Jeff took her in his arms and was grateful for her presence There, her warm, strong body pressed against his. Her hair, stirred by the wind, caressed his cheek, and his heart leaped up with the love he held for her—strong, harsh, demanding from long repression. Emotion swept over him in a tumultuous tide, like the combers curled fiercely over the shore and claimed it, taking the land into the sea. And so they yielded, each to the other, and the union of their souls was made complete.
Jarvis was not sorry, for something within him said that their wait had been long enough. After today, this alien world would be alien no longer, but theirs to dwell in and master.
* * * *
The tremendous river they had first seen from the crown of the Great Cliffs was a barrier which, without the insensate drive that spurred Jarvis onward, might have turned them back. The mouth of the river was many miles across, a muddy gush spewing its stain into the bright blue wash of the ocean, and it seemed impassable.
They tramped ten miles upstream, threading a way through the forest along limbs high above the ground. There they camped and set to work building a raft. Jarvis swung his stone axe until his arms ached and the sweat poured from him, and his bones crackled like hollow cylinders of desiccated tissue. As the stone lost its edge in the day’s work, he reshaped it by firelight, chipping and flaking its edge.
The raft grew slowly. It had to be built large enough to transport safely the three of them and their belongings. It had to be fitted with a mast and a sail and a sweep to steer it with. While Jarvis and Toby worked at the heavy carpentry, Jo gathered thin, broad reeds along the river’s edge and wove them into a mat for a sail. When the sail was finished and spread in the sun to dry and shrink, she worked on the ropes and cordage they would need, experimenting with reeds and grasses, twisting and braiding them for strength. Again and again she made short lengths and tested them, only to have her work fall apart in her hands when she tugged upon it.
Undiscouraged, she roamed the upper reaches of the forest, clambering far up among the branches, whereto even the echoes of Jarvis’ axe were loath to penetrate. There she found a species of vine exposing scarlet, broad-petalled blooms to the sun. The vine was long, thin and strong. When stripped of flowers and leaves, it could be braided into stout rope to support their mast and for hanging and controlling the sail.
From shore, the river currents looked dangerous. Heavy with silt, it boiled constantly in its endless race to the sea.
At last the raft was launched. They made no ceremony of their departure. Jarvis loaded his companions aboard and stood waste deep in the water, pushing it out into the current. He had, he felt, taken the width of the river and the speed of the current both into consideration. Granted a decent wind, they should reach the other bank before the current carried them as far as the sea.
Close to the bank where the river was sheltered by the immense height of the forest, the wind came only in vagrant puffs. He ran up their sail and lashed it to a set that would catch what wind there was and manned the sweep. Slowly the unwieldy craft moved farther from shore.
Moment by moment, as they cleared the shelter of the trees, the wind freshened. The sail slatted a few times against the mast, then bellied strongly, tugging at the primitive stays until they creaked. Wavelets began to lap at the forward end, and a swirl boiled up astern.
The flood on whose bosom they rode was quiet, but the tremor of the deck, communicating itself through his bare feet to his knees, let Jarvis know the remorseless strength of the current. There was no backing out now. They could not possibly return against the wind.
Sometimes, as they rode, Jarvis caught glimpses of things that boiled up in the muddy flood, and his blood ran cold. Perhaps it was only a balefully gleaming eye he saw, or the tip of a snaky pseudopod, but it let him know the river had a population of its own, and that it was peopled with horror indescribable.
CHAPTER 11
The spot Jarvis had selected for a landing stood just ahead; behind were miles of river width. Then the wind died.
Jarvis yelled, and his companions sprang to lend a hand at the sweep and scull the ungainly raft crosswise of the deadly current which here raced with the speed of a rip tide.
The beckoning point of land on which he had planned to make beach head swept past, and with sinking heart, Jarvis watched it dwindle in the vast reach of space behind. The raft tore on, riding the current, creaking and straining against the heave of the sea. They flung themselves flat and clung to the deck of poles as the raft bucked in the furious cauldron where the river and ocean came to grips. Giant waves tossed them high, tilted their raft, and dropped it shuddering in a welter of thundering waters. Straining every muscle to maintain his hold on the canted deck, Jarvis watched with agonized eyes as the rifle and their packs slid overboard. He had taken the stone axe out of his belt and laid it on the deck when pushing the raft out into the river, and now it, too, slithered to the edge, caught a moment, then fell to the bottom of the sea.
The raft came upright, askew in its members, but still whole. The mast still stood and the sail hung from its lashings. They rode a heavy ground swell while the current carried them ever farther out to sea.
They had lost the steering oar, and another had to be fabricated out of materials ripped from the deck—not so efficient as the lost sweep, but serviceable. By the time he had finished necessary repairs, the wind had again risen, but had backed around a few points more northerly, so that their progress across the current was not so effective as it might have been.
Jarvis’ mind worked lightning calculations, figuring their chances of making the beach before nightfall. He knew that when night came and brought with it the customary nocturnal storm, the raft would never hold together. They were out of the grip of the river current now, but far out to sea. The land was only dimly visible as a smudge on the horizon.
