Planet of the Apes Omnibus 2 Page 38

  Daena silently followed him out. When he looked back into the cage, he could see that the other two slaves had not moved. However, both of them had their eyes open and were watching him. Bon, in particular, looked scared to death. Davidson couldn’t understand it. Wasn’t he offering them a chance at freedom? Could they be so degraded by their captivity that they were unable to even try to escape?

  Bon’s eyes gleamed at him out of the darkness as she spoke. “There’s a curfew for humans.”

  Davidson stared at her in amazement. Evidently his worst speculations about the two slaves were true. Then Tival shifted slightly on his own mattress.

  “If you’re found on the street at night… they kill you on sight.”

  Feeling sickened, even shamed for his own humanity by their fear, Davidson moved closer to the cage. He peered down at them as they cowered on their mats.

  “If you stay here… you’re already dead.”

  Bon stared at him and shivered. But Tival, after a long moment of thought, suddenly nodded as if making up his mind about something. He grunted as he got his feet under him; then he rose and walked out of the cage, an uncertain but determined expression on his dark features. Bon watched him go, then curled herself more tightly and retreated farther back into the cage. Her thin voice drifted out like the cry of a ghost.

  “Our mistress has been so kind to us.”

  Daena moved back to the cage and looked in the door at the little servant. “She’s your enemy,” she told her.

  But Bon was unable to overcome her long, deep conditioning. She uttered a soft whimper and retreated even farther, watching Daena as if she were afraid the barbarian woman might leap on her and eat her.

  Davidson was paying no attention to this. He was too busy opening doors, rummaging through drawers, checking boxes and shelves, looking for anything he might find that would make a better weapon than the tiny fork he’d used to open the cage’s lock. Finally he struck pay dirt when he found a long, dangerous-looking knife.

  Tucking the knife away, he turned back to Daena. “Can you find your way back to the place where we were captured?”

  She stared at him, a look of consideration in her eyes, as if she were weighing his own resolve against hers. Evidently he satisfied her inner questions, because finally she nodded slowly.

  He was beginning to feel the urgent beat of time pressing in on him. Anybody—Krull, some of Thade’s soldiers, for all he knew, even Thade himself—could come walking in on them at any moment. And then what was he supposed to do? Fight them off with his kitchen knife? He grabbed Daena by the arm and began to urge her toward the stairway door. She came reluctantly, and after a moment, pulled away from him.

  He turned, his eyebrows rising in question.

  “Not without my father,” she said.

  It all seemed so simple to him. You pick a lock, you break out of your cage, you find a weapon, and you get the hell out. What was so hard about that? And why was everybody making it so difficult?

  He shook his head. “Too dangerous. We have to go right now.”

  Daena stepped back, her chin coming up stubbornly, her eyes flashing. Davidson recognized the signs, and if he hadn’t needed her so badly, he would have just left her there. But he did need her, and so he had no choice but to convince her.

  “You don’t have a clue who I am. Or where I’m from. And you wouldn’t understand if I told you. But I can help you.”

  She showed him her teeth. It didn’t really look much like a smile.

  “Find your own way back,” she said flatly.

  Davidson groaned inwardly, but did his best to keep his expression unmoved. It wouldn’t do him any good to show her the slightest sign of weakness. But he also couldn’t help the spark of admiration that began to burn inside him.

  Damn, she was tough.

  * * *

  The moons danced above the dark green forest like great, glowing cue balls across perfect felt. The hard, clear brightness they cast through the trees was not quite daylight, but it would do.

  The smell of the bog at the edge of the jungle filled Thade’s nostrils, and he booted his horse into a trot. Behind him, the two soldiers struggled to keep up.

  When they came out from beneath the trees, they found themselves on a narrow, rocky, mud-packed beach.

  Thade urged his steed to the water’s edge, looked around, then looked back at the two soldiers. The first soldier waved vaguely.

  “Here! This is where I saw it.”

  Thade nodded as he dismounted. “Go on.”

  The second soldier moved forward. “Something fell from the sky.”

  “With wings of fire,” the first chimed in.

