His tone reassured the man, who finally looked up, albeit apprehensively. Hok studied his face.
Long loose lips, a nose both small and flattish, and no chin at all beneath a scraggle of brown beard. From the wide mouth protruded teeth—Hok saw businesslike canines above and below, capable of inflicting a terrible bite. This much was plainly of animal fashion, unpleasantly Gnorrlish. But neither the fangs nor the shallow jaw could detract from the manifest intelligence of the upper face.
For here were large dark eyes, set very well under smooth brows. The forehead, though not high, was fairly broad and smooth, and the cranium looked as if it might house intelligence and good temper.
“Don’t be afraid,” persisted Hok. “You were friendly enough to call me into this shelter. I am grateful, and I will show it.”
RMANTHS, the monster outside, sniffed and scraped at the entrance. He seemed baffled. Hok leaned against the wall. “What is your name?” he asked.
The other peered timidly, Hok saw the size and brilliance of those eyes, and guessed that this man could see, at least somewhat in the dark. “Soko,” came the reply. “And you?”
“Hok the Mighty.” That was spoken with honest pride. “I came here from snowy country up above. I had wounded a mammoth, and followed him down here.”
“Mammoths always come here,” Soko told him. “Rmanth and his people before him—for he is the last of a mighty race—ate their flesh and flourished. If we dare descend the trees, Rmanth kills and eats us, too. In the high branches—the Stymphs!”
“Stymphs?” echoed Hok. “What are those?”
Soko had his turn at being surprised at such ignorance. “They fly like birds, but are bigger and hungrier—with teeth in their long jaws—man cannot prevail against them—”
“Oh, the bird-snakes! One attacked me as I came down. I killed it, and descended before its friends came.”
“You were climbing downward,” Soko reminded. “There was cover below. But if you leave the cover to climb upward, you will be slain in the open, by many Stymphs. Not even Rmanth ventures above the thickets.”
“As to your elephant-pig, Rmanth,” continued Hok, “he has tasted my arrows.”
That was another new word for Soko, and Hok passed his bow and quiver across for examination. “One shaft I feathered in his tongue,” he confined, “and another in his nostril.”
“But were forced to take shelter here. Meanwhile, those wounds will make him the thirstier for your blood. He will never forget your appearance or smell. If you venture out, he will follow you to the finish. Between him and the Stymphs above, what chance have you?”
“What chance have I?” repeated Hok, his voice ringing. “Chance for combat! For adventure! For Victory!” He laughed for joy, anticipating these things. “I’m glad I came—these dangers are worth traveling far to meet . . . but tell me of another wonder. This tree, which is not a tree, but shelters us in its heart—”
“Oh, simple enough,” rejoined Soko. He was beginning to enjoy the comradeship by the glowing fire. Sitting opposite Hok, slender hands clasped around his knobby knees, he smiled. “A true tree grew here once, tall and strong. At its root sprang up a vine, which coiled tightly around like a snake. In time that vine grew to the very top. Its hugging coils, and its sapdrinking suckers, slew the tree, which rotted and died in the grip. But the vine held the shape to which it had grown, and when we tree-folk dug out the rotten wood, little by little, it made a safe tube by which we could descend to the valley’s floor.”[12]
“That must have taken much labor,” observed Hok.
“And much time. My father’s father barely remembered when it was begun, that digging.”
“You speak as if you live up above here,” said Hok.
“We do,” Soko told him. “Come, kill the fire lest it burn the forest, and I will take you to the home of my people.”
He rose and began climbing upward.
CHAPTER V
The World in the Branches
HOK quickly stamped out the fire. Its dying light showed him a sort of rough ladder—pegs and stubs of hard wood, wedged into the spaces between the coils of that amazing vine. Soko was swarming well above ground level already. Slinging his weapons to girdle and shoulder-thongs, Hok followed.
Hok had always been a bold and active climber, able to outdistance any of his tribe-fellows, in trees or up cliffs. But Soko kept ahead of him, like a squirrel ahead of a bear. The tree-man fairly scampered up the ladder-way.
