In the Morning of Time Part 14

As Grom stood studying the pair, the mother kept throwing glances of horror over her shoulder, as if expecting her a.s.sailants to arrive at any moment. Grom followed her eyes, but there was no sign of any pursuit. Then he observed the fugitives' wounds more closely, and noted that the blood upon them was already, in most cases, pretty well coagulated. He noted also certain other wounds, deep, narrow punctures, like stabs. He guessed that they could not be much less than an hour old. The Thing, whatever it was, which had inflicted them--the Thing with so strange a mouth, and so strange a way of using it--had apparently given up the pursuit. Grom's curiosity burned within him, and he was angry at the woman because she could not speak to him in his own language, or at least in that of the Bow-legs. It seemed to him willful obstinacy on her part to refuse to understand the Bow-legs' tongue. He stooped over her, and roughly examined one of the wounds with his huge fingers. She winced, but made no complaint, only covering her baby with her hair and her arms in terror lest it should suffer a like harsh handling.

With a qualm of compunction, which rather puzzled him, Grom gave over his investigating, and turned to a tall, slim youth with a great mop of chestnut hair who at this moment came running up to him. It was A-ya's young brother, Mo, Grom's favorite follower and hunting mate; and he had come at speed, being very swift of foot, in answer to Grom's signal. Breathing quickly, he stood at Grom's side, and looked down with wonder and dislike upon the crouching woman.

Briefly Grom explained, and then pointed to the inexplicable wounds.

The youth, unable to believe that any human creature should be unable to comprehend plain human speech, such as that of the Cave People, tried his own hand at questioning the woman. He got a flow of chatter in reply, but, being able to make nothing out of it, he imagined it was not speech at all, and turned away angrily, thinking that she mocked him. Grom, smiling at the mistake, explained that the woman was talking her own language, which he intended presently to learn as he had learned that of the Bow-legs.

"But now," said he, "we will go and see what it is that has bitten the woman. It is surely something with a strange mouth."

Mo, who was not only brave to recklessness, but who would have followed Grom through the mouth of h.e.l.l, sprang forward eagerly. Grom, who realized that the mystery before him was a perilous one, and who loved to do dangerous things in a prudent manner, looked to his bow-string and saw that his arrows were handy in his girdle, before he started on the venture. Besides his bow he carried the usual two spears and his inseparable stone-headed club. Though danger was his delight, it was not the danger itself but the thrill of overcoming it that he loved.

The moment he stepped forward, however, the woman divined his purpose and leapt wildly to her feet. She sprang straight in front of him, screaming and gesticulating. She was plainly horror-stricken at the thought that the two men should venture into the perils from which she had so hardly escaped. To Grom's keen intelligence her gestures were eloquent. She managed to convey to him the idea of great numbers, and the impossibility of his dealing with them. When he attempted to pa.s.s her, she threw herself down and clung to his feet, shaking with her terror. When she saw that Grom was at last impressed, she stretched herself out as if dead, and then, after a few moments of ghastly rigidity, with fixed, staring eyes, she came to and held up one hand with the fingers outspread.

This frantic pantomime Grom could read in no other way than as an attempt to tell him that the unknown Something had killed five of the woman's companions. The information gave him pause. Adventurous as he was, he had small respect for mere pig-headed recklessness. He was resolved to solve the problem--but after all it could abide his more thorough preparation.

"Come back," he ordered, turning to the impetuous Mo. "She says they are too many for us two. They have killed five of her people. We will go back to the Caves, and after three sleeps for good counsel, we will return with fire and find the destroying Thing."

II

On their return to the Caves, Grom gave the strange woman and her baby to his faithful slave Ook-ootsk, who accepted the gift with enthusiasm because, being a Bow-leg, he had not been allowed to take any of the Cave Women to wife. He lavished his attentions upon the unhappy stranger, but he could make no more of her speech than Grom had done.

The girl A-ya, however, in a moment of peculiar insight had gathered, or thought she gathered, from the stranger's signs, that the dreadful and destroying Thing was something that flew--therefore, a great flesh-eating bird. But she gathered, also, that it was something which in some way bore a resemblance to fire--for the woman, after getting over her first terror of the dancing flames, kept pointing to them and then to her wounds in a most suggestive way. This, however, as Grom rather scornfully pointed out, was too absurd. There was nothing that could be in the least like fire itself; and the wounds of the fugitives had no likeness whatever to the corrosive bites of the flame. A-ya took the correction submissively, but held her own thought; and when a day or two later, events proved her to have been right, she discreetly refrained from calling her lord's attention to the fact--a point upon which Grom was equally reserved.

