“What do you think the future holds for us—for us two Earthmen?” Raske said. “We might be safe in Ireland for a while. I know that Perkunisha doesn’t intend to invade it until next year, maybe not for two years, if Ireland gives no trouble. Perkunisha is overextended as it is; it wants no new wars.”
“If—when—Perkunisha finds out we’re in Ireland, it’ll demand we be turned over to it,” Two Hawks said. “You know as well as I do that they won’t want us floating around. They think we’re too dangerous to them. Which is a laugh.”
“What do you mean?” Raske said. His hurt pride showed in his voice.
“This world has already sucked us dry of our—admit it—limited knowledge. We really have nothing more than some technical assistance to give it. It’s true the Blodlandish have rejected what I told them about the origin of disease. But they’ll come around to it in time. They would have done so in a few years anyway, when some native Pasteur stood up to their superstitions and fought them down. Just as all we have told them would have come about in ten years or less, anyway. We just accelerated science a little bit, that’s all.”
Raske chuckled. “You know, Two Hawks, you’re really right. I was hurt for a minute, but I can recognize the truth when I have to. Only... well, I did have what they wanted, and I was parlaying my advantages into an empire for me. If things had gone just a little bit differently.”
“They didn’t. So here we are. Doomed to be hounded to the ends of the earth because of something we don’t have. But try to convince them of that.”
He hesitated a moment, then decided not to tell Raske his plans. Raske might be harmless, even useful. However, if he saw a chance to advance himself at Two Hawks’ expense, he would not hesitate a moment. He had proved himself capable of murder and, perhaps, even abandoned the woman who had given up her country and title for him. Yet, two Hawks found it hard not to confide in Raske. There was the tie of Earthkinship between them, and the fellow was so charming. He would smile at you just before putting the knife in, and the strange thing about it was that the smile would ease the pain a little. Or anaesthetize the victim.
Two Hawks thought that, if he could be realistic, he would tell the captain of the ship to throw Raske into the sea.
He sighed and rose, saying, “I won’t turn you in. But if I hear of any skullduggery on your part, you’re done for. And this is goodbye. I don’t want to see you anymore, except at a far distance.”
“Two Hawks! You hurt me! Why?”
Raske actually did sound as if he had been cut deeply. Two Hawks walked away, knowing that he was possibly letting a wolf loose on this world but unable to sever the bonds of a common universe. Strange as it sounded, Raske’s death would be like cutting out part of his own heart.
The rest of the journey was in fog. Dublin was just as mist-shrouded. The passengers disembarked in a wet dusk. Gilbert led Ilmika, Two Hawks, and Kwasind to the home of a friend. They were there only one day when news of the plague came.
It was just as it had been thirty years ago, when Perkunisha was on the verge of conquering the Western World. The piles of rotting bodies all over the land, the weakening hunger and deadly winter, the lack of cleanliness, and the thriving of the rats had brought the Black Plague once again.
“Europe is saved from the Perkunishans; God save it now from a far worse fate,” Gilbert said. His normally red face was pale, and he was no longer smiling. “My own parents and three of my brothers and two of my sisters died the last time the scourge struck. My aunt brought me to Ireland to escape it, but it followed us, and she, too, died. God help mankind. Now you will see such a slaughter as the Perkunishans could envision only in their nightmares. They, too, will die; half of mankind will die in two years.”
“If they had listened to me...” Two Hawks said. He stopped, shrugged, and resumed. “Do we stay here and die?”
Gilbert said, “No! One of my ships is in port, in fact, the last of my ships. It’s provisioned for a long voyage. We’ll sail tonight for Hivika! Only, let’s hope we get there before Hivjka hears of the plague! Otherwise, we’ll never be allowed on shore!”
Two Hawks knew what was in his mind besides escaping bubonic plague. He said, “I’d like to hope, but I don’t have much faith in the tales of superstitious witch-doctors.”
“Why not?” Gilbert said.
And indeed, why not?