“This is another way in which Soko’s people are different from the Gnorrls,”[13] muttered Hok.
The climbing-sticks had been meant for bodies of Soko’s modest weight, and once or twice they creaked dangerously beneath the heavier Hok. He obviated the danger of a fall by keeping each hand and foot on a different hold, dividing the strain four ways. Meanwhile, the light above grew stronger, waxing and waning as Soko’s nimble body cut this way and that across its beam. Finally, noise and bustle, and a new voice:
“Soko! You went down to see what was happening with Rmanth. What—”
“A man,” Soko answered. “A strange man, like none you ever saw.”
Hok took that as a compliment. He was considered something of a unique specimen, even among his own kind.
“He is master of the Hot Hunger,” Soko went on, and Hok guessed that he meant fire. “He has killed one Stymph, he says, and has hurt Rmanth.”
A chatter of several agitated voices above. Then, “Will he kill us?”
“I think not,” said Soko, and drew himself through some sort of gap above. “Come on out, Hok,” he called back. “My friends are eager to see you.”
Hok came to the opening in turn. It was narrow for his big body, and he had difficulty in wriggling through. Standing on some crossed and interwoven boughs, he looked at Soko’s people.
All the way up, he had thought of Soko as fragile and small; now he realized, as often before, that fragility and smallness is but comparative. Soko, who was a head shorter than himself and slim in proportion, would be considered sturdy and tall among the tree-folk—almost a giant. He was the biggest of all who were present. Hok smiled to himself. While he had been pegging Soko as a timid lurker in a hollow, these dwellers of the branches must have thrilled to the courage of their strong brother, venturing so close to the mucky domain of the ravenous Rmanth.
As Hok came fully into view, the gathering—there may have been twenty or thirty of Soko’s kind, men, women and children—fell back on all sides with little gasps and squeaks of fearful amazement. With difficulty the chief of the Flint People refrained from most unmannerly laughter. If Soko was a strapping champion among them, Hok must seem a vast horror, strangely shaped, colored and equipped. He smiled his kindliest, and sat down among the woven branches.
“Soko speaks truth,” he announced. “I have no desire to fight or kill anyone who comes in peace.”
THEY still stood off from him, balancing among the leafage. He was aware that they moved so swiftly and surely because they got a grip on the branches with their feet. He was able, also, to make a quick, interested study of the world they lived in.
Though Soko had led him upward in a climb of more than twenty times a man’s height, the upper hole in the vine spiral was by no means the top of the forest. Leafage shut away the sky above, the swampy ground below. Here, in the middle branches of the close-set mighty trees, appeared something of a lofty floor—the boughs and connecting vines, naturally woven and matted together into a vast bridge of platform, swaying but strong. Layers of leaf-mold, mixed with blown dust, moss and the rotted meal of dead wood, overspread parts of this fabric. The aerial earthiness bore patches of grass and weeds, bright-flowering plants, as richly as though it were based upon the rock instead of the winds. Birds picked at seeds. Hok heard the hum of bees around trumpet-shaped blooms. It was a great wonder.[14]
“I wondered how you tree-men could possibly live off the ground,” he said, with honest admiration. “Now I wonder how you
can live anywhere else but here.” A deep-chested sigh. “Of such fair places our old men tell us, in the legends of the Ancient Land.”
That friendly speech brought the tree-dwellers closer to this big stranger. A half-grown lad was boldest, coming straight to Hok and fingering his leather moccasins. Hok’s first thought was how swiftly young Ptao, at home by the frozen river, could thrash and conquer such a youth—his second was a hope that Ptao would be forebearing and gentle to so harmless a specimen. The others gathered around reassured. They began asking questions. It was strange to all that a human being could kill large beasts for food and fur, and the men were particularly fascinated by Hok’s flint weapons.
“We have our own stories of old times, when your fathers made stone things,” volunteered Soko. “Now we satisfy ourselves with what bones we can raid from that great pile of mammoths, when Rmanth is not there gorging himself.” He produced his own dagger, smaller than Hok’s reindeer-horn weapon, but well worked from a bone fragment. “After all, we need not fight monsters, like you.”
