Authors: George England
Very beautiful the world was that afternoon. In the soft south wind
the fronded palms across the river were bowing and nodding gracefully.
Overhead, dazzling clouds drifted northward.
It seemed to him he could almost hear the rustle of the dry
undergrowth, parched by the past fortnight of exceptionally hot
weather; but, above all, rose the eternal babble of the rapids. High
in air, a vulture wheeled its untiring spirals. At sight of it he
frowned. It reminded him of the Pauillac, now wrecked far beyond the
horizon, where the Horde had trapped him. He shuddered, for the
memories of the past week were infinitely horrible, and he longed only
to forget.
With a last glance at the scene, over which the ominous threads of
smoke now drifted in considerable numbers, he frowned. He reentered
the villa.
"No matter
what
happens now," he muttered, "I've got to snatch a few
minutes rest. Otherwise, I'm liable to drop in my tracks. And, above
all, I must try to pull through. For on me, and me alone, now
everything depends!"
He sat down by the bed again, too stupefied by the toxins of fatigue
and exhaustion to do more than note that Beatrice was, at any rate, no
worse.
Human effort and emotion had, in fact, reached their extreme climax in
him. He felt numb all over, in body, mind and soul. A weaker man would
have succumbed long ago to but half the hardships he had struggled
through. Now he must rest a bit.
"Bring water, Gesafam!" he commanded. When she had obeyed, he let her
wash his wounds and dress them with leaves and ointment. Then he
himself bandaged them, his head nodding, eyes already drooping shut
from moment to moment.
His head sank on the bed, and one hand sought the girl's. Despite his
wonderful vitality and strength, Allan was on the verge of collapse.
Vague and confused thoughts wandered through his unsettled brain.
What was the destiny of the colony to be, now that the Pauillac was
lost and so many of the Folk wiped out? Were there any hopes of
ultimate success? And the Horde, what of that? How long a respite
might be counted on before the inevitable, decisive battle?
A score, a hundred questions, more and more illusory, blent and faded
and reformed in his overtaxed mind.
Then, blessed as a balm, sleep took him.
A violent shaking roused him from dead slumber.
Old Gesafam stood there beside him. She had him by the arm.
"Waken, O master!" she was crying. "O Kromno, rouse! For now there is
great need!"
Dazed, he started up.
"What—what is it now? More trouble?"
She pointed toward the door.
"Beyond there, master! Beyond the river there be many moving
creatures! Darts and arrows have begun to fall against the cliff. See,
one has even come into the cave! What shall be done, master?"
Broad awake now, Allan ran to the door and peered out.
Daylight was fading. He must have slept an hour or two; it had seemed
but a second. In the west the sun was burning its way toward the
horizon, through a thick set of haze that cloaked the rim of the
earth.
"Here, master! See!"
Stooping, she picked up a long, slight object and handed it to him.
"One of their poisoned darts, so help me!" he exclaimed. "Cast that
into the fire, Gesafam. And have a care lest it wound you, for the
slightest scratch is death!"
While she, wondering, obeyed, he hastily reconnoitered the situation.
He had felt positive the Horde, after his escape from it by devious
and terrible ways, would track him down.
He had known the army of the hideous little beast-folk, that for a
year now had been slowly gathering from north and east for one final
assault, would eventually find Settlement Cliffs and there make still
another attempt to crush him and his.
But, knowing all this, knowing even that the whole region beyond the
river now swarmed with these ghastly monstrosities, the actuality
appalled him.
Now that the attack was really at hand, he felt a strange and sudden
sense of helplessness.
And with a bitter curse he shook his fist at the dark forest across
the canyon where—even as he looked—he saw a movement of crouching,
furtive things; he heard a dull thump-thump as of clubs beating hollow
logs.
"You devils!" he execrated. "Oh, for a ton of Pulverite to drop among
you!"
"Look, master, look! The bridge! The bridge!"
He turned quickly as old Gesafam pointed up-stream.
There, clearly outlined against the sky, he saw a dozen—a score of
little, crouching figures emerge from the forest on the north bank,
and at a clumsy run defile along the swaying footpath high above the
rapids.
