Authors: George England
"It meets my pleasure," answered Allan. "And when ye have talked, I
desire your answer!"
He crossed his arms, faced the multitude, and waited, while the elders
gathered in a little group by the dungeon and for some minutes
conferred in low and earnest tones.
Outwardly, the man seemed calm, but his soul burned within him and his
heart was racing violently.
For on this moment, he well knew, hung the world's destiny. Should
they decide to venture forth into the outer world all would be well.
If not, the long labor, the plans, the hopes were lost forever.
Well he knew the stubborn nature of the Folk. Once their minds set,
nothing on earth could ever stir them.
"Thank God I managed that lie about the patriarch!" thought Allen
quickly. "If I'd slipped up on that, and told them he died at the very
minute the sunlight struck him, it would have been all off, world
without end. Hope it doesn't make a row later. But if it does, I'll
face it. The main and only thing now is to get 'em started. They've
got
to go, that's all there is about it.
"Gad! After all, it's a terrific proposition I'm putting up to these
simple fishers of the Abyss. I'm asking them, just on my say-so, to
root up the life, the habits, the traditions of more than a thousand
years and make a leap into the dark—into the light, I mean.
"I'm asking them to leave everything they've ever known for thirty
generations and take a chance on what to them must be the wildest and
most hare-brained adventure possible to imagine. To risk homes,
families, lives, everything, just on my unsupported word. Jove!
Columbus's proposal to his men was a mere afternoon jaunt compared
with
this!
If they refuse, how can I blame them? But if they
accept—God! what stuff I'll know they're made of! With material like
that to work with, the conquest of the world's in sight already."
His eyes, wandering nervously along the front ranks of the waiting
Folk, dimly illumined by the dull blue glow of the fire-well that
shone through the mist, suddenly stopped with apprehension. His brows
contracted, and on his heart it seemed as though a gripping hand had
suddenly laid hold.
"H'yemba, the smith, again! Damn him! H'yemba!" he muttered, in sudden
anger strongly tinged with fear.
The smith, in fact, was standing there a little to the left of him,
huge and sinewed hands loosely clasped in front of him, face sinister,
eyes glowing like two malevolent evil fires.
Allan noted the defiant poise of the body, the vast breadth of the
shoulders, the heavy hang of the arms, biceped like a gorilla's.
For a minute the two men looked each other steadfastly in the eye,
each measuring the other. Then suddenly the voice of Vreenya broke the
tension.
"O Kromno, we have spoken. Will you hear us?"
Stern faced him, a strange sinking at his heart, almost as though the
foreman of a jury stood before him to announce either freedom or
sentence of death.
But, holding himself in check, lest any sign of fear or nervousness
betray him, he made answer:
"I will hear you. Speak!"
"We have listened to your words. We believe you speak truth. Yet—"
"Yet
what?
Out with it, man!"
"Yet will we not compel any man to go. All shall be free—"
"Thank God!" breathed Allan, with a mighty sigh.
"—Free to stay or go, as they will. Our village is too full, even
now. We have many children. It were well that some should make room
for others. Those who dare, have our consent. Now, speak
you
to the
people, your people, O Kromno, and see who chooses the upper world
with you!"
Once more Allan turned toward the assemblage. But before he had found
time to frame the first question in this unfamiliar speech, a
disturbance somewhat to the left interrupted him.
There came a jostling, a pushing, a sound of voices in amazement,
anger, approbation, doubt.
Into the clear space stepped H'yemba, the smith. His powerful right
hand he raised on high. And boldly, in a loud voice, he cried:
"Folk of the Merucaans, this cannot be!"
"It cannot be? Who says it cannot be?
Who dares stand out and
challenge me?
"
"I, H'yemba, the man of iron and of flame!"
Stern faced him, every nerve and fiber quivering with sudden passion.
At realization that in the exact psychological moment when success lay
almost in his hand, this surly brute might baffle him, he felt a wave
of murderous hate.
He realized that the dreaded catastrophe had indeed come to pass. Now
his sole claim to chieftainship lay in his power to defend the title.
Failure meant—death.
"You?" he shouted, advancing on the smith.
