The Wind Whales of Ishmael

by Philip José Farmer

Again the faint noise drifted down the flight of stairs.

  It sounded something like chanting.

  "I think we might be close to the temple," Namalee said.

  "I hope we are close to the exit from this place," Karkri said. "Something is following us."

  Ishmael looked back down the steps, past the torches, and strained to see into the darkness at the foot of the steps. The extreme influence of the torchlights barely reached there. Still, it was light enough for him to see the hulk that moved slowly, creakingly, from the corridor into the space at the bottom. Though he could not make out the details, he knew that it was the stone beast.

  "It didn't die," Namalee said.

  "And it's waiting for us," Ishmael said. "Well, it surely can't come up the steps after us."

  The thing made no effort to ascend the flight. It was as motionless as the statue it seemed to be. It was waiting, and it probably was better at waiting than any creature in this world or the one that Ishmael had left.

  "It's blocking the corridor," Karkri said. "And the next time it will be aroused. We have hurt it, and it won't forget that."

  "You don't know that," Ishmael said.

  He climbed on until he reached another narrow corridor. This led straight for about sixty feet and ended in a wall of stone. But the voices, which had become louder, had to be close by. He put his ear to the wall and could hear the chanting quite clearly. It was not in the tongue of the Zalarapamtrans.

  Softly, he rapped on the wall. He was surprised to find that the wall was not as thin as he had thought. It was very thick and solid. He determined after going over the wall that the voices were filtering through openings near the bottom, the center, and the top of the wall. These were holes a quarter-inch wide drilled through the stone and spaced about a foot apart.

  "They must move this wall somehow," Ishmael said to Namalee.

  He pushed at various places and passed the torch over every inch of the wall and the adjacent areas of the corridor. But he could find nothing that might serve as a button or an activator to swing the wall on a pivot. He was convinced that this had to be the manner in which the wall was operated.

  "Perhaps," Namalee said, "the mechanisms are all on the other side?"

  "I hope not," he said, "though that would be one way of making sure that intruders did not get into the temple even if they escaped the guardians. To return after feeding the beasts, though, the priests would have to notify those on the other side of the wall to operate the mechanism. I suppose they could do so through the little holes."

  Ishmael returned to the head of the stairs and looked down in the light of the torch Karkri held. It was true. The great shell of the beast was tilted upward, and the massive legs with the claws of stone were gripping the edges of a step. Slowly, and with a grinding noise, the bottom of the shell scraping against the steps, the monster pulled itself up. Its head was extended out of the shell and its jaws were opened wide. Ishmael went carefully down the steep steps until he was close enough to see into the wide yawn of the mouth. The eyeball thing inside pulsed much more rapidly than the first time he had seen it. And the arrow and spear seemed to have been absorbed into the organ. Possibly their wood had provided it with fuel. The beast's life must be comparable to a low and slow-burning fire under a tea kettle. The energy was low, but even a small fire will eventually make a kettle boil.

  Ishmael went down several more steps until he was just out of reach of the beast if it should extend its neck to its limit. The head turned slightly to each side as if the thing wanted to give each of the gray granite eyes a view of its victim. Ishmael retreated one step and to do so had to turn his back on the thing. He grabbed the edge of the high riser and pulled; Namalee shrieked. Without looking back he pulled himself up swiftly and then turned.

  The thing had come up more swiftly than he would have thought possible. A paw reached up and the dead-looking gray-rock claws hooked into the edge of the step. The second paw hooked, and the legs bent to pull the great body up. The hind legs spread out to brace itself. The neck slid back into the shell, but the mouth remained wide open.

  Ishmael kept on retreating while the stone thing clambered after him. When he was near the top, Ishmael stopped. Once that monster came over the edge and had a stable footing on the corridor, it could advance on the party. And, due to the narrowness of the corridor, not more than two men could fight it at one time.

  Ishmael turned and said, "Hurry up! Try to find how to get out, or..."

  He didn't need to finish. The others could see what might happen. Karkri came to his side and looked down. He said, "The beast has a precarious hold."

  "There's only one way to keep it from getting up here," Ishmael said.

  They went down four steps and stood just out of reach of the head if the neck should extend further. They whispered together and then, as they saw the beast reach out its right paw to grip the next step, they leaped outward with all their force.

  With a speed that neither man had reckoned on because they considered the creature to be of stone, and stone had to be slow, the neck thrust the head at them. It was fortunate only that the beast chose Karkri and not Ishmael. If it had been the other way, that head, launched on a neck as swift as a line singing out at the end of a harpoon deep in a whale just struck, would have closed its jaws on Ishmael.

  But they ground down like millstones on Karkri's feet as he leaped forward.

  Ishmael's feet struck the shell just beside the right side of the neck.

  Karkri screamed as his leg bones were ground together and his back struck the edge of a step.

  The monster, borne by the impact of the two bodies, rose up and backward. Its hind feet slipped and, still holding the screaming Karkri in its jaws, it fell back. Karkri was flipped up and over through the air as if he were a weight on the end of a cracked whip. He described an arc and smashed into the steps below the monster, which then fell upon him on its back.

