Seg the Bowman by Alan Burt Akers Read Free Book Online

hold on,” shouted Seg. “Just hold on a minute. I’ve shot the poor dratted toilca for you. I do not expect much in the way of thanks, but I do expect a little friendship—”
     
    “No boltim is a friend to any dinko.”
    “Boltim?”
    “That means big man,” whispered Milsi.
    “I know that — oh, I see. Yes.” Seg retained that cunning archer’s left-handed grip on bow and shaft.
    “I may be a boltim. I bear you no ill will. By the Veiled Froyvil! I could have passed by and you’d all be dead, chomped up by that monster!”
    The fellow with the red feathers said: “That is true, by Clomb of the Ompion Never-Miss.”
    “Whoever he and it may be,” said Seg — to himself.
    Blue feathers wasn’t so sure.
    “You speak with a false tongue,” he started.
    “And if I had not spoke you’d be quietly digesting in that toilca’s insides. Why, man, he could eat all of you and look around for more!”
    “Seg!”
    Assuredly, that had not been a politic thing to say.
    Seg blustered on.
    “We are just taking a little stroll along here, doing no harm to anyone, least of all you, noble dinkus. We have helped you. Now we will go on our way and give you the remberees.”
    A chattering gobble of argument among the pygmies followed. They spoke the universal Kregish that had been imposed on the world, heavily adulterated by accent and local dialect words. They began to form up into two separate bands. Beside the long blowpipes and the quivers of darts slung over their shoulders by straps they carried cudgels. These were, by ordinary standards, puny. If one was laid alongside the head of one dinko, powered by the angry muscles of another, the results could be fatal.
    Seg did not speak again.
    He slowly withdrew to the tree, and stood, silently, watching. Before very long, tribal hatreds flared up.
    The red feathers and the blue feathers started off, bashing at one another. And Seg noticed a curious fact.
    They did not puff out their cheeks into twin balloons and blow darts tipped with poison at one another.
    They slung the blowpipes down or over their backs and started in a-slugging one another with the cudgels. He understood what he was seeing. This was survival of the species, survival of the dinkus, against the perils of their home in the jungle.
    Presently the fight was of such an intensity that he and Milsi could edge along on the fringe of the trail and pass by without any one of the battling pygmies bothering his head about them.
    They reached the far side of the conflict and turned to rejoin the trail out of sight of the dinkus.
    Seg fell over a couple of naked bodies entwined beside a bush. He staggered and regained his balance with the litheness of a cat. The blowpipe quivered three inches from his chest, the lad’s cheeks distended like twin red apples.
     
    Without hesitation Seg’s left hand holding bow and arrow swished around, deflecting the blowpipe. The lad expelled his breath in a mighty gasp and the dart shot off into the jungle. At once a shrill squawk sounded.
    Seg said, “I hear you hit your target then, my lad. For, of course, you were not shooting at me, were you?”
    His gaze beat down on the pygmy lad. He was a young dinko, and he was cuddling up to a younger dinka, who still lay by the bush, rigid with terror.
    “No,” said the lad. He swallowed. He looked up and up to this monstrous boltim who towered like an ancient tree of the forest. “No.”
    “That is wise.”
    “Oh, the poor things!” exclaimed Milsi. She came forward in a rush and gathered the girl up and cradled her as she might a child. The girl was crying.
    “So that’s the way of it, then,” observed Seg.
    He sighed. Sex and passion and tribal taboos had played tricks with Kregen’s past, and no doubt would continue to do so into the future.
    The lad wore red feathers.
    The girl wore blue feathers.
    “They will surely part us if they find us,” said the boy. He spoke up bravely. “If they do not kill us.”
    “I do