By Tooth and Claw Read online

  * * *

  Njekwa pointed to a low rise in the shoreline perhaps two hundred yards to the south. “Tell them to gather there. Away from the army, and close to the beach.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Zilikazi

  Like snakes, the sea lizards devoured their prey whole. Their jaws were double-hinged and their skulls were flexible, allowing them to swallow very large animals. If the prey was too large, though, they were faced with something of a problem. Unlike sharks, their teeth were not well-suited to biting off pieces of flesh. The teeth of the lizards were conical, not serrated. The points were sharp, certainly, but they had no cutting edges.

  So, when attacking prey too large to swallow whole, they use a crude and simple method. They bit down—hard—and then lashed their long and sinuous bodies, using their immensely powerful tail muscles.

  Just to see what might happen, as it were.

  What usually happened was that the prey started coming apart.

  * * *

  In this case, Zilikazi’s raft didn’t—quite—start disintegrating. The logs used to make up his raft had been among the biggest; the ropes used to tie them together had been among the best; and the knots had been well designed and well made throughout.

  So, the raft held together when the huge sea lizard clamped down and lashed its body. But the raft was crammed with warriors and it was jolted so hard that fourteen of them were flung completely into the sea and another six barely managed to hang on to the sides of the raft when they went into the water.

  The huge lizard relinquished her mouth’s grip and circled for another bite, still intent on the raft itself.

  Others, however, went after what looked like easier targets. Whatever these things were wriggling and thrashing on the surface.

  Within ten seconds, five lizards had come to the same conclusion.

  This is food!

  It didn’t take even that many seconds for the smell of blood—lots of blood—to transmit that information to twice as many lizards, and within a few more minutes any lizard in the strait knew that a feeding frenzy was underway.

  * * *

  All but one of the warriors who’d managed to hold on to the raft got back aboard before lizards could take them down. But, of the fourteen who went into the sea, only five managed to swim back and climb aboard to safety.

  Such as it was—briefly.

  The second bite-and-lash of the biggest of the lizards began disintegrating the raft. Almost at the same time as she relinquished that bite, two more lizards had taken bites on the opposite side of the raft.

  That side began disintegrating. Twenty-two more warriors had gone into the sea.

  A few seconds later, the big female who’d begun the attack got her first meal of the day. She’d left off going at the raft in favor of something wriggling closer and much easier to swallow.

  Her first meal—but by no means her last. Like most large carnivores, the sea lizards were firmly devoted to gorging.

  * * *

  Zilikazi had managed to keep from being thrown off the raft by holding desperately onto the pole he’d had fixed near the front of the raft to hold up his banner. So, he had time—he certainly had the rage and fear—to bring down a wave of sheer mental force and fury onto the creature he knew was responsible. That hateful tekkutu—oh, yes, he recognized his psychic stench! he was the one who’d inflicted so much grief on the army in the mountains—who was the cause of this horror.

  Zilikazi could slay anyone outright when he applied that much power, so long as he could find and latch onto his mind. Which, he finally could. He could now see his tormentor, for the first time. The tekkutu standing at the very edge of his own raft.

  The wave came down, like a mallet striking an insect.

  Sebetwe

  Sebetwe felt the blow, certainly. But only in the way someone feels a blow when he’s wearing thick, padded armor—and the blow itself is delivered using a padded club. Great pressure, but almost no pain. A powerful jolt, but not a sharp one. It felt more like being suddenly pushed by someone than being hit with a weapon.

  A very big someone, true. But not big enough—not when Sebetwe had such sure and certain footing.

  He was farther into Bekezel’s mind than he’d ever been before; almost communing with the Sure One, insofar as “communing” was a term that could be applied to a consciousness that had neither language nor abstract ideas. It was a mind that had no filters between itself and its environment, because it needed none. It was simply too huge, too powerful, too well-protected to need screens between itself and what it saw, and felt, and tasted, and smelled, and heard. Why bother interpreting reality when it was so engrossing in itself.

