The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard

by Geoff St. Reynard

  * * * *

  While I stared about me, Dy-lee passed into a far corner and began to clear away a great heap of trash, broken wood, old discarded sleeping furs, and other useless articles, which had been piled in a haphazard fashion there. I followed him across the floor and saw that he had cleared a space in the center of which was a square slab of stone set into the floor, with a huge ring embedded in one side of it. This ring he now grasped, and began to tug and haul at it, grunting with the strain. The block of stone moved upward, fell, moved and fell again, and it seemed it would take him an age to lift it free. So I put my hand on the ring beside his. He relinquished it to me, I think out of curiosity to see how powerful I was; and it was then I discovered that I was much the stronger, for the slab came up out of its hole smoothly and easily to my tug. Dy-lee straightened and said something in an awe-struck voice.

  “That is the result of a hunter’s life, friend Dy-lee,” I said, grinning. “If you stalked with a bow and a hatchet, rather than a pack of dogwolves, you would be as strong as I.”

  Pointing down into the black well exposed by the raising of the stone, he indicated the torch in my hand. I thrust it down into the mouth of the well. There was a kind of sputtering sound from the brand, which I could not attribute to anything in particular, except perhaps that the fire was afraid to go down into that jetty darkness. Peering past it, I saw a line of the graduated stones that abounded in these ruined places, going down like a curious tilted rock ladder into the depths of the earth. Dy-lee made urgent motions to me, that I should go down. I shook my head. “Not for an extra year of life, friend,” I said.

  He took the torch from me and before I could stop him he had dropped into the pit. The two dogwolves brushed by me and followed him down.

  Well, it ill became a hunter of the glen-folk to sit here gnawing his knuckles when even the brute beasts showed no fear of this terrible hole; so with many misgivings I took my first hesitant steps down the underground passage.

  It was almost pleasant in the tunnel. I had expected chill and dampness, but the walls were dry and quite warm to the touch, rather like the rocks on the sides of Ruddy Mountain, which is the cone-shaped hill that gives off sparks and smoke, far to the north of our land. As we progressed downward, the flambeau lighting our way, I seemed to notice even more heat; there may be a great fire somewhere beneath the earth of the ruined country—who can tell?

  * * * *

  Shortly we came to a level stretch of tunnel, and some few score paces thereafter, to a widening portion which shortly became about as broad as the inclosure with the stone roof. Here it was like an ordinary cave, except that the floor and walls and ceiling were flat, with sharp angles at the jointures. The thought was inescapable: the giants or whoever had made all the walls and inclosures above had hollowed out the earth and made this place likewise. I examined the wall in one place (it was all alike, as much as I saw of it that day). Small smooth stones of agreeably differing colors were set in rows to form the surface, and their substance was such as I had never found before, being sleek and wonderfully glossy, as lustrous as the hair of my Lora in the morning sunlight.

  Dy-lee now seemed excited, and urged me to follow him swiftly through the shining grotto. The dogwolves’ claws clicked along the level floor, and they constantly sniffed the air, which was musty and made our breathing rather labored. The big torch crackled and blazed brightly.

  At last we turned a corner—as sharply angled as those at the base of the walls—and after one look I gave a cry of fear, of brain-breaking wonder.

  How can I explain what I first thought I saw? It was ... it was as if in this gallery there were many many square holes in the walls, and each of these holes gave on a vista of vivid color and much apparent movement; as though by some inconceivable magic there were different worlds beyond each hole!

  I covered my eyes with an arm and moaned with terror. My knees smote together, my teeth chattered. And when Dy-lee laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder, I leaped as though Halfspoor himself had snorted in my ear.

  With murmurs meant to restore my confidence, he led me to one wall and waited patiently until I found the courage to uncover my eyes. Then he pointed to the first of the large square openings. Seeing that nothing malignant had sprung out of it yet, and that the dogwolves had casually lain down in the light dust of the floor, I gripped my nerves with the teeth of my mind and peered closely.