With so provocative a mystery waiting to be solved, Grom could not long rest idle. Had she not known well it would be a waste of breath, A-ya would have tried to dissuade him from the perilous, and to her mind profitless, adventure. It was one she shrank from in spite of her tried courage and her unwavering trust in Grom's prowess.

The mystery of it daunted her. She feared it in the same way that she feared the dark. But she kept her fears to herself, and claimed her long-established right to go with Grom on the expedition. Grom was willing enough, for there was no one whose readiness and nerve, in a supreme crisis, he could so depend upon, and he wanted her close at hand with her fire-basket. There was nothing to keep her at home, as the children were looked after by Ook-ootsk.

It was a very little party which started southward from the Caves--simply Grom, A-ya, young Mo, and a dwarfish kinsman of Grom's, named Loob, who was the swiftest runner in the tribe and noted for his cunning as a scout. He could go through underbrush like a shadow, and hide where there was apparently no hiding-place, making himself indistinguishable from the surroundings like a squatting partridge.

Each one carried a bow, two light spears, and a club--except A-ya, who had no club, and only one spear. The weapon she chiefly relied upon was the bow, which she loved with pa.s.sion. She considered herself the inventor of it; and in the accuracy of her shooting she outdid even Grom. In addition to these weapons, each member of the party except the leader himself carried a fire-basket, in which a ma.s.s of red coals mixed with punk smouldered in a bed of moist clay.

The little expedition traveled Indian file, Grom leading the way, with A-ya at his heels, then Loob the Scout, and young Mo bringing up the rear. They had started about dawn, when the first of the morning rose was just beginning to pale the cave-mouth fires. They traveled swiftly, but every two hours or so they would make a brief halt beside a spring to drink and breathe themselves and to look to the precious fires in the fire-baskets. When it wanted perhaps an hour of noon, they came to a little patch of meadow surrounding a solitary Judas-tree covered with bloom. Here they built a fire, for the replenishing of the coals in the fire-baskets, and as a menace to prowling beasts. Then they dined on their sun-dried meat and on ripe plantains gathered during the journey. Having dined, the three younger members of the party stretched themselves out in the shade for their noon sleep, while Grom, whose restless brain never suffered him to sleep by day, kept watch, and pondered the adventure which lay before them.

As Grom sat there, ten or a dozen paces from the fire, absorbed in thought, his eyes gradually focussed themselves upon a big purple-and-lemon orchid bloom, which glowed forth conspicuously from the rank green jungle-growth fringing the meadow. The gorgeous bloom seemed to rise out of a black, curiously gnarled elbow of branch or trunk which thrust itself out through the leaf.a.ge. Grom's eyes dwelt for a time, unheeding, upon this piece of misshapen tree trunk. Suddenly he saw the blackness wink. His startled vision cleared itself instantly, and revealed to him the hideous, two-horned mask of a black rhinoceros, peering forth just under the orchid blossom.

Grom's first impulse was to wake the sleepers with a yell and shepherd them to refuge in the tree--for the gigantic woolly rhinoceros, with his armor of impenetrable hide, was a foe whom Man had not yet learned to handle with any certainty. But a deeper instinct held Grom motionless. He knew that the monster, whose eyesight was always dim and feeble, could not see him distinctly, and was in all probability staring in stupid wonder at the dancing flames of the camp-fire. As long as no smell of man should reach the brute's sensitive nostrils to rouse its rage, it was not likely to charge. There was no wind, and the air about him was full of the spicy bitterness of the wood-smoke.

Grom decided that the safest thing was to keep perfectly still and wait for the next move in the game to come from the monster. He devoutly trusted that the sleepers behind him were sleeping soundly, and that no one would wake and sit up to attract the monster's attention.

Grom could now see plainly that it was the fire, and not himself, which the rhinoceros was staring at. The shifting flames, and the smell of the smoke, apparently puzzled it. After a moment or two, it took a step forward, so that half of its huge, black, s.h.a.ggy bulk projected from the banked greenery as from a frame. Then it stood motionless, blinking its little malignant eyes, till the silent suspense grew to be a strain even upon Grom's well-seasoned nerves.