  Deep inside that mind, with that mind as his shield and armor, Sebetwe was simply impervious to anything Zilikazi or his ilk could ever do. And his shield and armor were more than great enough to shelter everyone near him as well.

  Zilikazi

  If Zilikazi had been in full possession of his wits, if he’d had the time to ponder and contemplate the problem, he might have eventually come up with a way to insinuate his mental strength past Sebetwe’s protection, in the way a skilled warrior might slip a blade between joints in a suit of armor.

  But he had no time to ponder anything and he was not in possession of his wits. He was in a panic, his mind a chaotic swirl. Having no experience with such a state of abject terror, he was hysterical. The blows he lashed out were furious but completely wild.

  Within half a minute of the first lizard attack, those wild mental blows had killed six of his own warriors. That wasn’t his intent, of course. But just as a fighter who’s lost his bearing in a battle strikes out at anything that moves—not knowing who he struck, and not caring, either—so did Zilikazi.

  The blows against the tekkutu on the raft in the distance were somehow simply being shed by the hideous creature. So, his terrified rage thwarted in that direction, Zilikazi struck at targets he thought he could reach.

  He struck at the lizards first—or tried to. But he had neither knowledge nor understanding of tekku. He tried to strike down giant animal predators in the same way he struck down intelligent beings.

  All he accomplished was to drive the monsters into an even more furious frenzy. Three more bit the raft and lashed it; a third of it fell away, the logs separating into small clumps. Dozens of warriors were now in the water, being devoured by lizards.

  One lizard—a very large one, if not quite as large as the one who’d begun the attack—came up under the raft, smashing its snout right through the deck before it fell back.

  The lizards had begun attacking other rafts as well. The entire armada except the lead raft bearing Zilikazi was now desperately trying to return to the beach from which they’d launched.

  They were aided by the waves, but impeded by the current, which in this part of the strait seem to run parallel to the shore. They were also impeded, needless to say, by the lizards attacking them.

  Perhaps their greatest impediment, though, was their ruling lord. Seeing them abandoning him, Zilikazi’s fury lost whatever coherence it might have still retained.

  The traitors! They’re dared to defy him? He was their master!

  All the tremendous force of his mind came down on the traitors. They would obey him and return.

  He might even have succeeded, so great was his power. But he had no time left.

  Another lizard smashed into the raft from below and the vessel finally disintegrated completely. Still clutching the flagpole with its bright banner, Zilikazi went into the sea.

  Fury finally vanished. All that was left was terror.

  Njekwa

  “Hurry! Hurry!” The priestess was almost running herself. At least a thousand people were gathering on the rise. Many of them she recognized as adherents, but many others were not.

  Who were they? Most looked to be females and younglings, but there were at least half a hundred warriors in their midst. Looking back as she hurried, Njekwa c
ould see that many more warriors were beginning to drift away from the clusters on the beach.

  None of the noble-lineage officers who were starting to gather little armies around themselves were very powerful. For sure and certain, not one of them would be powerful enough to impose his will on all those who contended against him.

  So, confusion swirled; doubt and uncertainty coursed alongside. Many of the warriors, with no real attachment to any commander, would be looking toward the largest gathering they could see—the one being formed by Njekwa and Litunga. Few if any of them adhered to the Old Faith themselves, but they knew of it. Some of them had mothers who belonged. Or sisters, or cousins, or even daughters.

  It was not only the largest gathering, it was the most visible because it was centered on the one rise in the shoreline in the area.

  The pull was powerful. More and more warriors began drifting that way. After a few steps, the drift became a current.

  Then all of them felt a new spike driving through their minds, whose meaning was unmistakable.

  The current became a tide.

  Achia Pazik

  Part of her hated the Dance, but it was exhilarating in its own way.

  Its own cruel, bloody, ravenous way. Their raft was close enough to Zilikazi’s armada for Achia Pazik to understanding what was happening over there.

  Death, dismemberment, destruction. Feeding.

