Robert Silverberg - At Winter's End

Not human. Not at all.

They were moving in a circle, around and around in a creepy shuffling way, pausing now and then to raise their snouts and sniff. Hresh could not understand the language they were speaking, but the meaning of their words rode clearly to him on his second sight:

“ Flesh — flesh — flesh — eat — eat — eat — eat flesh— ”

The rat-wolves are gathering in the valley, the hjjk-man had said. They will have your flesh, for you are flesh-folk, and they are very hungry. Koshmar had not seemed especially alarmed by that. Perhaps she had thought that the hjjk-man was lying; perhaps she thought there were no such creatures as rat-wolves at all. But what else could these snuffling shuffling bright-eyed long-toothed things be, if not the rat-wolves of whom the hjjk-man had tried to warn them?

Hresh turned and ran.

Around the jutting fangs of rock, past the low sandy hummocks, down into the dry lake bed — scrambling desperately in the dark, losing his basket of tinder in his haste, running as fast as he could back toward the campfire of the tribe. Strangenesses of the darkness assailed him. Something large with wings and bulbous greenish-gold eyes buzzed around his head. He slapped it away and kept running. A hundred paces farther on, another something that looked like three long black ropes side by side rose up before him, coiling and swaying in the cold faint starlight. Hresh darted to one side and did not look back.

Breathless, gasping, he rushed into the midst of camp.

“The rat-wolves!” he cried, pointing into the night. “The rat-wolves! I saw them!” And he went tumbling, exhausted, almost at the feet of Koshmar.

He feared that they would not believe him. He was only wild Hresh, troublesome Hresh, Hresh-full-of-questions, was he not? But for once they paid attention.

“Where were they?” Koshmar demanded. “How many? How big?”

Harruel began handing out spears to all but the smallest children. Thaggoran, squatting by the fire, aimed his sensing-organ out across the dry lake to read the rat-wolves’ emanations.

“They’re coming!” the old man called. “I feel them, heading this way!”

Koshmar, Torlyri, and Harruel, spears in hand, took up positions shoulder to shoulder at the western side of the camp. How magnificent they look, Hresh thought: the chieftain, the priestess, the great warrior. Nine more stood behind them, and then another row of nine, with the children and the childbearing women huddled in the middle.

He heard Koshmar invoking the Five Heavenly Ones, saw her making the Five Signs, and then the sign of Yissou the Protector over and over. He murmured a prayer to Yissou himself. Alone of his tribe he had seen the rat-wolves, their long snouts, their fiery little eyes, the sharp blades of their teeth.

There was a long timeless time when nothing happened. The warriors guarding the approach to the camp paced in tense circles. Hresh began to wonder if he had dreamed the rat-wolves out there in the dark. He wondered, too, how severely Koshmar would punish him if this proved to be a false alarm.

But then abruptly the enemy was upon them. Hresh heard terrible high-pitched chittering cries, and smelled a strange loathsome musky smell; and an instant later the camp was invaded.

“Yissou!” Koshmar bellowed. “Dawinno!”

The rat-wolves came bounding in from every side at once, screeching, leaping, snarling, flashing their teeth.

Women began to scream, and some of the men also. No one had ever seen animals like this, animals that lived on flesh and used their teeth as weapons. And no one had ever had to fight in this manner before, a true fight, not just a little social brawl among friends but a battle for life. It had been so easy in the cocoon, so sheltered. But they were not in the cocoon any longer.

The wolf-pack circled round and round as if seeking to find the weaker members of the tribe and cut them off. The sour smell of them was heavy on the air. By the flickering firelight Hresh saw their beady red eyes, their long naked sensing-organs, looking just as they had when he had seen them by second sight a little while before, but perhaps even more repellent. What ugly things, what monsters!

He shrank back toward the center of the group, holding the spear that Harruel had given him but not very sure what to do with it. Grasp it here, was that it? And thrust — upward? Let a rat-wolf come near him and he’d figure it out fast enough, he told himself.

The huge figure of Harruel was outlined against the darkness, thrusting, grunting, thrusting again. And there was Torlyri valiantly holding one rat-wolf at bay with robust kicks while skewering another on the tip of her spear. Lakkamai fought well, and Konya, and Staip. Salaman, who was not much older than Hresh himself, struck down two with two successive strokes of his weapon. Koshmar seemed to be everywhere at once, using not only the sharp end of her spear but its butt as well, ramming it with bloodthirsty joy into the toothy mouth of this wolf and that one. Hresh heard dreadful howling sounds. The rat-wolves were calling to one another in what could only be a sort of a language: “ Kill — kill — kill — flesh — flesh — flesh — ” And someone human was moaning in pain; and someone else was uttering a low whimpering sound of fear.

Then, as swiftly as it had begun, the battle seemed to be over.

Between one moment and the next all grew still. Harruel stood leaning on his spear, breathing hard, wiping at a runnel of blood that streamed from his thigh. Torlyri crouched on her knees, shivering in horror and saying the name of Mueri over and over. Koshmar, clutching her spear at the ready, was prowling about looking for more attackers, but there were none. Dead rat-wolves lay strewn all around, already stiffening, looking even more hideous in death than they had when living.

“Is anyone hurt?” Koshmar asked. “Answer when I call out your name. Thaggoran?”

There was silence.

“ Thaggoran? ” she repeated uneasily.

Still no answer came from Thaggoran. “Look for him,” Koshmar ordered Torlyri. “Harruel?”

“Yes.”

“Konya?”

“Konya here.”

“Staip?”

“Staip, yes.”

When it was Hresh’s turn, he could barely speak, so amazed was he by all that had occurred this evening. He managed to croak his name in a hoarse whisper.

Everyone was accounted for, in the end, except two — three, actually, for one of the dead was Valmud, a kindly if not overly intelligent young woman, one of the breeding couples; and she had been carrying an unborn. That was serious enough; but the other death was catastrophic.

It was Hresh who found him, lying sprawled in some straggly dead weeds just beyond the edge of the camp. Old Thaggoran had defended himself well. The wolf who had ripped out his throat lay beside him, eyes bulging, tongue black and swollen. The chronicler had strangled it even as he died.

Stunned and numbed, Hresh stared somberly at the dead man, unable even to cry. The loss was too great. He felt almost as if his own throat had been ripped out. After a time he managed a little dry choking sound, and then a sort of a sob. He could not move. He dared not even breathe. He wanted time to unhappen itself, this day to roll backward upon its foundations.

Finally he knelt and tremblingly touched the old man’s forehead, as if hoping that the knowledge that was packed so deeply behind it might leap from Thaggoran’s spirit to his at a touch, before Thaggoran had cooled. But Thaggoran’s spirit was gone.

It was beyond belief. Hresh had never known such a loss. His own father, Samnibolon, had been only a name to him, dead long ago. But this— this—

“Dawinno—” he began uncertainly.