  “There was a terrible thunder and the ground itself shook! I thought we’d all be killed,” the second ape added.

  Thade led the way along the edge of the boggy water, leaving the two soldiers to scurry after, trying to keep up.

  “Are you sure you didn’t dream this?”

  The two apes glanced at each other nervously. Finally the first ape spoke.

  “It was no dream, sir. Look!”

  They’d progressed some distance down the beach now, with the jungle at their backs. The soldier who had spoken looked at the trees, found what he was seeking, and pointed.

  Thade turned to look, and saw a line of charred and broken trees standing like skeletons in the moonlight.

  It was as if a great, burning knife had been thrust straight into the heart of the forest.

  Thade stared at the track of shattered trees, then turned and looked out over the still, moonlit waters, thinking furiously. Whatever it was, it must have been huge!

  After a long moment, Thade grunted and turned to look thoughtfully at the two soldiers, who were watching him with obvious apprehension.

  “Who else did you tell?” he asked, in as calm a tone as he could muster.

  Neither one of the soldiers wanted to be the first to speak, but finally the first one said, “No one, sir. We knew we had to come right to you.”

  Slowly, Thade smiled. Those who knew him well might have been unnerved by the sight of his fangs, but these troopers didn’t know him at all. If they had, they would have understood what it meant.

  “You did exactly the right thing,” he said soothingly, as he rested his hands on their shoulders.

  5

  The blossoms filled the bowl, mounds of them, a bowl full of beauty. Suddenly a long-fingered hand streaked with red-tinged fur hovered above the bowl, holding a stone pestle. Slowly, the hand lowered the pestle into the bowl and began to crush the flowers. The clean, heady scent rose into the air and hung in fragrant clouds around Limbo, who regarded himself in a tall mirror as he worked.

  When he’d reduced the flowers to mushy paste, Limbo stopped and looked himself over in the mirror again. He raised his head, wrinkled his nostrils, and sniffed. He couldn’t smell anything out of the ordinary, but he had somehow offended General Thade’s sensitive nose, and that meant that measures must be taken.

  He sighed, looked down at the bowl of mashed flowers, then scooped up a handful and began to smear the stuff beneath his arms and across his chest.

  It didn’t stick very well. Bits and chunks fell off, but some did remain in the appropriate places. And he had to admit that he certainly did smell… different. He grabbed another handful and kept on smearing, as he thought some more about Thade.

  Limbo had no illusions that the smell of crushed rainbow bud and morning blue would make the general like him any better. The general would never actually like him, no matter what he did. Just like the rest of the quality apes. They all looked down on him, even despised him, because of what he was. A slave trader. It was his occupation, not the flavor of his armpits, that stuck in their oh-so-delicate nostrils.

  Sometimes it made him angry. Who were they to look down on him because he was the one who supplied them with what they needed? If not for him, who would cook and serve their food, pull their carts, clean out their manure pit
s? They wanted all the benefits of human slaves, without having to face up to where those beasts came from, and how they were obtained.

  In a way, if only to himself, he had to admit to a certain amount of grudging respect for Ari, Senator Sandar’s crazy daughter. She might be dead wrong about the nature of the humans, but at least she didn’t shrink from the truth of them. She knew the source of the well-groomed, well-behaved beasts who kept her father’s house. And she hated him for all of it, because she did know.

  Well, in the end, he wasn’t sure he didn’t prefer her honest, knowledgeable hate to the reflexive condescension of somebody like Thade. Although he had to admit that Thade, at least, also knew where humans came from. It was Thade, in fact, who supplied him with many of his slaves. Which was why he was standing in front of a mirror in the middle of the night, smearing smashed posies on his armpits.

  Life was funny like that, sometimes.

  * * *

  Outside in the quadrangle, in the ramshackle male slave pen, the old man, Karubi, lay on the ground, his head resting against Gunnar’s shoulder. Gunnar’s chest rose and fell as he snored softly, but Karubi was wide awake. The pain in his mangled arm made sleep impossible.

