by Anthology
“Kuvurna will see the Man of the forest!”
“This is well—for Kuvurna,” replied Doody, in a voice that rang cold and just as clear. The silence was fractured by a swift, awed chorus of gasps which wheezed into an overwhelmed hush as Doody, tall, straight and impressive, stalked unattended toward the postern gate of Kuvurna’s citadel.
Doody remarks that brass has carried him through many a narrow place in his career in which lead would only have totally wrecked his chances. He had a hunch—which grew stronger as he advanced on that ominous gateway—that bullets were no good here. So he was banking on a good front, plus, of course, the emergency getaway of th^ time machine in case things went cataclysmically wrong.
Before the gate he stopped and bent quickly to lift the long-handied stone hammer; twice and three times he swung it thunderously against the heavy lattice, shaking it almost from its wrought-bronze hinges. Then he tossed the implement scornfully aside and folded his arms in lofty disdain, controlling his breathing, however, with some effort. Swinging that Thor’s hammer was no man’s picnic.
After a scandalized pause the barrier wobbled slowly out of his way, and Doody. head up, marched in.
Inside, he halted for a moment only to orient himself, and to be impressed, after a fashion, under his assumed hauteur, by the fortress temple of the dogmen’s god. In the shadows of the high palisade squatted a long, low building of hewn stone, built like an arsenal or fort, with the grim, high, narrow window slits of a medieval jail. The door was set far back behind a shadowed archway, from which the interior gloom seemed to spill almost into the sunlit outdoors, own the massive stone steps that ascended to the portal.
For the dog folk, with primitive tools and muscular power alone, the structure must represent long, back-breaking labor, which likewise must be employed in maintaining the garden which filled the inner court; in contrast to the dusty square outside, ivy clambered over the rough walls of the temple, roses tumbled about the stone stairway, and verdant, resilient grass underfoot defied the blazing power of the summer sun whose hot rays slanted over the jagged palisade. The water which brought forth all this greenery from the stubborn soil must be carried little by little, day after day, by the sweating slaves of the ruler.
None of the priesthood which is maintained by every god of means was in evidence, but Doody had that jittery, watched feeling, as of intent eyes fixed on the back of his neck. So strong was the sensation that he almost peered about the garden in search of concealed observers; but that would be to abandon his pose of nonchalance. He hesitated only momentarily, then advanced firmly to ascend toward the inset doorway.
The portal within the rough-hewn arch was massive and oaken, banded with strips of ornate bronzework. It stood a little ajar, opening on cool darkness within. It creaked only a little as Doody thrust it farther aside and slipped cautiously into the black interior—a hand in his coat pocket tense on the switch of his time machine, ready to snap it shut instantly if danger loomed near. He did not imagine that the fear-inspired reverence for the human overlord was all illusion on the part of the dogmen.
Inside the temple, to Doody’s light-accustomed eyes, it seemed dark as the inside of a shark. He stumbled, banging his shins painfully against something that toppled with a most shocking crash; he thought that a rasping chuckle from the darkness mingled with the echoes, and became immobile, his eyes slowly beginning to adjust to the Stygian gloom which was unrelieved by the high, close-shuttered windows. Doody can see in the dark almost as well as a Negro; but it was only with great difficulty that he discerned vague, looming shapes in the obscurity, and thought he saw a flitting figure that could have been a man.
Then a voice came out of the shadows, a thick, greasy voice. “Make a light, Shahlnoo,” it said heavily. “Let us see this one who calls himself Man.”
A small flame flared suddenly in the darkness, illuminated dimly the interior of the temple—a flame of burning tinder, apparently, in the hand of a black figure which applied it quickly to a teakettle-shaped oil lamp, like those used by the ancient Greeks. The lamp blazed up with a smoky light, and the shadowy forms resolved themselves.
