John Norman (22 page)

They were like great beasts that must be broken, or killed, that there might be the triumph of mildness, the victory of plows and religion, of fears and superstition, of complacency, of contentment, of smallness, and being afraid and mediocrity, and keeping in one’s place and being polite, of camouflage and invisibility, of passionless comraderie, of achieving prescribed adjustment, of smiling normality, and being safe, and indistinguishable from others, and quiet, and then dying.

She looked upon him.

He was not such a man.

Tree did not try to speak further to her. He sat across from her, observing her.

“Please do not hurt me,” said Brenda Hamilton to him. She knew it was foolish to try to speak to him, but she could not stand the silence, his watching her. In the group, men and women often looked at one another, sometimes for minutes at a time, simply seeing one another. In Hamilton’s time men and women looked at one another, but they seldom saw one another. There is a great difference. Hamilton was uneasy, and wanted to cry out. She had never, in this way, been seen.

In his eyes, and the carriage of his head, and body, the subtle movements of his face, Hamilton sensed, even though he was a gross savage, little more than an animal, great intelligence. She sensed, somehow, looking at him, that his intelligence was far greater than hers, or perhaps even Gunther’s, or Herjellsen’s, in spite of the fact that, doubtless, he could not read nor write, in spite of the fact that he must be little more than a primeval barbarian, ignorant, uncouth, illiterate. And in looking at him she understood sharply, with devastating force, for the first time, the clear distinction between learning and intelligence. He could not be learned, certainly not in the senses in which she understood that word, but she knew, and felt, looking upon him, that he was of incredible intelligence.

But his hands, too, seemed strong and cunning, supple and powerful, like the rest of his body.

It startled her to find, conjoined with intelligence, such strength and power, such size, such supple muscularity. The mighty brain she sensed had in such a body its mighty throne.

He seemed one thing to her, though, not a brain and a body, but one thing, somehow, a complete, and magnificent animal, whole, no part of him questioning or despising another part, not divided against himself, not diverted into attacking himself, not set at war with himself. There was no war here between this man’s brain, and his glands, and blood, no more than between the left hand and the right hand, no more than between the beating of the heart and the breathing of the lungs. In him Brenda Hamilton sensed a terrifying unity, as simple as that of the lion or leopard. In his eyes she read power and intelligence, and lust and cruelty, and the desire for her body, and she read these things not as furtive glimmers but as a snared hind might read them in the eyes of the tiger, sinuously approaching, preparing to feed.

“Don’t hurt me!” she begged.

Tree had not moved. He had not yet seen her, as he wanted to see her. When he had seen her, and wanted to, then he would move.

Hamilton turned her head away from him. She could not bear to look at him. She could not meet his eyes.

She knew now why civilization had no option but to break or destroy such creatures.

It had no place for them. It had no place for hunters. It needed diggers, not hunters.

Such a man, she knew, would never dig. There would always be another mountain, another horizon.

He would never make a civilization. It did not interest him.

Others would make a civilization, and breed in their hundreds, and thousands, and then millions, and the world of the hunters would be smothered, and the planet would be covered, and crowded, with the diggers. The giant cheetah would be extinct; the mammoth would no longer roam; the steppes would no longer shake to the charge of the wooly rhinoceros; and where the horses had run there would triumph the fumes of the internal combustion engine; the cave lion would be dead, and the cave bear, and there would be no striking of flints and hunting salt, for the hunters, too, like the lion and the bear, would have gone.

But Gunther had said that the hunters might not be dead, but only sleeping.

And Herjellsen had said to her, “Turn their eyes to the stars.”

“There is nothing more to hunt,” Hamilton had told Gunther.

“There are the stars,” had said Gunther.

Hamilton again looked at Tree.

The hunters would rule the world for thousands of years, and the diggers, perhaps, for little more than some dozens of centuries.

The longer triumph would be that of the hunters, and the beasts.

And they might not wish to share the digger’s world.

But Gunther had said that the hunters might not be dead, but only sleeping.

