Mists of Dawn

by Chad Oliver

  “It is Groxur,” Tlaxcan said. “The Dweller under the earth.”

  This name, for all its colorful suggestiveness, did not tell Mark what he wanted to know. He examined the thing as carefully as he could in the flickering light, but he knew that time was running out on them and they had to hurry if they were to make it out of the cave before their torches expired. The last one was already dying, and Tlaxcan lit another. That left them with just one spare.

  There was no time for curiosity. With Tlaxcan taking the lead and setting a rapid pace, they left the chamber of death and proceeded on through the branching tunnel Mark’s thoughts were still filled with the sight of the monster they were leaving behind, and the only animal with which he was familiar that he could liken the thing to was an enormous bear. That made sense,, he realized, since the thing evidently lived mostly on fish, at least while it was in the cave, and he remembered hearing stories about the huge cave bears that had formerly lived beneath the earth. He shuddered a little, knowing that never again would he see a bear without visualizing that horror in the cavern under the world.

  On and on they went. When their torch finally expired, they lit their last one and hurried on, almost running now. Over and over again, one thought kept churning through Mark’s brain: he had only one bullet left in his .45, and no prospects for getting any more. If he was ever to get back to the space-time machine, he would have to do it soon. The .45 had twice saved his life, and he had a hunch that without it he could not expect to live long in the savage dawn-world in which he found himself. But how could he possibly return to the space-time machine? There was only one chance . . .

  It was morning when Mark and Tlaxcan, with the happily barking Fang, emerged from the dank cave into the clean air and sunlight of a new day. Tlaxcan’s strategy of coming out by way of another exit proved successful, the half-men were nowhere to be seen. They threw away the smoking remnants of their last torch and worked their way down out of the hills to the plains below. There was no sign of danger, and they struck out for the valley of the Danequa with their spirits once more free and high under the rising sun. The news they carried, of the massacre of the three Danequa guards by the Neanderthals, could not dampen their spirits too much. They were too glad just to be alive themselves.

  Their underground maneuvering had carried them back toward the valley home of the Danequa, and their trip across the plains proved uneventful. They walked all day, pausing only to cook and eat a deer that Tlaxcan brought down with a well-placed arrow, and they pushed onward through most of the night. They arrived in the valley of the Danequa early the next morning, just as the Danequa were rising for another day. The tumbling cascades of the sparkling waterfall, the wonderful green of the grass, the smell of the clean pine trees—all of it was more beautiful and delightful than it had ever been before. The two men drank it in with their eyes, and listened to the happy shouts of the Danequa with new-found warmth in their tired hearts.

  It was good to be home.

  Mark and Tlaxcan reported the details of what they had seen to the warriors of the Danequa, greeted their friends, and then both hurried on up to Tlaxcan’s cave. Tlaxcal shooed little Tlax away, and the two men were asleep in an instant as outraged nature took its toll. Fang trotted obediently off to what he doubtless considered his own cave and promptly went to sleep himself.

  When Mark and Tlaxcan awoke, night had come again. The cold wind whispered through the valley grasses and sighed through the branches of the lonely pines, and the stars sprinkled the heavens with clusters of frosted diamonds. In the distance, they could hear the pleasant muted roar of the great waterfall, now a familiar backdrop against which they enacted the drama of their lives. And they could hear something else as well. Drums.

  Mark and Tlaxcan got up, feeling much refreshed, and walked across the valley floor to where they saw the leaping flames of the Danequa fires and heard the rhythmic throbbing of the brooding drums. The cold wind was fresh in their faces and the tall grasses brushed softly against their legs as they walked.

  “Those are the council drums,” Tlaxcan said quietly. “My people are holding a council of war.”

  Mark raised his eyebrows. “The Mroxor?” he asked.

  Tlaxcan nodded. “They have dared too much,” he said. “They have killed our warriors and they have stolen the quaro which we fought to bring down. This cannot go on. We have fought them before, and now we must fight them again.”

