Marion Zimmer Bradley - Hunters 01 by Hunters Of The Red Moon

Author:Hunters Of The Red Moon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-11-23T21:03:54+00:00

CHAPTER

TEN

Even during the day, the red light of the moon was brighter than the sun; the Red Moon seemed to obscure half the sky now, when, one evening, Rianna said to him near the baths, “There are men here—I mean humans, proto-simians very like us—who do not belong to the Unity.”

“Of course. There’s me. Why do you think the Hunters would confine themselves to raiding just your group of worlds in the Unity?”

“I don’t mean that. I went and greeted them and they did not—or could not—answer. They evidently did not have translator disks.”

“Poor bastards,” Dane said. “They must be pretty confused.”

“If so, they certainly didn’t act it. I went to talk to them,” Rianna said. “I’ve been taught nonverbal communication techniques. But they slipped away before I could come near them. I don’t know where they went—of course this place is confusing, but still, it was like something done with mirrors.”

Cliff-Climber had had an experience something like that.

“I wonder if it ever occurred to you,” Dane said soberly, “that they might have been Hunters—or their servants.”

“Hardly servants, when Server and all his pack are around. Dane! Do you mean the Hunters might be—human?”

He nodded. “It seems reasonable,” he said. “There seem to be as many humans here as all other biological types put together.”

“Would men hunt men?”

“They do,” he said with a shrug, and explained his theory that possibly the Hunters preferred prey who could give them a good, equal fight. “And it would be a good way to size us up, observe us for the Hunt, decide what weapons we’ll be carrying. Maybe even, now and then, take on one of us for a workout, though so far no one’s come near enough for that.”

Or pick out which of us would make the best trophies. … His mind refused to put away a gruesome picture which had come to him, one night, in a nightmare: the head of a Japanese samurai, still in armor and preserved four hundred years by some unguessable technique, hanging on the wall of a Hunter’s dwelling….

Involuntarily, Dane shuddered, and Rianna reached for him and held onto him, hard. He clasped her in his arms, feeling her warmth and closeness as the only comfort on this strange, cold, red, mysterious world.

It was a bond. Unwanted. Undesired. But a bond. If he lived, he and Rianna would always belong to one another… .

Over their meal that night, looking across at Aratak, Rianna brought that up again,

“If the Hunters are human, would they really want to take on someone the size and—and fierceness of Aratak?”

“Even on my world, big game hunting is regarded as more of a sport than shooting rabbits,” Dane said. “A man who kills a tiger is considered braver than one who kills a deer.” Once again he wondered how the words were coming across to the others through their translator disks.

He asked them, curious, and Rianna said with a shrug, “On my world, as on most, there are large fierce predators and small gentle ones regarded mostly as a source of food.

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