  She fed herself, drawing from it the strength to continue the Dance. The most savage, hideous, intoxicating Dance ever designed.

  Nurat Merav should be ashamed of herself.

  Nurat Merav

  She couldn’t see what was happening, but Zuluku and Raish and Selani rushed back and forth from the rock spur to bring her constant reports.

  After a while, she thought she should probably be ashamed of herself.

  Meshwe

  The oldest and most powerful of the Krek’s tekkutu, on this day, also possessed in full measure another characteristic of great age and power.

  Ruthlessness. There would be no mercy for Zilikazi.

  He drove the lizards. Again, and again, and again, and again.

  Zilikazi

  The flagpole and its large bright banner kept Zilikazi alive for a while. Three times a lizard tried to devour him; each time, the pole and banner thwarted the attack.

  The first two lizards were distracted by the banner. The first took away half of it. The second took away the rest.

  The third lizard tried to engulf the entire pole and its jaws got stuck open.

  Not for long, of course. Not those jaws. But by the time the jaws shattered the slender pole, Zilikazi had swum off.

  He was a good swimmer, as Liskash measured these things. And he was full of fear to drive him forward.

  He was also lucky. All three attacks had pulled or driven him far outside the frenzy. He was now in the open, more than halfway to the raft that held his enemies.

  Perhaps they would accept his surrender.

  He wasn’t sure he know how to surrender.

  * * *

  It was a moot point. The lizards who arrived a few seconds later wouldn’t have accepted his surrender anyway.

  The first one to strike was a small lizard, as such creatures went; not more than fifteen feet long and weighing less than three tons. It tried to swallow him whole but missed and only got his left leg in its maw. An instant later, a second and larger lizard bit his torso and crushed his chest.

  A brief tussle followed. The first lizard swam off with the leg. The second started to engulf the rest of the body but a third lizard arrived and ripped off the other leg, the hips, and part of the abdomen.

  By then Zilikazi was dead, of course. A few pieces of him were missed by the lizards. The largest was his right arm severed just below the shoulder. Those bits and pieces drifted with the current until they came within reach of Bekezel’s tentacle mass. The Sure One scooped them up efficiently, neatly, almost daintily. Seconds later, they vanished into the huge beak.

  * * *

  Most of the rafts, and most of the warriors, made it to shore safely. Still, it had been the biggest feast in any of those lizards’ lifetimes. If they’d had bards, they would have been singing lays about it for centuries.

  CHAPTER 18

  Meshwe

  “We have to have the river also,” Njekwa insisted. “We have many more people to feed than you do. We will need to fish.”

  By now, after days of negotiating, Meshwe was more than a little tired of the old priestess. She was stubborn almost beyond belief. The fact that her position was the weakest of the three negotiating parties—the biggest party, but still the weakest—just seemed to make her more recalcitrant.

  Fortunately, as had happened several times since the parlay began, the representative of the smallest of the three parties intervened with a compromise. Perhaps that was because she was also—by far—the youngest of the three chief negotiators.

  “You should pay a toll for it, then,” Achia Pazik proposed. When Njekwa glared at her, the Mrem Dancer shook her head.

  “Be reasonable, Njekwa. The river has its own monsters. If the tekkutu don’t control the turtlesnakes for you, none of your fisher folk will last very long if they go out onto the river. Even the marshes are dangerous. Do you expect the tekkutu do that work for nothing?”

  Njekwa was still glaring, but the young Mrem simply met the glare with a gaze so calm it was almost serene. She had the priestess boxed in—again—and they both knew it.

  After a moment, Njekwa looked away. “I suppose that would work,” she said. The glare came back to the surface. “So long as the toll is reasonable!”

  Meshwe raised his hand in a gesture of conciliation. “Quite reasonable, I assure you.”

