Doomstar. Part 17

The village of the Krinn was dirty. Rude shelters made of branches and the huge leaves kept off the rains after a fash-ion. They were scattered anyhow under the trees, but there was a wide central s.p.a.ce with all the undergrowth cleared out and here the sacred fire burned in a pit and the G.o.d had a house ofleaves with bones piled in front of it. The G.o.d was a log set upright, the top hacked into the suggestion of a head. It was daubed with bright colors and hung with heartstones. Kettrick had once counted fifty of them in its necklace and girdle. Few peoples in the Cl.u.s.ter had such a wealthy deity.

The men sat in the visitor's side of the clearing, farthest from the G.o.d's house, and Kettrick kept Chai close to him, forbidding her to growl. She was obedient, but her neckhairs stood up even so. There was a second fire here, and the Krinn crouched around it facing them, hairy, bristling, hump-shouldered creatures out of ancestral nightmare, or worse; the Krinn had kept their tails, and their antecedents were apelike only in that they were not birdlike or fishlike. The terms were relative to the worlds of their origin.

The Krinn had teeth, large and strong for tearing. Their hands were strong and clever for the making of weapons and simple tools. They stank with a vile, strong smell as human as it was animal. The hair that clothed their powerful bodies ranged in color from black to brindled red and they did not bother with other garments, except that the dominant males ornamented themselves with heartstones according to the order of their dominance. Ghnak had as many as he had fingers and toes, more than any other man but significantly less than the G.o.d. The others scaled down to a single gem. They had not the skill to pierce them. The women wove strands of tough fibre around them and made them fast to collars of hide, and even through the fibre webs and the dirt the stones burned with their beautiful inner light. They were the reason why the Krinn were so rigidly protected.

According to Krinn protocol, beginning with the one-gem men, Kettrick served out the gifts he had brought, a weird a.s.sortment raided from the lifeboat's supplies, anything that was shiny or important-looking. He was sick with impatience, but he knew it was no good trying to hurry. At the very last he handed Ghnak the showiest item, a spare helmet, and said, "I give this to the G.o.d, who has called me."

There was some astonished grunting. Ghnak took the hel-met and laid it on top of the bones in front of the G.o.d's house, and came back again, peering very sharply at Ket-trick.

"The G.o.d makes talk only to Ghnak," he said.

'True," said Kettrick. "So he has told you why we come." And he thought, Oh lord, you stupid apeling, I have to go through all this to get it into your bean-brained head that your sun is going to run amok and kill you.

"The G.o.d is powerful, like Ghnak. He can make his voice very loud. He can call across between the stars. He said to me, 'Evil spirits in the shape of men have come. They stand upon my high places. They make magic. Ghnak the great chief, my brother, has seen this. He knows the magic they make. He knows what they mean to do.'"

Ghnak's small eyes were now very bright but also puzzled and uncertain. If the G.o.d had indeed said these things he did not wish to deny them, nor to admit to his tribe that he was ignorant of them. So he grunted and thumped his chest and said, "Ghnak is brother to the G.o.d. He knows."

Gracefully yielding him the ploy, Kettrick said, "Ghnak knows that the man-things came to kill the sun."

Ghnak's eyes opened wide. A burst of grunting ran through the males. Behind them and apart, the hairy women and the young made shriller noises. Automatically, every face turned upward.

"They kill the sun!" Kettrick shouted. "They stab it with their magic." He pulled Flay's knife from his belt and struck it into the dirt before him. "They stab it as I stab the ground. They wound the sun with magic!"

He thrust the knife again and again into the ground, and because what he said was true, the conviction and the fear carried over to his audience. Ghnak stared at the blade, ap-palled.

Kettrick dropped it and sprang to his feet. "Ghnak and his brother the G.o.d will save the sun. Theyhave called us here to help, because we know the ways of the Tailless Ones and can use their own magic against them." His voice rang in the hot green shadows under the trees, over the ranks of stunned, half-terrified, half-uncomprehending faces, snouted and toothed and hairy faces with perpetually angry eyes.

"Ghnak will save the sun! Lead us, strong chief! Make talk with all the People of the River, so the G.o.d can quickly tell you where to find the Tailless Ones and kill them." He made the Krinn kow-tow before Ghnak. "Lead us, Ghnak, to where the evil spirits make magic with flame and thunder, with big noises, with coming and going from the sky. Hurry, oh chief, and save the sun!"

Ghnak continued to stare at Kettrick, his mouth open like that of a man winded by a sudden blow.

