“When was it? Yesterday?” he interrupted.
“Sh-h-h-h! No more questions now.”
“But I want to know! And what happened to me? And the—the Lanskaarn? What about them? And—”
“Heavens, but you’re inquisitive for a man that’s just missed—I mean, that’s been as sick as you have!” she exclaimed, taking his head in both hands and gazing down at him with eyes more deeply tender than he had ever seen them. “Now do be good, boy, and don’t worry about all these things, but go to sleep—there’s a dear. And when you wake up next time—”
“No, no!” he insisted with passionate eagerness. “I’m not that kind! I’m not a child, Beta! I’ve got to know—I can’t go to sleep without knowing. Tell me a little about it, about what happened, and then—then I’ll sleep as long as you say!”
She pondered a moment, weighing matters, then made answer:
“All right, boy, only remember your promise!”
“I will.”
“Good! Now listen. I’ll tell you what the old man told me, for naturally I don’t remember the last part of the fight any better than you do.
“I was struck by a flying stone, and—well, it wasn’t anything serious. It just stunned me for a while. I came to in a hut.”
“Where I carried you, dearest, just before I—”
“Yes, I know, just before the battle-ax—”
“Was it an ax that hit me?”
“Yes. But it was only a glancing blow. Your long hair helped save you, too. But even so—”
“Skull cracked?”
“No, I guess concussion of the brain would be the right term for it.” She took his groping hand in both her own warm, strong ones and kissed it tenderly. “But before you fell, your raking fire along the wall there—you understand—”
“Cleaned ‘em out, eh?” he queried eagerly.
“That’s about it. It turned the tide against the Lanskaarn. And after that—I guess it was just butchery. I don’t know, of course, and the old man hasn’t wanted to tell me much; but anyway, the ladders all went down, and the Folk here made a sortie from the gate, down the causeway, and—and—”
“And they’ve got a lot more of those infernal skeletons hanging on the poles by the fire?” he concluded in a rasping whisper.
She nodded, then kept a minute’s silence.
“Did any of ‘em get away in their canoes?”
“A few. But in all their history the Folk never won such a victory. Oh, it was glorious, glorious! And all because of you!”
“And you, dear!”
“And now—now,” she went on, “we’re not prisoners any more, but—”
“Everything coming our way? Is that it?”
“That’s it. They dragged you out, after the battle, from under a big heap of bodies under the wall.”
“Outside or inside?”
“Outside, on the beach. They brought you in, for dead, boy. And I guess they had an awful time about you, from what I’ve found out—”
“Big powwow, and all that?”
“Yes. If you’d died, they’d have gone on a huge war expedition out to the islands, wherever those are, and simply wiped out the rest of the Lanskaarn. But—”
“I’m glad I didn’t,” he interrupted. “No more killing from now on! We want all the living humans we can get; we need ‘em in our business!”
Stern was growing excited; the girl had to calm him once more.
“Be quiet, Allan, or I’ll leave you this minute and you shan’t know another thing!” she threatened.
“All right, I’ll be good,” he promised. “What next? I’m the Big Chief now, of course? What I say now goes?”
She answered nothing, but a troubled wrinkle drew between her perfect brows. For a moment there was silence, save for the dull and distant roaring of the flame.
By the glow of the bluish light in the hut, Stern looked up at her. Never had she seemed so beautiful. The heavy masses of her hair, parted in the middle and fastened with gold pins such as the Folk wore, framed her wonderful face with twilight shadows. He saw she was no longer clad in fur, but in a loose and flowing mantle of the brown fabric, caught up below the breast with a gold-clasped girdle.
“Oh, Beatrice,” he breathed, “kiss me again!”
She kissed him; but even in the caress he sensed an unvoiced anxiety, a hidden fear.
“What’s wrong?” asked he anxiously.
“Nothing, dear. Now you must be quiet! You’re in the patriarch’s house here. You’re safe—for the present, and—”
“For the present? What do you mean?”
