by Don Wilcox
“Then Cobert outsmarted him, by guessing he’d change it. It’s a cinch Cobert will have a better chance to work his tricks from this set-up than at the Octagon. I’d bet a sand rat he’s in one of these Caves right now, setting up his knife throwing machines.”
“He is,” said Whitey, whose nervous eyes never missed the most minute hint of danger. “I saw a fresh shoe track in the dust as we came down. It was Cobert’s, I’m positive.”
I remembered now that Whitey, bearing one of the lights through the tunnels a few minutes ago, had stopped to examine something. So there we had it—and it all fit into a perfect jigsaw. Those murderous huskies who had lifted our guns were already kowtowing to Cobert as the power above Thunder Splitter. They had attacked us at his command. They had brought him here. He, like ourselves, was waiting in one of these black chambers, armed to the teeth, looking out on the slope where the whole population of wingmen would gather.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Blood Red Dawn
Dawn burst over the land, a blood red dawn.
The wingmen gathered—males, females, old and young, all feverish with the excitement of the anticipated execution.
Soon Thunder Splitter and a squadron of his huskies flew in, circled the multitude, and alighted on a level shelf of rock that had outcropped like a platform through the gentle slope.
As their formation broke and spread into two winged lines, we could see the two prisoners—Wells bound, hand and foot, and the beautiful Orchid Wings bound, wing and talon.
They lay helpless on the ground until Thunder Splitter ordered huskies to lean them against the stone wall where all could see them.
Then a hush came over the crowd and the ceremony began.
Thunder Splitter recited the crimes of Orchid Wings.
“She has defied the authorities. She has cried out against the feasts which I have kept in honor of the Flash Death.
“She has violated the customs of marriage, by taking a mate who has no wings. If she were allowed to live to give birth to his child the Flash Death would surely punish the whole tribe of us for allowing such a child to be born. Our race is proud of its wings. We must never let any unwinger strain begin among us.
“We know that these crimes are his as well as hers. He shall die first. He shall die by her hand”
A slight murmur went over the crowd.
Orchid Wings’ eyes were red from a night of crying. Her face was at once beautiful and savage. To look at her, no one would doubt that she might kill. She might even be capable of feeding upon human flesh. But regardless of what Nature had written in her boldly beautiful face, I knew that she had fought her way up two steps on the ascent to civilization.
She had become a bitter enemy of the human feast.
She had put aside all racial prejudice in favor of choosing her mate on the basis of his true quality of character.
Two bold steps—and for them she had earned three deaths, one for Wells, one for herself—and one for her unborn child.
A husky cut the ropes that bound her talons. The wings were left tied. She was handed a stone hatchet, one very much like the one I had lost in my night’s encounter.
She advanced toward Wells. The morning light was in his face. She leaned close to him and they seemed to be embracing, even though his hands were tied.
Yes, they were spiritually in each other’s arms in that moment. And there must have been those among the thousand spectators whose hearts beat in sympathy. The stone ax dropped from her talon.
Thunder Splitter might have held off barking until they had had a moment together. His bark must have jarred on many a wingman’s ear.
“On with the killing. The Flash Death is impatient. Do you want him to beset us with another earthquake?” Orchid Wings turned slowly to face Thunder Splitter, and the curl of her lips made a cynical answer. Not a spoken word, but many wingmen must have understood.
She seemed to be saying, “Flash Death! Who believes that the Flash Death had anything to do with that awful storm? It just came—and you tried to claim it—to blame it on me! I don’t believe it!”
There may have been a hundred or more whispers to this effect, as the wingmen caught the meaning of her smile. For it was a fact that such whispers had been extant among some wingmen ever since the quake. Now you could hear the low, sullen murmur.
Thunder Splitter heard, and he tore into an unrehearsed speech which was very nearly an outburst of rage. He cut short, then, and for a tense moment everything was silent.
Then McCorkle did it. He cupped his hands and called, in the wingman language:
“The Flash Death commands you to let these people go.”