  A great shout went up when the Danequa caught sight of Mark and Tlaxcan, and they were escorted to the center of a circle of council members. There Tlaxcan repeated the story of what they had seen, and told of how Mark had destroyed the Dweller under the earth with his magic. The story lost nothing in the telling, and Mark could sense the murmur of respect which ran around the seated figures about the council fires. Qualxen, the shaman, all painted up and looking very impressive for the occasion, eyed Mark with a rather worried look on his face. Mark was getting altogether too powerful, and if it came to a contest of supernatural skills Qualxen feared that he might be out of a job. Mark smiled at him in a reassuring way, however, and the shaman relaxed visibly.

  One by one, the elders of the Danequa were called upon to give their views on the Mroxor raid and what should be done about it. There was a great deal of talking, most of it ceremonial in nature, and it went on far into the night. Mark noticed the thin, pale figure of Tloron, whom he had not seen since he had first come among the Danequa, sitting alone by one of the fires. Tloron was silent, as he always was, and seemed to be looking into the flames. What did he see there, dancing in the night? Mark knew that Tloron was a holy person to the Danequa, but he realized that, oddly enough, he knew no more about the man now than he had known the first time he had met him. What was he like, that lonely figure? What did he think in those silent thoughts he never shared with anyone?

  The general view seemed to be that the Danequa should organize a return raid upon the Mroxor, in order to punish them for their actions against the Danequa. In fact, such an overwhelming majority of the speakers favored this move that Mark was for some time at a loss to discover why the council went on so far into the night. Part of the reason was undoubtedly the fact that the meeting was ceremonial in nature. There were set things to say, set procedures to go through, all of which were time-consuming. And the Danequa were in no particular hurry, inasmuch as •such diabolical inventions as watches had not yet made their appearance in the world. If they finished in time, they could attend to it tomorrow. If not, the day after that would be fine. If they had to postpone it a week, or a month, or a year, what real difference did it make? One time was quite as good as another,

  But that was not the whole reason. There was a decided earnestness about the proceedings that could not be entirely explained in terms of ceremonialism. The council of the Danequa was clearly doing its level best to reach a decision, and as far as Mark could see, every single member but one was in favor of the same plan!

  The one opposing speaker, a middle-aged warrior named Dranqan, maintained that they had already lost more men than” they could afford. It seemed to Mark he was not unreasonable in his position. It was his view that the time was coming for the Danequa to break camp for the winter and go their separate ways after the herds. They should not waste warriors in a fight with the Mroxor, which would after all not benefit them in any way. Dranqan, in a sense, was the voice of reason. He was not swept away by proud feelings of revenge, but rather was taking the long-term view of things. Mark suspected that Dranqan might be around for many years after the others were dead and gone.

  Around and around the council fire the debate went, each member in turn repeating the same arguments that he had used before. But Dranqan would not move from his position, and it became clear to Mark that the social organization of the Danequa was in some ways an ultimate democracy; it was not enough to have a clear majority, but rather every decision had to be unanimous. This system had its drawbacks, to be sure, and one of them was re
adily apparent to Mark. What happened if one member held out indefinitely? Would the meeting go on forever, with nothing ever accomplished?

  Clearly, the system was workable or it would not have been used. Mark saw the way out of the difficulty in the early hours of the morning. When it became absolutely clear that Dranqan could not be won over, and Dranqan saw that he could not change the views of the others, Dranqan simply got up and left, taking with him those of the Danequa who wished to follow him. There were no hard feelings on either side, each had its way, and neither group was hampered by having members who were reluctant in following the policies set forth by their leaders.

  Mark breathed a sigh of relief when it was finally decided that a raid upon the Mroxor was in order, to take place as soon as the Danequa could make ready. Mark had carefully refrained from trying to influence the decision of his friends one way or the other, since he did not want to be in any way responsible for the death of any of his fellows. But it was obvious to him that this raid upon the half-men represented his one and only chance to ever get back to his space-time machine.

