When the Mountain Shook Part 1

When the Mountain Shook.

by Robert Abernathy.

[Sidenote: _Dark was the Ryzga mountain and forbidding; steep were its cliffs and sheer its creva.s.ses. But its outward perils could not compare with the Ryzgas themselves, who slept within, ready to wake and conquer...._]

At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the dying sun.

Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her.

The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a warming cloak, a cloak that glowed softly golden in the deepening twilight, even as her love was about him.

Var said, "The Watcher's cave should be three miles beyond this pa.s.s."

He stood rigid, trying to catch an echo of the Watcher's thoughts, but there was nothing. Perhaps the old man was resting. From the other direction, the long way that they two had come, it was not difficult to sense the thought of Groz. That thought was powerful, and heavy with vengeance.

"Hurry," said Neena. "They're closer than they were an hour ago."

She was beautiful and defiant, facing the red sunset and the black mountain. Var sensed her fear, and the love that had conquered it. He felt a wave of tenderness and bitterness. For him she had come to this.

For the flame that had sprung between them at the Truce of New Gra.s.s, she had challenged the feud of their peoples and had left her home, to follow him. Now, if her father and his kinsmen overtook them, it would be death for Var, and for Neena living shame. Which of the two was worse was no longer a simple problem to Var, who had grown much older in the last days.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"Wait," he commanded. While she waited he spun a dream, attaching it to the crags that loomed over the pa.s.s, and to the frozen ground underfoot.

It was black night, as it would really be when Groz and his henchmen reached this place; lurid fire spewed from the Ryzga mountain, and strange lights dipped above it; and for good measure there was an avalanche in the dream, and hideous beasts rushed snapping and ravening from the crevices of the rock.

"Oh!" cried Neena in involuntary alarm.

Var sighed, shaking his head. "It won't hold them for long, but it's the best I can do now. Come on."

There was no path. Now they were descending the steeper face of the sierra, and the way led over bottomless creva.s.ses, sheer drops and sheer ascents, sheets of traitorous glare ice. Place after place had to be crossed on the air, and both grew weary with the effort such crossings cost. They h.o.a.rded their strength, helping one another; one alone might never have won through.

It was starry night already when they saw the light from the Watcher's cave. The light shone watery and dim from beneath the h.o.a.ry back of the glacier, and as they came nearer they saw why: the cave entrance was sealed by a sheet of ice, a frozen waterfall that fell motionless from the rocks above. They heard no sound.

The two young people stared for a long minute, intrigued and fearful.

Both had heard of this place, and the ancient who lived there to keep watch on the Ryzga mountain, as a part of the oldest legends of their childhood; but neither had been here before.

But this was no time for shyness. Var eyed the ice-curtain closely to make sure that it was real, not dream-stuff; then he struck it boldly with his fist. It shattered and fell in a rain of splinters, sparkling in the light that poured from within.

They felt the Watcher rouse, heard his footsteps, and finally saw him--a shrunken old man, white-haired, with a lined beardless face. The sight of him, more marred by age than anyone they had ever seen before, was disappointing. They had expected something more--an ancient giant, a tower of wisdom and strength. The Watcher was four hundred years old; beside him even Groz, who had always seemed so ancient, was like a boy.

The Watcher peered at them in turn. "Welcome," he said in a cracked voice. He did not speak again; the rest of his conversation was in thought only. "Welcome indeed. I am too much alone here."

"You were asleep!" said Var. Shock made his thought accusing, though he had not meant to be.

The old man grinned toothlessly. "Never fear. Asleep or awake, I watch.

Come in! You're letting in the wind."

Inside the cave it was warm as summer. Var saw with some surprise that all the walls were sheathed in ice--warm to the touch, bound fast against melting by the Watcher's will. Light blazed in reflections from the ice walls, till there was no shadow in the place. Behind them began a tinkling of falling water, thawed from the glacial ridges above to descend sheet-wise over the cave mouth, freezing as it fell into lengthening icicles. The old man gazed at his work for a moment, then turned questioningly to the young pair.