His opponent only leered and grimaced offensively. Then without even
having vouchsafed an answer, he swung toward the elders.
"I challenge!" he exclaimed. "I have the right of words!"
Vreenya nodded, fingering his long white beard.
"Speak on!" he answered. "Such is our ancient custom."
"Oh, people," cried the smith, suddenly facing the throng, "will ye
follow one who breaks the tribal manners of our folk? One who disdains
our law? Who has neglected to obey it? Will ye trust yourselves into
hands stained with law-breaking of our blood?"
A murmur, doubtful, wondering, obscure, spread through the people. By
the greenish flare-light Stern could see looks of wonder and dismay.
Some frowned, others stared at him or at the smith, and many muttered.
"What the devil and all have I broken
now?
" wondered Allan. "Plague
take these barbarous customs! Jove, they're worse than the taboos of
the old Maoris, in the ancient days! What's up?"
He had not long to wonder, for of a sudden H'yemba wheeled on him,
pointed him out with vibrant hands, and in a voice of terrible anger
cried:
"The law, the law of old! No man shall be chief who does not take a
wife from out our people! None who weds one of the Lanskaarn, the
island folk, or the yellow-haired Skeri beyond the Vortex, none such
shall ever rule us. Yet this man, this stranger who speaks such great
things very hard to be believed, scorns our custom. No woman from
among us he has taken, but instead, that vuedma of his own kind!
What? Will ye—"
He spoke no further, for Allan was upon him with one leap. At sound of
that word, the most injurious in their tongue, the fires of Hell burst
loose in Stern.
Reckoning no consequences, staying for no parley or diplomacy, he
sprang; and as he sprang, he struck.
The blow went home on the smith's jaw with a smash like a pile-driver.
H'yemba, reeling, swung at him—no skill, no science, just a wild,
barbaric, sledge-hammer sweep.
It would have killed had it landed, but Allan was not there. In point
of tactics, the twentieth century met the tenth.
And as the smith whirled to recover, a terrible left-hander met him
just below the short ribs.
With a grunt the man doubled, sprawled and fell. By some strange
atavism, which he never afterward could understand, Allan counted, in
the Folk's tongue: "Hathi, ko, zem, baku" and so up to "lamnu"—ten.
Still the smith did not rise, but only lay and groaned and sought to
catch the breath that would not come.
"I have won!" cried Allan in a loud voice. "Here, you people, take
this greun, this child, away! And let there be no further idle talk
of a dead law—for surely, in your custom, a law dies when its
champion is beaten! Come, quick, away with him!"
Two stout men came forward, bowed to Allan with hands clasped upon
their breasts in signal of fresh allegiance, and without ceremony took
the insensible smith, neck-and-heels, and lugged him off as though he
had only been a net heavily laden with fish.
The crowd opened in awed silence to let them pass. By the glare Allan
noticed that the man's jaw hung oddly awry, even as the obeah's had
hung, in Madison Forest.
"Jove, what a wallop that must have been!" thought he, now perceiving
for the first time that his knuckles were cut and bleeding. "Old
Monahan himself taught me that in the Harvard gym a thousand odd years
ago—and it still works.
One
question settled, mighty quick; and
H'yemba won't have much to say for a few weeks at least. Not till his
jawbone knits again, anyhow!"
Upon his arm he felt a hand. Turning, he saw Vreenya, the aged
counselor.
"Surely, O master, he shall not live, now you have conquered him? The
boiling pit awaits. It is our custom—if you will!"
Allan only shook his head.
"All customs change, these times," he answered. "
I
am your law! This
man's life is needed, for he has good skill with metals. He shall
live, but never shall he speak before the Folk again. I have said it!"
To the waiting throng he turned again.
"Ye have witnessed!" he cried, in a loud voice. "Now, have fear of me,
your master! Once in the Battle of the Walls ye beheld death raining
from my fire-bow. Once ye watched me vanquish your ruler, even the
great Kamrou himself, and fling him far into the pit that boils. And
now, for the third time, ye have seen. Remember well!"
A stir ran through the multitude. He felt its potent meaning, and he
understood.
