‘Yes, unless we take some more enemies first. I’d like you to be even better in our language before you go to talk to Phemropit. You have wandered far and wide, if your story is true. You come from different tribes. Perhaps you have the wisdom and experience which we stay-at-homes lack. You might ask him the right questions. If you do, you won’t be killed by Phemropit. And you’ll be set free.’
He paused, then said nonchalantly, ‘By the way, that cube. I’ve spent much time in my house looking at it. What is it purpose?’
Sloosh started to buzz. Deyv said, ‘Shut up! Now is no time to tell the truth!’
He spoke to Fat Bull. ‘That is a magical weapon of immense power. Unfortunately, it is so destructive that we can’t use it without destroying ourselves. If we had set it off when we were caught in the net, we would have slain ourselves and the netters, and the jungle would have been blown apart, and a great flame would have swept to the sea and burned your village and the people in it to ashes within a second.
‘One of the things we were seeking was a shield we had heard about. This belongs to a witch. We were going to steal the shield and use it to protect ourselves when we did unleash the weapon.’
Apparently, the shaman believed the big whopper. He said, ‘That rod sticking out of the cube? Does pulling on that release this terrible magic?’
‘If you also use a certain chant at the same time,’ Deyv said.
‘I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me what it is?’ Fat Bull said.
‘Certainly, if you release us,’ Deyv said. ‘You may have the cube as a gift in return for our freedom.’
‘I can torture the chant from you.’
Deyv sweated even more heavily. He said, ‘Not this chant. It is arranged so that I forget it if someone tries to force it from me. Only if I use it willingly will it stay with me.’
‘You’re very glib,’ Fat Bull said. ‘Well, we’ll see what we’ll see. In the meantime, learn our speech even better. It may serve you well, perhaps save your life, even free you.’
The shaman rose from his squat to his over-seven-foot height. The painted beast-prognathous face poked its nose through the bars. The huge dark eyes stared into Deyv’s.
‘My sticks tell me that you queer strangers may be able to understand the god’s language. I sincerely hope so, since I want Phemropit to come dwell in my house and tell me his secrets. Sometimes, I have bad dreams about him. Then he comes to me, walking legless, armless and headless, and he speaks to me in his blinding manner. And he gets very angry when I can’t understand him. It is not good for a god to be angry with you.’
When the shaman had left, Deyv said, ‘I wish I knew what he was talking about.’
‘We’ll find out some time,’ the Yawtl said. ‘I hope that they take some more captives soon. That’ll give us more time, though our death is inevitable.’
Hoozisst began prowling around again, looking for a weak place in their prison. He knew he would not find one, but useless action was better than just sitting.
A moment later, the ground shook and rumbled and the walls of the cabin swayed. After balancing themselves on the jelly-like earth until nauseated by the motion, they threw themselves down. After a short time, the tremor ceased to affect the surface. But Deyv, his ear to the ground, could detect a very faint thunder. He got up and looked out of a window. The leaves of the few trees near by were still shaking. The Tsimmanbul were up off the ground, piping excitedly but ready to resume their routine.
Their guards inspected the cabin to make sure that the ends of the logs were still tightly interlocked. Satisfied, they took their stations again.
Some time later the big tremor was succeeded by two smaller ones. Nobody bothered to comment on them.
Just before bedtime there was some excitement among the Tsimmanbul. The two log gates facing the path down the cliff to the sea swung open. Several warriors rushed in, loudly piping. The shaman was summoned, and he talked for a few moments to the warriors. Then he led the entire population, except for the guards, through the gateway. Time passed. Deyv was about to go to sleep when he heard the loud chatter of the returning natives. He got up and listened while the wife of a guard told him what had happened.
Some males had come back from a hunt, and one had noticed a large fissure about twenty feet back from the cliff’s edge and forty feet from the stockade. Investigation showed that the tremor had cracked the rock from side to side. Another such quake, and the mass overhanging the sea might fall off.
The shaman threw his sticks and shook his rattle. Would the gods say whether it was best for the village to be moved back, far from the crack? No, the shaman said, after a dozen stick throwings. The gods say that there is no danger – yet.
