Bitter Gold Hearts

The conclave of death was being held at the downhill end of an open, grassy area about twenty yards wide and fifty long. Patches of lichened granite peeked out of the soil. I collected a dozen loose chunks of throwing size and cut loose at the wild dogs. They snarled and growled but fled. They have grown very cautious around humans because bounty hunters are after them constantly. Espe­cially farm kids who want to pick up a little change for the fair or whatever.

The buzzards tried to bluff me. I didn't bluff. They got themselves airborne and began turning in patient circles, looking down and thinking, Someday, you too, man. In the pantheon of one of the minor cults of TunFaire, the god of time is a vulture.

Maybe that's why I hate the damned things. Or maybe that's because they've become identified with my military service, when I saw so many circling the fields of futility where young Karentines died for their country.

So there I stood, a great bull ape, master of the land of the dead. Instead of pounding my chest and maybe forc­ing myself to inhale some tainted air, I moved as upwind as I could and started looking at what I'd come to see.

There wasn't a woods bison in that mess.

I muttered, "I ought to remember Saucer head's tend­ency to exaggerate."

I counted up enough parts to make at least seven bodies. Four or five he said he'd taken. Even torn apart they remained ogre ugly. They'd been buried shallow beneath loose dirt, leaves, and stones. The lazy way, I might call it, but I look at comrades differently than ogres do. They don't form bonds the way humans do. For them a dead associate is a burden, not an obligation.

No doubt they were in a hurry to quit the area, too.

You do what you have to do. I got in and used a stick to poke around, looking for personals, but it took only a minute to figure out that the living hadn't been in too big a hurry not to loot the dead. Even their boots had been taken. That wasn't the behavior of a band expecting to be in the big money soon. But with ogres you never know. Maybe their mothers had taught them the old saw, "Waste not, want not."

I circled the burial site three times but could find no sign of comings or goings other than by the route I'd followed, and that the second group had taken down from the road. In places the soil was very moist from ground-water seepage. Such places sometimes hold tracks. I started looking those over, trying to cut the trail of a guy on crutches or one who wore his feet backward; something that would stick out if I happened to be hanging around with a bunch of ogres and one of the bad guys showed up. I didn't expect to find anything, but luck doesn't play for the other side all the time. Got to keep looking for that ten to one.

I found the nothing I expected, though not exactly because there was nothing to be found. It was one of those cases of suddenly deciding you ought to be investi­gating something somewhere else. I heard a stir in the woods behind me. Not much of one. Thinking some of the dogs had gotten brave, I turned with the stick I still carried.

"Holy shit!"

A woolly mammoth stood at the edge of the woods, and from where I was it looked about ninety-three hands high at the shoulder. How the hell it had come up so quietly is beyond me. I didn't ask. When it cocked its head and made a curious grunting noise, I put the heels and toes to work according to the gods' design. The beast threw a trumpet roar after me. Laughing. I paused behind a two-foot-thick oak and gave it a stare. A mammoth. Here. No mammoth had come this close to TunFaire in the past dozen generations. The nearest herds were four hundred miles north of us, up along the borders of thunder-lizard country.

The mammoth ambled out of the woods, laughed at me again, cropped some grass a couple of bales at a time while keeping one eye on me. Finally convinced that I was no fearless mammoth poacher, it eyeballed the vul­tures, checked the dead ogres, snorted in disgust, and marched off through the woods as quietly as it had come. And last night I'd been unconcerned because no wolf-man had been seen since I was a kid.

Like I said, luck is not always with the bad guys.

It was time to stop tempting it with the one out of ten and hike on back to my rig before the horses got wind of that monster and decided they would feel more comfort­able back in the city. Too bad Garrett had to ride shank's mare.

______ XVIII ______