She took it from him and replaced it on the grave. “My father gave me this when I was a little girl. If you really loved me, you would not need to ask such a question.”
Kublai’s expression grew stern. “Ishara, I do honor your father’s memory, and I will, but not with children’s playthings. My honor will come through this!” Kublai drew a knife, one that Magwich had given him. “And with this!” With the other hand, he held out his spear.
Ishara shook her head, her eyes on fire. “You understand nothing, though you are our king. I tell you, Kublai, there is more power in this shell than in all of your weapons.”
Kublai replaced the knife. He took Ishara’s hand, stood, and helped her to rise, too. “We will not speak of such things. I came to tell you this, Ishara: We are to marry.”
Ishara studied his face and saw shame deep in his eyes. He was still the same handsome youth she had known, but now she saw cruelty in the set of his mouth, determination in his expression. “Is that truly your wish?”
“Bar-Atu says we must,” Kublai returned firmly. “And we will unite the Atu and the Tagu people in a way that has never been done before. The kings have always been Tagu. Now the people will have an Atu king in me—and you are Tagu. Our children will be true Tagatu. Our son would be the first ever to lead our people.”
“I would not marry you because Bar-Atu said I should!”
“I would not ask you for his sake,” Kublai said. “Don’t you see? Bar-Atu is wrong. Our marriage would destroy his cause, now or when a son is born. It is a weapon to use against him!” Perhaps he even believed it. Without speaking, she reached for and held Kublai’s hand, and so accepted him.
The wedding ceremony was held at the full of the moon, and that night Kublai took Ishara into the king’s house as his bride and queen. And now would he expect her to bear him a son? Their son would be the first leader of their people to ever have the blood of both royal families in his veins, true. But would he be a pawn of the Atu and lead the island to ruin, or a king who would have the strength and conviction to restore Tagu tradition?
More weeks passed, with Ishara feeling as if she were battling for Kublai’s soul with the subtle and scheming Bar-Atu. At times Ishara stood gazing up at the great Wall, noticing that late in every day its shadow crept out to claim the village and everyone in it. On one such evening, Ishara stared up to the hut where the Storyteller lived and realized that in truth it was late in the day for her people. And yet beyond the Wall, the Storyteller had said, an answer waited. Ishara closed her eyes and her mind went groping into the darkening jungle, searching for the answer, praying that there was a way to find it. . .
On the night of his escape, Kong had rushed out headlong to battle the gigantic saurian. His kind had always borne a great enmity against the flesh-eaters of the island, and instinctively, he felt the challenge and the fury of imminent battle. But once beyond the great gate, once he had seen the scalded Gaw flee, Kong’s own weakness after weeks of captivity took hold. He took a different path through the dark trees.
The cries of the humans back within the wall still echoed in his ears when the first deathrunner attacked. The small creature, moving in silence, leaped for him, jaws snapping, claws flashing. With a roar of anger, Kong dashed it to the earth, shattering its bones. He burst into a clearing as lightning flashed and a sharp rain stabbed down from the clouds. Three more of the deathrunners leaped for him, coming from the shadows of the undergrowth. In a terrible silence, Kong seized them, slapped at them, struck them. Over the trees he could see the red reflection of the fires beyond the Wall, but otherwise he struggled in darkness. He crushed the skull of one attacker, felt more leaping at him, tearing at his flesh, stamped on another, seized another in his teeth and bit down, breaking the spine.
Breathing deeply, tasting blood, Kong ripped at the dead deathrunner’s flesh, feeding. His captors had kept him starved. Now he ate the meat of the three fallen deathrunners, filling his belly, finding strength in the bodies of his enemies.
But he could not rest. From behind, two more of the deathrunners attacked him. The wily creatures had circled, then had attacked from his blind side. Kong snarled, hurling himself backward, falling to the ground, crushing one beneath him and scrambling back up again at once. Wind lashed him, and he could smell water, not rain, but the standing water of a lake. Snarling, tearing off the last of his tormentors and flinging it aside, Kong lowered his massive shoulders and hurtled into the forest, heading toward the scent of water
More of the deathrunners chittered in the darkness among the trees. A scout had found him, had summoned others, and now they were pacing him, running him down, waiting until he was too weary to defend himself. Or waiting for their queen, Gaw, to come and finish him off.