Six sleep-times later, a war party brought in another captive, a Yawtl. He was put in the hut that had contained the previous enemy, and the giant firefly was also taken in to him. Sloosh asked Deyv to ask a guard if the captured Yawtl spoke Narakannetishaw. When the guard said that he did, Sloosh said, ‘Ah, I thought so.’ He would not say why, however.
The time came when the Yawtl was painted black and carried out in the palanquin. Seven sleep-times later, he returned in it. Sloosh commented again on the hole in the breastbone and the holes in the skull.
The prisoners were not to receive another stay of execution. Fat Bull told them that even if other captives were taken, they would have to face the god next.
‘You know our language well enough now.’
He turned and snapped his fingers. A guard brought in a large bamboo cage holding nine giant fireflies. Fat Bull removed a firefly and held it up so they could see it closely. The insect did not struggle, though it turned its multi-faceted eyes this way and that.
‘See this green spot on its back?’ the shaman said. ‘Notice now how I control the flashing of its tail. I place my thumb on the green spot. I press down gently.’
The insect’s tail glowed with its cold light, strong enough to dispel some of the twilight of the cabin.
‘Now I lift my thumb. The firefly immediately becomes dark. It has been trained to respond to pressure. If you were to hold your thumb on that spot, the bug would emit light until its source was exhausted.
‘But its power is much, and you won’t burn it out. Observe me closely now. See the length of the four pulses I make this fly emit. Four lengths of light, each a little longer than the other. With practice you’ll be able to make the lengths exact. And then you’ll learn how to speak our language without speaking. You will translate each word into a certain number of pulses, each word a group of so many pulses of so many lengths. Do you understand?’
‘Easily,’ Deyv said. ‘The fireflies do with light what the Archkerri does with sound when he talks. All of us have had much experience with his buzzes. We won’t have any trouble transferring to light pulses.’
‘Very good,’ Fat Bull said. ‘Bluebird-woman has been teaching you our speech, so she might as well teach you how to use the fireflies. You will become almost as fluent with the light as with the sound. And then you will have the great honour of talking to Phemropit.’
‘I’m not worthy of the honour,’ Hoozisst said.
The Tsimmanbul piped laughter. ‘If that is so, then we might as well kill you now. After you’ve had a chance to demonstrate your bravery by not crying out during the torture.’
‘Perhaps I was being too modest,’ the Yawtl said.
Grinning whitely, the: shaman left the cabin.
The practice started at once. Within six sleep-times, the prisoners were just beginning to master the control of the flies. Bluebird-woman said that they should be skilled enough in another ten sleep-times.
Meanwhile, Sloosh obtained from a guard some information that excited him. The others found it slightly interesting. What did they care if there was a giant lake only three sleep-times’ walk inland? Or that it had been formed from a crater made by a colossal meteorite?
‘It fell many many human generations ago,’ the Archkerri sa
id. The various sapients had highly advanced civilizations then, though nowhere near as high as those that moved the Earth and that made the moons and the great outer planets into small suns.
‘If they had been, they would have been able to deflect or disintegrate the meteor long before it collided with Earth. This fell near here, and the explosion and earthquake that followed burned or knocked down the forests halfway across the land mass. It slew a quarter of the animal life and tumbled all the great cities. The civilizations were destroyed within a few minutes. And the few survivors became savages. They forgot their knowledge, and their descendants never recovered it. This coastline was shattered; the sea poured into the hot crater. But since then smaller cataclysms have lifted up the sea-bottom to form a new shoreline.’
‘All tribes have tales of this,’ Vana said. ‘Though the reasons for the cataclysm and the details vary much.’
‘I’m surprised that after such a long time there should be even a memory of it in the folk tales. But then the fall of the meteor was so terrible that some dim traces of the event have persisted. It had a numbing effect upon my brothers, the trees and the grass. Their own memories are vague, distorted. All plants went into shock, and many species died from this shock.