“There is nothing more to hunt,” Hamilton had told Gunther.

“There are the stars,” had said Gunther.

“Turn their eyes to the stars,” had said Herjellsen.

But Herjellsen was mad, mad!

Tree had decided that he would not, this day, take the white-skinned slave girl to the camp. He would take her to the camp tomorrow. He had never seen a woman like this. He did not wish, immediately, to share her with the others. For the time he would keep her for himself.

He looked at her. Her wrists were bound behind her back. She was sitting, with her knees bent. She seemed very much afraid of him. His rope, knotted about her neck, tethered her to a tree.

He was hungry. From his pouch he took a strip of dried meat, antelope meat, and chewed it.

He did not offer the slave any.

He was puzzled. She did not lie before him and lift her body. She did not beg meat. Perhaps she was not hungry. It did not occur to Tree that she did not know how to beg meat. He thought all women knew how to beg meat.

“Please,” she said. “I am hungry.”

He swallowed the meat. Then he got up to look about, for three suitable roots.

“What are you going to do?” asked Brenda Hamilton.

He found three roots, of the sort he wished, sturdy, properly placed. From two, he scooped out dirt beneath them, exposing them. The third was already fully exposed. They formed the points of an isosceles triangle, whose longer sides were something over a yard in length.

He then returned to Brenda Hamilton, and regarded her. She was filthy, from when she had been caught, tied, turned and raped in the mud.

Tree untied the rope from the tree and, approaching her, coiled it in his hand. When he stood over her he pulled her to her feet by the end which was still knotted about her throat.

“He is taking me to his camp,” thought Brenda Hamilton.

She followed Tree, his hand holding the rope, about a foot from her throat.

At a stream he stopped and tied the rope about a small tree.

He then, to her surprise, untied her wrists. He then, with a gesture, ordered her to the center of the stream. She stood there, shuddering in the cold water, it swirling about her waist. She looked at Tree. Her neck was tethered to a small tree on the bank.

He, making scooping motions with his hands, and rubbing his body, instructed her to wash herself.

She stood there, looking at him.

I Tree wondered if she were stupid. Then he would wash her. He waded toward her.

“No!” she cried. “I will do it!”

Although the water was cold, Brenda Hamilton cleansed her body, and hair.

It pleased her to do so. She washed the dirt from her body. She washed, too, the blood from her leg.

She thought how ironic it was, the concern of Gunther and Herjellsen, and William, for her precious virginity. It had meant nothing. They could not have known, of course. She had lost it. Lost? She smiled to herself. It had been ripped from her. She stole a glance at the bronzed giant sitting on the bank, watching her. She had scarcely seen him before she had been caught, hurled to her belly and bound helplessly, then turned on her back. She had looked into his eyes, had been startled, had cried out with astonishment, seeing the magnificence of the creature that had caught her. Then, within the minute, that virginity which she had hoarded, protected and prized, and had hitherto been willing to surrender only to Gunther, had been, she helpless, unable to resist, torn from her. When Tree had caught her, she had been a girl; when he had pulled her, bent over, by the hair to his accouterments, she was a woman. She looked again at Tree. She was not sorry that it had been he, not asking, predatory, arrogant, insolent, her captor, like an animal, who had torn her virginity from her. She was pleased that she had not been invited to surrender it, or bestow it on some nice fellow as a gift; she could scarcely admit the thought to herself but she was pleased to have lost it as she had; she had not had to beg him to take her virginity, as she had Gunther; he had simply wanted her, and taken it; startled, protesting, shocked, suddenly she had found herself a captive; she had been powerfully desired; her virginity, at his will, by storm, had been removed from her. She looked once more at Tree. She was not displeased that it had been a man such as he. How many women, she wondered, could boast that they had inspired such a desire in such a man as he. But she again looked at him. But he might have taken any woman in such a way, she told herself. Any other woman he had fallen in with, she told herself, might have suffered the same fate. And she knew this was true, but still she was much pleased that on this signal occasion, when first her body was forced completely, to serve a man, that the man had been such as he. To her horror, and pleasure, she realized she would not have wanted it otherwise. It bad been, for her, a fantastic experience. Yet he had hurt her, and she feared him.