You should have heard the stir that caused. Maybe the rear two thirds of the spectators didn’t hear, but you could tell that the message was being relayed back in a hurry.
And you could tell something, too, from the curious hint of a smile that touched Wells’ lips. He had recognized the good Irish voice of Toby McCorkle.
Thunder Splitter and the huskies hadn’t. They went into an excited conference, in which you can bet your life the huskies were talking fast to convince Thunder Splitter that they hadn’t got their wires crossed on the earlier message at the spring.
Thunder Splitter was shaking his head. This hoax wasn’t going to get by him. He and his officials cast anxious glances along our shadowed ledge. But they weren’t looking in the right direction to see us, so McCorkle yelled again, “No executions!”
At the same moment Maxie let fly with a big iron knife. The thing whizzed through the air and fell at Thunder Splitter’s feet. He raised his eyebrows. He stood like a statue. His gaze came up slowly. That might have clinched our point, but—
Another voice sang out from somewhere around the gentle curve of our ledge of rock windows—Franz Cobert’s voice.
“Execute them at once! . . . Now! . . . Don’t delay for one more breath of time . . . Now . . . Now!!!”
Then a knife sped toward the wall where Wells and Orchid Wings stood. It sped, not as if thrown, but as if shot from a gun. Damned accurate, that knife throwing mechanism. Orchid
Wings jumped back. The blade passed between her and Wells, banged against the wall, clattered to the ground. The crowd gasped.
All of which aroused the Irish in Toby McCorkle. He cut loose with a weird hollow which, resounding throughout our cavern, must have sounded like a general announcement of doom to the whole desert.
“Whoo-ooo! Does Thunder Splitter obey Flash Death? Or does he listen to the squeaks of sand rats! No executions, I say. No executions!”
Then we hurled knives, hatchets, stones—anything we could get our hands on. It was a veritable battery of weapons, none of which hit anything. But my stone ax made Thunder Splitter jump, and a flying rock made him jump farther. He drew himself up defiantly, and spread his wings in a gesture of great power, as if no more missiles would make him move a step. And then a flying knife blade shot past his wing tip so close it would have taken a camera to tell whether he lost the tip.
All of which put the whole crowd in a terrible uproar. What did this mean? Would such a dignified god as Flash Death quarrel with himself from different ends of the hill cave? No, this wasn’t Flash Death. It was a sham demonstration of power. It must be the work of the humans!
I’ll bet every one of the thousand winged spectators were shouting by now, crying down this hoax—or in some cases yelling an alarm—yelling to look out for the prisoners.
For in that wild moment of pandemonium Orchid Wings must have closed her yellow claws over one of the fallen knives.
Suddenly her wings spread, she caught up Wells, she leaped into the air.
Swift as a dart she shot past our eyes—up and up—to the west.
Instantly a flock of huskies were after her. The flap of their wings blew dust through our rock windows as they took off.
“Saint Patrick help us!” McCorkle groaned. “She can’t fly him across to the west. One pair of wings—two live
s—no, three! Saint Patrick, help—ok-oh!”
She dropped him.
CHAPTER XXIX
What Curse Upon This Race?
He fell—and there was Rattle Whiskers flying in from the west—flying under her—timing his strokes like a trapeze artist. That move had been planned, anyone could tell. It couldn’t have just happened.
Out of the air Rattle Whiskers caught Wells. His strong wing bounced with the impact, then he shot over the heads of the oncoming huskies—shot eastward toward the top of this mountain whose cinnamon roll tunnels concealed us.
Ten minutes later we knew that Orchid had outwinged all pursuers. The confusion created by that criss-cross play had left her with a clear field of escape.
And ten minutes later Wells, pale and perspiring but smiling, was escorted by Rattle Whiskers into our rocky chamber.
The first thing he said was, “Did she get away?”
“Like an American bomber,” said McCorkle. “She’ll hide herself in the west range till dark.”
Wells managed to grin. Absently he rubbed his cut wrists, exercised his lame arms. Then he stopped, staring out at the crowd.
