Thus heartened by his own reasoning, he studied the situation cagily.
“The Thunderer has built a home here,” he concluded. “He is an enemy—and, I think, not a god. I shall kill him.”
Stepping into the open, he aimed his arrow. With a sudden skilful flexing of all the proper muscles, he drew that arrow to the head and released it. The flint-tipped shaft yelped in air, flew across the valley like a little flying serpent, and struck its mark fair in the gleaming flank.
The monster seemed to speak, with a voice such as Lone Hunt had never heard—like the ringing of a water-drop in a pool, but unthinkably louder. Naku’s people knew nothing of metal. Naku was haying new experiences indeed. He felt a thrill of exultation, for the echoing ring of the plates must be the cry of a wounded creature.
Setting a new arrow to string, he watched. A great hole had appeared in the forward part of the body, and something moved there. Lone Hunt sped his second arrow straight for and into that hole, and the movement checked abruptly. A new sound drifted forth—a wailing sigh, as from a severed throat. Lone Hunt grinned. He was conquering the Thunderer.
BUT, at the new cry, the hole reappeared in the wall. Out scrambled two of the twig-thin creatures, perhaps the same pair that he had seen before. They hurried to the forward orifice, and hauled into view a companion. That companion lay still and limp, and from its high skull jutted Naku’s arrow. The two living things examined the corpse and the shaft. Even at that distance, they seemed agitated.
Naku flourished his arms.
“Hai! Hai!” he yelled defiantly. “I killed him, I—I—I! The Thunderer blew storm and drowned my father and mother. I, Naku, take vengeance.”
The creatures turned toward him. One was handling something that gleamed and twinkled, a short rod the length of Naku’s forearm and as thick as his two fingers. From this bright object suddenly belched a greater brightness—a flash of lightning, surely, that leaped clear across the intervening space at Naku.
But he had expected some sort of assault, a charge or a hurled missile. He fell flat on his face, and just behind and above him he heard a crackle of fire. The trees kindled to that beam of light, which cut through the space just occupied by Naku’s own torso.
The hunter cursed, scrambled well to one side, rose behind a bit of scrub and launched yet a third arrow. It struck the skinny chest of the ray-wielder, and he collapsed across the body of his dead friend. The light switched off. The surviving stranger bundled himself frantically into the forward opening of the Thunderer, and the shiny shell closed up. Naku felt himself master of the field—the Thunderer struck dead, and two of its mysterious children—
Wait! The Thunderer was not dead! It rose from the ground, swooped toward him!
Naku did not fear greatly. He thought that he could spring into the woods, where that immense soaring mass could hardly follow him.
But the Thunderer, too, wielded the lightning, it flung a burning white flash at him. Naku, retreating among the trees, felt them spring into fire around him. He himself was saved because he shrank behind a big gnarled oak—the other side of it blamed up in the moment he stayed. Springing sidewise, he ran and ran. Chance brought him to a creek which flowed lakeward. His mind struck the saving equation for him—the enemy fought with fire, and he, Naku, would protect himself with water.
In he splashed, and none too soon. He swam down to the muddy bottom, and heard dully a great swishing gasp—the ray of hot light was drawn along the surface of the water, turning it to steam. The creek heated unpleasantly in that brief moment before the ray left it. Naku swam as far as he could on the bed of the stream, came to a wide pool, and cautiously peeped out.
He could see the flying monster high up, hovering in place and probing the forest with its ray, as a boy stirs grass with a stick to find a hiding lizard. Flames darted above the treetops everywhere and this was no place for a man whose bow had been ruined by water, anyway. Naku swam swiftly but silently with the current, came to shore a long bowshot ahead, and ran back the way he had come.
He paused once more on the shore of the lake, near the spot where he had first seen the Thunderer in the sky. Glancing back, he found that his enemy had flown away, but the forest roared with the fire it had kindled to destroy him.
Naku, swiftest racer of his tribe, outdid himself in the flight for home.
WHEN the flying machine returned to the Martian camp, there was a grim council.