  It would be, too. Not much more than a token charge, in fact. Meshwe did not really care about the disposition of the river itself. It had already been agreed that the Krek would have possession of most of the island—all of it except the crest and the valley leading from it to the west that the Mrem had been given. There was more than enough arable land on the island to feed three times their number. When the time came that the Kororo numbers had swelled greater than the island could sustain, it had already been agreed that the Krek possessed everything on the mainland coast south of the great river. No one still knew yet what sort of lands lay there, but some of it was bound to be fertile.

  Besides, if the Krek decided to start fishing—which they very well might—why would they bother piddling around in the river? They had the sea at their disposal.

  Sebetwe

  That very moment, Sebetwe was contemplating the same issue. He’d noticed that the Sure Ones enjoyed shade, on those occasions when passing clouds provided it for them. It had then occurred to him that if they built a large enough vessel with a platform supported on double hulls, they could sail anywhere with an escort that no creature in the sea would think of challenging.

  They’d have to sail slowly, of course, so the Sure Ones could stay in the shade between the double hulls. Perhaps they could design the hulls with oars and banks for the rowers.

  But so what? Fishing was best done slowly.

  So he’d been told, anyway. Being a sane and sensible Liskash, Sebetwe had never fished before.

  Achia Pazik

  By the end of the day’s negotiating, Njekwa looked more sour than ever, even though she’d gotten most of what she wanted.

  Achia Pazik thought she knew the reason. After Zilikazi’s death, the nation he had welded together by sheer force of mind immediately began to disintegrate. Within two days, eight separate contending little armies had emerged, each with its own fledgling lord.

  But the largest of those armies, commanded by one of Zilikazi’s former subordinates named Mehuli, had fewer than five hundred warriors and the most outstanding characteristic of their new noble lord—semi-noble lord, rather, and that was being generous—was his fledgling status. His mental powers were still feeble, and might very well remain so.r />
  It was true that for the moment Mehuli’s powers exceeded those of any of his seven rivals, all of whom were also fledglings. But he no more considered challenging the Kororo than he would have considered challenging the tides or the sunrise. Whatever might be the nature of their mysterious tekku, the Krek had destroyed the most powerful lord Mehuli had ever known. The world’s most fearsome monsters were at their command.

  The only thing Mehuli wanted from the Kororo was a great distance. The day after he consolidated his hold over his little army, he ordered them to march back to the lands they’d come from.

  Within another two days, his seven rival armies had done the same. All of them were trying to find separate routes through the mountains because none of them was yet ready to match their strength against another. The likelihood was that few of them would manage to do so, however. Most of them would have no choice but to fight over the one route they did know.

  That was their problem, however, not the Krek’s and certainly not Achia Pazik’s.

  Unlike Njekwa, she was in a very good mood. The survival of the Kororo depended on their control over the passage between the island and the mainland. So long as they—and they alone—could maintain the peculiar relationship with the Sure Ones that allowed them to keep the sea lizards at bay, they would always have an impregnable sanctuary on the island.

  But doing so also depended on maintaining their not-quite-as-peculiar relationship with the Mrem. Without the Dancers, no tekkutu could hope to control even a gantrak, much less the behemoths of the sea.

  So, Meshwe had been very generous and compliant when it came to Achia Pazik’s demands. And, for her part, she’d been careful to present those demands as pleasantly phrased modest requests. The Mrem were just as dependent on the Kororo as the Kororo were on them.

  More dependent, in some ways. Scouting parties would continue to be sent into the mountains, searching for any more small splinters from Achia Pazik’s shattered tribe. Each of those parties would have a Mrem accompanying it—but only one. There simply weren’t enough Mrem to do the work on their own.

  Their numbers had reached eighty-three now, of whom eleven were Dancers. (Twelve, if you counted Nurat Merav.) The valley they’d been given was more than sufficient for them. It would probably be sufficient for ten times their current number, and if they came to exceed that—which she now had every confidence they would, someday—then there were still all those mysterious lands south of the river. She and Meshwe had also already agreed that if the time came, the Mrem and the Kororo would share those lands in an equitable manner.