“If you did fight like me, all together, and with wisdom and courage, Rmanth would not have you treed,” said Hok bluntly. “Perhaps I can help you with him. But first, tell me more of yourselves. You think it strange that I wear skins. What are these weavings you wear?”
“The forest taught us,” said Soko sententiously. “As the branches weave and grow together, so we cross and twine little tough strings and threads drawn from leaves and grasses. They give us covering, and places to carry possessions. Is it so marvelous? Birds do as much with their nests.”
“NESTS?” repeated Hok. “And how do you people nest?”
“Like the birds—in woven beds of branches, lined with soft leaves and fiber. A roof overhead, of course, to shed the rain.” Soko pointed to a little cluster of such shelters, not far away in an adjoining tree.[15]
“You do nothing but sleep and play?”
“We gather fruits and nuts,” spoke up another of the tree-men. “That takes time and work, for a man who has gathered much must feed his friends who may have gathered little.”
“It is so with my people, when one hunter kills much meat and others return empty-handed,” nodded Hok. “What else, then?”
“A great labor is the mending of this floor,” replied Soko, patting with his foot the woven platform. “Branches rot and break. We look for such places, through which our children might fall at play, and weave in new strong pieces, or tie and lace across with stout vines.”
Once again Hok glanced upward. “And what is there?”
A shudder all around. “Stymphs,” muttered Soko, in a soft voice, as if he feared to summon a flock of the bird-snakes.
“Ugly thing,” said Hok. “I may do something about them, too. But I am hungry just now—”
Before he could finish, the whole community dashed away like so many squirrels through the boughs, to bring back fistfuls of nuts, pawpaws and grapes. Hok accepted all he could possibly eat, and thanked his new friends heartily.
“I did not mean that you must feed me,” he told them. “You should wait for me to finish my talk. But since you bring these fruits, I will make my meal of them. You may take my provision.” From his pouch he rummaged the remainder of his dried meat. It was one more new thing to the tree people, who nibbled and discussed and argued over it. Flesh they had occasionally—small climbers, fledgling birds, even insects—but nothing of larger game, and both cooking and drying of food was beyond their understanding. Hok chuckled over their naivete.
“A promise!” he cried. “I’ll give you Rmanth himself for a feast, and I shall roast him on a fire, that which you call the Hot Hunger. But let Soko sit here by me. I want to hear of how you came to this place to live.”
Soko perched on a tangle of vines. “Who can tell that? It was so long ago. Cold weather drove us from the upper world,” and he pointed northward. “Those who stayed behind were slain by it. Our old men tell tales and sing songs of how the remnants of the fleeing tribe blundered in here and gave themselves up as trapped.”
“Why did the ice not follow you in?” asked Hok.
“Ask that of the gods, who drove it to right and left of mu valley. In any case, we were sheltered here, though there were many fierce creatures. But the cold was fiercer—we could not face it—and here we stay.”[16]
“Treed by Rmanth and harried by those Stymph bird-snakes,” summed up Hok. “You are happy, but you could make yourselves much happier by some good planning and fighting. Who is your chief?”
“I am their chief,” growled someone behind him, “and you had better explain—quickly—why you seek to make my people dissatisfied.”
CHAPTER VI
A Chief Passes Sentence
THERE was a sudden gasping and cowering among all the tree-folk, even as concerned the relatively sturdy Soko. Hok turned toward the speaker, expecting to come face to face with a fearsome challenger.
Around the spiral vine-column a little grizzled form was making its way. This tree-man was old and ill-favored, with almost pure white whiskers on his chinless jaw. He wheezed and snorted, as though the exertion were too much for him. Perhaps this was due to his weight, for he was the fattest Hok had yet seen among those dwellers of the trees. His belly protruded like a wallet, his jowls hung like dewlaps. But there was nothing old or infirm about the power in his big, close-set brilliant eyes.