Doody first saw the aged, shriveled little dogman, clad in a single dirty garment that left his skinny figure almost naked, who crouched beside the pedestal of the lamp. Then his eyes flicked rapidly about the interior of the temple, taking in the barbaric luxury displayed in all its furnishings. Great ornamental urns stood about the drapery-hung walls, and it was one of these which Doody had overturned in the dark; even now the light struggled feebly against the deep shades of the folded draperies. The chamber was like a somber courtroom of the Inquisition, or like some dim-lit crypt out of the tales of Poe—the product of a morbidly dismal imagination, utterly at variance with the healthy, outdoor cheerfulness of the dogman.
At the other end of the long room the little wizened priest passed with noiseless tread from right to left to light another lamp. The illumination in the funereal chamber brightened, and for the first time Doody saw the fat man who lay in gross ease upon a draped and cushioned couch against the farther wall.
Kuvurna was fat, fat with the disgusting obesity of a long life of overfeeding and inaction. His piggish eyes peered out from between rolls of flesh that threatened to swamp them; his cheeks were blubbery, his chins multifarious. His face was that of the last of a long line of degenerate French Louises. His body was massive, effeminate in its corpulence.
The dog priest spoke, in a voice dry and cracked as a dead stick.
“Do not move, stranger. The lightning of Kuvurna strikes down whom he wishes to destroy!”
Doody stood obediently motionless, but his eyes were busy. There might be a portable atomic-blast rifle concealed among those curtains over the man-god’s divan. Those weapons had been built to last forever; some might have endured nine thousand years and remained in the hands of this last decadent scion of a fallen humanity, enabling him to reinforce man’s age-old lordship over the dog.
“My lightning,” drooled Kuvurna lovingly, his plump fingers fumbling among the bed clothing while his small eyes blinked at the light, “Be careful, impostor, or it will slay you!”
Mentally, Doody placed Kuvurna as a low-grade imbecile, perhaps even an idiot. A rank odor hung in the air; Doody sniffed, and wrinkled his nose disgustedly at its familiarity. If ever he had smelled cheap corn whiskey, he smelled it now. Drink of the gods!
No doubt the priesthood controlled the alcohol supply and consequently Kuvurna. But the god’s life was precious above all else, since without him the priests could not continue to impose on their credulous and loyal fellow villages. Hence the fortresslike temple inclosure, the elaborate precautions and taboos.
“Kuvurna,” remarked Doody loudly, “you are a great, swollen mass of corruption, and no Man worth the name!”
The deity winked stupidly; his blubbery face registered no expression. He heaved in vague displeasure at his visitor’s frankness, though he was apparently incapable of rising. Doody felt a wave of revulsion in which he despised himself for being a man. If this was what civilization had done for the human race, thank God for barbarism, for blackest savagery!
The little priest was answering for his lord. “That is sacrilege, blasphemy,” he spat in a voice like the snarl of an angry hound. “You are no Man or you would not speak thus of another Man.”
Kuvurna reared angrily, like a great, unwieldy sea lion, among his gloomy cushions. His skin, under the flickering yellow light, was an unhealthy, pasty white which had seen too little of the sun; his eyes were muddy and befuddledly vicious.
“He is no Man,” he repeated, his thick fingers twitching. Doody rose stealthily to the balls of his feet; he knew that, on guard, he could beat the degenerate’s slow reflexes ten times out of ten. All the while, though, another part of his mind was struggling to piece out the answer to the wider question; but it was like arranging a tough puzzle with the key piece-elsewhere. “He is no Man, but a lying dog; and for hi
s lie he must be put to death!”
“Just a moment,” said Doody, and was surprised at the suave smoothness of his own voice. “Has it occurred to you that the entire canine populace, now milling about outside your palisade, believes that I am a Man? They will require explanations, in all probability, if I fail to emerge after going in so bravely.”
That made no difference to Kuvurna, armored in invulnerable stupidity. But the shrewd mind of the little priest was clearly disturbed. He turned with nervous haste to address his so-called “master”:
“O Man of the village, he speaks the truth. The Pack believes his lie; and, having been once convinced, they will not readily disbelieve. What shall be done?” Then, almost without pause, as Kuvurna mumbled to himself, making the words register on the surface of the stagnant pool that was his mind: “If the master will hear his slave, I would suggest that the case of this impostor be tried according to the customs of the Pack; and, if he be proved what he is, let him be incontinently put to death. Thus will the law and the Pack be satisfied.”