“Two killed out of twelve, and by one primitive animal with the crudest weapons,” summed up the commander bleakly. “And he got away.” His gaunt, hard features seemed turned to carved wood. “I am not pleased.”
“We did not know of attack,” protested the one who had flown after the raider. “Anyway, I set the forest afire. He will not survive that.”
“I am afraid that he has already escaped, and warned others,” replied the commander.
Vwil spoke up. His face was calmer, gentler, than the others. “Perhaps, if he understood that we meant friendship—” he began.
“Do not speak for everyone, Vwil,” snubbed the commander. “This is war. If the creature escaped, he will bring others of his kind. We will prepare for that.”
He turned toward the knot of new-assembled robots, fixing his eyes upon them. He did not speak or gesture, but their delicate receiving mechanisms understood and obeyed his thought-impulses—they came toward him, a full score of silent metal men, each with a glowing face-lamp that gave off pulsations of white light. At his unspoken will they moved quickly to the space-ship in the center of the stockade, and entered. They emerged with a variety of weapons.
“I still hope—” began Vwil timidly.
“It makes no difference what you hope,” the commander snapped. “If we are to be safe here, we must be masters. These savages are intelligent, brave, warlike. We must teach them a lesson, in terms they understand.”
The others nodded agreement—all save Vwil. He was deep in thought.
CHAPTER III
Battle
AT home, on the sandy, hut-studded level between lake and bluff, Naku was talking more loudly and passionately than any had ever heard him. First he thrust himself upon Rrau, the war chief, and began to fling earnest words at him. Others, curious, came around, and what they heard caused them to beckon still others. As the men of the tribe poured from their huts and thickened into a big audience, Naku ceased his talking to Rrau alone. A great log lay at hand, and he sprang upon it, raising his voice so that all might hear.
“Men of the Flint!” he addressed them. “I come from seeing marvels. The Thunderer nests near here, it hurls fire upon the forest and threatens to kill us all! With it come strange creatures, like ugly dreams of skinny men, who attack good warriors, but who can themselves be killed!” He paused, and an amazed murmur went up. “I have seen the monster, and have shot arrows at the men-things it spawns—I have killed two!”
The murmur died. All gazed aghast at the comrade who had dared face and defy the Thunderer. Those nearest him moved away, and Naku saw and laughed.
“You are afraid that I will be struck with the Thunderer’s lightnings? You do not want to share that death? But I was threatened and escaped. It hurled fire—and missed! Men of the Flint, my friends and brothers, this Thunderer is no god. He is only a dangerous and evil monster, and must be killed.”
He glanced shrewdly around. Here and there he saw a bright face among the dark ones, a face suddenly touched with hope. Others of the Flint Folk disliked the Thunderer worship, yearned like himself for the return of service to the warm, beneficent Shining One, the sun. One such face was that of Rrau, the war chief. If the brave and popular leader should join his voice to Naku’s . . . But here came hobbling a fat, excited figure—Ipsar, the priest who led the new cult of the Thunderer.
Ipsar was the only man of the village whose life was so soft and easy that he could grow fleshy. He wore a great red beard, like the lightning itself, braided into two plaits. His body was clad in a deers
kin skirt and jerkin, and painted over with mystic jagged symbols. Around his neck were looped great chains of bright pebbles and shells, and other chains bound his fat arms and legs.
Upon his head rested a strange cap or helmet, a curved and spiralled thing that gave off faint flashes of rainbow-tinted brilliance. Ages before, it had been the shell of a nautilus-like sea creature and had become a fossil, turning to stone. Found by some oceanside loiterer, it had been prized, and in some way—a tedious succession of tradings, journeyings, thefts, war-plunderings—it had come the far distance from the sea, through the hands of a dozen peoples, into possession of the Flint Folk. Unique, glorious and full of mystery, it was the sacred head-dress of the priest. Some of the inner spirals and partitions had been cut away, so that the thing fitted Ipsar’s head snugly.