  * * * *

  Again I am at a loss for words to tell of this marvel. It was not a hole or opening, it was but an enclosed place on the wall, overlaid with a sheet of something so shiny and transparent that it must have been water frozen there forever by unthinkable sorcery. Beneath this motionless water, the figure of a woman looked out at us with calm unwinking gaze. She was dressed in fantastic furs, blue and emerald and gold, wrought in patterns that surely no one had ever seen before; her face, crowned by the gaudy feathers of a bird, was like those of my own people, being without hair and gentle-looking. After a long time of staring, I reached out to touch this wonder, and the still water over it felt cool and slick to my fingertips. The woman made no move as my hand passed before her. I was thunderstruck.

  Dy-lee led me to the next enclosed place, and there was a man, clad as fabulously as the woman, with a stern look of resolution on his features. He seemed a curious hybrid, for while most of his face was as smooth as mine, on his chin was a fringe of dark hair such as covered Dy-lee’s folk. Him I did not try to touch, for fear he should burst out of the frozen water at me.

  With the third of these strange things I began to notice something else: namely, that the people—there were two behind this water—seemed very flat and completely without true substance. It is difficult to explain. It was as though a man could be pressed flat as a leaf, and still hold his form, his color, even his life (though this was in abeyance, suspended as it were, yet waiting to break into movement at any second).

  * * * *

  So we went down the long gallery, and I saw more multitudes of wonders than ever I can tell. There were many sorts of folk in even more awesome furs and pelts than the first; men clad entirely in what appeared to be metal, and women in garments that surely never came from the cave cat or doe or anything that walks our world today. There were scenes I could not comprehend, enclosed flat places on the wall which I could not make myself believe were flat places at all, but rather must be the holes on vistas I had first thought them. These showed tiny trees and brooks, figures of people smaller than my thumb, even portions of the sky with infinitesimal clouds hanging motionless therein. And it was after I had looked on two or three of these that the truth began to come to me, like a fiery jewel of knowledge shining murkily up through the black waters of my ignorance. For these were not real people at all, nor real vistas, nor was there anything real or magical about them at all; they were flat places on the walls, whereon some clever man had laid multihued dyes, so that when all were applied this representation of reality sprang to its mysterious, incredible, unmoving life!

  I longed to ask Dy-lee if this was the true nature of the things, but could not think how to do it by signs. I therefore simply pointed at one of them and raised my brows questioningly.

  “Peesha!” said he. “Peesha!”

  It was, I gathered, a peesha. Whatever that might be.

  He put a finger on a certain part of this peesha, and said, “Tree!”

  I reeled. Literally I reeled, staggering back and dropping my jaw like a fool. “Tree?” I gasped. “Yes, yes, a tree!”

  He made polite motions, asking me my word for it.

  “Tree!” I shouted. I pointed to the beasts at our feet. “Dogwolves,” I said, with one hand on my breast; then, aiming a finger at him and still indicating the two animals, “poort,” I said. He understood that, for he nodded. I pointed to the wall. “Peesha,” I cried, nodding to him, and then, “flat place with many dyes,” I said in my own tongue. Finally, I waved at him and then at myself, and said, “Tree, tree. Tree, t
ree!”

  * * * *

  He grasped it then. He was as amazed as I had been. We had at least one word in common. It suggested astonishing possibilities to me. Eagerly I touched the sky in the representation before us, the clouds, the earth, a small hillock; naming them and getting his names in return. Not until we came to a brook did our languages coincide again. Then I said, “Stream,” and he said, as clearly as any man could, “River.” “Yes, yes!” I shouted. “River, river!”

  Babbling with excitement, he grasped my wrist and dragged me past several of the dye-images to a large one that was without the protecting rigid water, and which showed many men and women walking about between stone inclosures such as littered the ground above us. These inclosures, however, were not broken, but seemed whole and strangely beautiful, being decorated lavishly with carving and dyes. Some of them went up for hundreds of feet, as I could see by comparing them with the size of the people. Before this peesha he halted and proceeded to point out many things, naming them eagerly; but here we could not find anything for which we had a mutual name. Indeed, it was not remarkable, for most of the objects I had never seen until the day before, and then only in a ruined state.

