He flung the veiled taunt loudly at them, with a raising of both arms.
"I have spoken truth! Now answer!"
He ceased, and for a short minute there was silence. Then spoke Vreenya:
"O Kromno, master! We would question you!"
"I will answer and say only the thing that is."
"First, can our people live in that other, lighter air?"
"They can live. We have prepared caves for you. At first you shall not see the light. Only little by little you shall see it, and you and your children will change, till at last you shall be as I am and as your people were in the old days!"
Vreenya pondered, while tense interest held the elders and the Folk. Then he nodded, for his understanding—like that of all—was keen in spite of his savagery.
"And we can eat, O Kromno? This flesh off beasts you speak of may be good. This strange fruit may be good. I know not. It may also be as the poison weeds of our sea to us. But, if so, there are fish in those waters of the upper world?"
"There are fish, Vreenya, and of the best, and many! Near the caves runs a river—"
"A what, master?"
"A going of the waters. In those waters live fish without number. At the dark times you can catch them with nets, even as here. The dark times are half of each day. You shall have many hours for the fishing. Even that will suffice to live; but the flesh and fruits will not hurt you. They are good. There will be food for all, and far more than enough for all!"
Vreenya pondered again.
"We would talk together, we elders," he said, simply.
"It meets my pleasure," answered Allan. "And when ye have talked, I desire your answer!"
He crossed his arms, faced the multitude, and waited, while the elders gathered in a little group by the dungeon and for some minutes conferred in low and earnest tones.
Outwardly, the man seemed calm, but his soul burned within him and his heart was racing violently.
For on this moment, he well knew, hung the world's destiny. Should they decide to venture forth into the outer world all would be well. If not, the long labor, the plans, the hopes were lost forever.
Well he knew the stubborn nature of the Folk. Once their minds set, nothing on earth could ever stir them.
"Thank God I managed that lie about the patriarch!" thought Allen quickly. "If I'd slipped up on that, and told them he died at the very minute the sunlight struck him, it would have been all off, world without end. Hope it doesn't make a row later. But if it does, I'll face it. The main and only thing now is to get 'em started. They've got to go, that's all there is about it.
"Gad! After all, it's a terrific proposition I'm putting up to these simple fishers of the Abyss. I'm asking them, just on my say-so, to root up the life, the habits, the traditions of more than a thousand years and make a leap into the dark—into the light, I mean.
"I'm asking them to leave everything they've ever known for thirty generations and take a chance on what to them must be the wildest and most hare-brained adventure possible to imagine. To risk homes, families, lives, everything, just on my unsupported word. Jove! Columbus's proposal to his men was a mere afternoon jaunt compared with this! If they refuse, how can I blame them? But if they accept—God! what stuff I'll know they're made of! With material like that to work with, the conquest of the world's in sight already."
His eyes, wandering nervously along the front ranks of the waiting Folk, dimly illumined by the dull blue glow of the fire-well that shone through the mist, suddenly stopped with apprehension. His brows contracted, and on his heart it seemed as though a gripping hand had suddenly laid hold.
"H'yemba, the smith, again! Damn him! H'yemba!" he muttered, in sudden anger strongly tinged with fear.
The smith, in fact, was standing there a little to the left of him, huge and sinewed hands loosely clasped in front of him, face sinister, eyes glowing like two malevolent evil fires.
Allan noted the defiant poise of the body, the vast breadth of the shoulders, the heavy hang of the arms, biceped like a gorilla's.
For a minute the two men looked each other steadfastly in the eye, each measuring the other. Then suddenly the voice of Vreenya broke the tension.
"O Kromno, we have spoken. Will you hear us?"
Stern faced him, a strange sinking at his heart, almost as though the foreman of a jury stood before him to announce either freedom or sentence of death.
But, holding himself in check, lest any sign of fear or nervousness betray him, he made answer:
"I will hear you. Speak!"
"We have listened to your words. We believe you speak truth. Yet—"
"Yet what? Out with it, man!"