“See here.” the girl threatened, “if you don’t stop asking questions, and go to sleep again, I’ll leave you alone!”
“In that case I promise!”
And now obedient, he closed his eyes, relaxed, and let her soothingly caress him. But still another thought obtruded on his mind.
“Beatrice?”
“Yes, dearest.”
“How long ago was that fight?”
“Oh, a little while. Never mind now!”
“Yes, but how long? Two days? Four? Five?”
“They don’t have days down here,” she evaded.
“I know. But reckoning our way—five days?”
“Nearer ten, Allan.”
“What? But then—”
The girl withdrew her hand from him and arose.
“I see it’s no use, Allan,” she said decisively. “So long as I stay with you you’ll ask questions and excite yourself. I’m going! Then you’ll have to keep still!”
“Beta! Beta!” he implored. “I’ll be good! Don’t leave me—you mustn’t!”
“All right; but if you ask me another question, a single one, mind, I’ll truly go!”
“Just give me your hand, girlie, that’s all! Come here—sit down beside me again—so!”
He turned on his side, on the rude couch of coarse brown fabric stuffed with dried seaweed, laid his hollow cheek upon her hand, and gave a deep sigh.
“Now, I’m off,” he murmured. “Only, don’t leave me, Beta!”
For half an hour after his deep, slow breathing told that the wounded man was sleeping soundly—half an hour as time was measured where the sun shone, for down in the black depths of the abyss all such divisions were as naught, Beatrice sat lovingly and tenderly beside the primitive bed. Her right palm beneath his face, she stroked his long hair and his wan cheek with her other hand; and now she smiled with pride and reminiscence, now a grave, troubled look crossed her features.
The light, a fiber wick burning in a stone cup of oil upon a stone-slab table in the center of the hut, “uttered unsteadily, casting huge and dancing shadows up the black walls.
“Oh, my beloved!” whispered the girl, and bent above him till the loosened sheaves of her hair swept his face. “My love! Only for you, where should I be now? With you, how could I be afraid? And yet—”
She turned at a sound from a narrow door opposite the larger one that gave upon the plaza, a door, like the other, closed by a heavy curtain platted of seaweed.
There, holding the curtain back, stood the blind patriarch. His hut, larger than most in the strange village, boasted two rooms. Now from the inner one, where he had been resting, he came to speak with Beatrice.
“Peace, daughter!” said the old man. “Peace be unto you. He sleeps?”
“Yes, father. He’s much better now, I think. His constitution is simply marvelous.”
“Verily, he is strong. But far stronger are those terrible and wonderful weapons of yours! If our Folk only had such!”
“You’re better off without them. But of course, if you want to understand them, he can explain them in due time. Those, and endless other things!”
“I believe that is truth.” The patriarch advanced into the room, and for a minute stood by the bedside with venerable dignity. “The traditions, I remember, tell of so many strange matters. I shall know them, every one. All in time, all in time!”
“Your simple medicines, down here, are wonderful,” said the girl admiringly. “What did you put into that draught I gave him to make him sleep this way?”
“Only the steeped root of our n’gahar plant, my daughter—a simple weed brought up from the bottom of this sea by our strong divers. It is nothing, nothing.”
Came silence again. The aged man sat down upon a curved stone bench that followed the contour of the farther wall. Presently he spoke once more.
“Daughter,” said he, “it is now ten sleeping—times—nights, the English speech calls them, if I remember what my grandfather taught me—since the battle. And my son, here, still lies weak and sick. I go soon to get still other plants for him. Stronger plants, to make him well and powerful again. For there is haste now—haste!”
“You mean—Kamrou?”
“Yea, Kamrou! I know the temper of that evil man better than any other. He and his boats may return from the great fisheries in the White Gulf beyond the vortex at any time, and—”
“But, father, after all we’ve done for the village here, and especially after what Allan’s done? After this wonderful victory, I can’t believe—”
“You do not know that man!” exclaimed the patriarch. “I know him! Rather would he and his slay every living thing in this community than yield one smallest atom of power to any other.”