“What paralyzed them? I thought they’d turn on each other and have a free-for-all.”
“They started to,” said Maxie.
“Then they saw something coming over the ridge,” said McCorkle. “It froze them—everyone of them, even old Thunder Splitter. Look at him gazing across—”
“With his mouth open, like someone had socked him in the gizzard,” said Maxie.
The huskies jostled Thunder Splitter’s shoulders and shook him into action. They fell in at the rear of a procession that was slowly forming—one thousand pairs of wings strong.
They moved eastward, up the mountain slope, so slowly you’d have thought they were a funeral procession. They forgot they had wings. Their colored wings rustled lightly. You could hear the thousands of clicking claws like the tapping of tiny hailstones all over the mountainside. But you heard no voices.
They moved in a body as the children of Hamlin must have moved when the Pied Piper called to them.
At the crest of the ridge, bright like a million tiny woven strands of incandescence against the morning’s cobalt sky, towered the solitary figure of the Goddess.
She was moving slowly along the ridge—beckoning them to follow—beckoning with her blazing silver wings.
They followed. We watched them gather before her as she took her station near a slender spire of rock.
That spire might have been placed by a landscape gardener. On either side of it the ridge cupped to form a shallow U. From the lay of the land we could see that the right U led toward the valley of the Octagon. The left U swung back to the northeast, toward the peak in which we were hiding, and the white valleys still farther east.
“Listen!” Wells said. “That’s her voice. She’s whispering!”
We were too far away to see her facial expressions. And if, as she talked, there was a magnetic drawing that held her audience hypnotized, we did not feel it in a physical sense. But we heard. The whisper carried down over the half-mile slope and breathed through our cavern window as intimately as if we had been in a small auditorium with magic acoustics.
“Have the centuries passed . . . so swiftly,” she was saying, “that you have forgotten . . . how you came here?
. . . And why you stayed?”
At once we forgot everything; she caught our most intense attention. Yes, even Whitey must have relaxed his nervous vigil for once—and well he might, for he had seen Franz Cobert sneak out of an adjoining chamber as soon as the crowd had turned its back, to slip off in another direction in the broad daylight. In perfect safety we listened. And those weird whispers floated down in clearly spaced words—the words of the wingmen.
If I missed some of the phrases McCorkle repeated them in English. And so the revealing message came slowly—yet striking the multitude with the impact of an earthquake:
“You think . . . that you are here . . . as a race damned . . . damned for the sins of your forefathers . . . damned by an evil god . . . called Flash Death . . . But this is not so.”
I wondered if Thunder Splitter didn’t hide his head under his wing at that. The Fire Goddess tossed her head of flowing platinum hair. There was an attitude of kindliness in the way she extended an open wing as she went on: “If any sins have placed a curse upon you . . . they are these widespread sins . . . of pettiness . . . of quarreling . . . of greediness . . . Some of you . . . are grasping . . . for new power . . . Some of you are hard . . . intolerant . . . saturated with hate . . . consumed by appetites . . . and you hide your meanness . . . behind laws and customs . . . which you blame on this long-suffering god . . . Flash Death.
“But that is not why you are here . . . It is rather the reason . . . that you are unhappy here . . . These stupid sins weigh down upon you . . . You even choose leaders . . . who bind them upon your wings . . .
“I tell you these things . . . so you will know . . . that you may throw off the ideas that damn you.”
The silence almost rocked the hills.
Wells whispered, “That’s exactly what Orchid has been preaching to them.”
“Sounds like a revolution,” said McCorkle.
“There’s a chance,” said Wells eagerly. “The time’s ripe. A lot of those wings are gathering up for a rebellion this very minute. We can help swing it, men—you four and Slim and the Kid—”
Our expressions betrayed something unpleasant. Wells took us in sharply.
“Or aren’t you with me?” he said.
“Sure,” said McCorkle. “Don’t ever question that. If our faces slipped, it was on account of your mentioning Slim. He had a jackpot of hard luck last night. Bullet from one of Cobert’s pet huskies having a whing-ding with his first pistol.”