Kettrick held the pose. Behind him Boker, who understood the Krinn speech, nudged Hurth and Glevan and they bent their foreheads to the ground. Then a sub-chief of ten heartstones bent and cried out, "Lead us, Ghnak!," and the rest of the men fol-lowed, shouting, "Ghnak! Ghnak!"

Pride swelled Ghnak's chest and brought his tail up in a stiff arc until the tip almost touched his shoulderblades. He still did not quite understand what he was about. But it is the business of a chief to lead his people, and the magnitude of the idea set his ego afire. He stamped his feet and pound-ed himself and roared.

"Ghnak will save the sun!"

He moved away quickly, with half the tribe at his heels, adding, "The G.o.d will speak through the talking logs."

"Suppose he doesn't," said Boker under his breath to Ket-trick. "Suppose the People of the River don't have a thing to say about big noises and comings from the sky."

"You won't live past morning, anyway," said Kettrick, "What difference does a few hours make?"

"Because of the vanity of man," said Glevan, "I will make a large prayer for a miracle."

The flat rattling voices of the talking logs began to speak, calling up and down the river to the scattered tribes of the Krinn. Kettrick understood very little of the drum talk. He switched on the radio, but the lifeboat now seemed to be out of range and all he got was static. He turned it off.

The sun was higher. The heat increased. The needle of the counter crept toward the red. The clack of the primeval jun-gle telegraph halted and stuttered. A feeling of unreality came over Kettrick, a detachment psychotic in its cheerfulness. He was no longer afraid. He no longer worried. He looked across at the G.o.d who sat in his house beyond the sacred fire, and he said, "If you let your brother down, friend, there will be no more offerings for you."

In a semistupor he sat and waited and listened to the drums.

Boker shook him. "Wake up," he said. "I think they've heard something."

24.

Kettrick started up. He could hear Ghnak's deep grunting ba.s.s crying out that the G.o.d had spoken. Other voices shout-ed "Ghnak! Ghnak!" Women began to howl shrilly. There was a lot of stamping about, and the drums were still.

Kettrick and the others ran.

They met Ghnak between walls of fern and sawgra.s.s, on the trail that led to the talking place and the bank of the river."The G.o.d my brother has told me," he said. "The tribe of Hhurr beyond the Many Hills has seen the magic of the sun-slayers."

Kettrick said, "Ghnak will lead us." He looked at his companions, seeing their faces as blank as he knew his own must be. They did not believe it. He did not believe it.

They did not dare believe it.

"A volcanic upheaval," said Hurth. "Or an earthquake."

Glevan said nothing. His lips moved without sound.

Ghnak was chanting. The tribesmen answered him. They stamped their feet and performed ritual obscenities of a de-fiant sort, their tails erect and quivering. In a moment there would be a rush to pick up weapons and then a surge back to the river bank. Kettrick stepped aside into the clearing where the talking log lay on its supports. It was hollow and had a long slit on its flattened top surface. The sticks were hung beside it. Kettrick switched on his radio and called the lifeboat.

After what seemed a moderate eternity the copilot an-swered, sounding very distant and rather peevish.

"Negative so far," he said. "Nothing but dust and vol-canoes. This is a h.e.l.l of a world. I've lost the cruiser now but her last transmission was negative."

"I may have something," Kettrick said, and explained rap-idly, leaving out the supernatural embellishments. "The Many Hills are the line of b.u.t.tes west of where you dropped us. How far beyond them this tribe lives I don't know. The country is a mess seen from the air..."

"I know. I saw it this morning. We'll give it a closer look when we reach it." Kettrick heard him talking to the pilot, and then he added, "That will be our next westward sweep. We're almost at the terminus now and about to head east."

Kettrick said, "You don't think it would be worth your while to go a little bit out of your way."

"We were a.s.signed to a definite sweep pattern, Kettrick. We can't just drop out a few thousand miles of it because one of your apes down there saw a thunderstorm or an..."

"Volcanic upheaval," said Kettrick. "Sure. Suit yourself."

He cut the switch. He was angry, though he knew he had no right to be. The copilot was completely correct.

The tribe came streaming back down the trail with their weapons slung over their shoulders, following Ghnak. Kettrick and the others joined them. At the edge of the water the tribe's two river craft were pulled up onto the mud. The Krinn, quite nonapelike, were fearless and expert in the water. They swam, hunting the aquatic mammals with great skill. For long voyages they built a kind of rude catamaran out of two long buoyant logs sharpened at both ends and lashed to-gether with cross branches about four feet apart. The river was the great highway, and from it other rivers branched, and the Krinn traveled for astonishing distances, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of desire for conquest or sheer curiosity. They were a gutty, energetic breed. In another mil-lion years or so they might amount to something. If they lived.

