“That’s impossible. Henry Annesley would be…”
“At least a hundred and twenty. I suspect time passes differently here. But these people also brew up a ritual concoction to which they attribute their healthy life-spans, as well as their, uh … fertility.”
“A ‘concoction’?”
“And I am not shacked up with Bidge. Though I admit she’s lovely. Perhaps you’d like to get down now, Bidge.”
Bidge led the way back to the Pthang village, in the large grove of trees just ahead, where a good-sized group of people, mostly women and children, mostly naked except for a few more fur vests, and about half the women obviously pregnant, now stood pointing and chattering. Chantal had by no means softened her expression toward Matthew and his charming cavegirl bride, or whatever the hell she was. In fact, she was wondering what the punishment for homicide might be, here.
Bidge’s muscles flexed and unclenched as she walked. This and the width of her hips caused her well-muscled butt to kind of, well … sway as she rhythmically shifted her weight from one leg to the other. From time to time Chantal rabbit-punched Matthew in the left kidney, which hurt a bit.
“What else am I supposed to look at?” he asked. “You’ll have to admit it is a nice one. Notice the way it … Ow!”
The trees were huge, easily 70 or 80 feet tall, and well spaced to provide large, shaded clearings. Chantal’s botany wasn’t good enough to be sure if they were any kind of tree she’d ever seen. She’d heard baobabs were big like this, but largely leafless, while these seemed well-covered in leaves, so her best guess was some gargantuan version of what all those southern boys in the teams called the “live oak.” The huge, columnar central trunks rose a good 12 or 15 feet from the ground before they spread in substantial horizontal branches, which finally curved upward again toward the vertical only after extending outward forty feet or more.
Forming a kind of ring just outside the circumference of the grove of big trees, a four-foot-high hedge of thorny green bushes, broken here and there by openings only wide enough to admit one adult at a time, had been planted or encouraged. It didn’t look too formidable as a defensive perimeter all by itself, but given the fair number of eight-foot lances among the gawkers, tipped with what appeared to be razor-sharp flint or obsidian points, it occurred to Chantal that a phalanx of spearmen, standing inside that hedge with lances leveled, might present some fairly serious discouragement to unwelcome guests.
The Pthang appeared to have built their primary dwellings on platforms lashed to the main network of horizontal tree limbs, basically enormous tree houses, portions open to the sky and potions thatched with something resembling palm fronds, linked to each other by swaying rope catwalks and to the ground by ladders which could presumably be hauled up in case of attack by man or beast. Some smaller platforms decorated the next set of sizeable horizontal limbs, fully 30 feet off the ground, possibly for storage. Chantal thought she could spy even a third level of construction higher than that, though those were so small that they were likely used only as crows’ nests — watchtowers, whatever.
The most impressive feature of the constructions, though, were a series of five, no, at least six huge crossbow-like things pointing outward from elevated tree-fort positions arranged around the perimeter of the grove, compound bows, each loaded with a very businesslike looking six-foot spear with huge triangular obsidian warhead. Given that the rest of the Pthang technology seemed to be consistently stone-age, these were unexpected.
A babble of excited voices broke out as Bidge announced the arrival of a new visitor, and more largely naked bodies came scrambling down the ladders and — closest to the center of the grove — one route of descent that looked more like a traditional staircase with handrails, suspended by ropes.
There were lots of children, excited and curious. As a matter of fact, while there were probably 40 adults and 80 children — Chantal was ashamed to admit she was slightly relieved to see the men at least wore some kind of minimal loincloth — the first thing she noticed was that the balance seemed off.
“Where are the men?” she asked Matthew.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he said, while smiling and waving at the approaching children to reassure them. “There is one band of men still away on a hunt, four or five maybe, but women outnumber eligible men here by at least three-to-one, probably due to combat losses. First you’ve got these large predators that you’ve met, but secondly they seem to be fighting an ongoing defensive war with this other aggressive species, the aforementioned arachnidae. Except for a few of the bigger Amazons, like Bidge, the women take to the trees to guard the children, the men guard the perimeter and take losses. Obviously, a system of monogamy, if they ever had one, can’t stand up to that kind of attrition. The women apparently mate with most of the men, any chance they get. Only way to keep the population numbers up.”