"Yet will we not compel any man to go. All shall be free—"
"Thank God!" breathed Allan, with a mighty sigh.
"—Free to stay or go, as they will. Our village is too full, even now. We have many children. It were well that some should make room for others. Those who dare, have our consent. Now, speak you to the people, your people, O Kromno, and see who chooses the upper world with you!"
Once more Allan turned toward the assemblage. But before he had found time to frame the first question in this unfamiliar speech, a disturbance somewhat to the left interrupted him.
There came a jostling, a pushing, a sound of voices in amazement, anger, approbation, doubt.
Into the clear space stepped H'yemba, the smith. His powerful right hand he raised on high. And boldly, in a loud voice, he cried:
"Folk of the Merucaans, this cannot be!"
Chapter XIII - The Ravished Nest
*
"It cannot be? Who says it cannot be? Who dares stand out and challenge me?"
"I, H'yemba, the man of iron and of flame!"
Stern faced him, every nerve and fiber quivering with sudden passion. At realization that in the exact psychological moment when success lay almost in his hand, this surly brute might baffle him, he felt a wave of murderous hate.
He realized that the dreaded catastrophe had indeed come to pass. Now his sole claim to chieftainship lay in his power to defend the title. Failure meant—death.
"You?" he shouted, advancing on the smith.
His opponent only leered and grimaced offensively. Then without even having vouchsafed an answer, he swung toward the elders.
"I challenge!" he exclaimed. "I have the right of words!"
Vreenya nodded, fingering his long white beard.
"Speak on!" he answered. "Such is our ancient custom."
"Oh, people," cried the smith, suddenly facing the throng, "will ye follow one who breaks the tribal manners of our folk? One who disdains our law? Who has neglected to obey it? Will ye trust yourselves into hands stained with law-breaking of our blood?"
A murmur, doubtful, wondering, obscure, spread through the people. By the greenish flare-light Stern could see looks of wonder and dismay. Some frowned, others stared at him or at the smith, and many muttered.
"What the devil and all have I broken now?" wondered Allan. "Plague take these barbarous customs! Jove, they're worse than the taboos of the old Maoris, in the ancient days! What's up?"
He had not long to wonder, for of a sudden H'yemba wheeled on him, pointed him out with vibrant hands, and in a voice of terrible anger cried:
"The law, the law of old! No man shall be chief who does not take a wife from out our people! None who weds one of the Lanskaarn, the island folk, or the yellow-haired Skeri beyond the Vortex, none such shall ever rule us. Yet this man, this stranger who speaks such great things very hard to be believed, scorns our custom. No woman from among us he has taken, but instead, that vuedma of his own kind! What? Will ye—"
He spoke no further, for Allan was upon him with one leap. At sound of that word, the most injurious in their tongue, the fires of Hell burst loose in Stern.
Reckoning no consequences, staying for no parley or diplomacy, he sprang; and as he sprang, he struck.
The blow went home on the smith's jaw with a smash
like a pile-driver. H'yemba, reeling, swung at him—no skill, no science, just a wild, barbaric, sledge-hammer sweep.
It would have killed had it landed, but Allan was not there. In point of tactics, the twentieth century met the tenth.
And as the smith whirled to recover, a terrible left-hander met him just below the short ribs.
With a grunt the man doubled, sprawled and fell. By some strange atavism, which he never afterward could understand, Allan counted, in the Folk's tongue: "Hathi, ko, zem, baku" and so up to "lamnu"—ten.
Still the smith did not rise, but only lay and groaned and sought to catch the breath that would not come.
"I have won!" cried Allan in a loud voice. "Here, you people, take this greun, this child, away! And let there be no further idle talk of a dead law—for surely, in your custom, a law dies when its champion is beaten! Come, quick, away with him!"
Two stout men came forward, bowed to Allan with hands clasped upon their breasts in signal of fresh allegiance, and without ceremony took the insensible smith, neck-and-heels, and lugged him off as though he had only been a net heavily laden with fish.