He recollected the view he had first had of the river mouth, from the crown of the Great Cliffs. If memory served him, the beach on this side of the river made a sweeping, inward curve, betokening a back current set up in the ocean by the outpouring of river waters. That current should be carrying them parallel to shore now. If the wind stayed as it was, they should be able to make way toward the beach without hindrance.
He stood by the sweep, straining his eyes shoreward. The distant smudge of land was definitely more sharply defined now. He glanced toward the sun, which was about half past mid-day. With luck, they would make the beach in plenty of time before sunset.
* * * *
When they arrived at a point about a mile offshore, the wind shifted again, halfway around the compass, and began to blow directly against them. A low sun hovered among gathering storm clouds over ancient hills in the distance. Although the full force of the nocturnal storm would not strike before midnight, the wind was already rising, beating them inexorably out to sea.
“We’re as close to shore as we are likely to get,” Jarvis said, weighing the situation carefully before he spoke. “We can stay with the raft and try to ride out tonight’s storm, or swim for shore now. Which shall we do?”
“I could swim it, all right,” Toby said. “I’m strong!”
Jo frowned worriedly. “Would the raft hold together in the storm?”
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t depend on it.”
She laughed, nervously. “Swim it is, then! If anything happens—at least, it will be sooner!”
He nodded, not daring for a moment to speak, lest his voice betray the worry he tried to hide. What currents waited to drag them under—what monstrous denizens of the sea lurked between them and shore—well, those were things against which they had to take their chances.
He said, “I’ll go first. After I’m out a hundred yards—you’ll know it’s safe by then—Toby can follow. After him—you.”
Jo nodded hastily. He knew by the sudden darkenin
g of her eyes that fear for him stabbed through her. She smiled, bravely.
“Lead on, McDuff!”
A hundred yards from the raft, Jarvis straightened and began treading water. The sea was not so salt, he thought, as the oceans of Earth, and it was comfortably warm. However, it seemed to have less buoyancy. He had to stroke harder and faster to keep his head out of water. The heaviness to which he had grown accustomed on land was a burdensome thing here, and he would have sunk like a plummet except for the months of hardship that had hardened his muscles to the strength and endurance of steel cords.
A moment later, it seemed, Jo and Toby joined him and they struck out together for the frothing line of breakers that marked the shore.
The combers breaking among the rocks that fanged the beach made wild water far out from shore. Jarvis was blinded and buffeted, and he was not aware when he lost contact with his companions. The breakers foamed over him, came cascading down, beating him under, turning him end over end. He strangled on brine, and stroked his best, frantically, to avoid the jagged flanks of streaming rocks.
There was an undertow here that threatened to drag him under. He was gasping for breath and pains lanced through his arms and shoulders. He saw the rock through a blinding dash of spray—too late to avoid it. A wave lifted him high and slammed him down, as a wrestler slams his opponent on the mat. He twisted his body agilely at the last moment, then felt the jarring as his flesh contacted stone, the ripping and bruising, and then he was unconscious.
The nightly storm had come and gone when he came again to his senses. The stars were out, and Eloraspon’s twin satellites rode high in the sky, once again near the full. Jarvis sat up, pulling his body painfully out of the rocky crevice into which it had been jammed. The tide was far out, and the roar of the surf sounded muted and distant.
He got up, staggering a little, wincing with the pain that seemed to throb all over him. But no bones were broken—of that he was sure and thankful. It was dark on the beach, in spite of moon-and star-light, and the chill sea wind nipped at his naked flesh.
Suddenly he thought of Jo, and after her, of Toby. He cried out, hoarsely. There was no answer and the dimness of the light was growing dimmer still as clouds hurried across the faces of the two moons.
Had they drowned, then, and he alone had been saved? He beat himself upon the temples with his knuckles. It was a miracle that he himself was alive. Where one miracle can occur, there can also occur two or three, he told himself grimly. Miracles come cheaper by the dozen. He would not let himself approach the thought that anything could have happened to either Jo or Toby. At the worst, he thought, they lay unconscious still on the beach. At the best, they were worriedly combing the beach and sand dunes for him, probably thinking much the same about him as he was thinking about them.
He called again, a few times, futilely. They would not be able to hear him if they were a hundred yards away. All he could do was wait for morning to bring enough light so that he could start searching.
* * * *
With the first light of dawn, he searched among the rocks and found nobody. Shellfish he found, and these he wrenched from their rocky habitat, pounded open and ate raw. His belly cried out with hunger, and he could not afford to be fastidious. He had covered several miles of the beach by the time the sun came up. On his right was the sea, white-maned, its incoming tide ever narrowing the strip of damp sand upon which he walked. At his left were dunes, their tops gilded in the morning sun. And beyond the dunes, towering over them, was the edge of the forest.
All his search for Jo and Toby had revealed no tracks in the sand, yet he stubbornly refused to believe that the sea had claimed them. He stood still and listened. The fresh morning air whipped around him, stirring the tatters of the skin clout he wore. What had stopped him? To what vagrant sound did he give ear? As he tried painfully to listen, he heard only the sibilant whisper of the wind over the sand, the quiet booming of the surf. There were no sea birds to flash wheeling and crying in the sun. There were no sea birds at all on Eloraspon.