Wells’ eyes narrowed. “Dead?”
“No,” I said. “But serious, I’m afraid. The Kid stayed to take care of him.”
Wells turned to Rattle Whiskers, who caught his cue.
“I’ll take you across if you want to go,” the doughty old wingman said. “Orchid will be anxious about you. If you’re feeling well enough to make the flight—” Rattle Whiskers finished with a “come-on” toss of the head and clicked off down the tunnel. We put Wells through the rock window to wait for him outside, and they soared away before the Fire Goddess had finished her whispered oration.
CHAPTER XXX
The Sheep from the Goats
Again we were listening to her.
She gave the crowd its money’s worth, and us too. The veil of mystery over this floating desert began to clear. The ancestors of this tribe, she said, had evolved on this desert centuries ago when the earth was young.
This continent was a part of the earth then, she explained. But in the shrinking of the earth’s crust this flake shell was cast off—for it was only a flake compared to the earth’s total surface. And so, apart from the shrinking earth it kept its own identity and its own life. Moreover, in the course of passing centuries, it acquired its own peculiar exceptions to the laws which govern most heavenly bodies.
“Your existence . . . was a cruel one in those centuries,” the Goddess said. “I took pity on you . . . and guided your evolution . . . I saw to it . . . that you developed wings and a physique . . . that could withstand desert life . . . But I have never given you the right to say . . . that you have achieved . . . perfection.” McCorkle gave a knowing nod to us at these words. “More fuel for a rebellion.”
“In fact, it is I,” she went on, “who have called vonzels from the earth during recent centuries.”
She added that recently some had arrived through devices of their own.
Knowledge in the nearby earth was developing to a degree that enabled nonwinged men to come of their own volition. But when the roar of thunder announced the arrival of a new party, that was her doing. It meant that she was lifting, out of some convenient space and time, some specimens to be award
ed to this tribe.
“I have tried to reward you with vonzels . . . in return for certain good deeds . . . I have hoped that you would let them be blended with your tribe. . . Through them you might add new qualities . . . to your race . . . to enrich your blood . . . little by little . . . But what has happened to these vonzels?”
The question brought a roar from the multitude, half sullen, half amused. Everyone knew what had been happening to these “gifts” since Thunder Splitter had come to power.
Then, “Did the power you call Flash Death ever tell you . . . that he wanted these vonzels eaten? . . . (Cold silence) . . . Did he ever tell you anything? . . . Did you ever see any manifestation of him? . . .”
Someone must have shouted back in reference to the earthquake, for the next whisper was a long shaming hiss. Then, “Storms! Earthquakes! They are rooted deeply in the same nature . . . that grinds rocks to sand. They are not unleashed by any vain oratory . . . How can you be so stupid? . . . They will come when they are ready.”
Finally she referred to some groups of vonzels.
“What vonzels would not intermarry with you if they find you congenial? The six Babylonians, men and women, who came long ago . . . would be worthy members of your tribe today . . . if someone’s appetite hadn’t prevented . . . The Greek warriors of recent days were so inclined . . . One you killed for a feast. . . The other is now wooing a winged maiden in the distant hills.
“Soon . . . now that I am finding pleasure in the way many of you are receiving my words . . . soon I will send you more vonzels . . . males and females . . . from other times and places . . . Do you understand all that I have said?”
There was some sort of commotion at the front of the group, now, and we guessed that the Goddess had drawn fire from some of her listeners.
It was Thunder Splitter, as we afterward learned, who spoke out in hard defiance.
He orated like a Nazi fanatic obsessed with the idea of a super race.
“Such clumsy bodies these vonzels possess!” he cried. “We proud winged people would throw away our most prized qualities if we took theirs into our race. Take that wingless man named Wells, who should have been executed—who will be before another slip is made by our traitors. Did you see what weak, naked, unfeathered shoulders he carried? How could such a man be worthy to father any child of our tribe? He is good only for feasting!”