The crowd opened in awed silence to let them pass. By the glare Allan noticed that the man's jaw hung oddly awry, even as the obeah's had hung, in Madison Forest.
"Jove, what a wallop that must have been!" thought he, now perceiving for the first time that his knuckles were cut and bleeding. "Old Monahan himself taught me that in the Harvard gym a thousand odd years ago—and it still works. One question settled, mighty quick; and H'yemba won't have much to say for a few weeks at least. Not till his jawbone knits again, anyhow!"
Upon his arm he felt a hand. Turning, he saw Vreenya, the aged counselor.
"Surely, O master, he shall not live, now you have conquered him? The boiling pit awaits. It is our custom—if you will!"
Allan only shook his head.
"All customs change, these times," he answered. "I am your law! This man's life is needed, for he has good skill with metals. He shall live, but never shall he speak before the Folk again. I have said it!"
To the waiting throng he turned again.
"Ye have witnessed!" he cried, in a loud voice. "Now, have fear of me, your master! Once in the Battle of the Walls ye beheld death raining from my fire-bow. Once ye watched me vanquish your ruler, even the great Kamrou himself, and fling him far into the pit that boils. And now, for the third time, ye have seen. Remember well!"
A stir ran through the multitude. He felt its potent meaning, and he understood.
"I am the law!" he flung at them once more. "Declare it, all! Repeat!"
The thousand-throated chorus: "Thou art the law!" boomed upward through the fog, rolled mightily against the towering cliff, and echoed thunderlike across the hot, black sea.
"It is well!" he cried. "One more sleep, and then—then I choose from among ye two for the journey, two of your boldest and best. And that shall be the first journey of many, up to the better places that await ye, far beyond the pit!"
Straining his eyes in the night, pierced only by the electric beam that ran and quavered rapidly over the broken forest-tops far below, Allan peered down and far ahead. The fire, the signal-fire he had told Beatrice to build upon the ledge—would he never sight it?
Eagerly he scanned the dark horizon only just visible in the star-shine. Warmly the rushing night wind fanned his cheek; the roar of the motor and propellers, pulsating mightily, made music to his ears. For it sang: "Home again! Beatrice, and love once more!"
Many long hours had passed since, his fuel-tanks replenished from the apparatus for distilling the crude naphtha, which he had installed during his first stay in the Abyss, he had risen a second time into that heavy, humid, purple-vapored air.
With him he now bore Bremilu, the strong, and Zangamon, most expert of all the fishermen. Slung in the baggage-crate aft lay a large seine, certain supplies of fish, weed and eggs, and—from time to time noisily squawking—some half-dozen of the strange sea-birds, in a metal basket.
The pioneers had insisted on taking these impedimenta with them, to bridge the gap of changed conditions, a precaution Stern had recognized as eminently sensible.
"Gad!" thought he, as the Pauillac swept its long, flat-arc'd trajectory through the night, "under any circumstances this must be a terrific wrench for them. Talk about nerve! If they haven't got it, who has? This trip of these subterranean barbarians, thus flung suddenly into midair, out into a world of which they know absolutely nothing, must be exactly what a journey to Mars would mean to me. More, far more, to their simple minds. I wonder myself at their courage in taking such a tremendous step."
And in his heart a new and keener admiration for the basic stamina of the Merucaans took root.
"They'll do!" he murmured, as he scanned his lighted chart once more, and cast up reckonings from the dials of his delicately adjusted instruments.
Half an hour more of rapid flight and he deemed New Hope River could not now be far.
"No use to try and hear it, though, with this racket of the propellers in my ears," thought he. "The searchlight might possibly pick up a gleam of water, if we fly over it. But even that's a small index to go by. The signal-fire must be my only real guide—and where is it, now, that fire?"
A vague uneasiness began to oppress him. The fire, he reckoned, should have shown ere now in the far distance. Without it, how find his way? And what of Beatrice?
His uneasy reflections were suddenly interrupted by a word from Zangamon, at his right.
"O Kromno, master, see?"
"What is it, now?"