‘Anyway, the god is near the edge of that ancient crater. It will be a pleasure to see the lake personally and not by report through the prism.’
‘A short-lived pleasure,’ the Yawtl said sourly.
The dreaded time arrived. The captives, excepting the two animals, were taken from the cabin and painted black. The cat and the dog, the shaman said, would be eaten after the tribespeople returned. Deyv asked permission to say farewell to Jum and Aejip. He was refused. Weeping, calling out to the animals, Deyv was carried off. Vana wept, too, but she shouted that they would come back and free them. Jum howled, and Aejip hurled herself, roaring, against the door.
Their hands tied behind them, their ankles bound, they were put into individual, brightly painted, heavily feathered palanquins. Four males lifted each of these. Amidst wild music and piping voices, they were carried through the stockade gateway. Three sleep-times later, they reached the end of their journey.
By the light of a hundred torches, they saw that they were at the top of a long gentle slope. This levelled out to a rocky beach beyond which was open water. Torch-bearing Tsimmanbul stood on the beach, and others were scattered up and down the slope. Tremendous boulders, half-buried, lined the ridge of the slope; others stuck out of the slope here and there.
Tall thick-trunked trees grew at widely separated intervals on the hill. One tree, however, about sixty yards from the top of the slope, had been entirely uprooted. It was not erosion that had done this. Something which had been buried deep under the tree had dug its way under it and raised it from the soil, tearing out the roots and toppling the two-hundred-foot-high plant.
Sloosh, after studying the situation, said that the uprooter might have rolled up.
But if this were so, why had not the monster kept on going?
‘I don’t know,’ the plant-man said. ‘It does seem to have moved of its own volition, however. Yet, how could it? The god of the Tsimmanbul is stone. Could it be the mineral kingdom’s bid for life?’
30
Ten warriors holding double-torches stood on each side of the god at a respectful distance. The blaze revealed Phemropit, a thing or a creature of a dark-grey shiny metal-stone. The body, if it was such, was a flattened oval, and must have weighed at least six hundred tons. It had no head, but its rounded front bore a number of depressions. Its means of locomotion, if it had any, was three endless tracks, one on each side of its body and one in the middle. The last came out of holes on the underside, the ‘belly’.
Sloosh said, ‘I can’t see any wheels. They must be inside the body or perhaps some other mechanism turns the tracks.’
After a while, he said, ‘Well, perhaps it’s not living. Perhaps it’s just some sort of machine. I doubt it, though. I think that it came down with the meteorite. It should have melted while going through the atmosphere. If it somehow escaped that, then the energy released by the collision should have melted it.’
‘Who cares?’ the Yawtl said. ‘In a little while we’ll all be dead, past knowledge, past non-knowledge.’
The captives were standing together on the top of the slope by a colossal boulder. Six guards stood behind them. Below them the whole tribe was dancing except for the drummers, harpists and flautists. The shaman was by himself, farther down the slope, leaping, whirling, screaming, shaking his rattle.
Below him was a short post rising vertically out of the earth. Deyv noted that it was in a direct line with the front of the god, which was twenty yards below.
The dancing went on for a long while, the participants dropping out from time to time to drink an acrid brownish liquid. And then the music and the motion stopped suddenly. The dancers froze, all piping, ‘Phemropit!’ After that, silence except for the cry of some animal in the jungle.
The shaman, crouching, stared down the slope at the stone-thing. Then he got down on his knees and bowed seven times, after which he rose and moved to one side of the post. A woman brought him a giant firefly in a cage. He removed it, and the woman ran back up the slope with the cage. Fat Bull walked close to the post and leaned over towards it, holding the firefly out.
‘Great god Phemropit, lord of the fiery falling star and of the great inland sea, god of the Narakannetishaw! Speak with your tongue of light!’
His thumb pressed, and the tail of the firefly flashed in the half-dark cast by The Dark Beast above.
Deyv jumped and gasped, and many screamed. From one of the holes in the front of Phemropit a thin bright light had shot out. It spat just above the top of the post, bored into the earth above it, then disappeared.