“Where’s she taking us?”
“To see the old man.”
The tree house at the center of the grove — the one with something approximating a normal wooden staircase — seemed to be the local headquarters. Word had moved ahead of them and Old Henry was ready to receive them, part-way reclining on a kind of couch in a roomy, well-ventilated hall but with his head and back supported by leather pillows. Henry Annesley had clung to the old ways at least to the extent that he wore a pair of leather short pants — very Austrian looking. With him was his grandson, Turok — probably past 60, himself — who seemed to be the closest thing to a chief that the Pthang recognized.
Given that he’d been a full-grown young man of at least college age when he disappeared from Providence on Earth One back in early 1921, Henry Annesley should be approaching 120 years of age. It sounded like the punchline to some joke to say a man “only looked 80,” but in this case it would have been about right. Diet and fresh air, maybe? The presumed absence of alcohol and all the stresses of modern life? Or maybe there really was something to their “concoction” — the fertility elixir that Matthew had mentioned.
He hadn’t been a very large man to begin with — unlike his grandson, Turok, who was a barrel-chested giant, and who sported a healthy thatch of red hair, one of the few such heads of hair they’d noticed in the settlement, except on some of the children. In a polyandrous society, where establishing fatherhood must be difficult, it was not far-fetched to presume such a head of hair might be seen as a mark of distinction, indicating direct descent from the old man.
No, Henry Annesley’s body was not exactly robust — his limbs appeared quite thin, actually, under their sheath of leathery skin. The thin wisps of hair forming a sparse halo around his head ranged from silver to white. And his face was heavily lined and weathered, no doubt. But his skin tone was excellent — so far as could be told, beneath his nut-brown tan. He wore something metallic on a leather thong around his neck, brass or gold. Weirdly enough, Chantal wondered if it could be a Phi Beta Kappa key, or maybe some Masonic talisman. His expression was cheerful beneath perpetually arched, inquisitive eyebrows. And his most formidable and surprising feature, his piercing blue eyes, peered out still bright, alert, inquisitive.
“So, Matthew, you were right,” Henry Annesley spoke up in a surprisingly strong voice, sounding weirdly like his great-nephew Windsor. “Another traveler from Earth One! I assume there are more reinforcements coming behind this gentleman?”
“This is Chantal Stevens, Henry, the woman I’ve told you about.”
“Hello, sir,” Chantal tried.
“Oh my goodness. And a thousand pardons, madam. My eyesight isn’t near what it used to be, not hardly. In that clothing, I took you for a soldier. …” The old man propped himself on an elbow, sat up straighter for a better look.
“Well, our new friend Matthew has been telling me how much things have changed back home, but hearing and seeing are two different things, aren’t they? You and your party didn’t suffer too much inconvenience from our neighbors the thunder lizards?”
> “Chantal is alone for now, Henry. She had to kill one of the big meat-eaters.”
“Kill it?”
“I brought a rifle, sir.”
“Thank God. Yes, that does look like an elephant gun. .416 Rigby?”
“Browning fifty.”
“But … that would be a machine gun, unless my memory fails me.”
“We’ve developed turnbolt repeaters, as well as semi-autos, that use the BMG round.” Chantal stripped one from the spare magazine in her thigh pocket and handed it over, a cartridge as big as a cigar. Bigger than one of Dona Solana’s cheroots, actually.
“Very effective, I would think.” Old Henry handed it back. “But surely the recoil must be substantial.”
“The muzzle brake helps a little, sir.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m sure I don’t outrank you anywhere including here, young lady. Here I’m ‘Henry’ or ‘Old Henry,’ or, when they think I’m not listening, ‘the old fool.’”