He arose wearily and gathered his mantle all about him, then reached for his staff that leaned beside the outer door.
“Peace!” he exclaimed. “Ah, when shall we have peace and learning and a better life again? The teaching and the learning of the English speech and all the arts you know, now lost to us—to us, the abandoned Folk in the abyss? When? When?”
He raised the curtain to depart; but even then he paused once more, and turned to her.
“Verily, you have spoken truth,” said he, “when you have said that all, all here are with us, with you and this wondrous man now lying weak and wounded in my house. But Kamrou—is different. Alas, you know him not—you know him not!
“Watch well over my son, here! Soon must he grow strong again. Soon, soon! Soon, against the coming of Kamrou. For if the chief returns and my son be weak still, then woe to him, to you, to me! Woe to us all! Woe, Woe!”
The curtain fell. The patriarch was gone. Outside, Beatrice heard the click-click-click of his iron staff upon the smooth and flinty rock floor.
And to her ears, mingled with the far roaring of the flame, drifted the words:
“Woe, woe to him! Woe to us all—woe—woe!”
CHAPTER XXX
EXPLORATION
Under the ministering care of Beatrice and the patriarch, Stern’s convalescence was rapid. The old man, consumed with terror lest the dreaded chief, Kamrou, return ere the stranger should have wholly recovered, spent himself in efforts to hasten the cure. And with deft skill he brewed his potions, made his salves, and concocted revivifying medicines from minerals which only he—despite his blindness—knew how to compound.
The blow that had so shrewdly clipped Stern’s skull must have inevitably killed, as an ox is dropped in the slaughter-house, a man less powerfully endowed with splendid energies and full vitality.
Even Stern’s wonderful physique had a hard fight to regain its finely ripened forces. But day by day he gained—we must speak of days, though there were only sleeping-times and waking-times—until at length, upon the fifth, he was able for the first time to leave his seaweed bed and sit a while weakly on the patriarch’s bench, with Beatrice beside him.
Hand in hand they sat, while Stern asked many questions, and the old man, smiling, answered such as he saw fit. But of Kamrou neither he nor the girl yet breathed one syllable.
Next day and the next, and so on every day, Stern was able to creep out of the hut, then walk a little, and finally—sometimes alone, sometimes with one or both his nurses—go all among the wondering and admiring Folk, eagerly watch their labors of all kinds, try to talk with them in the few halting words he was able to pick up, and learn many things of use and deepest interest. A grave and serious Folk they were, almost without games or sports, seemingly without religious rites of any kind, and lacking festivals such as on the surface every barbarous people had always had.
Their fisheries, netmaking, weaving, ironwork, sewing with long iron needles and coarse fiber-thread keenly interested him. Accustomed now to the roaring of the flame, he seemed no longer to hear this sound which had at first so sorely disconcerted him.
He found out nothing concerning their gold and copper supply; but their oil, he discovered, they collected in pits below the southern wall of the village, where it accumulated from deep fissures in the rock. With joy he noted the large number of children, for this bespoke a race still vigorous and with all sorts of possibilities when trained.
Odd little, silent creatures the children were, white-faced and white-haired, playless and grave, laboring like their elders even from the age of five or six. They followed him about in little troops, watching him soberly; but when he turned and tried to talk with them they scurried off like frightened rabbits and vanished in the always-open huts of stone.
Thoroughly he explored every nook and corner of the village. As soon as his strength permitted, he even penetrated parts of the surrounding region. He thought at times to detect among the Folk who followed and surrounded him, unless he expressly waved them away, some hard looks here or there. Instinctively he felt that a few of the people, here one, there one, still held hate and bitterness against him as an alien and an interloper.
