Dave Duncan - West of January

I suppose he died mostly from thirst. He could hear and see the stream, but the slightest movement would bring needle claws slashing down. He did do some crawling, at the cost of much skin and blood, but when he neared the water itself the panther took him by the ankle and dragged him back to where he started. We knew he was dead when it began to eat him, and after that there was no more talk of mass breakouts.

I remember when I first realized that I also had gone mad. I was lying under one of the filthy hides, being cooked, trying to go back to sleep. Unfortunately some herdman had lain down alongside me and was croaking psalms to his Heavenly Father. I could hear him and even smell him, but I was too exhausted to move away.

“Shut up!” I muttered, not raising my voice in case I woke myself completely.

He did not hear me and would not have reacted if he had. I reluctantly cracked open one eye and saw enough of a blood-caked furry leg to recognize Koothik. By then he was mad as a mating bogmoth, uncomprehending, needing constant clawings to make him heed orders. He wailed on, in a hoarse monotone.

“Idiot!” I said. “Your god isn’t listening. Try another for a change.” There were many gods worshipped in the slave compound—gods hidden in rocks and trees, gods of air and water, wood and bone, many gods.

“If your god cared,” I said crossly, “then he would not let this happen to you!” Koothik was no older than I was, but twice my size, a shaggy young giant picked up by traders when he was a loner, or perhaps sold to them by his father. “You haven’t done anything to deserve this,” I told him, still prone under my cover, the earth gritting against my cheek as I spoke. “You should be lounging in a comfortable tent, counting your daughters, tended by adoring women, lots of them.” That was the life he had been raised for.

Koothik, of course, neither heard nor replied.

Then I had an inspiration. I raised my head and checked around, but there was no one else within earshot. “I’ll tell you something, Koothik,” I said. “A big secret.”

Koothik’s mind was not there to hear, but I told the rest of him. “He can’t hear, Koothik! Our Father lives above the grasslands, and he can’t hear us from here. But I’m going to go back to the grasslands and I’ll tell him what’s happening to his children. Then he’ll throw thunderbolts and stop it! Then he’ll help us!”

Koothik uttered thanks for grass and wool…

“It’s wrong to treat men like woollies,” I explained carefully, lying flat again. “But I have a plan, Koothik! No use praying here, Koothik! I shall go back to the grasslands and pray to the Father, and he will hear me there and then come and rescue us all!”

Now I can detect certain logical weaknesses in that plan, but then it seemed very reasonable, and very comforting. And yet somehow I knew it for the insanity it was.

I turned over, but I was too excited to sleep. I decided I had been foolish to blurt out my plan to Koothik. He might tell the ants, and they would be frightened and kill me. I decided to tell no one else about my plan.

NOT LONG AFTER THAT, I met Hrarrh. Again I was stretched out on the hot clay of the paddock, just drifting off to sleep. This time my cover was pulled away—a not uncommon event. I decided to resist. I was thoroughly exhausted after a hard shift in a place called the Canyon, where the slaves worked in couples and the supervisor could watch us all the time. The woman running me then was the worst in the mine, worse than almost any of the men. She had paired me with an inadequate adolescent, forcing me to do more than my share. I felt as if I had earned that cover, although all a slave could earn by any effort was temporary freedom from pain.

I sat up and jerked the leather back again. Technically this was fighting, and someone would be watching to see who won the exchange. Too many wins would bring a mauling, but I was one of the best workers, so I could hope to get away with minor offenses once in a while.

Adjusting the stinking hide over myself once more, I glared challengingly at the would-be thief lying facedown on the dirt at my side. Then I looked again. He was barely more than a boy, still round with puppy fat, and he had the worst case of sunburn I had ever seen. His back was a marshland of water blisters, and his shoulders were cooked meat. Every part of him was red and peeling. By pulling off the cover, I had hurt him. His eyes were screwed up in pain.

“Maybe you do need this more than I do,” I said, feeling guilty. “Let me wet it for you.”

I clambered to my feet, limped across to the stream, and soaked the hide. Then I returned and spread it over him.

I flopped down at his side. “You won’t mind if I tuck my head under the corner? I’m Knobil.”

He scowled at me and said his name. It sounded like a cat snarl, and “Hrarrh” was the closest I could ever come to it. He had only a hint of mustache, but his shoulders were broad, and already his scalp was balding. Sunburn meant pale skin.

“You’re an ant!”

He opened his eyes again to glare. “A miner!”

“Beg your pardon! But it looks like you’re a slave now.” I had not seen him before. He was not of this tribe.

He nodded faintly and closed his eyes again. I put my head under the edge of the cover, for that made sleep a little easier. We spoke no more.

When I awoke, he was sitting with the cover draped over him, trying to shade himself. His burns had bled a lot, and I decided that he was dying. A man can lose only so much skin. He was rigid with pain.

“Did they raid your nest?” I was recalling what Orange had said.

He nodded his head without bothering to look me. “Prospecting parties—but we killed three of theirs.” He bared his teeth in satisfaction.

“And they took away your clothes?”

“Of course.” He seemed to find that deliberate cruelty quite reasonable.

When the bosses came to round up their gangs, Hrarrh knew what was expected of him. He lined up with the rest of us, looking surly. He was obviously too badly injured to work, but newcomers were normally given time to heal.

Slaves never learned any of the ants’ names. We addressed every one as “master” or “mistress,” and referred to them among ourselves by the names of their cats. At that time the slave master was a fat, rather tall man with gray in his beard and a face even flatter than most. He walked with a limp and was shadowed always by one of the largest panthers in the settlement, Whisper. Now he curled his bushy mustache at the new boy. “You’re excused, cat food!”

Hrarrh fell on his raw knees, touched his face to the man’s boots, and said loudly, “Master, I humbly beg permission to work in the mine!”

Any backtalk was cause for immediate mutilation, but the leader was obviously nonplussed by this insane request.

“You’re dying, dross!”

Still speaking to the man’s feet, Hrarrh said, “Then let me die working at the face, master, I beg you! Please! Please!”

The leader glanced at the gang bosses. They shrugged and grinned.

“I’d have to let Whisper clean you up first,” he said. That brought wider grins from the ants and made me shiver. The pain of the rough tongue and corrosive saliva on so much raw flesh would be unendurable torment.

“Thank you, master!” Hrarrh at once sat up, leaned back on his heels, spread his arms, and lifted his chin. He waited with eyes closed and teeth clenched.

The big cat glided forward at its master’s signal. Hrarrh flinched when the tongue first touched him, then remained motionless while the washing continued. The whole paddock, slaves and masters alike, watched this incredible display of endurance with something like awe, waiting for the screams to start—but they did not. How the boy remained conscious and sane and even silent, I could not imagine. It must have felt like a swim in boiling water. Sweat streamed down his face. He shivered convulsively with the effort, but otherwise his only motion was a steady jerking of his juvenile adam’s apple.