Gaining the side of the nearest tree-man to him, this oldster put out a confident hand and snatched away a sizeable slice of the dried meat Hok had distributed. Though the victim of this plunder was an active young man, he did not resist or even question, but drew diffidently away. The old man took a bite—his teeth, too, were young-seeming and rather larger and sharper than ordinary—and grunted approval. Then his eyes fastened Hok’s, in a calculated stare of hostility.
But Hok had met the gaze of the world’s fiercest beasts and men, and his were not the first eyes to falter. The old tree-chief finally glanced away. Hok smiled in good-humored contempt.
“Well?” challenged the oldster at last. “Do you know how to act before your betters?”
Hok was puzzled. The simple truth was that Hok had never recognized anyone as his better from his youth upwards.
Years before, when a big boy not yet fully mature, the slaying of his father by Gnorrls had made him chief of his clan. His young manhood had barely come to him before he had driven those same beastly Gnorrls from their rich hunting-empire of meadows and woods, and founded in their stead an alliance of several tribes, with himself as head chief. The mighty nation of Tlanis was sunken under the sea because of him. The Fishers in their seaside pile-villages had changed their worship from water-god to sun-god out of sadly learned respect for Hok. If ever he had been subordinate, even only the second greatest individual in any gathering, he had had plenty of time to forget it.
Just now he spat idly, through a gap in the woven branches.
“Show me my betters,” he requested with an air of patience. “I know none, on two legs or four.”
“I am Krol!” squeaked the other, and smote his gray-tufted chest with a fat fist. “Be afraid, you hulking yellow-haired stranger!”
“Men of the trees,” Hok addressed those who listened, “is it your custom to keep fools to make game for you? This man has white hair, he should be quiet and dignified. He is a bad example to the young.”
It was plainly blasphemy. Soko and the others drew further away from Hok, as though they feared to be involved in some terrible fate about to overwhelm him. The chief who called himself Krol fumbled in his girdle of twisted fiber, and drew forth an axe of mammoth ivory set in a hard-wood handle. Whirling it around his head, he cast it at Hok.
HOK lifted a big knowing hand, with such assurance that the movement seemed languid. The axe drove straight at his face, but he picked it out of the air as a frog’s tongue picks a flying insect. Without pausing he whirled it in his own turn and sent it sailing back. It struck with a sharp chock, deep int
o a big branch just above Krol’s head.
“Try again,” bade Hok, as though he were instructing a child in how to throw axes.
Krol’s big fangs gnashed, and foam sprang out in flecks upon his lips and beard. He waved his fists at his people.
“On him!” he screamed. “Seize him, beat him, bind fast his arms!”
Hok rose from where he sat, bracing himself erect. He looked with solemnity upon the half-dozen or so biggest men who moved to obey.
“Come at me, and you will think Rmanth himself has climbed up among you,” he warned. “I do not like to be handled.”
Kral yelped a further order, backing it by a threat. The men rushed unwillingly.
Hok laughed, like an athlete playing with children. Indeed, the tree-men were childlike in comparison with him. He pushed the first two in the face with his palms, upsetting them and almost dropping them through the branchy fabric. A third attacker he caught and lifted overhead, wedging him in a fork of the boughs. The others retreated fearfully before such effortless strength. Hok laughed again, watching.
But he should have watched Krol as well. The plump old despot had stolen close unobserved. In one hand he clutched a big fiber husked nut, of the milky kind Hok had enjoyed earlier in the day. A swinging buffet on the skull, and Hok staggered, partially stunned. At once the tree-men rushed back, and before Hok could clear his brain and fight them off, he was swamped. They looped his wrists, ankles and body with quickly-plucked vine tendrils, tough and limber as leather straps.
Krol found time to take some fruit from a child, and husk it with his teeth. “Now, stranger,” he sniggered, “you will learn that I am chief here.”
Hok had recovered from that stroke. He did not waste strength or dignity by striving against his stout bonds.
“A chief who plays tricks and lets other men do the fighting,” he replied. “A chief who strikes his enemies foully, from behind.”
The Complete Hok the Mighty Page 25
