| Go Down Killing |
| I found one of them later in the day, lying on the bare rock unconscious. His dog, a skinny beast of black and white, a worthless debasement of the wolf its forefather, lay beside him licking his face. The brute growled at me when I landed but stayed with its master, controlling its fear. I spoke to it in the dog-tongue, more a skeletal set of sound symbols than a language. �Go,� I said. �Leave master, ask help. Help come, master safe.� The dog ignored me but for sidelong glances from the tail of its eye and resumed its licking. As I watched, the man stirred and opened his eyes � and recoiled in fear at the sight of me. I switched to man-speak, a thing I never like to do. If you are not careful with it, it wriggles away from meaning and taints the tongue like rotting meat. �I will not harm you,� I told him. �You may go your way. Tell your fellows that if they leave us alone, we will do the same for them, as it was in times past. Perhaps we can never be friends but let us live in peace.� His mouth was opened wide, revealing the rotted stumps of teeth. Truly, without the cold iron a man is a shoddy piece of work. I flew then without giving him the chance to reply, not that he showed any sign of wanting to. I flew back to our cave, mine and Alfaxa�s, and spent a last night with my head resting on her dead shoulder. They came for me at dawn and this time I was ready for them. I controlled my breathing, slept lightly and kept my fire as close to full power as is compatible with sleeping at all. From the foot of the mountain I heard them coming and was wide awake on the instant. I did not need to tax myself with the question of whether they were coming in peace or in hoped-for conquest: I heard their voices and knew that the chance of peace was gone forever. Even so when the first archers appeared in the cave mouth I still had the choice of rushing them as before or incinerating them where they stood and some part of me, perhaps the part that brought me back to Afraxa�s stiffened corpse, made me hesitate. I feigned sleep and looked at them through a crack in my heavy eyelids. Either they were over-confident from their previous victory or just plain arrogant as is the way with men, for they did not loose their arrows at once. The man I had spared on the mountainside was one of them, and when I saw his face, the face of one I could have killed as easily as a spring lamb with no mother, the one to whom I had made an offer of peace in all good faith but who nevertheless had decided that I, I, was the one who must be killed, the decision was made, then and for always. I gave them just enough of the fire so that their living bodies turned to smoking stumps and remained upright for a few seconds before they toppled. If their comrades thought they were going to escape down the mountain as I had allowed them to do before, they were mistaken. I hunted them down, every one,and burned them to sticky ashes which defiled the morning sunlight. And I enjoyed the hunting. |
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