“What trick is this?” snorted Cos, jumping up. His sentries also pressed forward, listening. The threatening note in the racket was unmistakable, and all pressed out into the open, Cos prudently coming last. They moved toward the edge of the terrace, to peer down, when the answer to Cos’s question came on fagged but scurrying feet.
A soldier dashed up from the city below. He was a mass of sweat and blood, his armor cut and smashed, his spear lost. He almost fell at the feet of Cos.
“Master, master!” he gurgled. “They fight, they kill your servants, they cry out for your life!”
“Rouse the town!” thundered Cos; but it had already risen, and more of it against the tyrant than for him. The conflict was loud enough to convince any ear. Cos turned upon Maie.
“This is your doing,” he accused and put out a hand as if to clutch her shoulder.
At that moment there was a multiple scamper of feet, a chorus of howls, and the first of the revolutionists mounted the terrace. They saw Maie in the grip of the tyrant, and their angry shouting made the air shake. A spear sped at Cos, to be narrowly deflected by a guardsman who struck it aside with his own weapon. Then, at Cos’s shouts, the soldiers of the palace poured forth, and battle joined on the very lawn in front of the ruler’s dwelling.
Again forgotten, Maie ran for the second time. There was only one avenue of possible escape—the slanting way up the barrier to the sea above. And she took it because she must.
Rut before she had mounted far, cries rose behind her. The soldiers of Cos had begun to turn back the rebels, and some could be spared to pursue the woman who was being blamed for it all.
The pursuers gained, for Maie was only a woman, and badly spent. She doubted if she could reach the top—yes, she was almost there—but her way was barred, by a fierce, towering figure. He lifted a missile, a great piece of stone, and hurled it.
It buzzed past her, and clashed on armor behind. A moment later the giant had run down, and seized her to help her along.
“Are you hurt, Maie?” asked a voice she knew.
“Hok!” she whimpered gladly. “Oh, Hok!—” And her weary arms sought to embrace him, the rest of the world forgotten; but he thrust her away and up to the head of the slanting trail.
“No time for that. We have fighting to do.”
CHAPTER VII
When Hok Came to Bay
AS Maie had mounted upward, pursued by a leash of Cos’ soldiery, Hok had seen, understood, and prepared. Quickly he had gathered as many big rocks as he could find, heaping them at the very top of the sloping trail. Now he began to hurl them. The heavy missies, propelled by all his oaken strength, made themselves felt even through hammered helmets and linked breastplates of bronze. One or two of the foremost pursuers fell, badly hurt. The others paused, and Hok launched his chief dissuader—a rounded boulder, a leg’s length in diameter.
A heave and a shove started it, and down trail it bounded and plunged, sweeping three men along with it.
The others flung spears at Hok and Maie. The girl took a bronze point in her upper arm, but Hok dodged one shaft, caught another as was his wont, and threw it back to transfix an enemy. That was enough to halt a second volley. The soldiers hung back, cagy and nervous. Hok flourished his diamond-headed club.
“Come and fight!” he taunted them. “You are easier to kill than flies!”
More were approaching from behind, but those at the forefront tried to shove their comrades back. It caused a press not many men’s lengths beneath the place where Hok stood to hold the trail. Thus things might have hung in abeyance for an indefinite time; but Maie, behind Hok, looked up from cherishing her wound. She screamed.
“Hok! The priest! Beware—”
Hok spun around. The eagled-faced man who had served Ghirann had crept up, his robes kilted in one hand, a bronze axe in the other. He struck, but not soon enough. Hok stooped under the downward sweep of the axe, caught him at the waist with an encircling arm. Plunging back toward the trail, he found the soldiers rushing up toward him.
He hurled the priest, like a billet of wood. The man’s body mowed two men from the head of the trail, then flew from the path into the abyss. A shriek trailed upward as the wretch vanished. But others had gained the top of the barrier, were deploying to attack Hok as hunters might attack a lion or bear.
Hok made a lightning decision, shot out a hand to catch Maie, and ran swiftly back toward the mountain.