“Liar!” screamed the red-bearded man at Naku. “You speak sacrilege. If the Thunderer hurled fire at you—”
“I say that fire has been hurled. Look.” The young man pointed to where, in the forest far along the lake’s margin, rose brilliant banners of flame and clouds of smoke. “But it missed me. The Thunderer, I say again, is no god. If he is, let him strike me!”
EVERYONE waited. Naku shook his fist into the sky.
“I defy the Thunderer, I challenge him to fight me. See, nothing happens! If it hears, it is afraid!”
He gazed at the press of men around him, and farther at the timid, shifting fringe of women and children. He felt that his people half believed. Then another figure sprang to the log at his side. It was Rrau, as lean and gray and fierce as a wolf. The chief glared, and his beard bristled.
“Naku speaks the truth!” he trumpeted like a mad mammoth. “I have never believed in the Thunderer, but when others of you turned after Ipsar’s preachings I kept still. I am a man of war, not of words, and I thought to let the matter be proven before I took one side or the other. I say now, that it is proven!” He turned to Naku. “This man I know of old, and his father before him. He does not lie. What he says has happened. If he defies the Thunderer, so do I!”
At such an uncompromising statement from so important a figure in the community, a ragged cheer went up. Even those who had worshipped the Thunderer at Ipsar’s cunning behest, did so through fear—fear has always won more respect and service than beneficence. The old cult of the Shining One had been less exciting, but more kindly. If the fierce new deity could be overthrown, the Flint Folk would be thankfully pleased. One or two of the fiercest set up a shout.
“War! War!”
“Fools!” snarled Ipsar, but his voice was drowned in the swelling outcry. Rrau sprang down to earth and spoke to a brawny fellow near him.
“Seize that priest and hold him prisoner. His words, not Naku’s, are lies. We will go and see this Thunderer. If he seeks to do us harm—well, our arrows of flint are sure, our axes and spears of stone are sharp.”
But Ipsar went skipping and hirpling away, swift for all his infirmity. He looked funny, and the simple Flint Folk laughed. That laughter spelt the sudden end of his influence, of his soft living, and of the power of fear he wielded. Almost at once he was forgotten. Even the man to whom Rrau had spoken turned from pursuit, anxious to be one of the adventurers who would march against the Thunderer.
Rrau counted the fighting men present. There were a good sixty, more than two-thirds of the able-bodied men of his tribe. He weighed the number against what Naku had told him of the Thunderer’s fortress.
“These are enough,” he pronounced. “There must be more of us than of those Thunder Folk, and Naku says that they are weak and thin to the seeming. Also, we will sneak upon them without their knowledge. When the others return from hunting, let them stay here and keep watch.” He lifted his voice to bellow orders: “All warriors, go to your huts, take your best weapons! Follow me! Naku, lead the way!”
More cheering and enthusiastic hubbub. The party formed quickly, a column of twos, with Rrau and Naku walking together at the head, The women exhorted their males shrilly, and the men laughed back that they would return with the wing-feathers of the deposed god with which to sweep the hearths of their huts. At Rrau’s gesture, the column moved out.
THE noise and laughter died out quickly, but not the determination. Naku led his companions in a wide curve to avoid the section of forest that still smouldered, and Rrau kept watchful scouts far to right and left of the main body. At length the expedition came to the trees at the brink of the cuplike valley. Rrau and Naku, moving cautiously forward, peered out and down.
“The fortress looks larger than you described it,” said Rrau at once.
“It has grown since I was here,” replied Naku, wondering how, in less than half a day, the strange Thunder Folk had made great curving redoubts that swelled their lair to almost twice its original size. He and Rrau studied the light reflections and rising threads of smoke that showed inside, speculating vainly on what they might be. They had no conception of furnaces, refineries or forges.
There was a busy sound in the air, a blend of clanking metal, churning wheels, dragging of weights. The Thunder Folk—those invaders from a far world—were tightening their grip upon the empire they hoped to conquer.
“Look!” said Naku suddenly.
From another part of the forest’s edge, beyond the section which had burned, darted a human figure. It was heavy-set, and ran unsteadily down the slope toward the walled spaces in the bottom. The sunlight glowed upon a flying red beard. Ipsar, the priest, was hurrying toward the lair of his god, the Thunderer.