It sounded somewhat fishy to Doody; but Kuvurna seemed to find the solution gorgeously simple—as needs it must be for his dim mentality to grasp it. At least, he nodded his well-nigh hairless, oversized head, and continued to nod it in dreamy affirmation for some little time. But the priest turned swiftly on Doody, his face hideous with triumph:
“Do you hear, O dog who calls himself a Man? You are to be tried by the council and your abominable lie made plain. Tremble, then, and howl supplication to the spirits of your ancestors, for pardon that you ever denied them!” His tone was ferocious, a canine snarl. Doody found time to wonder what the fellow’s background was; he had seen dogs before who had been kicked into viciousness.
Abruptly, no doubt at some prearranged signal, from behind the dark hangings which masked the stone walls emerged a dozen of the dogmen, spears thrusting menacingly as they surrounded Doody. The latter made no resistance, save to shake himself once as horny hands grasped insistently at his arms; his life seemed safe enough for the nonce. He went with them quietly, out through the creaking temple door and through the arch into suddenly blinding sunlight.
The high priest followed to stand at the summit of the stair and glare down at Doody and his guard—so different, this, from the innocently adoring escort of hunters who had led him out of the forest—with baleful eyes; the eyes of any priest who beholds a rival to the god that is his very bread and butter.
“Take the impostor forth before the people,” his old voice crackled savagely. “Take him and hold him there, till Kuvurna comes forth and the council of the Pack sits in judgment over life and death!”
The gathering crowd out in the sunburned square had surged nearer and packed more densely as the grapevine telegraph carried the word of great doings to all quarters of the dog people’s village.
The air was stifling with dust and the odor of many bodies pressed close together—an odor which differed subtly from that of humanity in the mass. Only a little space about the palisaded gate remained still invisibly roped off; in it, clustered closely and silently together, the little group of dogmen who had discovered Doody in their forest still waited bravely for the return of their marvelous heavenly messenger. But when they saw him emerge hemmed in by the armed acolytes of Kuvurna, a captive, threatened on all sides by sharp spears, yet failing to employ any homicidal magic for his liberation—hastily they shrank back, appalled, into the throng, slinking away fearful lest they should be involved in the consequences of their own error. But Doody, on the sharpeyed alert, thought he saw more than one sinewy hand tighten convulsively on a spear haft before its owner thought better of his half-formed intentions.
The sun beat down uncomfortably, and Doody was sweating stickily under his clothes, while striving to preserve an airy nonchalance in the face of the heat and the indignity of his close, rather smelly cordon of priests. The watching crowd, most of its eyes and mouths wide, was hushedly silent, save for the intermittent shuffling of bare or sandaled feet as this or that shaded his eyes over his neighbor’s shoulder, squinting into the sun, and for the shrill little yelping cries of the children—puppies—who played in the rear of the assemblage.
Dispassionately, Doody considered the dog people once more from his vantage point—this time for what they were, rather than as human beings. They were not an unhandsome breed and were certainly well-made physically; and there was about them a gentleness, a humility, that the human animal lacks. Man had done a better job of domesticating them than he had ever succeeded in doing on himself.
There was a curious, wistful appeal in the great eyes of some of the young—well, female dogs. Doody broke off on that line of thought. Considering, he did not imagine that there had been any interbreeding. In the perfect uniformity of the dogmen there was no trace of the corruption which, even in Rudnuu’s day, had been engulfing all humanity, and which seemed to have reached its nauseous fruition in the unwhisperable Kuvurna.
A stir went over the multitude, like the sigh of a single voice. Doody wheeled to stare over the heads of his guards, saw that the lattice gate had swung inward and that the canine high priest was issuing forth, strutting ceremonially and surrounded by his subordinates or accomplices in the priestly racket, as Doody mentally labeled them. The shriveled little dogman advanced to a point where he could command the attention of the whole great crescent of villagers ranged about the southern border of the square; then, flinging his two skinny arms on high, he cried in a loud and penetrating voice:
“Kneel. O Pack! The Man comes!”