But the mass of them now outwardly seemed so eager to serve and care for him, so quick to obey, so grateful almost to adoration, that Stern felt ashamed of his own suspicions and of the revolver that he still always carried whenever outside the patriarch’s hut.
And in his heart he buried his fears as unworthy delusions, as the imaginings of a brain still hurt. The occasional black looks of one or another of the people, or perchance some sullen, muttered word, he set down as the crude manners of a primitive and barbarous race.
How little, despite all his skill and wit, he could foresee the truth!
To Beatrice he spoke no word of his occasional uneasiness, nor yet to the old man. Yet one of the very first matters he attended to was the overhauling of the revolvers, which had been rescued out of the melee of the battle and been given to the patriarch, who had kept them with a kind of religious devotion.
Stern put in half a day cleaning and oiling the weapons. He found there still remained a hundred and six cartridges in his bandolier and the girl’s. These he now looked upon as his most precious treasure. He divided them equally with Beatrice, and bade her never go out unless she had her weapon securely belted on.
Their life at home was simple in the extreme. Beatrice had the inner room of the hut for her own. Stern and the patriarch occupied the outer one. And there, often far into the hours of the sleeping-time, when Beatrice was resting within, he and the old man talked of the wonders of the past, of the outer world, of old traditions, of the abyss, and a thousand fascinating speculations.
Particularly did the old man seek to understand some notions of the lost machine on which the strangers had come from the outer world; but, though Stern tried most patiently to make him grasp the principle of the mechanism, he failed. This talk, however, set Stern thinking very seriously about the biplane; and he asked a score of questions relative to the qualities of the native oil, to currents in the sea, locations, depths, and so on.
All that he could learn he noted mentally with the precision of the trained engineer.
With accurate scientific observation he at once began to pile up information about the people and the village, the sea, the abyss—everything, in fact, that he could possibly learn. He felt that everything depended on a sound understanding of the topography and nature of the incredible community where he and the girl now found themselves—perhaps for a life stay.
Beatrice and he were clad now like the Folk; wore
their hair twisted in similar fashion and fastened with heavy pins or spikes of gold, cleverly graven; were shod with sandals like theirs, made of the skin of a shark-like fish; and carried torches everywhere they went—torches of dried weed, close-packed in a metal basket and impregnated with oil.
This oil particularly interested Stern. Its peculiar blue flame struck him as singular in the extreme. It had, moreover, the property of burning a very long time without being replenished. A wick immersed in it was never consumed or even charred, though the heat produced was intense.
“If I can’t set up some kind of apparatus to distil that into gas-engine fuel, I’m no engineer, that’s all,” said Stern to himself. “All in time, all in time—but first I must take thought how to raise the old Pauillac from the sea.”
Already the newcomers’ lungs had become absolutely accustomed to the condensed air, so that they breathed with entire ease and comfort. They even found this air unusually stimulating and revivifying, because of its greater amount of oxygen to the cubic unit; and thus they were able to endure greater exertions than formerly on the surface of the earth.
The air never grew foul. A steady current set in the direction that Stern’s pocket-compass indicated as north. The heat no longer oppressed them; they were even getting used to the constant fog and to the darkness; and already could see far better than a fortnight previously, when they had arrived.
Stern never could have believed he could learn to do without sunlight and starlight and the free winds of heaven; but now he found that even these were not essential to human life.
Certain phenomena excited his scientific interest very keenly—such as the source of the great gas-flare in the village, the rhythmic variations in the air-current, the small but well-marked tides on the sea, the diminished force of gravitation—indicating a very great depth, indeed, toward the center of the earth—the greater density of the seawater, the heavy vaporization, certain singular rock-strata of the cliffs near the village, and many other matters.
All these Stern promised himself he would investigate as soon as time and strength allowed.
The village itself, he soon determined, was about half a mile long and perhaps a quarter-mile across, measuring from the fortified gate directly back to the huge flame near the dungeon and the place of bones.
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