Marauders of Gor (coc-9) by John Norman

Author:John Norman [Norman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy
Published: 1975-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11 The Torvaldsberg

It lifted its head.

It stood on the small hill, sloping above the assembly field. This hill was set with stones, rather in the manner of t~rraces. On these stones, set in semicircular lines, like terraces, stood high men and minor jarls, and rune-priests, and the guard of Svein Blue Tooth. Just below the top of the small hill, cut into the hill, there was a level, stone-paved platform, some twelve feet by twelve feet in dimension.

On this platform stood Svein Blue Tooth, with two high men, officers, lieutenants, to the jarL.

The thing, its head lifted, surveyed the assembly of free men. The pupils of its eyes, in the sunlight, were extremely small and black. They were like points in the yellowish green cornea. I knew that, in darkness, they could swell, like dark moons, to fill almost the entire optic orifice, some three or four inches in width. Evolution, on some distant, perhaps vanished world, had adapted this life form for both diurnial and nocturnal hunting. Doubtless, like the cat, it hunted when hungry, and its efficient visual capacities, like those of the cats, meant that there was no time of the day or night when it might not be feared. Its head was approximately the width of the chest of a large man. It had a flat snout, with wide nostrils. Its ears were large, and pointed. They lifted from the side of its head, listening, and then lay back against the furred sides ofthe head. Kurii, I had been told, usually, in meeting men, laid the ears back against the sides of their heads, to increase their resemblance to humans. The ears are often laid back, also, incidentally, in hostility or anger, and, always, in its attacks. It is apparently physiologically impossible for a Kur to attack without its shoulders hunching, its claws emerging, and its ears lying back against the head. The nostrils of the beast drank in what information it wished, as they, like its eyes, surveyed the throng. The trailing capacities of the Kurii are not as superb as those of the sleen, but they were reputed to be the equal of those of larls. The hearing, similarly, is acute. Again it is equated with that of the larl, and not the sharply-sensed sleen. There was little doubt that the day vision of the Kurii was equivalent to that of men, if not superior, and the night vision, of course, was infinitely superior; their sense of smell, too, of course, was inccmparably superior to that of men, and their sense of hearing as well. Moreover, they, like men, were rational. Like men, they were a single-brained organism, limited by a spinal column. Their intelligence, by Priest-Kings, though the brain was much larger, was rated as equivalent to that of men, ar.d showed similar random distributions throughout gene pools. What made them such dreaded foes was not so much their intelligence or, on the steel worlds, their technological capacities, as their aggressiveness, their persistence their emotional commitments, their need to populate and expa nd, their innate savagery.

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