Short Fiction - Ray Bradbury (short story to read .TXT) 📗

“Stop!” shouted a voice. The whole war seemed to give pause. “Retreat!” commanded the voice swiftly. And as Sim watched, lying upon his side, his comrades turned and fled back toward home.

“The sun is coming, our time is up!” He saw their muscled backs, their moving, tensing, flickering legs go up and down. The dead were left upon the field. The wounded cried for help. But there was no time for the wounded. There was only time for swift men to run the gauntlet home and, their lungs aching and raw with heated air, burst into their tunnels before the sun burnt and killed them.

The sun!

Sim saw another figure racing toward him. It was Chion! Lyte was helping Sim to his feet, whispering helpfully to him. “Can you walk?” she asked. And he groaned and said, “I think so.” “Walk then,” she said. “Walk slowly, and then faster and faster. We’ll make it. Walk slowly, start carefully. We’ll make it, I know we will.”

Sim got to his feet, stood swaying. Chion raced up, a strange expression cutting lines in his cheeks, his eyes shining with battle. Pushing Lyte abruptly aside he seized upon a rock and dealt Sim a jolting blow upon his ankle that laid wide the flesh. All of this was done quite silently.

Now he stood back, still not speaking, grinning like an animal from the night mountains, his chest panting in and out, looking from the thing he had done, to Lyte, and back. He got his breath. “He’ll never make it,” he nodded at Sim. “We’ll have to leave him here. Come along, Lyte.”

Lyte, like a cat-animal, sprang upon Chion, searching for his eyes, shrieking through her exposed, hard-pressed teeth. Her fingers stroked great bloody furrows down Chion’s arms and again, instantly, down his neck. Chion, with an oath, sprang away from her. She hurled a rock at him. Grunting, he let it miss him, then ran off a few yards. “Fool!” he cried, turning to scorn her. “Come along with me. Sim will be dead in a few minutes. Come along!”

Lyte turned her back on him. “I will go if you carry me.”

Chion’s face changed. His eyes lost their gleaming. “There is no time. We would both die if I carried you.”

Lyte looked through and beyond him. “Carry me, then, for that’s how I wish it to be.”

Without another word, glancing fearfully at the sun, Chion fled. His footsteps sped away and vanished from hearing. “May he fall and break his neck,” whispered Lyte, savagely glaring at his form as it skirted a ravine. She returned to Sim. “Can you walk?”

Agonies of pain shot up his leg from the wounded ankle. He nodded ironically. “We could make it to the cave in two hours, walking. I have an idea, Lyte. Carry me.” And he smiled with the grim joke.

She took his arm. “Nevertheless we’ll walk. Come.”

“No,” he said. “We’re staying here.”

“But why?”

“We came to seek a home here. If we walk we will die. I would rather die here. How much time have we?”

Together they measured the sun. “A few minutes,” she said, her voice flat and dull. She held close to him.

He looked at her. Lyte, he thought. Tomorrow I would have been a man. My body would have been strong and full and there would have been time with you, a kissing and a touching. Damn, but what kind of life is this where every last instant is drenched with fear and alert with death? Am I to be denied even some bit of real life?

The black rocks of the cliff were paling into deep purples and browns as the sun began to flood the world.

What a fool he was! He should have stayed and worked with Dienc, and thought and dreamed, and at least one time cupped Lyte’s mouth with his own.

With the sinews of his neck standing out defiantly he bellowed upward at the cliff holes.

“Send me down one man to do battle!”

Silence. His voice echoed from the cliff. The air was warm.

“It’s no use,” said Lyte, “They’ll pay no attention.”

He shouted again. “Hear me!” He stood with his weight on his good foot, his injured left leg throbbing and pulsating with pain. He shook a fist. “Send down a warrior who is no coward! I will not turn and run home! I have come to fight a fair fight! Send a man who will fight for the right to his cave! Him I will surely kill!”

More silence. A wave of heat passed over the land, receded.

“Oh, surely,” mocked Sim, hands on naked hips, head back, mouth wide, “surely there’s one among you not afraid to fight a cripple!” Silence. “No?” Silence.

“Then I have miscalculated you. I’m wrong. I’ll stand here, then, until the sun shucks the flesh off my bone in black scraps, and call you the filthy names you deserve.”

He got an answer.

“I do not like being called names,” replied a man’s voice.

Sim leaned forward, forgetting his crippled foot.

A huge man appeared in a cave mouth on the third level.

“Come down,” urged Sim. “Come down, fat one, and kill me.”

The man scowled seriously at his opponent a moment, then lumbered slowly down the path, his hands empty of any weapons. Immediately every cave above clustered with heads. An audience for this drama.

The man approached Sim. “We will fight by the rules, if you know them.”

“I’ll learn as we go,” replied Sim.

This pleased the man and he looked at Sim warily, but not unkindly. “This much I will tell you,” offered the man generously. “If you die, I will give your mate shelter and she will live, as she pleases, because she is the wife of a good man.”

Sim nodded swiftly. “I am ready,” he said.

“The rules are simple. We do not touch each other, save with stones. The stones and the sun will do either of us in. Now is the time⁠—”

A tip of the sun showed on the horizon. “My