The firefly flashed out groups of pulses of four lengths.
‘Oh, great god! Here are your people again, come to worship you, to offer you more sacrifices! Take these, and this time may you be pleased to return with us to the holy House and dwell there for ever and protect us from our enemies!’
Again the slim blindingly bright beam flicked out. This time it almost touched the firefly and the hand that gripped it. The shaman moved back a step, turned, and looked up the slope.
‘Bring the first one!” he piped.
The captives waited in terror. They had been told that the shaman had picked the order in which they would go, but he had not said what that was. Now the two giant males moved towards the group, halted, looked darkly at them. Deyv sweated and shook. Was this the end? After all he had endured? If only he had his soul egg with him, he could at least stroke it and draw from it courage.
Suddenly, the two warriors grabbed Jeydee. Screaming, struggling, he was dragged down the slope. Feersh, hearing his voice, knew what had happened. She cried out to him to be brave, to show the savages that he was not afraid. He should demonstrate that the child of the dreaded witch Feersh the Blind was strong.
It was doubtful that Jeydee heard her. Even if he had, he would not have acted any differently. His mother knew this, but perhaps she hoped that in his last hour he would pull from deep within him his manhood.
Jeydee continued to writhe and scream until he was tied to the; post by ropes around his legs and waist. Then he stood silent and trembling while his hands were untied. The shaman handed him the big insect and said something. Deyv could hear the piping faintly, but he could not understand what was said. Doubtless, though, he was repeating the ritual questions to him. And promising again that if he could get the god to talk, he would be saved.
Sloosh muttered, ‘Those stupid Tsimmanbul. They could talk to it if they would teach it their language, I think. But not by standing someone directly in front of it. And they need referents, objects, to show it, so they can correlate words with these.’
He shrugged, then said, ‘Still, maybe the thing has an intelligence which is so alien that it couldn’t understand the correlation. If it in
deed has a mind as we know minds.’
Jeydee, very pale, held up the firefly. He pressed on the green spot, and the insect pulsed out its first message.
‘Oh, god Phemropit, I want to speak with you. Your people worship you with fear and adoration. They have sent me, an enemy of the Narakannetishaw, to speak with you so that you will not be guilty of slaying one of your true worshippers. Speak to me, Phemropit. And spare me so that I may go free and so that you may talk to your people and give them your ancient stony wisdom and make them powerful. And your worshippers will grow great and spread all over the Earth and make you the god of all people: Narakannetishaw, human, Yawtl and Skinniwakitaw. We shall conquer even The Shemibob.’
The Archkerri buzzed the equivalent of a snort of disgust. ’What nonsense! And I must die for their stupidity!’
The message was finished. A few seconds passed. And then the beam lanced out, piercing Jeydee’s chest. He fell forward and hung from the post. Again and again, repeating exactly the group-pulses, the beam flashed. It shot through the top of the head, and blood ran down from it until it was drained.
When the beam ceased, the Tsimmanbul broke into a frenzy of drumming, fluting and piping. Two warriors ran down the slope and untied the body, making sure that they were not in the line of the beam.
The shaman piped so loudly that he could be heard even at that distance. ‘Once more, the god Phemropit has mocked us! But we will not be discouraged! We know that the time will come when he will deign to talk to us!’
Feersh stood crying. Jowanarr’s face showed no emotion. Tishdom and Shig, the two slaves, were sobbing, not for their former master but for themselves. Vana was looking round as if she would like to make a run for it. She would not get far with her hands tied behind her. The Yawtl seemed withdrawn, as if he was no longer acknowledging the reality around him. Deyv thought that was only a pose, however. The wily Hoozisst would take advantage of any chance, no matter how small. But he was not going to get any.
The two warriors brought up the body of Jeydee and flung it down on the earth. They looked at the captives as if to say, who’s next? Fat Bull came up a few minutes later. He piped for silence and said, ‘The god Phemropit has refused to talk to us. But he has given us meat to eat, the body of an enemy!’
The Lovers * Dark Is the Sun * Riders of the Purple Wage Page 43