Nevertheless, as the days went by and the Atlantic was the only thing to be seen, the cold gray and sometimes angry ocean, Two Hawks grew less optimistic. Even if there were a “gate” in a cave on top of that high mountain in Hivika, it probably would not be open. The sorcerers themselves had stated that it only opened every fifty years or so and then only for a few seconds. The last time had been thirty years ago. Moreover, there was the problem of gaining access to the cave. Of all the many tabu places on the island, the cave was the most sacred. No one except the few high priests and the king were ever allowed there; the mountain itself, though close to the sea, was walled halfway up its slope and heavily guarded.
Despite his misgivings, Two Hawks enjoyed the trip. He and Ilmika had a chance for a long honeymoon. For the first time, they really became acquainted and found, much to the surprise of both, that they not only loved each other—that is, had a mutual passion—but actually liked each other. They had, of course, certain ways of thought and behaviour that aggravated the other. These were both personal and cultural. But they were willing to tell one another when the partner did something to offend, and the friction would be smoothed out. Two Hawks was happy, although he was realistic enough to know that she would always have a certain amount of arrogance. She could not help it, since she had been brought up as an aristocrat in an undemocratic world.
Two Hawks really began to feel uneasy for the first time when the vessel crossed that invisible line which would have been the shore of North America on Earth 1. Almost, he expected the ship to shudder, then rise up out of the water on a slope of land with a great crash and grind. But the Hwaelgold continued on smoothly while somewhere below was New Foundland. It went over the area in which the city of New York would have been; he imagined a sunken metropolis of skyscrapers and human bones on the streets, over which fish swam. It was sheer fantasy, or course, since in this world no man had ever seen that area. It was at least 6,000 feet below the surface, cold and dark and covered with slimy mud.
There was no part of the North or South Americas above water which had not been, on Earth 1, at six thousand feet above sea level. In the Northern Hemisphere, only a few small islands in the east (the highest part of the Appalachians on Earth 1) and a chain of islands, some rather large, in the west, existed. These were inhabited by Polynesians, presumably immigrants who had arrived 750 years ago. The South American chains, bigger in area and longer than the North, were populated by colonizers from, presumably, that island known on Earth 1 as Easter Island.
The main island toward which the Hwaelgold was heading was composed of highland which, on Earth 1, would have been the mountainous parts of Colorado. The capital city of Kualono was on the eastern sea coast and was a harbor with great stone temples and palaces and massive granite idols, light airy houses ill-adapted to the cold winters, highways of huge close-fitting stone blocks, and vegetation peculiarly North American. The natives wore few clothes in the summer time and played and swam much like their Hawaiian cousins. In the winter, they wore heavy clothes of spun fabric and feathers. There were also iron mines and smelters and factories now, and automobiles on the roads. Despite the increasing industrialization and trade (mainly with the South African Arabs), the Hivikans lived much as they had in the past: easy-going, laughing, playing, and only vicious in their wars. The last one had taken place some fifty years ago and had made more than enough elbow room in an overpopulated land.
Two Hawks spent much time on the bridge with Gilbert. Ilmika sat on a chair in a corner and knitted; Kwasind stood like a bronze statue of Hercules in one corner. Two Hawks, who had drawn a map from
memory of the North America of his native world, indicated the Mississippi River.
“We should be about over it,” he said. “Rather, where it would be if it existed here.”
At that moment, the captain exclaimed. Two Hawks looked up to see him staring through a pair of binoculars to the north. He picked up a pair given him by Gilbert and searched the same quarter of the sea. There, so low on the horizon it could only be viewed with glasses, was a small cloud. The captain, after studying it for a while, gave orders to increase the speed of the Hwaelgold. He explained that the vessel might be peaceful, perhaps a merchantman from South Africa. But if the contact with the ship could be avoided, it would be best.
By dusk, the smoke had come closer. Its estimated speed placed it out of the category of merchant; it could only be a warship, either a destroyer or cruiser. “The direction from which it comes should make it an Ikhwani. But it could be a Perkunishan raider.”
At the end of the second day, the pursuer (if it was one) was a little over a mile away. It glittered whitely in the sun and was identifiable as Arabic.