His flying feet outdistanced the none-too-eager servitors of Cos, and there was considerable margin between him and his enemies as he gained the mouth of the cave where the thunder weapon was made.
At his roars and club-flourishes, the score and more of toiling slaves wailed and scurried out like rats surprised by a hungry ferret. Hok motioned to Maie.
“Into the cave,” he directed quickly. “It is full of the thunder stuff. We can fight off nations.”
They ran in, gazing around in the light of the fire. Maie uttered a despairing groan, and shook her dark head.
“It will not serve us,” she said. “Look!”
Lifting her unwounded arm, she pointed to the great heaps of powdered black material that almost filled the back of the cave. “The thunder dust is loose, not in round balls,” she said. “We cannot throw it. I might have known that Cos would not let the weapon be finished anywhere but in his palace—up here an enemy might come and gain advantage over him.”
“We can still defend this cave,” said Hok, and sprang back to the entrance. His big bulk almost filled it.
The first rush of men was upon him, and his heavy diamond club hummed as it struck once, twice, smashing two craniums. The bodies fell across each other, and Hok caught up a weapon in his left hand, one of the cleaver-like swords of Cos’ bodyguard. He flailed at the oncoming band with both weapons, cutting a third man almost in half and breaking the arm of still another. The rest gave back. They had to.
“Spears!” roared someone, and Hok dropped the wise stone from his right hand in time to snatch yet again a whistling shaft, reverse it, and send it through the body of its hurler. Then he dropped to one knee, quickly dragging the bodies of his dead into a protecting heap in front of him. The press of soldiers—there were at least sixty or seventy by now—again drew back, staring in panic. About Hok and his dead hung a certain atmosphere of uncertain, superhuman horror.
“He is invulnerable,” muttered one.
“Yes—was he not sent to be eaten by Ghirann? Could not even Ghirann finish him?” And the murmurs grew.
Then there was more commotion, and into the heart of the group hurried a figure with gold on head and arms, with a dark face and a lopsided black beard—Cos, the tyrant. His men below had beaten the undisciplined throng of rebels and was driving it through the lower levels of the city, and he had come aloft to see what happened on the barrier. His eyes blazed as he stared into the cavern, and saw Maie staunching the blood on her arm.
“Who hurt the woman?” he bawled. “I want her.”
“You can never have me,” Maie cried back to him.
Cos gestured angrily. “Why do you all stand like fools? Go into the cave and fetch her out.”
“They are sick of trying,” Hok informed him.
Cos gave new orders: “Throw no more spears. Capture Maie alive, but cut that big savage to pieces.”
“He is a devil,” protested a whitefaced soldier, who felt that he had had more than enough of fighting with Hok.
“Do you fear him more than you fear me?” demanded Cos angrily. “Charge him!”
A full dozen obeyed. Hok, meeting them, was hard put to it to defend himself a rain of blows, much less speed returns. But help came. Maie, catching up a hoe-like tool from the floor of the cave, rushed pluckily. She came to Hok’s right side, and with a sweeping stroke brought down a guardsman.
Others turned blindly upon her, striking and stabbing, and Hok in turn belabored them. Once again there was a reeling backward from the cave-mouth, now half-blocked with bodie
s. Cos, safely out of reach, was again able to see what had happened, and he cursed wildly.
“Fools! You have killed her!”
IT was true. Maie, the fair chieftainess whom a ruler had coveted, lay dead. Her body was stabbed through with spears, her head was bitten open by a chopping-sword. There was silence. Hok and Cos gazed at each other above the heap of mangled bodies, as fixedly as though they were the only two men left in the world.
“You have been the reason for her death,” said Cos, in a cold voice of accusation.
Hok wagged his bright-thatched head. “That is a He, as is almost every word you speak. It is you who made her die. A quick death, and now she is happy with the Sky-Dwellers—safe out of your hands, Cos the liar and coward.”
“Ghirann shall punish you,” gritted the ruler of Tlanis.
Again Hok made a sign of negation. “Can Ghirann punish his punisher? Look yonder in that cave, that is halffull of water. Ghirann, whom you called your brother, lies pounded to nothing. And I did it—I! Hok, who brings woe to you and yours!”