  Across the way, he could see that the boy, Birn, was also awake, peering restlessly through an opening in the slats of the pen wall at the tiny sliver of night sky visible beyond.

  Karubi watched the boy, pitying him for the loss of his freedom at such a young age, and at the same time envying him his youth and strength.

  Suddenly Birn leaped to his feet. He stood, head cocked, almost quivering with the intensity of his listening.

  A chill snaked up Karubi’s spine. Then he heard it, too. A faint scraping sound coming from above, as if somebody were creeping across the roof of the pen. As the noises grew more distinct, others began to stir, and Karubi waved for everybody to be quiet.

  Outside, a pair of Limbo’s hulking gorilla guards ambled slowly along the line of pens, beneath a night sky that sparkled with a million stars. One of the gorillas abruptly came to a halt. He turned and carefully scanned along the top of the roof line above the cages.

  After a moment, he turned to his partner and asked, “You smell that?”

  The second gorilla cast a cursory glance at the top of the pens, then sighed in exasperation. “Don’t start now. We’re off duty. And I’m starving.”

  The first gorilla listened a moment more, not quite satisfied, but then he shrugged, and the two guards trudged slowly away.

  Up above, along the part of the roof where the first gorilla had looked, a shadow moved. Down below, in the male pen, a new sound, heavier and louder than the first, shivered in the silent air. Another shadow rippled past, casting a stroboscopic glimmer across the ragged openings in the slats. Karubi lurched to his feet against the back wall, groped around with his good arm, and found a wooden plank that would serve as a weapon. He hoisted it and made ready for an attack as he strained his eyes toward the darkness beyond the walls and ceilings.

  Daena’s face appeared in one of the openings. Karubi gasped and lowered his club. For a moment he stared at this apparition in stunned disbelief, until Daena extended her hand toward him. Then he rushed forward, took her fingers in his own, and kissed them.

  As tears of gratitude at the sight of his daughter leaked slowly from Karubi’s eyes, he heard something rattling at the gate to the pen. He dropped his daughter’s hand as a rope slithered through an opening in the door. He hurried over, took the end of the rope, and fed it back outside…

  …where Davidson quickly lashed both sides of the rope loop to a wooden stake. He tested the knots, then began to turn the stake, quickly tightening the pressure of the loop on the wooden slats of the pen. Tighter… tighter… the slats snapped with a sharp firecracker sound that froze them all.

  Davidson didn’t move for several heart-thumping seconds, listening so hard he began to hear a buzzing in his ears. But no shouts of alarm, no hurrying thud of running feet, no clash of spears or swords or clubs.

  No gorillas.

  Slowly he let his breath out. They were still okay.

  Daena and Tival slipped around him, went to the gate of the pen, and carefully pulled it open. Birn came bounding out first, his eyes glittering with excitement. Then Gunnar appeared, hard and watchful, his fists clenched. Karubi was last, barely able to shuffle along, clutching at his twisted arm.

  As soon as Daena saw her father, she hurried to him.

  “You’re hurt!”

  Carefully, so as not to do any further damage to himself, Karubi folded his daughter in a heartfelt embrace. Daena clung to him until finally he disengaged himself and pushed her gently back.

  “How did you get away?” he asked her softly.

  She paused, then slowly turned and looked at Davidson. Karubi followed the direction of her gaze, then carefully looked Davidson up and down, as if inspecting a cut of beef he was thinking about buying. But slowly his suspicious expression softened, as if almost against his will, he liked what he was seeing.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Davidson shrugged. “Just somebody trying to get the hell out of here.”

  Gunnar, his muscular body still taut with tension, was eyeing Tival, Senator Sandar’s black houseman, with an expression of surprise and dislike on his blunt features.

  Davidson saw him looking, and cocked a questioning eyebrow in his direction.

  Gunnar’s lips twisted. “This is one of their house humans. He thinks he’s better than us.” He gave Tival a poke. “He thinks he’s part ape.”

  Davidson stared at him. He’d just about had enough. First he’d given the two slaves at Senator Sandar’s house a shot at freedom, and one of them had been too frightened to even give it a try. Now he’d risked his own neck to come back here and break people he didn’t even know out of their cages, and some of them had started to give him a load of grief as well.