Kong seized a massive fallen branch and used it as a club, striking down any deathrunner he could reach. He ran for a long time, his enormously powerful legs propelling him faster than a man could run. Another clearing, and the storm had swept past, with a pale full moon now showing between ragged flying clouds. It gleamed on the backs of ten or twenty more of the deathrunners, closing in. Kong struck at them, took out four with one blow, sending them flying through the air, broken-backed and dying.
The ground sloped downward. Ahead, through the trees, moonlight reflected back in points of light from the lake surface. The chattering deathrunners slowed, dropped back, a sharp, urgent warning note creeping into the cries they made. Kong reached the edge of the lake, and the two bravest or most foolhardy of the deathrunners made a rush at him, leaping high, trying to reach his throat, his jugular. He struck one down, clutched at the other, staggering, splashing into the shallows. He ripped the deathrunner free and plunged it beneath the water, feeling it heave and squirm as its lungs filled and it drowned. He left it floating and waded into the water, sensing that the deathrunners would not follow him there.
Holding his head back, Kong waded deeper and deeper into the black water, until he was far from the shore. He did not know just where he was, but far ahead the moonlight shone on a rounded stony shape that had to be Skull Mountain. Kong’s mother and father had always made their home in the mountain heights, secure from the large predators, who could not climb. For Kong, the mountain spoke of safety, and it drew him forward. He stayed just close enough to the right-hand shore of the lake to touch the bottom with his feet, half-wading, half-swimming as the moon sank low and the night wore on.
Ripples hit him now and then, coming from the unseen distance, raised by he knew not what. He persisted, not seeing the great long dark shape in the water that was slowly creeping toward him, closer and closer.
Dawn was on the way when Kong came to the marsh on the far side of the lake. The earth here was soft, slimy, and it sucked at his feet. He searched for a place to leave the water, saw an outcropping of stone, and made for that. Skull Mountain lay closer now, its craggy forehead lit with the rising sun. Leathery-winged flying creatures launched themselves from the great empty eyesockets and spiraled up into the morning air.
Kong reached the jumble of fallen boulders and wearily hauled himself out of the water. He was weak and chilled, his wounds aching, his muscles near their limit. His sodden fur lay heavy on him, and his limbs could hardly support his own weight. In the dimness, he rested for a few moments on the stones, then dragged himself back to his feet.
A fallen tree lay on the far side of the boulders, on a slope leading down into the lake. As Kong neared it, the tree stirred, lunged forward: it was a crocodile-like monster, thirty feet long, torpid from the coolness of the night but insatiably hungry. Kong backed away as smaller animals with snake-like necks and tails made strange noises as they ran in all directions. The monster lurched closer, its great mouth gaping. He had no chance against those jaws, those fangs.
And then the thing that had followed him reared from the lake with an outraged bawl, dripping water. It was a longneck, a plant-eater, not normally dangerous unless something ventured too close—or threatene
d her young. The sauropod burst from the depths, reared on her hind legs, towering up, impossibly tall—and then it came down with a world-shattering crash, its front legs crushing the life from the flesh-eating phobosuchus, the monster crocodile.
Kong fell sideways, saw the angry sweep of that great neck as the plant-eater searched for him. It bawled again, now completely out of the water, and swept its long, deadly tail, snapping trees off short. The monster dwarfed Kong; he had no hope of surviving combat with the creature. It lumbered forward, hunched at the shoulders, sweeping its neck from side to side as it looked for him.
Only one chance. Kong leaped, seized the base of the neck, and clambered up onto the creature’s back, just where the neck joined the torso. The plant-eater went berserk. It shook, screeched, trampled everything as it tried to dislodge him and crush him. Kong hung on, desperate.
