Urbis

In the hour before dawn, before even the first rooster had crowed, Tana was awake. She arose, wrapped herself in Crispin’s travelling cloak, lit a fire and heated some broth.

She grinned broadly as she crouched at the side of her snoring husband. Reluctant to rouse him, but knowing that he had a communal duty to answer a request for help, she reached out and stroked the red hair away from his temple. He stirred, and his eyes opened. He looked up at her in the dim lamplight as she presented him with a bowl of broth and some bread.

“Breakfast,” she said.

He took the broth and the bread. As he ate, he spoke in quiet, serious tones of the strange encounter, and how Master Torfinn had expressed vague fears of some kind of future retribution. He described to her as accurately as he could the flying machine and the men it had carried.

“If you see them,” he said grimly, “run. Run and hide. They are dangerous, and, I fear, evil. There is no knowing what they may want or what they can do. Tell all the others in the village - women, children, old folk, all.”

“I will,” she said.

He took her in his arms and kissed her. He pulled the cloak off her shoulders, exposing her breasts, and rolled her across the bed until she was lying beneath him. He kissed her again, caressed her breasts, buried his face in their sweet-smelling softness, and she pressed him to her and tousled his hair.

And then he was gone. She had stood in the doorway and watched as he crossed the bridge to join the shadowy figures of Arne, Ralf, and the others waiting there. She saw him wave to her, and then he turned away, and the little knot of men melted into the first dim light of dawn. Somewhere far off, the first cock crowed the day.

The dew was still shining on the bare bones of the mammoths when a second helicopter swept over the ridge. The flash of sunlight on metal and glass attracted the attention of the two men within it, and it circled above the one on the ground. The new arrival was a drab olive green, and bore the word: `Security’.

One of the men pointed. Two human figures could be seen on the ground. The helicopter landed, and the two men ran to the bodies. When they saw how the crows had fed on them, they looked away, their stomachs heaving, and for some minutes could not bring themselves to look at the mutilated corpses.

They turned to face them again. The men’s clothes were in ribbons and drenched in their blood. The flesh of buttocks, thighs and arms was shredded, and the crows had torn out parts of their entrails. Other creatures had also helped themselves to smaller body parts. The fingers had been chewed off. And now the bodies had been claimed by flies and maggots.

The two men balked at conducting a closer examination, but such tasks came with the uniform they wore, and they turned the corpses over. Almost at once, they observed that each of them had a neat hole through the chest and the back.

The two men exchanged glances, and suddenly spun round, wondering if they were being watched. Their hands flashed to the holsters on their hips.

The more senior of the two men resembled a weasel and had the name of O’Rourke. He said, “Let’s have a look around. But keep your eyes peeled.” The other man, Granby, ruddy of complexion and with an unruly thatch of dusty brown hair, assented with a nod of the head.

They looked at the helicopter, with its cargo of tusks. A wry grin crossed O’Rourke’s face. “They were obviously planning to make a bit of spare cash with this little lot,” he observed.

“Somebody stopped them,” said Granby. “If it was somebody else from the city, why didn’t they take the ivory?”

“Maybe they’re still around,” O’Rourke suggested, glancing over his shoulder.

“In that case,” said Granby, “where’s their chopper?”

O’Rourke shrugged. “Who knows?”

“I think it’s locals,” Granby announced. “All they seem to have taken is the flesh from that one animal. Meat-eaters! Blagh!”

Locals? O’Rourke shuddered, half fearful, half disbelieving. He thought back to when he had first heard about the mammoths, about two years previously. It was the spring following an exceptionally hard winter. Some of his people had been on an unauthorised flight among the mountain passes, and they had spotted the huge shaggy creatures with their magnificent dentition, driven down from higher ground by persisting snows. Ivory was a hangover from a long-gone former time, and consequently held in high regard, and high value, by those who cared for such things. But there had been something else reported - or rumoured - from that first observation: men. Naked, mud-smeared, hairy men, who had scattered and gone to ground at the sight of the helicopter. Of course, there had been no cameras rolling at that point, so no evidence. Everyone either knew or suspected that a fair amount of drinking and drug-taking went on during such trips, so no one had been particularly inclined to believe the stuff about men. But the stories would not go away.

Granby and O’Rourke walked around the area slowly, staring at the ground. Every so often one or other of them would jerk his head up abruptly and stare about, expecting to see hostile brutes approaching them.