“Not so, grandfather,” smiled Turok, in what was obviously some pretty rusty English, as he patted the old man’s knee.
“I’m not that deaf, Turok. At any rate, no need to call me ‘sir,’ young lady, unless it makes you happy.”
“OK, sir.”
“Henry has been telling me the Pthang had almost lost faith in his tales of more people coming from Earth One,” Matthew explained.
“Matthew tells me my resonator was lost all this time, despite young Lovecraft writing about it. Smart, I’ll admit, young Howie Lovecraft, well-read, but a bit of a mama’s boy. We never thought he’d amount to anything. He wrote a newspaper piece?”
“Fiction — basically a mad scientist story. No one ever thought it was anything but fiction.”
“Well, good. That’s all for the best. I was scared to death the Army would get hold of the thing, or some latter-day P.T. Barnum looking to build a carnival attraction. Not meaning to insult the Army, young lady.”
“I did my tour in the Navy, sir.”
“And now I’ve insulted the young woman twice. See there? Never knew a Navy man who liked being called a soldier — or a Marine, either. I imagine you fetched coffee and donuts, that kind of thing?”
Matthew smiled and looked at the floor.
“That’s a lot of it. There’s more routine duty in the service than a lot of people realize … Henry. Always something to be cleaned and oiled. I take it you’re responsible for those big crossbows arranged around the perimeter?”
“My ballistae? Yes. A shame, isn’t it, all I managed to successfully bring them from Twentieth Century Earth were a few improvements in homicidal technology that date back to the Romans? Though Lord knows they’ve needed it. The arachnidae only visit us every few years, but when they do show up they just wreak havoc. Oh, in the storybooks the visitor from the future is supposed to show the primitive tribesmen how to build firearms and steel plate armor and steam engines and all kinds of modern wonders, I know. Wireless receivers, I suppose. But what you quickly realize is that every one of those technologies is built on a grasp of other, more basic, underlying technologies. Even showing them how to shape and fit pieces of wood and bone big enough to build my ballistae was quite an undertaking without steel axes, believe me.”
“The Pthang don’t seem to feel your presence here is of no value.”
“Well, I’ve done what little I could. Certainly produced as many great-grandchildren as I could!” the old man laughed until he wheezed, took a few moments to catch his breath. “I tried to show them how to weave textiles, but the Pthang don’t see much need for textiles, as you may have noticed. I did manage to invent the reed mat, for what that’s worth, and a recurved bow, shooting a longer arrow.”
“These are not small things, grandfather,” Turok insisted.
The old man waved his hand dismissively. “And of course I always told them more people would eventually follow me from Earth One, from Providence, that it was important some of them, at least, learned and kept up some practice speaking English.”
Their reminiscing about old times on Earth One was quickly cut short as shouts were raised outside. It was Bidge, it turned out, who’d first raised the alarm. She’d taken her bow and gone scouting southwest toward a small river which Old Henry called the Annaquatucket, where the Pthang apparently took a quantity of shad during the spring runs. But when she came to an overlook she’d spotted a large number of thunder lizards moving along the north bank and toward the tree village in a considerable hurry.
Hearing her cries of alarm, the villagers set to work quickly but with a sense of organization that argued they’d been through this plenty of times. The smaller children made for the taller trees near the center of the village, climbing not just to the more spacious “first floor” of the tree houses but to the next higher level, more than 30 feet off the ground, where they’d presumably be safe from even the largest predators.
It appeared the medium-sized children assumed child protection duties there, along with the most thoroughly pregnant women, while all the men and the rest of the adult women and even the few teen-aged boys raced to man the six most heavily fortified positions around the perimeter, where Henry Annesley had positioned his giant crossbows. Evidently the bows were not kept wound to full torsion, since several sweating men now set to work ratcheting up the coiled-rope springs on these weapons, while the actual shooters — mostly women, Chantal noticed — traversed their weapons from side to side to make sure they were swiveling freely.