The craft were pushed off. Holding long paddles, a dozen or so Krinn bestrode each log. The men found places among them and Chai, holding herself rigidly in check, climbed obediently up behind Kettrick. The Krinn had found it convenient to ignore her, but she was finding it not so easy to ignore them. Kettrick laid his head back against her and said, "Soon over now. Be patient."

The Krinn began to churn the water, one of them on each craft calling out, "Ough! Ough! Ough!"

rhythmically to mark the time. They picked up the beat and the logs shot away downstream, toward theMany Hills and the tribe of Hhurr who had seen the magic.

And here we go, thought Kettrick, a brave little band with our tails in the air, to save the sun.

Once more the strange feeling of unreality came over him, but this time the comfortable detachment was lacking. I have done this before, he thought. And he had. He had ridden a smooth log in the midst of a line of Krinn rowers, watching their hairy backs bend and the paddles swing, flashing in the sun. He had seen the banks of the river glid-ing past and felt the warm suck of the water on his legs and smiled at the way the tails of his fellow sailors were carried daintily aloft out of the wet.

Yet after a while he understood that this was not what he meant.

He understood that at last he was living the dream.

They went downriver with the current. They moved swiftly, but not so swiftly as the sun that hastened to reach its zenith, rushing toward its doom. A sick sun, a dying sun, and to Kettrick it seemed that a strangeness came into the light and turned all the landscape into such a place as one might see in fever. Dim shapes flopped and floundered and swirled in the tainted waters. The great b.u.t.tes reared high, their flanks torn to the bleeding red rock, their foreheads shattered by lightning. The forest crept darkly along the banks, full of sounds and furtive motion, and far on the other side of the sink, atop the desert wall, the yellow cur-tain of a sandstorm blew and trailed its raggedness down and down across the treetops. The rowers, humped and fanged, churned tirelessly from nowhere into nothing, under the shining of the Doomstar.

The lifeboat, its delta wings extended, appeared high in the western sky.

The Krinn broke their rhythm, shouting that the sun-slayers had come. Kettrick, shaking off his daze, cried out that this was some of the help that the G.o.d and his brother Ghnak had sent for. He clawed at the radio.

The copilot still sounded peevish. But he said, "We de-cided to come back this way, just to break the monotony. It is a high probability area. You said west of that line of b.u.t.tes? And north of the river.

How large an area do you suggest?"

"Not too large, if the visual and aurak phenomena could be detected from the river. But I don't know how far west the tribe is."

"The scanner shows a bunch of critters gathering on an open landing place on this side of the bend.

They seem to have spotted us. That's probably your tribe."

The lifeboat swerved and dropped and presently was out of sight behind the b.u.t.tes, for the catamarans had not yet turned the bend of the river.

"It is a mess," the copilot complained. "Old craters, old lava beds, rugged little mesas..."

"Do you see anything?" said Kettrick into the transmitter. "Anything?" He was aware of Boker and Hurth and Gevan straining from their log perches.

"Nothing yet. We're circling, as low as we dare." A long silence. "No..." Some background gabble with the pilot. "Nothing." Another silence. Then, wearily, "Oh, h.e.l.l, we might have known. It was a good try, Kettrick, but we should have stuck with our pattern..."

The pilot's voice cut suddenly across his, loud and curi-ously flat. "Look at that."

The copilot made the beginning of a startled cry.

Then nothing. A crackle of static, but nothing more.

Kettrick worked furiously with the radio, shouting until he was hoa.r.s.e. Finally he understood that they were not going to answer. The boat's radio was dead.The boat itself had not reappeared, nor would it.

"They may have crashed," said Boker. "Or they may have landed. But did they sight the thing, that's what I want to know. Did they sight it?"

Kettrick shook his head. He kept the radio open but there was not a whisper from it, all the way down the bend of the river to where the tribe of Hhurr waited at the landing be-yond the Many Hills.

And now the sun was beginning its last journey to the west.

Kettrick let the two chiefs have the first and most impor-tant part of their ceremonial greeting, and then he said, "It is known to Ghnak, and no doubt to Hhurr also, for they are both great chiefs, that the sun must be saved before its setting. Where has Hhurr seen the magic of the sun-slayers?"

Hhurr, a muscular Krinn with many scars and the twenty heartstones around his thick neck, pointed to the tumbled land beyond the belt of forest.