  He shot a glance at Daena. “You promised to show me the way back.”

  Karubi listened to this exchange with bright-eyed interest, then shot a questioning look at his daughter. She glanced at Davidson, then at her father.

  “We’ll go together,” Karubi said decisively.

  * * *

  Davidson stepped out onto the roof of a building near the slaver compound, followed by Karubi, then Daena, and the rest trailing after. Everybody stayed low, but moved quickly, painfully aware of how they were silhouetted against the bright, moonlit sky. All any ape had to do was glance up at the stars, and it would be all over. Davidson, for one, didn’t look forward to another meeting with Attar or General Thade, and he doubted any of the other humans were much interested in finding out what Limbo might do to punish a bunch of recaptured slaves.

  As they crept along, nobody noticed that on a rooftop lower than them, but directly in their path, four youthful male apes were passing around a jug as they indulged in a time-honored tradition of all teenaged boys: the monkey equivalent of a late-night kegger.

  One of the ape kids sloppily placed a finger over his numbed lips and blurted out, “Shhh. I hear something.”

  His friends stared at him in goggle-eyed shock. One of them, more paranoid than the rest, shot drunkenly to his feet.

  “I think it’s my mom! Hide it!”

  A third grabbed the jug and went lurching toward the edge of the roof, looking for a hiding place. His eyes bulged and he reared back in stunned surprise as he found himself face-to-face with Davidson. The young male might have been drunk, but he recovered quickly and lunged for the man, who stepped nimbly out of his way.

  Overbalanced, his brain fuddled with alcohol, the ape tumbled over with a crash that alerted his friends. Davidson saw what was happening, whirled, and sent his foot smashing through an attic door that opened onto the roof. It slammed open and he plunged through, with the others piling after him as he raced down a narrow stairwell. Behind them, the teenaged apes roared in outrage, bellowing alarm after alarm.

  The pani
cked humans scrambled pell-mell down the stairs, fanning out in wild disorder as they reached the bottom. Davidson veered off from the pack, took a hard right, and crashed through a door into a bedroom.

  Nova, Senator Nado’s popsy, sat up in bed, her eyes bulging as she tried to cover herself. Next to her, Nado snored, so deeply asleep even this racket couldn’t waken him.

  Davidson barely looked at them, only to note that Nova was too frightened to be a threat, as he kicked through another door and burst into another bedroom.

  Here an old ape was taking off a wig, revealing a bald head. As she placed it onto an ape bust, Davidson came through, overturned the bust, never slowing for an instant.

  He dove through a window, landed rolling on a balcony, leaped over the edge of the railing, smashed through another window, and kept on going.

  The interior of the ape apartment house was a spreading mass of chaos as frantic humans collided with an ever-growing circle of terrified apes. In one room, unconscious of the rising din outside, a little ape girl put her new pet human to bed in the human girl’s small, cramped cage. The ape girl was just mouthing a goodnight kiss at the trembling human child when Davidson and Karubi burst into the bedroom, followed by Daena.

  The two men barely noticed the drama with the little ape and the little girl, but Daena did. She’d been there when General Thade had snatched the human child from the children’s holding pen and given her like a pretty toy to his niece.

  Daena’s rage was a coal burning in her chest, but she managed to be almost gentle as she shoved the little ape girl aside, reached into the cage, and lifted the human child out into her own arms. As she turned to follow her father and Davidson, the little ape girl opened her mouth wide, revealing a row of sharp, tiny white canines, and let out a thin, childish howl of anger. Daena ignored her, which was a good thing. If she had to touch her again, she could probably not have kept herself from snapping the ape’s neck like a rat bone.

  * * *

  Not far away, Limbo, with a glum expression on his face, was carefully scraping half-dried patches of mashed flower blossoms off his once-clean pelt when a chorus of outraged gorilla roars suddenly began to thunder beyond his window. He turned to stare, his jaw dropping open, as the din grew louder.