"I am the law!" he flung at them once more. "Declare it, all! Repeat!"
The thousand-throated chorus: "
Thou art the law!
" boomed upward
through the fog, rolled mightily against the towering cliff, and
echoed thunderlike across the hot, black sea.
"It is well!" he cried. "One more sleep, and then—then I choose from
among ye two for the journey, two of your boldest and best. And that
shall be the first journey of many, up to the better places that await
ye, far beyond the pit!"
Straining his eyes in the night, pierced only
by the electric beam that ran and quavered rapidly over the broken
forest-tops far below, Allan peered down and far ahead. The fire, the
signal-fire he had told Beatrice to build upon the ledge—would he
never sight it?
Eagerly he scanned the dark horizon only just visible in the
star-shine. Warmly the rushing night wind fanned his cheek; the roar
of the motor and propellers, pulsating mightily, made music to his
ears. For it sang: "Home again! Beatrice, and love once more!"
Many long hours had passed since, his fuel-tanks replenished from the
apparatus for distilling the crude naphtha, which he had installed
during his first stay in the Abyss, he had risen a second time into
that heavy, humid, purple-vapored air.
With him he now bore Bremilu, the strong, and Zangamon, most expert of
all the fishermen. Slung in the baggage-crate aft lay a large seine,
certain supplies of fish, weed and eggs, and—from time to time
noisily squawking—some half-dozen of the strange sea-birds, in a
metal basket.
The pioneers had insisted on taking these impedimenta with them, to
bridge the gap of changed conditions, a precaution Stern had
recognized as eminently sensible.
"Gad!" thought he, as the Pauillac swept its long, flat-arc'd
trajectory through the night, "under any circumstances this must be a
terrific wrench for them. Talk about nerve! If
they
haven't got it,
who has? This trip of these subterranean barbarians, thus flung
suddenly into midair, out into a world of which they know absolutely
nothing, must be exactly what a journey to Mars would mean to me.
More, far more, to their simple minds. I wonder myself at their
courage in taking such a tremendous step."
And in his heart a new and keener admiration for the basic stamina of
the Merucaans took root.
"They'll do!" he murmured, as he scanned his lighted chart once more,
and cast up reckonings from the dials of his delicately adjusted
instruments.
Half an hour more of rapid flight and he deemed New Hope River could
not now be far.
"No use to try and hear it, though, with this racket of the propellers
in my ears," thought he. "The searchlight might possibly pick up a
gleam of water, if we fly over it. But even that's a small index to go
by. The signal-fire must be my only real guide—and where is it, now,
that fire?"
A vague uneasiness began to oppress him. The fire, he reckoned, should
have shown ere now in the far distance. Without it, how find his way?
And what of Beatrice?
His uneasy reflections were suddenly interrupted by a word from
Zangamon, at his right.
"O Kromno, master, see?"
"What is it, now?"
"A fire, very distant, master!"
"Where?" queried Stern eagerly, his heart leaping with joy. "I see no
fire. Your eyes, used to the dark places and the fogs, now far surpass
mine, even as mine will yours when the time of light shall come. Where
is the fire, Zangamon?"
The fisher pointed, a dim huge figure in the star-lit gloom. "There,
master. On thy left hand, thus."
Stern shifted his course to southwest by west, and for some minutes
held it true, so that the needle hardly trembled on the compass dial.
Then all at once he, too, saw the welcome signal, a tiniest pin-prick
of light far on the edge of the world, no different from the
sixth-magnitude stars that hung just above it on the horizon, save for
its redness.
A gush of gratitude and love welled in the fountains of his heart.
"Home!" he whispered. "Home—for where
you
are that's home to me!
Oh, Beatrice, I'm coming—coming home to you!"
Slowly at first, then with greater and ever greater swiftness, the
signal star crept nearer; and now even the flames were visible, and
now behind them he caught dim sight of the rock-wall.
On and on, a very vulture of the upper air, planed the Pauillac. Stern
shouted with all his strength. The girl might possibly hear him and
might come out of their cave. She might even signal—and the nearness
of her presence mounted upon him like a heady wine.