At last a large stick, laid across the fire, burned through and fell apart. The flames leapt upwards with redoubled vigor, preceded by a volley of crackling sparks. Knowing the temper of the rhinoceros, Grom expected it to fly into a fury and charge upon the fire at once. His mouth opened, indeed, for the yell of warning which should wake the sleepers and send them leaping into the tree. But he checked himself in time. The monster, for once in its life, seemed to be abashed. The curling red flames were too elusive a foe for it. With a grunt of uneasiness, it drew back into the leaf.a.ge; and in a moment or two Grom heard the giant bulk crashing off through the jungle at a gallop. The unwonted sensation of alarm, once yielded to, had swollen to a panic, and the dull-witted brute fled on for a mile or more before it could forget the cause of its terror.

That afternoon toward sundown the expedition reached the point where the fugitive had made her appeal to Grom. For fear of giving information to the unknown enemy, no fires were lighted. The night was pa.s.sed in a dense and lofty tree-top. For Grom, strung up with excitement, suspense and curiosity, there was little sleep. For the most part he perched on his woven platform with his arms about his knees, listening to the sounds of the night--the occasional sudden rush of a hunting beast, the agonized scream and scuffle, the gurglings and noisy slaverings that told of the unseen tragedies enacted far down in the murderous dark. But there was no sound novel to his own experience. Once there came a scratching of claws and a sniffing at the base of the tree.

But Grom dropped a live coal from his fire-basket, and chanced to make a lucky shot. With a snarl some heavy body bounced away from the tree.

The coal then fell into a tuft of dry gra.s.s, which flared up suddenly.

Grom had a glimpse of huge shapes and startled, savage eyes backing away from the circle of light. The blaze died down as quickly as it had arisen; and thereafter the night prowlers kept at a distance from the tree. But the sleepers had all been thoroughly aroused and till dawn they sat discussing, for the hundredth time, the chances of the morrow's venture.

Before the sun was clear of the horizon, the little party was again upon the march, but now going with the wariness of a sable. They no longer went Indian file, but flitting singly from tree to tree, from covert to covert, Grom picking up the old trail of the fugitive, the rest of the party keeping him in view and peering ahead for some sign of the unknown Terror. The red woman in her flight had left a sharp trail enough; but in the lapse of three days it had been so obliterated that all Grom's wood-craft was needed to decipher it, and his progress was slow. He began to be puzzled at the absence of any other trail, of any footsteps of a mysterious, unknown monster. Such tracks as crossed those of the fugitive, however terrible, were all familiar to his eye.

Suddenly he almost stumbled over a hideous sight. A low whistle brought his followers closing in upon him. The skeleton of a full-grown man lay outstretched in the gra.s.s. The bones were fresh--bloodstained and bright--and a swarm of blood-sucking insects arose from them. They were picked minutely clean, except for a portion of the skull, where the long, strong, densely matted hair seemed to have served as an effective armor. The bones were not pulled about, or crushed for their marrow, as they would have been if the victim had been the prey of any of the great carnivorous beasts. And there were no tracks about it save those of a few small rat-like creatures. It was clear that the Mystery, whatever it might be, had wings.

"A bird!" whispered A-ya, with a gleam of triumph in her eyes, at the same time glancing up into the tree-tops apprehensively. But Grom did not think so. There were no marks of mighty claws on the turf around the skeleton.

Grom cast about him an eager but anxious eye. The country was not densely wooded at this point, but studded with low thickets, and set here and there with scattered trees. From a little way ahead came a gleam of calm water through the greenery. It was a scene of peace, and security, and summer loveliness. Its very beauty seemed to Grom an added menace, as if some peculiar treachery must lurk behind it.

In the center of an open glade, not far from the skeleton, Grom set his party to building a circle of fires, as likely to afford the surest kind of a refuge. A supply of fuel having been gathered, he directed A-ya and Mo to remain and tend the fires and not to leave the circle unless he should summon them. Loob, the cunning scout, he sent off to the left through the underbrush. He himself followed the trail of the fugitive--now doubled by that of the other fugitive whose skeleton lay there in the sun--down toward that gleam of water through the trees. A-ya gazed after him anxiously as he vanished, half minded to dare his displeasure and follow him.

Grom was presently able to make out that the water was a wide, reedy lake or the arm of a shallow river. There was no wind, and the surface shone like clear gla.s.s. But once and again his eyes were dazzled by a dart of intense radiance, a great flash of rose or violet or blue-green flame, shooting over the surface of the water. A memory of what A-ya had professed to gather from the stranger woman rushed into his mind. Perhaps the Destroying Thing was like a bird, and nevertheless, at the same time, something like fire. He felt himself confronted by a mystery which made even his tried nerves creep; and he hid himself in the densest undergrowth as he stole forward toward the water. He had forgotten, and forsaken, the trail he was following, in his haste to solve the problem of those darting splendors.