  Ishmael leaped down again and drove his feet against the side of the beast, which had turned as if on a pivot on the high part of the shell. His driving legs spun it on around and it slipped on the edge of another step and crashed down the steps. At the bottom it turned over and fell upon its back, and there it stayed, kicking its short legs, unable to get back onto its feet, just like a tortoise of flesh.

  This time Karkri was almost on top of the beast. He lay face-down while blood ran from him down the steps and formed a pool around the shell of the beast's back.

  Ishmael took a few seconds to determine that Karkri was past saving. He climbed back up the steps and returned to the wall. Though the beast had made a great crashing noise when it went down the steps, the noise had apparently not been heard on the other side of the wall. The chanting was louder than before.

  Everything that they could think to do had been done, and still they had discovered no means for opening the wall. They could not just sit there and wait because they would starve to death. Moreover, step two of the plan would be set into motion, and if Ishmael's band was within the temple the raid would be a failure. It still was not too late to return to the boats and try to enter from the upper part of the ledge. But Ishmael had no heart for that and neither, he was certain, did any of his band. Surely there was a key to entrance into the temple. It was just that they were ignorant or blind.

  He looked through one of the shafts in the wall. There was a dim light on the other side the source of which he could not see. About twenty or so feet beyond the wall was another gray stone wall. The voices seemed to be coming from the right. He doubted that the chanters were in the room he was looking into, but the voices had to be close to penetrate the shafts.

  Ishmael clamped his teeth together as if he were biting down on time to shake it, as a terrier shakes a rat.

  "Perhaps we should put out the torches," Namalee said. "If they should go by the wall and see the light through the shafts.. ."

  Ishmael cursed to himself because he had not thought of that. He ordered the t
orches doused with a heavy powder which one man carried in a pouch for this purpose. Another man carried a small bag of oil with which to soak the torches and matches of weed and chemicals derived from some ground plants. Ishmael checked that they still had these before he allowed the flames to be put out.

  Then they were in darkness and silence. The voices had stopped.

  Ishmael put his ear to a shaft. After a while he heard a cough. Despite his situation, he smiled. There was something comfortable and comforting in that cough. Doubtless the congregation, or choir, was silent while waiting for a final benediction or statement of dismissal. And, as always happened in a church meeting, someone coughed.

  The earth never stopped shaking and the seas were dried up, the sun was a giant dying and the moon was falling, and most of life had taken to the air, which was itself disappearing. But human nature had not changed as swiftly as the world in which it existed.

  Then he lost the smile as someone shouted a few words and there was the sound of many feet shuffling and a murmur of voices. The meeting was breaking up.

  A minute later a torch brightened the room on the other side of the wall, feet shuffled, and two men talking in low voices, one holding a torch, went by. They were robed and hooded in a scarlet material and would have passed for the monks of his day if their faces had not been tattooed with bright greens and reds.

  Other men, always in pairs, followed them. Ishmael counted ten couples, and then there were none. But he was sure that the room in which they had chanted had held many more than that. The others must have gone off to other places or else were still in the chantry. But, if they were, they were silent.

  He waited. The silence became a singing. The darkness settled as if it had substance and weight and a mindless, malign purpose. Once there was a clank from behind him and he jumped, along with the others. But it was the beast grating its stone claws against the steps in an effort to get onto its feet.

  Namalee sniffed suddenly and put her nose to the end of a shaft and breathed deeply again. Then she said, "I thought I smelled it. It's the odor of the gods. The sacred room of worship must be very close indeed. But it might as well be a thousand miles away."

  Ishmael sniffed but could detect nothing. However, he had not been brought up in the odor of sanctity and so lacked a trained nose. And if he did not soon track down the secret of unlocking the doorway to the next room, he would lack more than just a nose.

  Ishmael listened but could hear nothing from the other side. He ordered that one torch be relighted. When the flame sprang out, causing him to blink with the light, he took the torch and held it so that its light fell through the length of a shaft. One by one, starting from the upper right-hand corner, he examined the interior of each shaft, searching for some difference in color of the stone, some lines, however faint, which might indicate a plate set in the hollow, or anything that was even in the slightest suspicious. But he found nothing.

  As he did so, he heard a slight squeaking sound, and he whirled. Krashvanni, the man who held the bag of powder with which to put out the torch, reached out for his flame. But Namalee said, "The wall is moving!"

  It was true. It was not turning upon a vertical pivot, as he would have expected. It was revolving on a horizontal rod, its lower part moving upward.

  Ishmael prayed to all the gods that be, not forgetting Yojo, Queequeg's godlet, that no Booragangahns would happen by at this time.

  Before the bottom of the wall had lifted more than a foot and a half, he was sliding forward on his chest. The others followed him, and long before the slow-moving section had turned completely over the band was in the little room on the other side.

  "What caused it to move?" Namalee said.

  "I do not know," Ishmael said. "But I strongly suspect that the activating mechanism is triggered by a bright light applied in a certain sequence to each of the shafts. Perhaps there is no necessary sequence, or it may be that just a certain number have to be exposed to a bright light. I do not know. But I am sure that the key is the application of torchlight to something within the shafts. Perhaps the light sets up a chemical reaction analogous to that..."