And then the monster reared again, sweeping Kong high into the air. It came down hard on its front legs, jolting Kong loose. He fell to earth, landing on his shoulder, feeling a stab of pain. Kong scrambled to his feet. The sauropod had shattered a tree, and Kong seized one of the limbs, prepared to strike at the creature as he had at the deathrunners—but how could he injure this mountainous beast?
The sauropod could not focus on him, a dark thing against the dark background of mud and foliage. Its head swept toward him—and Kong swung, swung with all of his strength. The club connected with the head, the small head on the end of that huge neck. The head snapped away, and the sauropod’s knees buckled. It crashed to earth, with Kong leaping to club the head again, then again. The plant-eater’s body was out of control. The legs brought it up, staggered, reeled, and then the creature fell side-ways, its collapse like an earthquake. The sides were heaving—it was not dead, but stunned. Kong dropped his club and fled again, skirting the bed of the river that fed into the lake.
The land rose, and soon he was on the lip of a ravine. His nostrils twitched at a scent of death and decay ahead, and the smell of many deathrunners. Kong veered, climbing over rising, broken ground. By midday he had come to the base of Skull Mountain, to the side away from the sea. Cliffs rose here, nearly vertical, gradually becoming the rounded overhang of the skull’s cranium. Height. The predators could not climb.
He hauled his weary body up, hand over hand, up the sheer cliffs. His breath rattled in his bruised and aching chest as fatigue threatened to loosen his grip and send him tumbling.
At last Kong came to a ledge far above the jungle. From here he could see the lake, and beyond that, on the edge of the world, the unbroken dark line of the Wall. His lips curled in a sneer of anger and defiance. The ledge slanted upward, and he followed it, seeking for the safety of height. At last he could force himself to go no farther. He crept under an overhang. Above him and to his right loomed the high mountain, pierced with caverns and resembling nothing so much as a skull. An image of death, but perhaps a place of safety, a place to rest, to recuperate.
A place to gather his strength for revenge.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SKULL ISLAND
The Past
Ayear passed, and part of another. Though Charlie became Ishara’s trusted friend, now he could not be alone in her presence. One of her serving women always had to be there as chaperone. Ishara chose one who knew no English, and she and Charlie spoke in that language. He told her strange stories of the world outside, stories of fighting aboard ships and of the men he called pirates.
She had the impression that Magwich and his crew had fought off some of these men in a desperate battle before coming to the island. But surely by now they had repaired all the damage done to their ship. Why did they stay?
“Ah,” Charlie said in answer to that, “that’s the Captain’s way. He’s a curious sort of fellow for a seaman. Likes to know everything. Take the way he picked up the island lingo so fast. He’s always been like that, learned the tongue of every place we’ve traveled. And old Bar-Atu is full of stories. He says the whole island’s full of treasures—and that’s something that communicates in all languages, if you get my drift. But Magwich knows he needs a plan, a way to find the loot and take it without being eaten alive by monsters.”
Monsters. Ishara now knew what the word meant.
She thought of it every sacrifice. Four. Six. Eight of them, and it had been two years since her father’s death. Nine. Ten. Eleven. And never did Gaw refuse the sacrifice. Sometimes she allowed the deathrunners to have the victims. It tore at Ishara’s heart to see the hideous creatures torture and kill people she knew. Those of Tagu lineage muttered against the custom, but Bar-Atu overruled them, knowing exactly how to exploit the islander’s fears. The Storyteller was held a virtual prisoner, and once she had been silenced, any hope of freedom disappeared. How could they all be so blind? Ishara’s father had pointed out the end result of Atu treachery, disguised as compassion, and he had sought to unite the people of the island with the Storyteller’s advice—and then he had fallen ill, and now he was gone.
As for Bar-Atu, he became more and more implacable. Three, four times a month he retreated into his hut, where he used herbs that gave him visions, put him in trances. He would always come out saying he had been in communication with Gaw, the island’s god, and that Gaw demanded more obedience from the people. More blood.
At first Ishara pleaded with Kublai to reject Bar-Atu and to follow her father’s ways, but he refused. Ishara fought with her husband more and more. “Won’t you do this?” she asked in despair.