Naku fitted arrow to bow, but the priest was too far away and moving too fast for a sure shot.
“He goes to warn the monster,” he muttered to Rrau. “He is afraid for it. He knows that it is not all-powerful.”
“That is well,” responded the chief, “We shall destroy him along with his Thunderer.”
At that moment, the circular door in the rampart opened. Something poked itself out—a gleaming something, at which all the hidden Flint Folk stared. It drew itself into view, a jointed object that moved and postured, and seemed to have a form grotesquely human.
“Is that one of the Thunder Folk?” the chief asked Naku.
“No, it is something new. It looks stronger, and it has no face—only that round light at the front of its head.”
The robot moved to meet Ipsar. A second robot emerged. Behind them lurked one of the stick-limbed Martians, a baton-like ray thrower in his red hands.
Ipsar sensed danger, and howled for mercy, throwing up his fat arms. The robots moved to either side of him, towering high above his head. They clutched his shoulders with the lobster-claw appendages that served them for hands. Ipsar winced, but when they drew him toward the door he went willingly enough.
“Let us begin the fight,” said Rrau, and Naku, stepping into the open, drew and aimed his arrow.
He intended it for Ipsar, who patently meant to betray his people to the enemy, but just then one of the metal giants interposed its cylindrical body, and against it Naku sped his shaft. True to the mark sang his shaft, and bounced away. Loud rang the impact, the same sort of vibrating noise that Naku had evoked when first he shot at the flying machine he called the Thunderer.
BUT the robot was not hurt. It only turned itself in the direction from which the arrow had come, seeming to glare upward at the forest-edge with its foggy light that was like a single eye in its blank, hard head. The other dragged Ipsar into the stronghold.
“Shoot, all of you!” growled Rrau at the other men.
They, too, sprang into the open, a skirmish line of ready warriors. At almost the same breath of time, their arrows were launched, a sudden storm of flint, converging on that dull-shining figure that stopped to face them.
The air rang with the multiple impact, but the arrows glanced away like hail from the side of a cliff. The thing did not even reel. Instead, it took a slow step toward them.
Another robot came forth from the fortress, and another and another. They ranged themselves besi
des the first. Then more appeared, a dozen, twenty. Some carried the metal rods that threw flaming rays. Others had long blades, with keen edges. One or two bore sheafs of shackles.
Again a volley of arrows, straight to the targets, but absolutely ineffectual.
“They have shields of some kind—or magic,” muttered Rrau. Again he raised his voice: “Do not fear, men of the Flint! Take axes and spears—they are fewer than we—charge at them!”
He himself sprang forward and led the rush, his mighty axe whirling overhead—a keen, heavy blade of stone set in a tough shaft of dark wood. Rrau could strike heavily and accurately enough to split the skull of a bison, and if these shining things were men—even men with some sort of armor, like a tortoise or crocodile—he would show them who was master. Inspired by his example, the other Flint Folk whooped and charged.
The robots did not move, either to retreat or to resist. They only stood in a row, each poising a weapon. It was not until Rrau, twenty paces in advance of his charging tribesmen, was almost upon them that a robot stepped forth, lifting the ray-rod in its clawlike hands.
“Hai-yah!”
Rrau thundered his warcry, sprang high into the air, and for the moment was on a level with his tall opponent. With both sinewy arms he swung his axe, in a great whistling arc, full upon the top of the metal lump that did duty for the robot’s head.
Thunk! It drove home, a blow that would have severed a tree-trunk ©r smashed a granite boulder—but the robot barely buckled. The flint edge crumbled, the metal head wagged, and only a slight dent showed.
Then came the response. The machine-man levelled the weapon it held. Forth gushed a streak of white fire. Rrau, chief and champion of his people, at whose name enemies trembled and sought to hide, was suddenly nothing—nothing but a fluff of smoke, a settling scatter of ashes. He had been rayed out of existence.
The Complete Hok the Mighty Page 11