"On the Black Hill the magic has been done."

"Ghnak will lead us," Kettrick said, "and also Hhurr. They will lead us as swiftly as the wind."

They set off, two tribes of Krinn now, or the males there-of, numbering something over a hundred, with the four men and Chai. The chiefs apparently were impressed by the need for haste. They ran, and the Krinn could run like deer. Chai kept up with them easily, though her tongue lolled and dripped in the heat. The men, weakened by two or three million years, soon had to submit to the indignity of being helped, and then carried by relays of grunting tribesmen.

They left the forest and the shade behind them. They ran in the naked blaze of the sun across stony slopes where scaled things hissed at them and slid away. There were lava beds and scattered malpais, and in a half circle to the west and north a nest of old volcanic cones thrust up. At their feet were the eroded remnants of a plain, flat rock tables of which the largest was the Black Hill.

It was black, with old lava, black against the charred stumps of the volcanoes, and it was impossible to see its top. But as they strained toward it, all at once they saw a quick bright flash against the blackness, and heard the un-mistakable crack and whish of a missile going skyward, and Kettrick said, "It is."

The ragged file of tribesmen had stopped. They pointed, shouting harshly, at the already silent mesa and the sky. "The magic! The magic!" cried Hhurr.

Ghnak thumped his chest and screamed with rage and fright. The men shook their weapons.

Kettrick licked his parched lips and summoned all the voice he had.

"They throw spears at the sun! The sun-slayers! Kill! Kill!"

"Kill! Kill!" shouted the tribesmen. They leaped forward. The sun threw their tailed shadows long across the sand, "There won't be anyone there to kill," said Glevan.

"We'll kill the launcher," Kettrick answered. "It's all one to them." He looked at the sun and the length of the shadows. "How many more of them until sunset?"

"At least two," Boker said. "Maybe three." He too looked at the sun and then at the distance they had yet to go. "Better hope it's three. Unless you can raise the cruiser." He glared at the fatuously crackling radio with a species of hate.

"Not yet," said Kettrick. He turned it off. "They had the bigger part of the globe to cover. They're working this way, but I don't think we'd better count on them."

"What happened to the lifeboat?" Hurth muttered. "That's what they must have seen, a missile goingoff. But what happened?"

Kettrick said, "Don't worry about it now."

The radio was an enc.u.mbrance and he shed it. They ran stumbling in the hot sand, blinded with glare, hauled and hurried by stinking tribesmen with the rank sweat dried and crusted on them. The shadows of the old crones lengthened and the Black Hill seemed to come no closer, and once again from its unseen summit a flaming spear went up to wound the sun. Kettrick felt himself very oddly empty of emotion. He was not excited or triumphant or even greatly interested. He had set himself to run toward a certain place, and he was running, and his energies were entirely ab-sorbed in the performance of that act. He thought that probably he was just a little out of his head.

A broken wall of rock appeared before him. He began to climb it. On both sides of him and before him ragged lines of Krinn went clambering swiftly. He knew then that they had reached the Black Hill. He was not conscious now of being tired. He was astonished at how quickly he was able to scale the rock.

And Chai, who was not so good at climb-ing, was beside him.

Strangely, here and there, Krinn began to lose their foot-ing and fall.

Chai said urgently, "John-nee..."

There were men on top of the mesa, firing at them. Beams from their weapons whiplashed downward, crackling, flick-ing away the tribesmen wherever they struck.

Kettrick shouted, "Hug the rock! Stay close!" He did not know whether anyone heard him or not.

The Krinn were screaming, howling their war cries. Some of them continued to scramble up toward the summit, spurred on by the sight of actual enemies. Others hesitated, fierce and furious as ever but daunted by the powerful magic of weapons that made the rock smoke and brushed their brothers away like flies. Kettrick thought that in a minute or two they would break and run.

He hunched himself into the rock as tight as he could and pulled out the weapon he had brought from the life-boat. He began to fire upward at the heads and leaning-out bodies silhouetted above him against the sky. There were not many of them, no more than eight or ten. Other sidearms now began to crackle where Boker and the others were. Wooden spears flew upward ineffectually and fell back and one of them hit Kettrick a glancing blow, nicking his b.u.t.tock. One of the silhouetted heads above him ap-peared to disintegrate. The body belonging to it came b.u.mp-ing and sliding down. Another head hung at a broken angle over the rock edge. The others drew back. The fire slackened and stopped altogether as a third man who had reached out to take careful aim at somebody, Kettrick or another of the humans who had punishing weapons, lost his own weapon and the hand that held it.