“I don’t think they’ll sink us,” the captain said. “We are too valuable a prize, a large well-built British craft the Ikhwani can use to enrich their merchant fleet. But they can’t put a prize crew aboard and take the Hwaelgold back to South Africa. It doesn’t have enough fuel or provisions to make the voyage. So, the only thing the Arabs can do is to sail us into Kualono and refuel it there.”
“What will happen to us?” Ilmika said.
“The Ikhwani might make some of the sailors help sail the Hwaelgold to Ikhwan,” he replied. “The rest of us should be left on Hivika, free to make our way back to Blodland as best we can. The Ikhwani won’t want to take more prisoners than they can help. After all, they’d have to feed us. Unless we could be used as slaves. That’s a possibility. Tell the truth, I don’t know. It’s up to God and the Ikhwani.”
Night fell. The cruiser kept a quarter-mile behind the Hwaelgold, its searchlights pinning the merchantman. The captain took no vain evasive action but continued to run his vessel at top speed. He could do nothing else unless the Ikhwani sent a shell over him and ordered him to stop. This the cruiser would undoubtedly do when dawn arrived.
At midnight, the rainstorm that the captain had been praying for swept like a dropped net out of the west. With it came rough seas. Two seconds after the rain and darkness struck, the captain ordered the Hwaelgold to turn sharply southwards. In a short time, the lights of the cruiser had disappeared. When the sun came up, it shone only upon the Blodland ship. The captain ordered a normal cruising speed, since he had been worried about his engines giving way under the long strain.
17
The seas were empty of alien smoke for the next five days. The dawn of the sixth day, the captain took a reading and verified that their position was only a hundred miles east of Kualono. Within an hour, they should be sighting Miki’ao, a small island. Exactly forty minutes later, the 500-foot peak of Miki’ao reared above the horizon. The captain’s grin of pride, however, was wiped off when smoke was sighted to the rear. He gave the orders for full speed ahead and spent most of the next two hours watching to the aft. This time, the Ikhwani had approached much closer before being detected. It was coming up fast to the southward and at an angle that would intercept them long before they reached the safety of Kualono.
The captain conferred with Gilbert and then ordered the Hwaelgold to turn at a 45-degree angle northward. “There are dangerous reefs just above the harbor,” he said. “I know them well. We’ll make a run through them; perhaps the Ikhwani will pile up on them. If they don’t we’ll run it ashore, if there’s a place on those forbidding cliffs to do so. In any case, the Arabs won’t get their hands on my ship.”
Gilbert said, “He’s making for Lapu Mountain, where the Cave of the Outer Gods is. If we land there, we’ll have a good excuse for trespassing on tabu property. We won’t get there until a little before dusk. So, if the Hivikans don’t see us...”
Two Hawks replied to Gilbert’s smile with one of his own. “We bulldoze our way in then? Great! And what if the Ikhwani respect the marine sovereignty of Hivika and refuse to follow us in? What do we use for an excuse?”
“If they respected the Hivika sovereignty, they would have quit long ago,” the captain said. “Hivika claims extend to fifty miles out from the coast. No, they’re not going to quit unless they come across a Hivikan naval ship. Maybe not then. Ikhwan would like an excuse to go to war with Hivika; it has coveted Hivika for a long time. Only the threat of war with Blodland and Perkunisha kept them from conquest. Now, I don’t know.”
The Hwaelgold, her engines pounding, beat northwestward. Its pursuer steadily cut down the distance between them. By the time that the black headlands of the coast had become quite high, the cruiser was only a half-mile behind. Then smoke flared out of the muzzle of one of its eight- inchers, and a geyser soared up twenty yards off the starboard bow of the Hwaelgold. Twenty seconds later, a second waterspout appeared fifteen yards off the port bow.
By then, the captain was taking his ship on a zigzag course. The path was not chosen at random, however, since the vessel was steering through the narrow channels between the reefs. Some of these were evident only by the darker blue of the water; others were near enough to the surface to cause the seas to boil.
