Yuen-Mong's Revenge by Gian Bordin Page B

the water. Gold nuggets? He bent down to grab one.
          "Atun, come, we must hurry," she urged and started crossing the river
at a shallow angle.
          "Just-a-second," he replied when he saw the golden glint in his hand.
He crouched and found another three. Looking over the river bed, he
suddenly saw hundreds of them. "Yuen-mong, wait! Wait! There’s gold,"
he shouted, looking down-river to see where she was. He just saw her
scale the bank. Confident that she would wait for him, as she had always
done so far, he stepped into the river and collected more until his vest
pocket was full. Then he started down-river too, although it was hard to
turn his back to all that gold.
          He had hardly taken a dozen steps when he found his path blocked by
a horde of howling savages, some holding their clubs ready to strike. He
turned to retreat upriver and ran straight into another group. The last he
remembered was an excruciating pain at the back of his head and then
everything went black.
          The first thing that entered his consciousness was a throbbing headache. The ground he was lying on was grinding into his back. The light
hurt his eyes and he closed them quickly. He tried to move into a more
comfortable position, but found his arms tied behind his head and pinned
down and so were his feet. For a moment he had no recollection of what
had happened, where he was, why he was tied up. Slowly, his memory
returned. He had crashed on Aros; he had been rescued by a woman, and
suddenly he saw again in his mind the glitter of gold nuggets in the river
and heard Yuen-mong’s urgent call "come! hurry!"
            Why had he not heeded her call? She never did anything without good
reason and if she said ‘hurry’ she meant it. And now he was splayed out
on the ground, naked, captured by the savages. Had she not said that they
usually kill all males, unless they intend to offer them as a sacrifice to the
craws? Was this the reason he was splayed out like this?
          In sudden panic, he opened his eyes to see where he was. He was in
a sizable oval clearing surrounded by broadleafs, with low rock outcrops
at one end. In fact, he was lying on bare rock. He heard voices behind
him and tried to turn his head. At the edge of his vision he saw three
men, the tallest one was wearing his clothing that was far too big for him.
The vest looked more like a coat and he must have shortened the pant
legs. On his head he wore his cap with its sun shield pointing backward.
He must be their leader, Atun concluded. The one facing him wore his
underpants. A short distance farther back was a group of about three
dozen men in loin cloths, armed with bows and arrows. Their faces and
bodies were painted in black and white stripes. They were attentively
looking at the three men next to him. Beyond them, spread out under the
canopy at the edge of the forest, women and children were milling
around, many pointing and looking at him. The women were also only
wearing loin cloths, several nursing infants on their undernourished
breasts. All the children went naked. Many of the women looked
pregnant.
          When the one in his underpants noticed that he was awake, he too
pointed at him, and the three came right up. The leader opened his mouth
with a horrible grin, revealing yellowish teeth with both incisors missing
and began to talk to him in an unfamiliar language with softly voiced j’s
and sh’s. At the end he spit in his face and nicked him in the rips, just
enough to draw blood. The other two immediately copied him. This was
the signal for all the men to form a circle, each holding a bow in his left
hand and an arrow in his right at breast level. They stamped the ground
to the rhythm of a drum and the circle began to rotate around him. When
they had completed a full round, a second drum joined in and the men
started to hum softly. At each completion of another round, a new drum
entered and the hum rose both in loudness and