"We need a little rest out of the cold," said Var. "And food, if you can spare it. We're pursued."

"Yes, yes. You shall have what I can give you. Make yourselves comfortable, and in one minute.... Pursued, eh? A pity. I see the world is as bad as it was when I was last in it."

Hot food and drink were before them almost at once. The Watcher regarded them with compa.s.sion as their eyes brightened and some of the shadow of weariness lifted from them. "You have stolen your enemy's daughter, no doubt, young man? Such things happened when I was young."

Warming to the old man now, Var sketched his and Neena's history briefly. "We should have been safe among my people by now. And before very long, I'm sure, I would have performed some deed which Groz would recognize as a worthy exploit, and would thus have healed the feud between our families. But our flight was found out too soon. They cut us off and forced us into the mountains, and now they are only a few hours behind us."

"A pity, indeed. I would like to help you--but, you understand, I am the Mountain Watcher. I must be above feuds and families."

Var nodded somberly, thinking that an old recluse would in any case be able to do little for them against Groz and his violent kinsfolk.

"And what will you do now?"

Var grinned mirthlessly. "We haven't much choice, since they're overtaking us. I have only one idea left: we can go where Groz may fear to follow us."

"To the mountain, you mean."

"And into it, if need be."

The Watcher was broodingly silent; his eyes shifted to Neena, where she nestled by Var's side. He asked, "And you--are you willing to follow your lover in this?"

Neena returned his gaze without flinching; then she looked sidelong at Var, and her lips curled with a proud and tender mockery. "Follow? Why, I will lead, if his courage should fail him."

The old man said, "It is no part of my duty to dissuade you from this thing. You are free persons. But I must be sure that you know what you are doing. That is the second part of the law the First Watcher made: to guard lest the unwary and the ignorant should bring harm on themselves and on all men."

"We know the stories," Var said brusquely. "In the hollow heart of their mountain the Ryzgas sleep, as they chose to do when their world crumbled. But if they are wakened, the mountain will tremble, and the Ryzgas will come forth."

"Do you believe that?"

"As one believes stories."

"It is true," said the Watcher heavily. "In my youth I penetrated farther into the mountain than anyone before, farther even than did the First Watcher. I did not see the sleepers, nor will any man until they come again, but I met their sentries, the sentinel machines that guard them now as they have for two thousand years. When I had gone that far, the mountain began to shake, the force that is in the Earth rumbled below, and I returned in time." Now for the first time Var sensed the power in the old man's look, the power of four hundred years' wisdom.

Var stared down at his hands.

"The Ryzgas also were men," said the Watcher. "But they were such a race as the world has not seen before or since. There were tyrannies before the Ryzgas, there was l.u.s.t for power, and atrocious cruelty; but such tyranny, power, and cruelty as theirs, had never been known. They ruled the Earth for four generations, and the Earth was too little for them.

They laid the world waste, stripped it of metals and fuels and bored to its heart for energy, poisoned its seas and its air with the fume of their works, wrung its peoples dry for their labor ... and in each of those four generations they launched a ship of s.p.a.ce. They were great and evil as no other people has been, because they wanted the stars.

"Because of them we must build with dreams instead of iron, and our only fire is that of the Sun, and even now, two thousand years later, the Earth is still slowly recovering from the pangs and poison of that age.

If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of gla.s.s and strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks of their shaping--the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And we--we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder.

"In the last generation of their power the Ryzgas knew by their science that the race of man would endure them no longer. They made ready their weapons, they mined the cities and the factories for destruction, making sure that their works and their knowledge would perish with them.

Meanwhile they redoubled the yoke and the punishments, hastening the completion of the last of the starships.

"From the memories that the old Watchers have left here, and from the memories of dead men that still echo in the air, I have gathered a picture of that world's end. I will show it to you...."