By then, the cruiser had quit firing. Evidently, it had not meant to hit its quarry but had only hoped that the shells would make it surrender. Seeing that the Hwaelgold intended to make a run for it, the Ikhwani went after them. It, too, zigged and zagged but at a more cautious pace. Two Hawks wondered why the Arabs were taking such chances. Why should they be so determined to capture them? What was special about the merchantman? Perhaps, their espionage system in Blodland had learned that he was on his way to Hivika. It would then have sent a radio message, by spark-gap transmitter, to an Ikhwani vessel somewhere in the vicinity. And the message would have been relayed by various ships until the cruiser had received it.
This would explain why the Hwaelgold had not been sunk. He was wanted alive so that the Arabs could use his knowledge, just as the Perkunishans and Blodlandish had. That would explain not only their hunting through the reefs but their ignoring the Hivika sea-domain.
The mountain of Lapu was at the very edge of the waters. It rose steeply on both the south and north sides; on the eastern, it sloped much more gently and terminated in a wide black-sand beach. Towards this, the captain steered the ship after it had slipped through a narrow channel. There was a slight scraping of the plates of the keel on the rocks, and the vessel was in calmer waters. Captain Wilftik heaved a sigh of relief and grinned.
“The cruiser won’t make it through there without tearing her bottom out. I hope she tries it.”
He gave orders to stop the ship and to lower two lifeboats. The cruiser did not attempt the passage; it slid on by alongside the reef, turned as closely as it could to avoid another reef, and then pointed her nose outwards. While her engines kept her from drifting backwards against the reef, it lowered two power launches. Two Hawks, observing them through his binoculars, saw that the launches were equipped with several two-inch cannons and mortars. Each held about thirty marines, in addition to the crews. The marines looked like medieval Saracens with their turbans above which rose the gleaming points of the helmets, steel cuirasses, great leather belts, scabbards containing scimitars, scarlet baggy pants, and calf-length boots with turned-up toes. Each had a large blue sack strapped to his belt and carried a rifle.
Captain Wilftik wanted to run his ship back through the entrance between the reefs and smash the launches just as they came into the passageway on the other end. Gilbert objected. “The cruiser will blow you out of the water. And it will then send another launch with marines after us on land. Hold your fire; permit the landing-party to go after us. The sailors in our party will ambush them, but I’m not asking them to give up their lives for us. They’ll do it from a place which the Ikhw
ani can’t take—if they can find one.”
Two boats took Two Hawks, Ilmika, Kwasind, Gilbert, and officers and crewmen ashore. They went quickly across the beach and began climbing. The sun had gone down behind the mountain by then, shrouding this side in twilight. Above them and out to the sea, the sky was a bright blue and the waters green. The Ikhwani launches drove their prows onto the sand, and the white and scarlet (twilight-browned) figures were little dolls. The pursued had a twenty-minute head-start and had taken advantage of it. Although they were soon in a dusk so thick it made climbing difficult, they continued. Then the sun plunged down into the sea, and they were slowed even more. They caught hold of bushes and pulled themselves up, occasionally slipping but always able to stop their backward slide by grabbing the vegetation.
Now and then, they came to great gnarled oaks, which Gilbert said had been planted here two hundred years ago by King Mahimahi. “The mountain above the guard-wall is a thick forest of oaks. We’ll be well concealed then—if we can get past the Hivika sentinels.”
“I wonder why they haven’t spotted us yet?” Two Hawks said. “I know it’s dark now, but the guards should have been able to see both ships.”
“I don’t know,” Gilbert replied. “Perhaps they’re planning on ambushing us, just as we are the Ikhwani.”
Gilbert’s fat was telling on him; he was breathing heavily. Aside from his panting, it was quiet on the mountain, with the only sounds being the wind through the oak leaves and the noise of their progress: twigs cracking, wet leaves squishing, a branch springing back with a swishing sound, muffled curses as a man slipped. When they stopped to rest, and Gilbert regained his breath, the silence was like that in a huge cathedral, in the moment when all have bowed their heads and just before the minister launches into a prayer. However, it was no prayer that was to come, Two
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