  Walking back through the valley of the Danequa in the pale light of early morning, with the roar of the friendly waterfall behind him and the voices of his adopted people around him, Mark knew that he was subtly out of place. He had won a position in Danequa society, and he admired them as much as any people he had ever known. But their ways were not his ways; he was cut off from them by customs and culture that had been built up in him throughout his life. The hard winter was coming, when the Danequa would split up to roam across the snows of the Ice Age in search of food, and Mark was by no means sure that he could survive such an experience. Twice, his .45 had saved his life, and now he had but one bullet left.

  Mark had found new friends, and wonderful friends, but he missed the old ones. He thought of his uncle, and the little lodge in New Mexico so many thousands of years away. He thought of his own Fang, so different from the wolf-dog that he had found in the dawn of man. No matter what happened here, he realized now that his life and his future were forever bound up with that of a world yet unborn.

  He had to get back.

  A raid with the Danequa would take him back to the fearful valley of the Neanderthals, and thus back into the vicinity of the lead sphere of the space-time machine. He would never have another chance as good as this one; quite possibly he would never have another chance of any kind.

  If he failed . . .

  Chapter 19 The Painting

  For the next several days, preparations and plans were made for the attack on the Neanderthals. From time immemorial, the leaders of men have known that in order to win a battle you must first attend to a thousand and one details of careful planning. In Mark’s own time, the ugly game of war had grown into a sprawling chaos of transportation, supplies, morale, leadership, and armaments. In the days of the Danequa, with far fewer men involved, it was simpler, but basically the same problems presented themselves. Arrows and spears had to be laboriously manufactured by hand, emergency food supplies had to be prepared, and plans had to be checked and agreed upon. All this took time.

  Mark was acutely aware that he was leaving his valley home for the last time. If he were successful in his quest, he would again travel through space and time back to the world into which he had been born. If he failed, it would be because he was dead. In either event, he would never again see the valley of the Danequa.

  There is nothing like the threat of loss to make one appreciate what one has. A person never fully understands the gift of life until he has stared death in the face and felt nothingness closing in all around him. Similarly, Mark looked at his surroundings with new eyes, noting every detail of the cascading waterfall, the hills honeycombed with dry caves, the dark pines with their sweet-smelling needles, and the long green grasses that rippled like a velvet sea under the blue sky and the great red flower that was the sun. These were things that he wanted to keep a part of him always.

  Mark spent much of the time just wandering around the valley with Fang, talking to the friends he had made in the lost shadows of man’s history. Roqan was storming around telling everybody about the way they would have done it when he was a young man, while his wife, Roqal, only slightly happy with the intoxicating kiwow, was working on his weapons. Roqan could not quite bring himself to compliment Mark directly upon his exploit in killing the Dweller under the earth, but he did hint that if Mark kept up the good work he might one day be as good a man as Roqan. As usual, the twinkle in old Roqan’s eyes clearly contradicted the gruffness of his words. He even forced a cherished stone knife on Mark as a gift, although he was careful to make it seem that he was almost insulting Mark to offer it to him.

  With Nranquar, now a fast friend, he spent many long hours watching the clean water plunge over the waterfall into the sparkling pool below. He talked across a flickering fire to the shy Tlaxcal, the wife of Tlaxcan, and finally gave her his steel pocketknife to help her in her work. Little Tlax, who by now was treating Mark as one of the family, was currently engaged in trying to dig a cave of his own in solid rock with a blunt stick he had picked up somewhere. He made very little progress, but he beamed contentedly most of the time, and Mark would have been proud to have him for his own son.

  Mark and Qualxen, the shaman, held many long and involved discussions about the intricate tricks of the magic business. Qualxen now regarded Mark as just about the most powerful medicine man he had ever heard anything about, and he was quite proud to be seen in his company since it increased his own stature among the Danequa. Mark treated the man with good-natured tolerance, priding himself upon his superior knowledge, until the shaman looked at him one day and smiled.