Somebody moved through the crowd to Cos’s side. It was the red-kilted imbecile who had been a servitor of Ghirann and Ghirann’s priest. The foolish head was wagging, to corroborate Hok’s story.
Cos turned back to the cave chieftain. His soft red mouth broke open in an ugly grin.
“Your life is forfeit, stone-chipper, before you bring more calamity on us,” he said in a voice that choked. His hand reached out, the fingers snapped. Someone gave him what he wanted—a bomb, with hanging fuse. Another offered a blazing lamp to kindle it.
But a frantic chorus of protests rose. “No, master! No! Throw nothing! He will seize and throw it back!”
“That is the truth,” Hok assured Cos. “I have been doing it all day.”
The tyrant of Tlanis gazed wildly about him. “Someone must charge him,” he said. “Charge and hold him, so that he cannot catch the thing. Who goes?” Only one dared rush upon death—the madman, who was too foolish to fear. He leaped forward and at Hok, grappling with monkeyish strength. For the moment Hok was busy tearing him free, then swung the Wise Stone against the idiot head. In the meantime, Cos laughed as Death laughs, ignited his fuse, and whirled the bomb backward for a cast.
Hok saw, and with his left threw something on his own account—the bronze chopping-sword he had caught up. It sang in the air like a deadly insect, and struck home. Cos remained briefly upon his feet, but of his head remained only the black beard, the grinning red mouth. The rest flew away like a nut falling overripe from its tree.
In death, his hand still moved to throw the bomb, but it went high. Diving beneath it, Hok landed in the thick of his enemies.
The lump of explosive intended for him went sailing, all a-sputter, into the cave he had quitted.
He broke a skull, another, with the Wise Stone. As he whipped it up for a third blow, he heard a voice shriek: “Fly! Fly! The cave is full of thunder dust—it will take fire—kill us all—”
And Hok, remembering that the bomb had fallen in the one place where it would wreak the most damage, stopped fighting and ran. He clove a way through the press as a knife speeds through water, and began to run northward along the causeway. So did some others. But it was too late.
The bomb exploded. Then came a greater explosion—the great hoard of thunder dust. Then a third—the volcano itself. And the doom of Tlanis was sealed.
CHAPTER VIII
Home Is the Hunter
HOK had thought only of getting away. The soldiers of Tlanis had thought only of returning to their city under the barrier. This difference of desire resulted in his escape and their destruction.
As Hok raced northward along the rocky shore, the voice of the bombarded mountain bellowed behind him, filling the earth and the sky with noise. The shock of the first explosion made him stagger, the shock of the second threw him flat. He scrambled up again, shaking off the dizziness. The air was suddenly full of pungent vapors. The volcano was spewing smoke and fire.
For the cave-full of explosive had acted as a greater bomb than any man of that age could conceive. It drove deep into the heart of the mountain, liberating a rush of red-hot lava.
The warriors of Tlanis dashed along their sloping trail to the levels below. Thus hidden under the overhang of the barrier’s height, they did not see the destruction that was upon them until the immemorial sturdiness of rocks dissolved and dashed them down, forty or fifty of them at once.
For the new upward rush of the subterranean fires had split open the slopes of the hollow mountain. Water from the sea flung itself upon a world of molten rock, fluffing away into live steam. The tortured rocks and slopes shook and writhed, like a huge animal in pain, then disintegrated.
Probably many in Tlanis—the merchants, the nobles, the soldiers, the beggars—died before they knew that the wall above them had changed from stone to water, and was descending to crush before it overwhelmed. Others did see, shrieked and ran. They were overtaken and obliterated before they could reach the gates. Tlanis, built for an age, was being washed away like a scattering of leaves in a spring freshet. The blue teemings of ocean, crowding through the widening rent in the barrier, deployed to flow out and down valley.
Hok, still running like an antelope, realized that the waves no longer beat against the shore at his left hand. They raced to his rear, to the south, scrambling and fighting like live things to find and pass through the hole where the mountain had burst. The sand-plugged stones under his feet ground and gritted together. They, too, would go before long.
