Gruntle realized, with a faint shock, that he knew the taste of these creatures-their hot flesh, their blood, the saltiness of their sweat. In this form, in this place and in this time, he had hunted them, had pulled them down, hearing their piteous cries as his jaws closed fatally round their necks.
This time, however, he was not hungry, and it seemed they knew it.
Awe flickered in their eyes, their mouths twisting into strange expressions, and all at once one of the women was speaking. The language trilled, punctuated by clicks and glottal stops.
And Gruntle understood her.
‘Beast of darkness and fire, hunter in dark and light, fur of night and motion in grasses, god who takes, see this our gift and spare us for we are weak and few and this land is not ours, this land is the journey for we dream of the shore, where food is plenty and the birds cry in the heat of the sun.’
Gruntle found himself sliding forward, silent as a thought, and he was life and power bound in a single breath. Forward, until the axe blade was at his taloned paws. Head lowering, nostrils flaring as he inhaled the scent of stone and sweat, the edges where old blood remained, where grasses had polished the flint, the urine that had been splashed upon it.
These creatures wanted to claim this glade for their own.
They were begging permission, and maybe something more. Something like…’. protection.
‘The leopard tracks us and challenges you,’ the woman sang, ‘but she will not. cross your path. She will flee your scent for you are the master here, the god, the unchallenged hunter of the forest. Last night, she took my child-we have lost all our children. Perhaps we will be the last. Perhaps we will never find the shore again. But if our flesh must feed the hungry, then let it be you who grows strong with our blood.
‘Tonight, If you come to take one of us, take me. I am the eldest. I bear no more children. I am useless.’ She hunched down then, discarding her spear, and sank into the grasses, where she rolled on to her back, exposing her throat.
They were mad, Gruntle decided. Driven insane by the terrors of the jungle, where they were strangers, lost, seeking some distant coastline. And as they jour-neyed, every night delivered horror.
But this was a dream. From some ancient time. And even if he sought to guide them to the shore they sought, he would awaken long before that journey was completed. Awaken, and so abandon them to their fates. And what if he grew hungry in this next moment? What if his instinct exploded within him, launch-ing him at this hapless female, closing his jaws on her throat?
Was this where the notion of human sacrifice came from? When nature eyed them avid with hunger? When they had naught but sharpened sticks and a smoul-dering fire to protect them?
He would not kill them this night.
He would find something else to kill. Gruntle set off, into the jungle. A thou-sand scents filled him, a thousand muted noises whispered in the deep shadows. He carried his massive weight effortlessly, silent as he padded forward. Beneath the canopy the world was dusk and so it would ever remain, yet he saw every-thing, the flit of a green-winged mantis, the scuttle of woodlice in the humus, the gliding escape of a millipede. He slipped across the path of deer, saw where they had fed on dark-leaved shoots. He passed a rotted log that had been torn apart and pushed aside, the ground beneath ravaged by the questing snouts of boar.
Some time later, with night descending, he found the spoor he had been seek-ing. Acrid, pungent, both familiar and strange. It was sporadic, proof that the crea-ture that left it was cautious, taking to the trees in its moments of rest.
A female.
He slowed his pace as he tracked the beast. All light was gone now, every colour shifted into hues of grey. If she discovered him she would flee. But then, the only beast that wouldn’t was the elephant, and he had no interest in hunting that wise leviathan with its foul sense of humour.
Edging forward, one soft step at a time, he came upon the place where she had made a kill. A wapiti, its panic a bitter breath in the air. The humus scuffed by its tiny hoofs, a smear of blood on curled black leaves. Halting, settling down, Gruntle lifted his gaze.
And found her. She had drawn her prey up on to a thick branch from which lianas depended in a cascade of night blossoms. The wapiti-or what remained of it-was draped across the bole, and she was lying along the branch’s length, lam-bent eyes fixed upon Gruntle.
This leopard was well suited to hunting at night-her coat was black on black, the spots barely discernible.
She regarded him without fear, and this gave Gruntle pause.
A voice then murmured in his skull, sweet and dark. ‘Go on your way, Lord. There is not enough to share… even if I so desired, which of course I do not.’