  “Since you are leaving soon to return to the land of your fathers,” Qualxen said quietly, “you should get to know Tloron before you go. He is a very holy man.”

  Mark stared at the shaman. “Leaving?” he said. “I have told you nothing about leaving.”

  “You are going,” Qualxen repeated. “You will not return.”

  Mark looked at Qualxen. The shaman smiled cryptically at him, but said nothing further. A good guess, Mark told himself. Pure and simple coincidence. Nonetheless, his respect for Qualxen jumped considerably. He had told his plans to no one—how could the shaman have known?

  Rationally, of course, Mark knew that it was all a question of good timing and luck. But, emotionally, he sometimes wondered. With every succeeding age, the knowledge of the preceding one had been shown to be worthless superstition—or so some people would like to have you believe. The age of the twentieth century, too, would pass on and become obsolete under the merciless tread of time. What would the people of the future think about the proud knowledge of 1953? How much did man really know, and how much did he just think he knew?

  All questions of supernatural powers aside, however, Mark was curious to know more about the silent Tloron. He sought out Tlaxcan and asked him where Tloron was. Tlaxcan told him he was at work in a cave far beneath the earth, at work in the sacred chamber of the Danequa. Tlaxcan did not actually say the word “sacred” of course—what he said was that the cavern was strong with power, force, mana; that it was heavy with the spirits of the earth, of the sub-earth, and of the sky. But his feelings toward the place were closely akin to the concepts of sacredness, and so it was thus that Mark translated Tlaxcan’s words to himself.

  Tlaxcan offered to take Mark down to see Tloron at work, and Mark readily agreed. They took torches and entered a large cave that was vaguely familiar to Mark, although he was certain that he had never been in it before that he could remember. They walked along through the dark tunnels until Mark judged that they were a good two miles beneath the earth, and still Mark was haunted by a feeling that he had been through the cave before. He seemed to remember as from a vast distance each turn and twist that the tunnel took. Where had he seen it before? When?

  After an hour’s walk, they noticed a light glowing ahead of them in the cave. They rounded a
corner and stopped, not saying a word, looking at the scene before them.

  In this deep recess of the limestone caverns, far beneath the surface of the earth, the pitch-black gloom was illuminated by two stone lamps set in the rock walls. The lamps were filled with animal fat and their wicks were soaked twists of moss. In the soft light of the stone lamps, the pale Tloron worked alone, painting with crude clays and berry dyes and charred sticks upon the side of the cave. He worked very slowly, unsurely, feeling his way. He stopped often to survey his work with a critical eye.

  Mark stood very still, hardly breathing. He could not express the emotions that raged within him at that moment. He felt much as an eavesdropper from the future might have felt in looking over Shakespeare’s shoulders when he was writing the great soliloquy in Hamlet. Mark knew that he was having the unique experience of seeing one of the wonders of the world in the moment of its creation.

  What was the silent Tloron painting? For the most part, he was working with animal figures. There was a wonderful bison, muscles rippling. There was a mighty stag, antlers tossing proudly. There was a stately mammoth, his long trunk curving back along his side. The animals were drawn in profile, without perspective, and they were vivid with black, brown, red, yellow, and white coloring. In the soft light of the soapstone lamps, the painting was startling in its force and clarity.

  Startling? That was hardly the word for it, for Mark had seen the painting before. He had seen it almost fifty-two thousand years in the future.

  When he had visited France with his uncle, he had been in this same cave, seen this same painting, the colors faded by the drift of years, but still remarkably well-preserved. This painting now before his eyes was the first great art in all the history of mankind; it was the oldest of the masterpieces of man. Mark had seen the painting in 1949, when he was thirteen years old. Now he was seeing it painted before his very eyes when he was seventeen years old, and almost fifty-two thousand years younger in time!