  And so we passed down the cavern until we came to the end, and crossed its narrow width to go back along the other side, looking at Dy-lee’s uncanny “peeshas;” and at last we had seen them all, and I was too shattered for speech. Nothing like it had ever been thought of, had ever been dreamt of, had ever been seen by anyone in all my world, before today. That one could do this with dyes! Some of them had had no water—he called it glaa—over them, and these I had touched cautiously, finding their surfaces raised slightly here and there; and had come to the conclusion that the dyes had been mixed cleverly with harder substances, so that when they were put on the wall, they stiffened there and would not blur nor run together.

  And nearly as wonderful as these things was the fact that there were points of contact in our languages, words which were the same in both tongues. “Hand” was and to him, or it may have been hand also, as his aspirates were breathed as lightly as his sibilants were tongued. Tree, river, and owl were the same. I grew quite wrought-up with the fascination of the game, and could scarcely wait to tell Lora all about it.

  We went up the slanted stones to the surface, and after he had carefully hidden the entrance slab with the rubble again (I could not guess from what or whom), he led me across the ruins to another whole roofed inclosure. This one we entered by a hole far up in one wall, raising two logs for a kind of bridge from the ground. Into this place the dogwolves did not follow, but lay down outside to await us.

  * * * *

  Dy-lee’s torch was burning low. When we had dropped into the inclosure, he chose two more from a pile of them stacked neatly in a corner, and lit one from the first. It flared up redly, and again we raised a ringed slab and descended into another warm dry place of peeshas. By then, I may say, I had identified this with our own word “picture,” which we use to describe several things, such as the images our minds form occasionally which seem to us very real, and also a distant view of a beautiful countryside, as perhaps from a hill; I felt certain that peesha was picture, and dimly I was wondering if our own race had once known this strange art of arranging dyes on walls. Certainly the similarity of the two words would indicate something of the sort.

  He led me to one of the pictures—I will use this other word from now on—and held up the torch so that I could see it well. There was none of the frozen water at all in this place. The things were done in large squares on the rock wall, just as in the first underground grotto, but there was no glaa, nor was any of the slippery curious stone set around them. These walls were rougher and less shining.

  The first one was very old, faded, flaked here and there so that the barren rock showed through. It portrayed a scene in just such a place as the plain above had once been, and as I had seen in a number of the other pictures. Tall inclosures rose into the air, with more lines of openings across them than I could count. Strange birds flew above them, looking stiff and featherless and glittery. If there were people on the ground, they were too small to be seen.

  Gently he urged me to the next. Here was a scene among the walls, with people moving about. They looked very like my glen-folk, excepting always for the odd garments they wore, which covered all of their persons but the faces and hands. Even upon their feet they seemed to have garments.

  The third picture was terrible. In its ancient much-faded colors it showed many men fighting. Not fighting bears, or cave cats, but other men. Yes, here were dead men, with blood upon their breasts, and others were locked in fierce combat. I turned from this view with a sickness pulling at my belly, and Dy-lee felt much the same, for he threw a hairy arm over my shoulders and bent his head sorrowfully even as I.

  * * * *

  The next few pictures were all the same, men slaying one another, often with strange stick-like things, the nature of which I could not imagine. From the attitudes it was plain that when one was pointed at a man, the man died. It was some form of magic, such as an ogre might dream of.

  Then we came to a picture which defied my comprehension for many minutes. It was a place of high walls and inclosures, over which flocks of the curious stiff-winged birds flew; and many of the tallest inclosures were toppling, while fire raged in among them (I knew it was fire by the marvelous crimson and scarlet of the colors, dimmed though they were), and great clouds of smoke rolled out.

  There were others. I disliked them, I loathed them, but I could not keep myself from looking intently at each one. It was impressed on me that this was no legend, but a true thing that had happened in the far olden times. These were my people dying, at the hands of others of my people. I could not understand, but I could feel the truth of this thing.

  Men slaying men! The legend of Sunset Fields had not lied!

