yet I could sense a deep rage in him. He was venting it on me, but I had done nothing to anger him.

“I suppose I could take you with me until we find a decent slough. Except that there aren’t any left around here.”

“No sir?”

“No sir! And I’m heading west. Every pee hole from here to the ocean has a herd around it—packed like flies on a dead roo. You’ll die for certain, anyway. Why should I bother with you?”

He was talking more to himself than me, but I said, “No reason.”