"A fire, very distant, master!"
"Where?" queried Stern eagerly, his heart leaping with joy. "I see no fire. Your eyes, used to the dark places and the fogs, now far surpass mine, even as mine will yours when the time of light shall come. Where is the fire, Zangamon?"
The fisher pointed, a dim huge figure in the star-lit gloom. "There, master. On thy left hand, thus."
Stern shifted his course to southwest by west, and for some minutes held it true, so that the needle hardly trembled on the compass dial.
Then all at once he, too, saw the welcome signal, a tiniest pin-prick of light far on the edge of the world, no different from the sixth-magnitude stars that hung just above it on the horizon, save for its redness.
A gush of gratitude and love welled in the fountains of his heart.
"Home!" he whispered. "Home—for where you are that's home to me! Oh, Beatrice, I'm coming—coming home to you!"
Slowly at first, then with greater and ever greater swiftness, the signal star crept nearer; and now even the flames were visible, and now behind them he caught dim sight of the rock-wall.
On and on, a very vulture of the upper air, planed the Pauillac. Stern shouted with all his strength. The girl might possibly hear him and might come out of their cave. She might even signal—and the nearness of her presence mounted upon him like a heady wine.
He swung the searchlight on the canyon, as they swept above it. He flung the pencil of radiance in a wide sweep up the cliff and down along the terrace.
It gave no sight, no sign of Beatrice.
"Sleeping, of course," he reflected.
And now, Hope River past, and the canyon swallowed by the dense forest, he flung his light once more ahead. With it he felt out the rocky barrens for a landing-place.
Not more than twenty minutes later, followed by Bremilu and Zangamon, Stern was making way through the thick-laced wood and jungle.
Awed, terrified by their first sight of trees and by the upper world which to them was naught but marvel and danger, the two Merucaans followed close behind their guide. Even so would you or I cling to the Martian who should land us on that ruddy planet and pilot us through some huge, inchoate and grotesque growth of things to us perfectly unimaginable.
"Oh, master, we shall see the patriarch soon?" asked Bremilu, in a strange voice—a voice to him astonishingly loud, in the clear air of night upon the surface o
f the world. "Soon shall we speak with him and—"
"Hark! What's that?" interrupted Stern, pausing, the while he gripped his pistol tighter.
From afar, though in which direction he could not say, a vague, dull roar made itself heard through the forest.
Sonorous, vibrant, menacing, it echoed and died; and then again, as once before, Stern heard that strange, hollow booming, as of some mighty drum struck by a muffled fist.
A cry? Was that a cry, so distant and so faint? Beast-cry, or call of night-bird, shrill and far?
Stern shuddered, and with redoubled haste once more pushed through the vague path he and Beatrice had made from the barrens to Settlement Miffs.
Presently, followed by the two colonists who dared not let him for a moment out of their sight, he reached the brow of the canyon. His hand flash-lamp showed him the rough path to the terrace.
With fast-beating heart he ran down it, unmindful of the unprotected edge or the sheer drop to the rocks of New Hope River, far below.
Bremilu and Zangamon, seeing perfectly in the gloom, hurried close behind, with words of awe, wonder and admiration in their own tongue.
"Beta! Oh, Beatrice! Home again!" Stern shouted triumphantly. "Where are you, Beta? Come! I'm home again!"
Quickly he scrambled along the broken terrace, stumbling in his haste over loose rocks and debris. Now he had reached the turn. The fire was in sight.
"Beta!" again he hailed. "O-he! Beatrice!"
Still no answer, nor any sign from her. As he came to the fire he noted, despite his strong emotions, that it had for the most part burned down to glowing embers.
Only one or two resinous knots still flamed. It could not have been replenished for some time, perhaps two hours or more.
Again, his quick eye caught the fact that cinders, ashes and half-burned sticks lay scattered about in strange disorder.
"Why, Beatrice never makes a fire like that!" the thought pierced through his mind.
And—though as yet on no very definite grounds—a quick prescience of catastrophe battered at his heart.
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