A few moments more and he gained the edge of an open glade which led straight to the water. He paused behind the screening leaves. Out over the water a bar of ruby light, surrounded by a globe of rose-pink mist, shot by and vanished from his narrow field of vision. He was just about to thrust out his head and crane his neck to follow the gorgeous apparition, when a peculiar dry rustling in the air above checked him. He glanced up cautiously, and saw hovering, not more than twenty or thirty yards away, a beautiful and dreadful being.

In shape it was exactly like a dragon-fly; but the length of its flaming violet body was greater than that of Grom's longest arrow. The spread of its two pairs of transparent, crystal-shining, colorless wings was even greater than the length of its body. Its enormous eyes, wells of purple fire which took up the whole of the top and sides of its monstrous head, seemed to see everywhere at once; and Grom shivered with the feeling that they had spied him out and were peering into his very soul.

The awful eyes may have seen him, indeed; but at that moment they spied out something else which apparently concerned them more. With a pounce like a flash of violet lightning--and, indeed, almost as swift--the bright shape swooped to the gra.s.s. The four shining wings waved there for a moment, and there seemed to be a mild struggle. Then the giant fly rose again, lightly, into the air, holding in the clutch of its six slender, jointed legs the body of one of those black, rat-like animals which Grom knew so well as infesting the gra.s.s of all meadows near the water. The captor flew to a naked branch near the waterside, alighted upon it, and proceeded to make its meal, holding up the body between the end joints of its front pair of legs and turning it over and over deftly while its appalling jaws both crushed and mangled it. The process was amazingly swift. In the s.p.a.ce of a couple of minutes all the blood, flesh, and soft material of the rat were squeezed out and sucked down. The remnants were rolled into a hard little ball, perfectly spherical, and scornfully tossed aside.

And the monster, leaping into the air with a rustle of its glittering wings, flashed off over the water.

Almost in the same moment an amazingly loud rustle, like the sweep of a fierce gust of rain upon a rank of palmetto leaves, filled the air above the glade, and Grom, looking up with a start, saw a great shoal of the radiant shapes storm by, as if with the rainbow entangled in their wings. He wondered upon what foray they were bent; and now for the first time he realized, with a creeping of the flesh, what it was that had overtaken the man whose skeleton he had found in the gra.s.s.

The shoal swept out over the lake a little way, and then down the sh.o.r.e toward the left; and Grom drew a long breath as he a.s.sured himself that their course was taking them far from the fires of A-ya and Mo.

When Grom lowered his eyes to earth again he started. On the side of the stump of a fallen tree, out in the glade not more than eight or ten yards distant, clung one of the monsters, scintillating blue-green and amethyst in the full blaze of the sun. Its wings, exquisitely netted and of crystal transparency, were tinged with an ineffable purple iridescence. Its jointed body, slightly longer than Grom's arm, was nearly as thick as his wrist, and ended at the tail with a formidable double claw. Its six legs, arranged in three pairs under the thorax, were armed on the inner sides with powerful spines, needle-pointed and steel hard, with which to grip and hold its victims. The thorax, from the back of which sprouted the four great wings, was of the thickness of Grom's forearm, while its head was as big as Grom's two great fists put together. It was this head which held Grom's fascinated gaze, giving him more of the sensation of cold fear than he had ever known before. More than two-thirds of the head consisted of a pair of huge, globose eyes, without pupil, ethereally transparent, yet unfathomable. From the depths of them flamed a ceaselessly changing radiance of blue-green, purple and violet. Grom found the stare of those blank, pupilless eyes almost intolerable.

It was plainly straight at him, through the ineffectual screen of the leaf.a.ge, that the dreadful insect was staring. At first it stared with the back of its head. Then, very deliberately, it turned its head completely around, without moving its body a hair-breadth, till its mouth was in the same plane with its back. This gave Grom a sense of disgust, and his shrinking dread began to give way to a sort of rage.

Then he took note of the monster's mouth--and understood those great cup-shaped wounds on the woman and the child. The mouth took up the remaining third of the head, and seemed to consist of globular discs working one over the other, so as either to cut cleanly or to grind.

They were working, slowly, now--and Grom felt suddenly that he must put a stop to it, that he must put out the awful light in those monstrous devil eyes. Stealthily, almost imperceptibly, he fitted an arrow to his bow, raised it, drew it, and took a long, steady aim. He must not miss. The shaft flew--and the great fly was pinned, through the thorax, to the soft, rotten wood of its perch.

