Free The Island Under the Earth by Avram Davidson Page A

enough wineskins to give them a few each … then they’d not have to fight.”
    Bosun swallowed, thirstily. “Ah, but then there wouldn’t be near as good sport,” he conceded, a gleam in his eye.
    Stag nodded a slow nod. A good fight and a good drunk: two things easy to appreciate, though of late years he had cared for them increasingly less than before. “They’ll kill each other off, at this rate,” he mused. “Then we’ll have no trouble getting the beasts and gear.” But the bosun shook his head. Weren’t they accompanying each blow with a draught of wine? And wasn’t wine a prime medicine for sixy-ills? Hadn’t they had proof of that? And once again Stag swore — to break off and roll over and half to his feet in anger as first one clod of turf and then another thudded softly upon him. Down from the outer rim of the bowl a face peered at them from the bushes. It leered, bared its teeth in a silent laugh. At first they thought it was a man. Then in another moment they saw it was a sixy …
the
sixy … the old one … but with a difference.
    “ ‘Speak of rain, and it thunders,’ ” he muttered. Then, with a half-doubtful look, he slid down to where the beckoning arm reached from the high grasses’ fringe.
    “Dthey dztill drinking wvinez?” the sixy asked. Stag nodded. The old centaur lifted his upper lip until the frenum showed. Silent chuckles shook his sides as the man added, “And mashing and bashing each other.”
    Abruptly the centaur’s look changed to one of mock seriousness. He snorted disapprovingly, shook his head. Then his eyebrows shot up and his eyes bulged. The bosun, at whom these mimings were directed, looked down at himself to see what the cause might be. He found out in a moment when the black-palmed hand reached down and patted the ropes wound round his waist, the coil of line he had cobbled together last night back at Stonehouse Hobar. “You gyivez me dthisz,” the sixy said. It was not a request, it was a statement.
    “Let him have it,” said Captain Stag. The command was scarcely a concession, as the old creature already had it. He didn’t bother with more buffoonery, simply vanished into the grass once more. They looked at the place where he had been, then at each other, then returned to their hiding-place of moments ago.
    The games below had entered another stage. Two sixies, each armed with an enormous branch, had stationed themselves not far from the diminished stack of wine-skins. Three of them, arms around each other, stood off, howling something in their own language which scarcely bore any semblance to singing by now; and now and then they picked up their feet and stamped them with an irregular regularity. But most of the centaurs were watching the two with the tree-limbs. Now one of them, a big roan, suddenly detached himself from the mass and, with a bellow which echoed all about the grassy bowl, galloped directly for the heaped-up cargo.
    The sixies fell silent. Only the thud-thud of the charge was heard. His attack, if attack it was, led him right between the two guardians, if guardians they were. They swung at him. One blow fetched him at the breastbone, one at the back of his head.
Tump. Tump
. His forelimbs collapsed, his hind limbs still galloped, the result spun him around and over, legs kicking, blood gushing from his open mouth. They swung again.
Tump. Tump
. And one final
tump
. One leg of the fallen sixy twitched. The rest of him lay motionless.
    The others gave voice in what seemed like one great bray, stamped their four feet each upon the ground, and the ground shook and the air trembled. Stag felt the taste of bile upon his tongue. This was not even his former notion of a good fight. Animals … utter animals … bucks in rut … might maim each other, even kill each other. But not for sport. It was with an effort that he recalled, and nodded silent assent to, words said to him which might have had just such a scene to call them up when they were