Hok’s mind, trained to face and deal with danger, told him that he had best get away from this sea-assailed rampart. He did not slack his windy speed, but his eyes quested ever and again to the right, the landward. And eventually he found what he sought—a sloping ledge that dropped away, like that other one now disintegrated and drowned, that had given descent toward Tlanis. Hok raced down it, sprang at the end into a lofty treetop, and swarmed down to the brown soil of the valley. He resumed his running, ever to the north and the higher ground. At length he came out on the brow of a rise, and stopped to look.
The sea had taken possession of the valley’s bottom. It rushed in a fierce, foul torrent, full of uprooted trunks and leafage, masses of turf and muck, the bodies of trapped animals, either slack or struggling—yes, and the bodies of men. Overhead flew screaming clouds of frantic birds. Beyond all this Hok could see the barrier, its gap now torn as wide as the whole of City of Tlanis had been, and widening. There was the greatest swirl, through which still burst the angry jets of steam and smoke from the riven volcano.
The water rose visibly as he paused. He dare not stop to see more.
But, as he turned away to run still farther, a sound broke forth beside him that made him jump, then turn gladly. It was a whinny, the voice of a horse—one of the horses of Tlanis, a servant and worshipper of man.
It came trotting to him, trailing a broken halter—a trembling brown beast with wide, worried eyes, glad all over to see a man still alive, already trusting Hok to avert danger and death for them both. Hok held out his open hand, and the animal put a soft nose into it.
“Shall we go together?” asked Hok, as though the beast could understand. He thrust the handle of the Wise Stone into his belt, seized the end of the halter, and vaulted upon the willing back. Then, with drumming heels, he urged his steed away to higher ground still.
On he rode, until the poor horse panted and stumbled, and the sun dropped down. The day was dying, and Hok took time to remember that at mid-morning he had first set eyes on Tlanis. A day’s adventure and strife beyond imagination—and would he live to see the sun again?
HORSE and man camped because they could budge no further, among hills that gave like buttresses upon the slopes of mountains. Hok slept, exhausted; but twice he awoke, shuddering, from ill dreams, and the gray dawn showed him that all the upward slope over which he had galloped was drowned, with the sea come in to fill, from horizon to horizon,
that vast valley which had known the rule of Cos and the worship of Ghirann. The water still climbed after him.
A second day he urged his horse to the slope, and a second day the sea crept in pursuit, but more slowly. At noon of the third day, he was aware of no chase. The sea was finding its depth, was content with its conquered lands.
He came to a forest of pines and beeches, a forest he thought he knew. Not far away would be his own country.
At once he dismounted from the brown horse. He drew off the halter that was its badge of servitude, and started away on foot. There came a clop-clop of hoofs. He was being followed.
Turning, he faced the animal. “Go and be free,” he bade it solemnly. “I cannot take you to my people. They do not use horses, except to eat.”
The horse gazed as though it understood, but made to follow again. Hok shouted, and it came to a halt.
“I tell you to go another way,” he said sternly. “My country is bad for horses. Not only men will eat you, but lions, bears, tigers, Gnorrls. You are safe from me, because you helped me escape. But not even I can protect you.”
Again he walked away, for a good hundred paces among the trees. Then he glanced back. The horse remained where his voice had last halted it, as though it was loath to bid him goodbye.
When Hok returned, after some days, to his home in the bluff-surrounded cave that fronted the half-moon beach and the river from whose brink he had driven the Gnorrl people, all his tribe came to stare respectfully.
“You have not been gone more than a moon,” remarked Zorr, his father-in-law. “Yet you have many new scars. Was there a fight?”
“There was a fight,” replied Hok. He felt like deferring the story until he had rested.
Oloana came forward, curiosity mingled with the adoration in her eyes. “What is that thing on your wrist, the thing that shines?” she asked.
Hok undid the string of beads.
“It is gold,” he said. “A woman called Maie gave it to me.”
The Complete Hok the Mighty Page 9
