Chapter 7

It took several exhausting hours with Nugun for Blade to get a picture of the world in the Mountains of Brega. Not that Nugun was either stupid or unwilling to talk-on the contrary, he had ample native intelligence. And he saw it as his duty to the new Hairless One who had spared his life to answer all the Hairless One's strange questions.

But Nugun knew only three hundred or so words to express all the concepts that his mind could conceive. And it was a long time before Blade knew even roughly what those words were. Much time was therefore wasted asking the Senar questions he could not even understand, let alone answer.

Even when Blade had figured out Nugun's limitations, matters still went slowly. Blade had to put each question into words in his own mind. Then he had to translate them into words that Nugun could understand. Finally he could ask the question-and settle back to wait for Nugun's answer. Again, Nugun was not slow or unwilling. But the new Hairless One was asking him about things he had never had to think about before in all the thirty-odd years of his life. Why should he think about them? They were part of the world, like the air he breathed and the water he drank.

But Nugun did his best, and his best soon became good enough. Blade was a fairly good rule-of-thumb anthropologist from his experience with the strange lands and stranger peoples of Dimension X. It took from noon until nightfall, but when darkness came Blade had a rough notion of how the Senar and the Hairless Ones-the Blenar-lived in the Mountains of Brega.

The mountains themselves «went up to the sky,» starting about three days' fast march from the western edge of the forest. That edge was about four additional days west of where Blade and Nugun were. From what Wyala had said, Blade knew that the forest also extended about the same four days to the east. It was another week beyond that across rolling plains to the city of Brega itself. Neither Wyala nor Nugun had any notion whether there might be other lands beyond Brega in any direction.

Nugun apparently knew nothing about the previous society in Brega or was unable to put what he knew into words. But from Wyala Blade knew that there had once been a normal society of men and women living more or less in harmony in the land of Brega. At least, so the legends went.

But this society had destroyed itself in a great and terrible disaster, a war brought on by the violence of the men. From Wyala's recounting of the legends of the war, Blade recognized atomic, chemical, and bacteriological warfare. How long ago the war had been, Blade had no idea. Certainly long enough for the land to recover and for the whole history of the war to become a hazy mass of legend.

The disaster had smashed the old society, but some of its people had survived. Most of the survivors were women, who decided that the violence of the men had been responsible for the war. Therefore they would build a society of women, with only enough men for breeding purposes. Enough of the knowledge of the old society survived to make this possible.

Unfortunately, there were inevitably surplus males. What to do with them? Regardless of their hatred and fear of male violence, the women could not uproot violence from themselves. So they decided to make the surplus males into game animals. They were released into the forests at the age of twelve or so. Then when they had reached the age of about twenty, hunting parties from the city slipped into the forests to track them down.

All of this Wyala had told Blade. The rest of the story he got from his talks with Nugun.

The women of the city did not catch all the men they released into the forest. Some at once fled farther west, toward the mountains, out of the reach of the hunting parties. Others learned so much skill in the woods that they could avoid the hunting parties. Sometimes they even turned the tables, making the huntresses the hunted. When they did that, they sometimes killed the women they caught outright. But at other times they enslaved them, perhaps later trading them to the mountain dwellers. In time, children began to be born of these strangely assorted matings.

Most of these children were Senar-the Hairy Ones. A few were of the Blenar-the Hairless Ones. No couple could tell in advance what their child might be. Whatever poison did this seemed to lurk in the air or the soil or the water, and there was no getting away from it. (Blade suspected it was a case of lingering radioactivity or bacterial contamination from the disaster.)

The time came when the women stopped releasing their surplus males into the forest to improve the game supply. There were enough of the Senar already.

«What about the Blenar?»

«Oh-Blenar not come into forest. Live in mountains. Not strong, I tell you. Women of city not know what are Blenar.»

«I see.»

So the women of Brega did not know that a race of intelligent males was growing up in those distant and inaccessible mountains. The years passed, and the number of men living in the mountains increased steadily. It was a harsh life, and many of the babies that were born did not live long. But there were many girls among those who did. In time it was no longer necessary to mate with women of the city captured in the forest. There were still not enough women to go around, however, and the Blenar usually wound up with more than their fair share. This would have meant war between the Senar and the Blenar, except that the Blenar's weapons were too good. Also, they taught the Senar many useful skills and made for them many things they could not have made for themselves. So there was an uneasy peace among the two kinds of men in the mountains.

More years passed, and the numbers of the men in the mountains increased still further. Blade could get only a very rough notion of how many there were now. Nugun could not count beyond a hundred. But Blade gathered that there were many more than a hundred clans and tribes among the Senar. And the area they occupied was nine days' march from north to south and three days' march from east to west. So there were a hundred thousand Senar, at least.

But in the last few years, some of the Blenar had been making friends with the Senar, or at least pretending to make friends. Nugun trusted no Hairless One's intentions toward his people, never had, and never would. Blade was no exception, for he was not really one of the Hairless Ones of the Mountains of Brega.

Many thousands of the Senar were listening to the Blenar, however. The Blenar were saying that the Senar could become the rulers of Brega. All they would have to do was learn the war skills that the Blenar could teach them and how to use the weapons the Blenar would give them. Then thousands of the Senar could march out of the mountains and through the forest and into the lands beyond the forest. They could take that land, where they could grow good crops and feed many children. Perhaps they could even take the city of Brega itself, with all its women. Then there would be a woman or even several women for every man old enough to know what to do with one, whether he was Blenar or Senar.

Blade could see how this might be a tempting vision and how it had attracted many thousands of the Senar. But it had not appealed to Nugun.

«Nugun think Hairless Ones want to kill Senar so they have all land in mountains, all women. Blenar not strong to kill Senar themselves. So want women in city to do it. Blenar think good. But Nugun also think good, yes?»

«You do think good,» said Blade. «Very good. I think that is exactly what the Blenar want to do with the Senar.»

«Blade not want to do this with Senar? Not listen to other Hairless Ones?»

«The other Hairless Ones are bad people. I do not listen to bad people or help them do what they want to do.»