But as soon as he started trudging on, he heard it again—or thought he heard it. And so he progressed—stumbling a few yards, then pausing to listen, then repeating. There was something ineffable about what he heard, something that caught the breath in his throat and filled his being with a kind of wonder. But it was fleeting—momentary—he could not grasp it at all.
The sun stood higher in the sky, beat upon his head and naked shoulders with the blistering percussion of red hot hammers. Sand and salt in his wounds stung like a horde of attacking ants. He breathed deeply, letting the air whistle out through his nostrils, head flung back—and then he heard it for sure. He grasped it, and it came in stronger, swelling throughout the breadth and depth of his soul with the magnificence of a mighty hymn, thousand-voiced.
This was a soul-song of living beings, but where that of Eluola and the Eeima had been a song of capricious passion, this was a nostalgic dirge of adoration, pregnant with awe and holiness, of a people prostrate before their god.
His legs twinkled in nimble flight over the ground, carrying him over the dunes, into the edge of the forest. He rounded great trunks at a run, leaped fallen limbs, staggered and flailed his way through underbrush; then he burst through a screen of leaves and found himself in a natural cathedral, arch-roofed, dim-lit, columned and aisled with trees. His sweeping glance took in a cluster of huts that must be the homes of the singers who worshipped so beautifully, and in the midst of the clearing were the singers themselves…and the object of their adoration…
The scene was like a painting from the mad brush of Ralph Rayburn Phillips—a weird caricature of a worshipping throng, low in color saturation, shadowy, gross and terrible!
CHAPTER 12
In the middle of the clearing, scarcely visible in the dim light, Jo and Toby huddled upon a five-foot high platform of poles. Around them, writhing and swaying with the unheard, soul-sensate melody of their dirge, weird monsters worshipped—Sea People, creatures of horror that had been beyond the powers of Eluola’s description. They were like giant spiders, many-eyed, football sized bodies sheathed in chitinous armor and huddled in the midst of attenuated, hairy limbs, almost threadlike, several-jointed and clawed, twitching with the rhythm of their silent song.
Jarvis’ mind struggled with opposing symbols—the sight of horror conveyed by his eyes to his understanding—the sound of sublimity captured in the mesh of his soul. What manner of creatures were these, whose hideous bodies hid the spirits of god-men, and whose souls paid homage to the kinship of the Mighty?
They knew he was there, and they cleared a path for him to the dais, for such it was, their soul-song rising in a paean of spiritual triumph, and the song became thought in his mind, and the thought was interpreted in words…
“Hail the Mighty!…of the Mighty of Old! Again the Mighty walk upon Eloraspon and the Song of Power is heard again in the Land…of the Mighty in our midst!”
Jarvis took Jo tenderly down from the platform, and Toby hopped down beside him. She quivered in Jarvis’ arms “There is nothing to fear,” he said quietly. “They are friendly.”
What more could he tell her? What more could she understand?
“Toby said that,” she whispered. “He said they talk…” She shuddered.
“Never mind,” he soothed. “We’ll leave here now. They won’t stop us.”
“Child of the Mighty… hail!” The salutation was adoration itself, and it made Jarvis feel uncomfortable. “The Sea People are made glad, for the day of the Mighty is come again! Blessed are we who have seen, blessed are we who have known the touch of the Mighty and of the Child who is of Him who is Mighty, whose soul is filled with the Song of Power…”
Quickly, Jarvis led Jo along the path edged with squirming horror. What he had sensed emanating from the Sea People, he knew Toby had sensed
also. But Jo had known none of the beauty of their souls, only the horror of their bodies.
“I don’t know why Jo couldn’t hear the song of the Sea People, Toby,” he said later to the boy. “She does not hear these things that you and I do. That does not make us better than her, nor her less than us. We are different, that is all. And because we can hear these things and she can’t, it means she is more of a stranger in this world than we are, and we must both protect her, and not let her worry about such things.”
They went on weaponless, marching along the seashore, until progress was stopped by a vast morass into which the sea thrust slimy, moveless fingers that swelled and dwindled with the tide, and stank of mud and nameless crawling things. The forest came down to the edge of the swamp and marched into it, and the only possible way of crossing was by means of the branches, from tree to tree, if the trees extended far enough.
But before they dared move farther on their journey, away from the sea, Jarvis had to arm himself. Rifle and stone axe now lay at the bottom of the sea, but he still carried his knife at his waist. With it, he fashioned a boomerang from a bent fragment of a limb. A few practice throws before it was quite finished revealed errors in design, which he corrected. Then, in the final test, he cast the weapon strongly from him. It whistled across the flat face of the beach until about to plunge into the surf; then it shot suddenly upward in wheeling flight, hesitated at the apex of its trajectory, and, spinning still, came planing down to land at his feet. He smiled with satisfaction, picked it up and tucked it under his belt. From the level of the animal, he had once again elevated himself to the status of Man.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 62