Matthew and Chantal joined the crew of fighters in the war turret on the southwest edge of the village — the direction from which Bidge came running. Chantal was glad to see the Pthang had not fallen into the lazy habit of manning only that ballista on the side from which the alarm had come. Elevated walkways and rope ladders would allow them to shift their forces as necessary, and it was true this little southwest tree fort was now the most heavily manned, but none were abandoned. No attacker was going to be allowed to circle around and take them unawares from behind.
Bidge came pounding up — she had lost her fur vest somewhere and was completely naked, making it obvious to Chantal now why she wore the jacket in the first place, the garment evidently serving the function of a sports bra for the well-endowed Amazon. Looking over, she saw Matthew was fully enjoying Bidge’s running form. Bidge was last up the ladder; it was hurriedly pulled up behind her.
Now here came the fast-moving predatory thunder lizards, led by a large tyrannosaur, possibly the mate of the one Chantal had taken out earlier, in the clearing to the northeast. The woman handling their ballista waited till the closest beast was a lot closer than seemed reasonable, given that the creature’s head was high enough to reach in and grab any one of them.
Finally she let fly. Her six-foot arrow slashed through the side of the beast’s neck, not killing it instantly but starting a considerable hemorrhage of blood. The creature roared, its hot breath stinking of rotted meat, and turned its head sideways, lunging out and grabbing one of the defending spearmen by the arm. He yelled in turn, his comrades struck out with their spears, piercing the beast’s skin but not to enough depth to cause fatal wounds. The giant lizard drew back, the spearman’s arm still in its jaws, and he was pulled outside the guardrail, held back only by the grip of three of his fellows around his legs.
Chantal decided that was enough, waited for a clear shot, and put a 50-caliber round through the dinosaur’s eye. It went down, thrashing about quite impressively on the ground below. The three spearmen pulled their comrade back onto the platform, though his arm was bleeding profusely. The spearmen then hastily backed away from Chantal, looking with considerable alarm at her smoking weapon. But at a shout from the operator of the ballista they went back to work quickly enough, re-winding her springs so she could prepare to launch another bolt.
To their left, the attacking dinosaurs were swarming past the tree fort on the southernmost edge of the village. There, it appeared one of the six-foot arrows had already be
en loosed without hitting its mark. Without the aid of Chantal’s repeating rifle the attacking monsters had more success there, pulling one of the defenders from his perch. He landed on the ground, stabbing upward bravely with his spear at his nearest attacker, though it was evident one of his legs was useless, possibly broken, making it unlikely he’d be able to run to shelter.
But then Chantal noticed something odd. Instead of following up for a kill, the big reptiles — the tyrannosaurs being followed by a couple of triceratops and other, smaller species she couldn’t name — seemed to be skirting the tree-village, swerving south to get around the obstacle and then continuing to run on toward the Bay, to the east.
“What’s going on, Matthew?” she shouted above the tumult. “Mixed species of animals don’t attack in waves like this. These animals don’t even act like they’re feeding.”
“They’re being driven, Chantal.”
“Driven by what?”
“Those,” he said, pointing back to the southwest.
Chantal blinked to clear her eyes. Although they were all silvery, some looked more bluish, while others tended to reflect light that looked a little more pink. At any rate, there were half a dozen of them, less than a mile to the southwest and closing, aircraft of some kind, but without visible wings or props.
“What the hell are those?”
“Aircraft.”
“Saucer-shaped aircraft?”
“That’s as good a description as any.”
“And did Grandpa Annesley have any gems of wisdom to share as to who’s flying these saucer-shaped aircraft?”
“Bugs.”
“Bugs?”
“Giant spiders, as near as I can make out. The aforementioned arachnidae.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“Too many for the one rifle, I presume.”
“I can’t do anything against those suckers with a single-shot weapon. Where’s my other case?”
The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) Page 20