Kublai had become terse, speaking to her rarely. “I will take a party of hunters out,” he insisted. “We will kill as many of the deathrunners as we can. No one has any love for them, not even Bar-Atu. With them dead, Gaw is not as great a threat. Perhaps even Gaw can be killed. That is the way to break Bar-Atu’s power—to show that I am even greater than his god. Then I would hold absolute control over the island and everyone on it. I could force them to live as you wish them to live. I thought that was what you wanted!”
“The true danger is not outside the Wall—it’s inside you. That’s what terrifies me! Kublai, haven’t you wondered why the people are so easily misled by Bar-Atu’s lies?”
“Often. But I am a ruler, Ishara. I must accept that Bar-Atu wields great power, and I must find my own way of dealing with him. With the help of Magwich, I have a chance of weakening Bar-Atu. His men are not afraid of that cunning murderer. With their weapons to pit against Bar-Atu’s fanatics, I have a chance of winning—if I choose my time well.”
“Are you deaf to the Storyteller’s words? She—”
“Is an old woman, Ishara. Her way might have worked in the past, but not any longer. She has no force to equal Bar-Atu’s fire and determination.” He touched her hand and leaned closer. “The time is coming soon. Magwich will come with me, and together we will put an end to Bar-Atu’s treachery with force—the only language he understands.”
“Do you trust him so much? Why do he and his men linger here? What do you offer them? Why don’t they leave?” Ishara’s frustration was palpable.
Kublai turned away from her. They lay in bed together, but they rarely even touched these days. “Some want to go, but their voyage is a long one. They have none of their own provisions left. If we bring in enough meat and other food—”
“That could have been done long ago.”
“I don’t know, then!” Kublai snapped. “I am king, Ishara, but a title means nothing without power behind it.”
“But the kind of power you seek, Kublai, is the wrong kind!”
“We will speak no more of this! I have a plan. I must do what is best,” Kublai snapped.
“Kublai, our people—your people—are slaves under Bar-Atu’s whip of fear. He has them sacrifice their own children, like animals, to gods who are animals. It is madness, and it comes of fear of what lies beyond the Wall. We are human, Kublai, we are not helpless! But you must teach the people that fear is dangerous only to those who surrender to it. You must—”
&nb
sp; “What I must do is decide what is right,” Kublai said in a tone of finality. “And that decision is mine alone!”
The first great hunt took place a few days later. It lasted for three days, and at the end of that time the party returned jubilant with three dead deathrunners and the meat of one of the great plant-eaters, a kind they had never killed before. The people feasted, but there was far too much meat, and much went to waste, cast into the sea as it began to decay. The Europeans smoked long strips of meat on wooden frames, but the islanders who tried this food found it revolting in taste.
Still, the villagers cheered Kublai as the greatest of hunters, as a king who brought them food in abundance and who promised more. Bar-Atu smoldered in his anger, shouting “Gaw gives the meat to the hunters’ weapons!” He glared at all those who celebrated and sat without eating for the rest of the evening.
Ishara had no stomach for the festivities. On the third night she climbed to the Storyteller’s hut, above the shouts and cheering of the great feast, and listening to them as she ascended, she wept.
For a long span of days, Kong roamed the high forest beyond Skull Mountain, a plateau with sparser trees than the lush jungle. In the time that had passed since his escape from the village, he had grown. And he had learned.
He fed well. When his parents had been alive, they had found fruits, grains, leaves to eat. Kong still did that. He knew which trees bore fruit, and he knew that old rotten logs were full of insects that could be gathered and devoured. But now he ate flesh as well. The deathrunners never came to this side of Skull Mountain, for the nearly vertical cliffs defeated them, but plenty of other smaller animals roamed the plateau. Kong had taken pterodactyls from their perches on the cliffs, and he had learned how to track and kill the armored plant-eaters almost half his size. Their defense was to tuck in legs and head, so they looked like humped boulders, but they could be turned over, and their bellies were softer, less defended. Kong had learned to raid nests for eggs, too.
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