With a combined rustle of ragged garments, the hundreds went down as one to their knees. Their eyes were turned upward eagerly to behold their deity; Doody was close enough to the front rank to see the look they held, rapt, worshipful, and it hit him with a queer nostalgia. He remembered a puppy that ha_d been his when he had been a boy on an Ohio farm—only a spotted mongrel tyke, but a blue-ribbon winner so far as he was concerned.
Out of the court, as the throng still knelt expectant, was borne Kuvurna, a huge, degraded, pulpy hulk, lolling amid padded cushions, upon a swaying and luxurious litter carried aloft by six strong, sweating priests. A broad, fatuous smile covered his countenance as he fluttered his fat white hands languidly toward the worshiping dog folk, after the manner of a benediction. Doody averted his eyes and resolutely said “No” to his stomach.
The six priests eased the litter carefully to the bare, dusty ground, its barbarically ornate magnificence contrasting oddly with the naked square, the squalid rags of the onlookers.
“Arise, O dogs, and hear how justice is to be done! There has come among us a stranger, this person with the queer garments and the black hair, who says that he is a Man. He proclaimed himself as such to some of our hunters; and they, being of the ignorant ones, believed him. But for this they are to be excused on account of their ignorance of the law and the belief.
“This pretender must be tried according to our laws. The members of the Pack Council will now come forward and take their places at the foot of Kuvurna, in readiness to administer the high justice before all the people.
“But first I will remind the Council and the Pack that a Man, it is plain, should know a Man and welcome him as a brother; whereas from this who calls himself a Man our lord Kuvurna has turned away his face.”
The fact that at that precise moment Kuvurna was gazing point-blank at Doody with a fixed and foolish grin, the while he blew small bubbles between his teeth, did not seem to disturb the speaker or his wide-eyed and attentive listeners. For some reason, Doody was reminded of the fact that most primitive idols wear bay windows and vacuous smirks.
From among the assembled dogmen, a round dozen individuals were wriggling and pushing their respective ways forward, and were beginning to form in a close huddle before Kuvurna’s royal palanquin. This brow-beaten-looking handful must be the council—the rude beginning of a representative form of government, whose scanty influence was vastly overbalanced by
that of the priests with their backing of divine omnipotence. They stood, shuffling their feet uneasily and eying Doody with some hostility—the high priest’s statement of Kuvurna’s position on the subject evidently carried much weight with them.
This Heliogabalus of the dogmen advanced swiftly to confront the “jury,” as Doody’s twentieth-century mind insisted on labeling them. His face was twisted, and his wasted old figure—clad only in a garment which resembled nothing more than a soiled towel wrapped around his waist with ends dangling—quivered with a fierce ecstasy compounded equally of religious fervor and burning hatred. His voice shook—with the same feverish intensity, as, with one sidelong glance at Doody, he began in the singsong of one reciting from some ancient and holy record:
“Before you sit in righteous judgment, O Council of the Pack, I conjure you to remember the true belief, given to our ancestors of old, that the truth might be theirs and their children’s:
“For Man created the dog in His own image; in the image of Man created He him.
“And He said to him, be fruitful, and multiply, and cover the Earth, that in all the Earth may the aspect of My face be known, through all the ages of all the time to come.
“And for all his days shall the dog serve Man, because He created him, who was as the dust of the earth, and without understanding.”
Doody did not hear the priest’s voice grind on with the rasping indictment. He was lost in a blaze of sudden revelation that was like apotheosis; the lost piece of the great puzzle had been all at once supplied, and now he knew the answer to all his blind questioning.
His quick mind fitted the jigsaw together, constructed a picture of what had happened thousands of years in the past, when the dogmen had first come into being. Somewhere in the slough of rotting earthman civilization, a fine mind or minds had been born—rising, perhaps for the space of one lifetime only—above the sluggish apathy of degeneration, able to foresee but not to check the oncoming doom.