“He is having me clean myself,” she said to herself, “to take me to his camp, to show me to his people.”

Doubtless they would be thrilled to see her.

She felt the leather leash pull on her neck and she stumbled through the water, toward him.

Tree was not fastidious, but he did not wish the female, whom he intended to enjoy, covered with dirt. He did not wish grit between his strength and her smoothness. Too, he was curious about the whiteness of her skin, and wished to see it more clearly. Too, he was learning the female, and he wished, when he had her in his hands, to experience her sweat, her secretions, her odors, freshly broken from her body. A rich dimension of Tree’s world was that of scent, which, to modern man would become largely a lost avenue of experience. Brenda Hamilton did not know it but her scent, to those of the Men, was as distinctive as a fingerprint, as individual as the lineaments of her face. Any of the Men, once smelling her, could, even in the darkness of a cave, even if she huddled among other women, find her, put their hands upon her, and pull her out from the others.

Brenda Hamilton saw that her master had already untied the rope from the small tree by the bank.

The rope was looped twice in his hand. He did not retie her hands. He turned about and went back to the place where he had left his accouterments.

She followed him, docile, tethered.

She expected to be led to his camp.

But when he reached his accouterments, be motioned for her to sit down, within the isosceles triangle he had formed of roots, facing the two exposed roots which formed the limits of its base.

She did so puzzled.

Suddenly he took her wrists and bound them together again, behind her back, tightly, but this time ran the rawhide twice, too, under the exposed root. She was tied half back; she could not sit upright.

She realized then that she was not to be taken immediately to his camp. He had other plans for her.

She struggled.

He removed the rope from her neck and tied it about her right ankle. He then ran the rope from her right ankle under the exposed root at her right, that forming the right termination of the base of the triangle. He then took the rope up and through the exposed root to which her wrists were tied, and brought it down to and under that root which formed the termination of the left side of the triangle’s base. He then tied it securely about her left ankle.

“You beast,” she hissed.

Old Woman had taught him the tie. The girl is tied down by the wrists, yet able to half rear to a sitting position. If her right leg is extended her left knee is sharply bent; if her left leg is extended her right knee is sharply bent; if tensions are equal, both knees are slightly bent. She cannot, in either case, because of the roots, close her legs. She remains deliciously, vulnerably, open to her captor. The tie, by intention, permits her to struggle, but the limits on such movements are so strict, their extent so precisely regulated, that the result of her movements induces in her, almost immediately, as a psychological consequence, a feeling of being trapped, of complete inability to escape, of utter helplessness.

“Beast!” cried Brenda Hamilton. “Beast!”

She struggled to sit up. She realized now she had been forced to wash herself not to be presented to his camp, as a rich prize, but simply that her body would be more pleasing to him. She jerked at the bonds; she moved her legs. She lay back, and moaned. She felt herself being lifted for his penetration.

“I cannot escape,” she thought to herself. “I cannot escape!”

“Please don’t hurt me,” she begged him. “Please don’t hurt me!”

She remembered the pain, and closed her eyes, tensing herself, but this time there was no cutting pain, no sharp pain, no tearing of her softness. Her body’s resistance had been ruptured. Never again could it oppose itself to a man. She put her head to one side. She was now only another opened woman, no different from any other, once again being used. She felt his manhood, urgent and vital, and gasped as her body, in a shameless spasm, a reflex, closed about him, and he cried out with a sound of animal pleasure that thrilled the womanhood of her to the quick, and then her body was struck by his ten to a dozen times, causing her to lose her breath, almost tearing her from the rawhide bonds, and then, so quick, he had pulled away from her, and stood up, looking down on her, wiping sweat from his upper lip. She looked up at him angrily, fighting for breath. He had finished with her too soon. She felt unsatisfied, cheated. Now, too, she became aware of a soreness, irritation from her earlier penetration.