  On the second wall there was an enormous picture, full seven paces long and as high as the roof, and this one I could not grasp though I studied it for a long time. It was a place such as this plain—once there must have been many such, in the far olden times—from the center of which there sprouted up a great mushroom, like those in the Fearful Forest, but all creamy-white and so big as to shatter the imagination. I cannot say how huge it was. All our glens and valleys would be hidden in the shadow of such a mushroom. Though I looked at it until my eyes watered, and Dy-lee had to light his third flambeau, still I could not understand how such a thing could grow in the midst of the tall inclosures.

  The next picture I could grasp, however. They were of ruins, like those below which we stood, and all among the ramparts and broken walls were the bodies of men. Some calamity had laid its dreadful hand on the place. I wondered if the giant mushroom had been to blame, wreaking this havoc as it grew.

  And now the pictures were different. No more men slaying men, or tall majestic structures spearing the very sky with their tops, but only ruins and blackened plains, raw cliffs and far-flung wastes, the wreckage of great metal things I did not recognize, and among them a few, a very few human figures, prowling like jackal-rats furtively in the chaos. These pictures were all very ancient, with their dye-stuffs flaked and marred by time.

  * * * *

  There was a view of a prairie, waving with orange grass, on which moved men who might have been my own tribe. Naked, with bows and hatchets, they stalked an animal something like a cave cat, which had a great mane of hair all down its back. I touched this picture and nodded to Dy-lee. He pointed to me. He knew that these were my kindred. And this picture too was older than the oldest man of the glen-folk, for it was much dimmed and discolored.

  Down the walls I went, and now the pictures seemed to be less ancient, and in them I saw a weird change coming over the race of men, for they grew more hairy, and leaving the fields and pleasant glens (why, I wonder?) they appeared to take up their homes in the blighted places and in the caves of the raw red cliffs. Time passed, the pictures were brighter and
less flaked, and mankind was furred as a beast, growing little by little to look like my friend, Dy-lee.

  This series of pictures I pored over for a long time, going back and forth along the wall, judging the age of each in relation to the others; and I could not apprehend why, but it was true—these men were the same race, but growing shaggier in every succeeding picture. How long was the time gap between the pictures? A generation, a hundred years, a thousand? I could not tell. I went back across the floor to look at the earliest pictures, those in which men fought together. They exuded the aura of an incredible antiquity. And what of those in the other cavern? Their dyes were more brilliant, newer looking; yet the people were dressed in the queer garments that I saw in the oldest portrayals here. Did it mean that there were folk existing even now like them—folk impossible to believe in!—or simply that the dyes in their pictures were better and lasted longer than these? There were many things here that I could not understand, and I felt small and stupid and as young as the youngest pink rabbit with still-blind eyes.

  Dy-lee made a speech then, indicating that I should look at the final pictures; so I left my speculation and came to him and gazed.

  * * * *

  Here, immediately after the series in which mankind grew hairy, was a large square with dyes that were still vivid and clear, though it still seemed quite an ancient picture. It portrayed a number of Dy-lee’s folk crouching amid the ruins, perhaps of this very plain above our heads. Their attitudes showed perfectly that they were afraid, for they drew back, with arms about their females and young ones. Then, in a cleared space, there stood a man of my own race, smooth-skinned and wearing the raiment of a guardian, the long fringed black fox pelts hanging from his waist and the short mantle of white hares’ skins about his shoulders. He faced away from the cave folk, with his arms lifted in just such a mystical gesture as I had often seen the guardians making; and beyond him, from the edge of an especially well-limned forest, there arose a being whose every line suggested evil—evil beyond the power of words. There was no definite outline to the thing. It appeared to change slightly even while I stared at it, as though the dyes had been mixed with smoke or mist. It seemed to have horns, and then when I looked again, the horns had vanished. There were great columns of legs, and arms that hung loosely before its chest with an indescribable air of menace. Perhaps there were two sets of arms. I could not tell. It is strange to speak of a picture this way, for after all it was but dyes of many shades laid upon rock; but all I could recall definitely about the evil being, when I had turned away, was that its color was that of a dead fish’s belly, and that from its amorphous head there blazed out two terrible eyes of purest lambent flame.