  He stopped. The tongue of Zalarapamtra had no words for the scientific inventions of Monsieur Daguerre or Professor Draper. Besides, what mattered was that he had accidentally discovered the lock, however it worked.

  "Zoomashmarta is with us!" Namalee said. "He knows that we have come for him through terrible dangers, and he has shown us the way as a reward for our devotion!"

  "That is an explanation which cannot be disproved," Ishmael said.

  He sent two men into the corridor to the left to scout, and he led the others down the opposite corridor. This was a very short incline which led into a vast room carved out of a greenish rock with red stippling. Torches were everywhere, and the sweet and intoxicating perfume of the gods was heavy.

  Cautiously, Ishmael stuck his head around the corner.

  There were hundreds of altars cut out of the rock; in fan-shaped bowers squatted the gods, the great and the little.

  Far down at the other end of the room, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards away, was the largest altar of all. On it sat the largest idol he had ever seen, though, admittedly, until then his experience with gods had been limited to the small ones of the whaling ships.

  It was about two and a half feet high. It was ivory with red, black, and green streaks, and had many arms and two heads. It was Kashmangai, the great god of the Booragangahns.

  A dozen robed priests were in the room. Three were genuflecting over and over before Kashmangai. The others were dusting the gods with feathery dusters or sweeping up the floor with feathery brooms.

  Ishmael withdrew his head and became slightly dizzy with the movement. Even at this distance the perfume was strong enough to make him somewhat drunk.

  "You'll have to identify Zoomashmarta and the lesser gods," he said to Namalee.

  She looked around the corner for perhaps a minute and then said, "He and the small ones are on altars near the great one of Kashmangai."

  The two scouts returned. They had traveled down the corridor to a point where it crossed another. They did not dare go further because of the sounds of many men nearby.

  "This corridor could be a well-traveled one," Ishmael said. "So we'll have to act quickly."

  He gave orders to each. The bowmen fitted arrows to the string and stepped out of the entrance. The others came behind them, and the entire band walked swiftly forward. They meant to get as close as possible before the priests would be aware of them. The bowmen had orders to shoot at the priests who were most distant.

  His eyes widened, his mouth fell open, his skin turned gray.

  Ishmael was already in the act of throwing a spear he had borrowed from an archer. The point took the man in the open mouth and drove into the back of his throat. Gurgling, the man fell with a crash against an altar, knocking over a small idol.

  The bow strings thrummed; the arrows leaped ahead and plunged into the backs of the three before Zoomashmarta.

  Other arrows and spears struck the remaining priests. None were able to give loud cries.

  Most of the priests had died; those who still breathed were unconscious and would probably remain so until they died. Their throats were cut, and the bodies were dragged out of sight behind various altars.

  Ishmael went with Namalee to the altar where the Booragangahns kept Zoomashmarta and the lesser gods prisoner. The great one was a foot and a half high and had a fat Janus head with two faces. He was sitting cross-legged with one hand on his lap and the other raised with a jagged stick which represented lightning. The lesser gods were about a foot high. All exuded the overpoweringly sweet and overwhelmingly intoxicating perfume.

  Ishmael felt by then as if he had had four cups of rum unmixed with water.

  "We have to get out of here quickly," he said to Namalee. "Or I'll have to be carried out of here. Aren't you affected?"

  "Yes, I feel very happy and a little d
izzy," she said. "But I am used to the divine perspiration and so I can stay soberer for a long time."

  Ishmael wondered how the priests endured the perfume and then thought that they would be like the drunkards of the ports, the men who could drink enough to put others under the table and still stagger along the street and beg, in a clear enough voice, for money with which to buy more drink.

  The little gods and Zoomashmarta were put into the bags of skin which would contain much of their perfume. Ishmael, seeing that their primary goal was accomplished, gave the order to return.

  But Namalee said, "No, we must steal Kashmangai and take him back with us."

  "So that the Booragangahns will then retaliate?" Ishmael said. "Do you want to establish a seesaw of slaughter?"

  "Gods are always stolen," Namalee said, astonished.

  "Why not just drop Kashmangai into a dead sea and forget about him?"

  "He would not like that," Namalee said. "He would not rest until he had seen to our complete destruction. But while we hold him prisoner, part of his power is ours, and..."

  Ishmael was about to throw up his hands in surrender and in disgust, when the scouts, who had stayed in the corridor as sentinels, came running.

  "We had to shoot two priests," one said. "We tried to take them unaware and failed. One shouted out an alarm before he died, and now there is much commotion down the hall."

  Kashmangai was stuffed into a bag, and the band started back toward the corridor. But, on reaching it, they saw a mob of priests and some armed men coming down the hall corridor toward them. Several had bows.

  Ishmael snatched a torch from a man and ran down the short flight of steps to the wall with the shafts set in it. He passed the torch back and forth before each shaft in the same linear sequence he had used on the first occasion. The stone squeaked and the lower part of the wall started to swing out.

  The approaching Booragangahns gave a great shout on seeing this, and two of the bowmen pushed to the front. They fitted arrows to their strings, but both fell before the shafts could be properly sent. Ishmael's archers had shot first.