Suddenly Granby gave a shout. O’Rourke hurried to his side. Granby bent down and picked up an iron bolt. He turned and stared back in the direction the bolt would have come from, over the body of Dale, to the forest beyond.

“Someone fired this,” said Granby, weighing the bolt in the palm of his hand. “That settles it. We’re dealing with primitives.”

“Primitive it may be,” said O’Rourke. “But it worked, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. It worked. Let’s see what else we can find.”

The two men continued their searching, and soon found the tracks of the wagon. But those did not startle them so much as the hoofprints of the horses.

“Horses!” exclaimed O’Rourke. He stared at Granby with an expression of utter incredulity.

They followed the tracks to the edge of the forest, laser-powered blasters at the ready. Even on a bright morning, the forest was dark. The thick branches of the trees permitted only thin shafts of light to filter through to the ground. The two men looked about warily. Fallen tree trunks, branches, dense undergrowth, all offered extensive cover for possible enemies.

“It was pretty stupid of those guys to come out here,” O’Rourke muttered. “There is a law against such stunts, and it’s there for a reason.”

The two men turned away from the forest and began walking back towards their own helicopter. Neither could resist occasionally looking back at the forest.

“What do you think that stuff would fetch?” said Granby, casting an eye over the cache of mammoth tusks.

“Hard to say,” said O’Rourke. “Big units. it’s as rare as anything.”

“We gonna take it back with us?” said Granby.

O’Rourke pondered for a moment. “Seems an awful shame to leave it here, after those guys died for it. You be okay flying that machine?”

Granby looked across at the red and blue helicopter, sizing it up. “Low pressure air anti-torque system in the tail boom. Yeah, I can fly one of those. Not a problem”

“Okay.” O’Rourke smiled. “You and me, we could retire on the proceeds. No more risking our skins for small change.”

Granby returned the smile. “What happened to those laws you were talking about?”

“Laws are for suckers. In any case, now we’re here, sent out to look for those guys in dangerous unknown territory, why shouldn’t we salvage what we can from the situation?”

Granby jerked his thumb towards the corpses. “What we do about them?”

“I sure ain’t taking ’em back in my machine,” O’Rourke snarled. “And I’m sure you don’t want ’em for company. We bury ’em here, I say. They’ll take our word on what happened. You still got that bolt?” Granby pulled the bolt out of his pocket. “Good,” said O’Rourke. “Let’s get the ’bot out and get him to work.”

From a compartment in the body of their helicopter the two men unloaded a small, tracked robot and fitted to its hydraulic arm a shovel attachment. They seated themselves in the cockpit, and with the aid of a handset O’Rourke sent the robot trundling across the grass. He had it dig a shallow grave next to each of the two dead men, and then it pushed each of them unceremoniously into the holes and covered them over.

As he was doing this, O’Rourke said: “You know, I’m curious about these people who live out here. Who knows what we’ve stumbled on. I vote that before we head back we go and see if we can find us some. Maybe pay ’em back for killing those guys for no good reason.”

When the robot had finished its work, O’Rourke summoned it back to the helicopter. He replaced the shovel attachment with a chainsaw, and they began loading the ivory. Whenever possible, they stowed the tusks intact, but when necessary, the little robot would advance and slice through one with the saw.

When the booty was loaded and secured, Granby got into the pilot’s seat and began warming up the engine. O’Rourke returned to the other machine and installed the robot in its carrying compartment. In moments the two helicopters were airborne, skiimming the upper canopy of the forest side by side. “Let’s go see what we can find,” said O’Rourke.

The trees, they saw, lay in a broad belt, beyond which lay open country. It was not hard to plot the route a heavily laden wagon would be likely to follow on the ground. The land sloped gently towards a lake, which the wagon would have had to skirt, then rose at a similar incline on the far side. A broad plain covered in tall grasses, through which the passage of the wagon was clearly visible, terminated at the base of a range of steep hills scarred with rocky outcrops. A river wound its way through a deep valley scattered with large boulders. The wagon would have had a hard time picking a path between them, O’Rourke decided, but he spotted what had clearly been a campsite, and knew they were still on the right track. The valley took them to higher ground, and they continued to follow the river until it was joined by a smaller tributary. At their confluence, the men paused, the helicopters hovering, while O’Rourke tried to decide which watercourse to follow. He was about to suggest they land to look for the wagon’s tracks when Granby hailed him.

“O’Rourke? To your left. Smoke.”