At sight of the advance-guard of the Horde now already loping,
crouched and ugly, over the narrow bridge to Settlement Cliffs Allan's
first impulse was one of absolute despair.
He had expected an attack ere night, but at least he had hoped an
hour's respite to recover a little of his strength and to muster all
the still valid men of the Folk for resistance. Now, however, he saw
even this was to be denied him. For already the leaders of the Horde
scouts had passed the center of the bridge.
Three or four minutes more and they would be inside the palisade, upon
the cliff!
"God! If they once get in there, we're gone!" cried Allan. "We're cut
off from everything. Our animals will be slaughtered. The boy will
die! They can bombard us with rocks from aloft. It means
annihilation!"
Already he was running up the path toward the palisade. Not one second
was to be lost. There was no time even to call a single man of the
Folk to reenforce him. Single-handed and alone he must meet the
invaders' first attack.
Panting, sweating, stumbling, he scrambled up the steep terrace. And
as he ran his thoughts outdistanced him.
"Fool that I was to have left the bridge!" choked he. "My first act
when I set foot on solid land should have been to cut the ropes and
drop the whole thing into the rapids! I might have known this would
happen—fool that I was!"
The safety, the life, of the whole colony, including his wife and son,
now depended solely on his reaching the southern end of the bridge
before the vanguard of the Horde.
With a heart-racking burst of energy he sprang to the defence, and as
he ran he drew his hunting-knife.
Reeling with exhaustion, spent, winded, yet still in desperation
struggling onward, he won the top of the cliff, swung to the left
along the path that led to the bridge, and—more dead than
alive—rushed onward in a last, supreme effort.
Already he saw the Anthropoids were within a hundred feet of the
abutment. He could plainly see their squat, hideous bodies, their
hairy and pendent arms, and the ugly shuffle of their preposterous
legs, as at their best speed they made for the cliff.
Three or four poisoned darts fell clicking on the stones about him.
Howls and yells of rage burst from the file of beast-men.
One of the horrible creatures even—with apelike agility—sprang up
into the guy ropes of the bridge, clung there, and discharged an arrow
from its bamboo blow-gun, chattering with rage.
Stern, running but the faster, plugged him with a forty-four. The
Anthropoid, still clinging, yowled hideously, then all at once dropped
off and vanished in the depths.
Full drive, Allan hurled himself toward the entrance of the bridge. It
seemed to him the beasts were almost on him now.
Plainly he could hear the slavering click of their tushes and see the
red, bleared winking of their deep-set eyes.
Now he was at the rope-anchorage, where the cables were lashed to two
stout palms.
He emptied his automatic point-blank into the pack.
Pausing not to note effects, he slashed furiously at the left-hand
rope.
One strand gave. It sprang apart and began untwisting. Again he hewed
with mad rage.
"
Crack!
"
The cable parted with a report like a pistol-shot. From the bridge a
wild, hideous tumult of yells and shrieks arose. The whole fabric, now
unsupported on one side, dropped awry. Covered from end to end with
Anthropoids, it swayed heavily.
Had
men
been on it, all must have been flung into the rapids by the
shock. But these beast-things, used to arboreal work, to scaling
cliffs, to every kind of dangerous adventuring, nearly all succeeded
in clinging.
Only three or four were shaken off, to catapult over and over down
into the foaming lash of the river.
And still, now creeping with hideous agility along the racked and
swinging bridge that hung by but a single rope, they continued to make
way, howling and screaming like damned souls.
One gained the shore! At Allan it bounded, crouching, ferocious,
deadly. He saw the tiny, venomous lance raised for the throw.
"
Flick!
"
He felt a twitch on his arm. Was he wounded? He knew not. Only he knew
that with blind rage he had flung himself on the second rope, and now
with demon-rage was hacking at it desperately.
The snapping whirl of the cable as it parted flung him backward.
He had an instant's vision of the whole bridge-structure crumpling.
Then it vanished. From the depths rose the most awful scream, quickly
smothered, that he had ever heard.