To Grom's horror that stroke, which to any beast he knew would have at once been fatal, did not kill the monstrous fly. Its struggles, and the beating of its four great wings were so violent that the arrow-head was presently wrenched loose from its hold in the wood, and the raging splendor, with the shaft half-way through its thorax, bounded into the air. It darted straight at Grom, who had prudently edged in among a tangle of stems. Its fury carried it through the screen of leaf.a.ge--but then, its wings impeded by the branches, and the arrow hampering it, it dashed itself to the earth. Instantly Grom was upon it, stamping its slim body, as it lay there blazing and quivering, into the soil. The violet light in the huge, pupilless eyes still stared up at him implacable, from a head turned squarely over the back. But in a cold fury Grom shattered the gleaming head with his club. Then he trod the silver wings to dust.

Having slaked his wrath effectually, Grom turned to stare forth again at those destroying splendors darting and glittering above the surface of the lake. To his surprise there were no more of them to be seen.

Then far off down the sh.o.r.e he heard the voice of Loob, shouting for help. The shouting changed at once to a scream of terror, and Grom started to the rescue on the full run--taking care, however, to keep within cover of the thickets. But before he had gone a quarter of a mile he heard A-ya's voice calling him, wildly, insistently, mingled with excited yells from Mo. He shouted in reply and dashed madly for the fires. The peril of A-ya put all other considerations out of his mind.

As he burst forth into the glade of refuge, he saw A-ya and young Mo leaping about frantically among their fires, now trying to stir the fires to a fiercer blaze, now beating upwards with their spears, while above them darted and gleamed and swooped and scintillated, with a horrid dry rustling of their silver wings, shoal upon shoal of the devouring monsters. As he burst into the open, with a great shout of encouragement, something dropped upon him. He felt his head instantly caged by six steel-like legs which gripped like jaws, their spines sinking deep into the flesh of neck and cheek. He reached up his left hand, caught his dreadful a.s.sailant just where the head and thorax join, and strove to throttle it. This was impossible, by reason of the insect's armor, but he succeeded in holding off those horrid jaws from his face as he dashed for the circle. Another monster swooped and struck its spines into his back, and bit a great mouthful out of his shoulder. But he gained the fires, and, holding his breath, sprang right through the fiercest flame. The wings of his a.s.sailants shrivelled instantly, and the flame, drawn into the mouth of their breathing tubes, sealed them up. Grom tore them off, and slammed the writhing, wingless bodies into the fire.

Inside the circle, now that the fires were burning high, it was possible to defend oneself effectually, as the bulk of the a.s.sailants seemed to realize that the flames were fatal to their frail wings. But there were enough so headlong in their ferocity that both Grom and Mo were kept busy beating them off with spears, while A-ya fed the fires; and the ground inside the circle was littered with the radiant bodies of the dying insects, which, even in dying, bit like bull-dogs if foot or leg came within reach. Grom noticed that their supply of fuel was all but gone, and his heart sank. He measured with his eyes the distance to the nearest thickets that looked dense enough for a shelter.

"We'll have to run for those bushes," he said presently. "They can't fly in where the branches are thick. It breaks their wings."

"Good," said young Mo. But A-ya, whose shapely shoulders and thighs were already covered with hideous wounds, trembled at the prospect.

At that moment, however an amazing change came over the scene. A black thunder-cloud pa.s.sed across the face of the sun. The moment the sunshine vanished the destroyers seemed to forget their fury. All the life and energy went out of them. They simply flocked to the nearest trees and hung themselves up, gigantic, jewelled blooms, upon the branches. In less than a minute every dreadful wing was stilled.

"Now is our time. Come!" commanded Grom, leading the way out of the circle.

"Let's stop and kill them all!" pleaded young Mo, his eyes red with rage.

But Grom pointed to the cloud. "It will pa.s.s quickly," said he. "We must be far from here before the sun shows his face again."

He paused, however, to transfix upon his spear-head one of their wounded but still fluttering foes, that he might be able to show the tribe what manner of monsters they had had to deal with. Both A-ya and Mo followed his example; and they all ran off down the glade searching for Loob, whom they soon found and bearing their strange trophies on their spear-heads they went on. The monsters, clinging sullenly to their perches, rolled baleful eyes of emerald and rose and amethyst upon them as they went, but lifted never a wing to follow them. Ten minutes later the sun came out again. Then the monsters all sprang hurtling into the air, and darted hither and thither above the glade in shoals of iridescent radiance, seeking their prey. But Grom and A-ya, Mo and Loob triumphant in spite of their wounds, were by this time far away among the inland thickets, where those intolerable eyes could not search them out, nor the clashing wings pursue.