O’Rourke looked, and there was clearly smoke, several distinct trails, rising from beyond a bend in the tributary.

“Habitation, I guess,” he said. “Let’s pay them a visit. But let’s make sure we keep the upper hand. Do we have a full stock of gas canisters on board?”

With all the young men gone from the village, Tana and most of the other young women took the opportunity to enjoy the warmth of the sunshine by dressing lightly: a move that would normally attract keen attention and start jealous husbands rumbling in their beards. She selected a white shift that was simply a length of cotton material with a hole in the middle, through which she passed her head, and held the garment together with a cord tied around her waist. She smiled at herself in the mirror, ran her hands luxuriantly through her hair and went outside to work the vegetable patch with the other women.

From an early age, Tana had shown a sturdy independent streak in her character, a quick mind, and an ability to organise those around her. As a small child she had already caught the eye of the elders by co-ordinating her playmates in the building of a hut in the sheep pastures. With a little extra work by skilled adult hands, it had been made into a serviceable wet weather shelter for the herdsmen which had survived for ten years and many fierce storms.

She went merrily through Vale, gathering around her a band of women armed with mattocks and hoes. Her working party for the day was almost complete when she heard the clatter of the helicopter, and, looking up, watched it come round the bend in the river, flying low over the water.

Tana knew at once what it was, even if the word for it escaped her. “Crispin’s... beast!” she cried. “Run! Run and hide!”

Women, children and old men dropped whatever they were doing and moved towards their homes as fast as they were able.

Tana ran inside her cottage, shut the door, crouched by a window and watched. She heard the deafening roar of the engine as the machine came into the village, hovering low over the ground, darting here and there like an enraged wasp, dropping small silvery canisters close to the houses.

O’Rourke watched the chaos with grim satisfaction. Within a minute, a thin carpet of grey gas had covered the village street, and had permeated the cottages, swiftly anaesthetising the occupants.

When he was sure the gas had done its job, O’Rourke turned the helicopter on its axis and sped back up the village, landing a short distance beyond the last house.

“Okay,” he murmured. “Let’s send our little friend for a wander round.” He clambered out of the cockpit and unloaded the robot once more. He hooked up a video camera on a mount on its body, returned to the cockpit and flicked on a monitor. Manipulating the controls on his handset, he sent the robot into the village. He found that by simply ramming the doors of the houses with the body of the robot, he could open them: they were designed to keep out weather, not intruders.

Granby joined him, and together they watched the screen intently as the robot entered the first house. It moved from room to room, but the house was empty. In the next house it entered, it almost collided with Tana, lying face down, lifeless on the floor.

“Hey,” chuckled O’Rourke. “I think we’re onto something here.”

He made the robot check out the rest of the little dwelling, then returned to where Tana was lying. He made the robot retreat a little, take hold of her ankle and drag her outside the house.

Obediently the robot worked its way from house to house, dragging the occupants into the open.

In the longhouse they found the two chainsaws.

“Well,” said Granby, “at least we’re sure that this is where the killers went to.”

“Right,” said O’Rourke, continuing to manipulate the robot. “But there’s something very strange here. We have women, children and old people. But no men. Where are they?”

“Maybe they’re all out hunting,” suggested Granby.

“Unlikely,” concluded O’Rourke, focussing the robot’s camera on the wagon loaded with mammoth meat.

“Well, who cares where the men are, anyway,” said Granby. “We’re gonna have some fun with their women.”

“I think not,” said O’Rourke thoughtfully.

“What! Why not?” Granby howled.

“Because, Granby, my friend, they will get us a much better price if they’re untouched.”

"Price?” said Granby, twitching in his seat.

“Do you have any idea what we could get for high quality womanflesh that nobody gives a damn about? Your ivory is small beer by comparison. You won’t have to worry about whether your Security Commission pension is going to keep you in your old age, my friend.”

Granby nodded sagely in acknowledgement. He took the cord from around Tana’s waist and used it to tie her hands behind her back. He used belts and a headscarf to do the same to the other three chosen women: Arne’s wife, Melissa, Sasha, the wife of another man named Gund, and shy seventeen-year-old Greta, daughter of Ulf and granddaughter of Torfinn.

“Okay,” said O’Rourke. “Let’s get out of here.”

The women were bundled into the back of O’Rourke’s aircraft. In moments its engine roared into life, and it took off, followed by Granby, whose chopper swayed a little drunkenly with the weight of the ivory. They gained height in the clear blue sky, leaving behind a silent village.