And as the bestial bodies went tumbling, rolling, fighting, down the
rapids, he suddenly beheld the bridge footway hanging limp and swaying
against the further cliff.
"Thank God! In time, in time!" he panted, staggering like a drunken
man.
But all at once he beheld two of the Horde still there in front of
him—the one that had flung the dart and another. They were advancing
at a lope.
Allan turned and fled.
His ammunition was all spent, he knew that to face them was madness.
"I must load up again," thought he. "Then I'll make short work of
them!"
Fortunately he could far outstrip them in flight. That, and that
alone, had already saved him in the past week of horrible pursuit
through the forests to northward. And quickly now he ran down the
terrace again—down to the caves below. As he ran he shouted in
Merucaan:
"Out, my people! Out with you! Out to battle! Out to war!"
Half way upward down to Cliff Villa he met Frumuos toiling upward. Him
he greeted and quickly informed of the situation.
"The bridge is down!" he panted. "I cut it! The further shore is
swarming with enemies. Two have reached this side!"
"What is this, O Kromno?" asked the man anxiously, pointing at Allan's
shoulder. "Have they wounded you?"
Allan looked and saw a poisoned dart hanging loosely in his left
sleeve. As he moved he could feel the point rubbing against his naked
skin.
"Merciful Heaven!" he exclaimed. "Has it scratched me?"
With infinite precautions he loosened and threw off his outer garment.
He flung it, with the dart still adhering, down over the cliff.
"Look, Frumuos!" he commanded. "Search carefully and see if there be
any scratch on the skin!"
The man obeyed, making a minute inspection through his mica
eye-shields. Then he shook his head.
"No, Kromno," he answered. "I see nothing. But the arrow came near,
near!"
Stern, tremendously relieved, gestured toward the caves.
"Go swiftly!" he commanded. "Bring up every man who still can fight.
All must have full burdens of cartridges. Even though the bridge be
down, the enemy will still attack!"
"But how, since the great river lies between?"
"They can climb down those cliffs and swim the river and scramble up
this side as easily as we can walk on level ground. Go swiftly! There
is no time to lose!"
"I go, master. But tell me, the two who have already reached this
side—shall we not first slay them?"
Allan thought. For the first time he now realized clearly the terrible
peril that lay in these two Anthropoids already inside the limits of
the colony.
He peered up the pathway. No sign of them above. Their animal cunning
had warned them not to descend to certain death.
Now Allan knew they were at liberty inside the palisades, waiting,
watching, constituting a deadly menace at every turn.
In any one of a thousand places they could lie ambushed, behind trees
or bushes, or in the limbs aloft, and thence, unseen, they could
discharge an indefinite number of darts.
It was now perilous in the extreme even to venture back to the
palisade. Any moment might bring a flicking, stinging messenger of
death. Those two, alone, might easily decimate the remaining men of
the colony—and now each man was incalculably precious.
"Go, Frumuos," Allan again commanded. "For the moment we must leave
those two up there. Go, muster all the fighting men and bring them up
here along the terrace. I must think! Go!"
Suddenly, before the messenger had even had time to disappear round
the first bend in the path, Allan found his inspiration.
"Regular warfare will never do it!" he exclaimed decisively. "They
have thousands where we have tens. Before we could pick them off with
our firearms they'd have exhausted all our ammunition and have rushed
us—and everything would be all over.
"No; there must be some quicker and more drastic way! Even dynamite or
Pulverite could never reach them all, swarming over there through
miles of forest. Only one thing can stand against them—
fire!
"With fire we must sweep and purge the world, even though we destroy
it!
With fire we must sweep the world!
"
Stern was not long in carrying out his plan.
Even before Frumnos had returned, with the seventeen men still able to
bear arms, he was at work.
In Cliff Villa he hastily lashed up half a dozen fireballs, of coarse
cloth, thoroughly soaked them in oil, and, with a blazing torch,
brought them out to the terrace. Old Gesafam, at his command, bolted
the door behind him. At all hazards, Beta and the child must be
protected from any possibility of peril.