by Anthology
Still, Doody glanced up hastily when, just as he was about to gash the straight, round trunk of a particularly fine Norway spruce, he heard a twig snap in the nearer bushes. His subconscious still half expected to behold a wrathful park policeman and be summarily pinched for trespassing, wanton vandalism, and wholesale destruction of public property; but the half a dozen warlike, seminaked figures advancing toward him at a swift trot looked like no policemen Doody had ever been arrested by.
They were short but well-proportioned and splendidly muscled figures, clad in clothing which even when new had been scanty, but which none the less informed Doody’s alert eye that their people had invented—or retained—the knowledge of the loom and weaving. More immediately important, they brandished wicked-looking spears and knives, knowingly fashioned of gleaming bronze. And that, in turn, meant a tremendous past of evolution through the use of wood, of stone, of metal—or an equally long background of degeneration.
But these people did not look like degenerates; they resembled more an idealist’s conception of the Noble Savage. That idea, of course, was fantastic; even nine thousand years could hardly have wiped out the corruption, the decadence, the utter decay of mind and body that had marked Rudnuu’s machine civilization. This must be a new stock—but from where?
The leader of the little band, a powerful, stocky fellow with a mane of lank, uncombed red-brown hair that mingled with his great beard to fall to his heavily muscled shoulders, pressed forward before the rest to approach Doody, who stood erect, shoulders thrown back and head haughtily high, waiting with an immobility which he hoped was impressive—his right forefinger meantime crooked tensely about the trigger of his loaded automatic, where it rested in his pocket with the muzzle pointed toward the savage. The latter just might try to use the sharp, bronze-headed javelin in his hairy hand, which would prove that he thought Doody, as a visiting god, a failure; but a touch of the finger would send three .45-caliber explosive slugs at that formidable-looking head man, and Doody would at least make a name for himself as a very dangerous sort of devil!
The barbaric leader paused before the tall stranger, half crouching as he stared; he fidgeted for an uncomfortable moment, then sank slowly to his knees in the grass at his sandaled feet, bowing his shaggy head in sudden humility.
His next move startled even Doody, who had had previous experience in godhead far back in the icy Pleistocene. Carefully the kneeling savage laid his long-hafted spear crosswise on the earth before the unmoving Doody, and beside it his broad-bladed dagger of hammered bronze.
Evidently these people took their gods seriously; sullen yet awed, the six remaining hunters advanced one by one, similarly to do reverence and unburden themselves of their weapons. Some of them bore a quite inclusive equipment for war or the chase; when the impromptu disarmament program was finished, a sprawling heap of spears, daggers, and short, leaf-bladed bronze swords, as well as a couple of heavy stone-headed axes, lay on the ground at Doody’s feet. He was uncertain of his part in this little ritual; if they expected him to carry all those away, he was afraid he wasn’t equal to the job.
The leader arose, spread both calloused hands above his head, palms outward—the old, old gesture of peace—and spoke, in a voice which was gruffly tremulous, a gutturally monosyllabic tongue.
“It’s all Sanskrit to me, old boy,” said Doody, shaking his head half amusedly as he became aware of the incongruity of his position—the anachronistic traveler from the forgotten past, receiving deific worship from the uncultured children of the far future in that little, leaf-shaded forest clearing. But an instant later he was shocked and appalled as the savage, apparently misinterpreting his mere gesture of negation, flung himself frantically to the ground and pressed his bearded face into the soft leaf mold, his hands and body quivering in abject terror. It was quite plain that he conceived the mysterious avatar to have denied his homage, and believed himself in peril of instant destruction.
At that moment Doody thought of an article which he should have remembered before—the convenient little telepathic mechanism which Rudnuu, back in the fourteenth millennium, had called a “translator,” and which even now nestled in Doody’s inside coat pocket. Hastily fumbling for the flat little cylinder of the device, he unfolded its three thin, silvery aluminum grid plates, equivalent to the earphones of a radio headset, and slipped them over his head, sides and back; the vibration given off by the apparatus, which derived its feeble energy from the pulsation of the veins in the temples on which it pressed, hypersensitized the language centers of the human brain to such an extent that, with a little concentration, Doody could address the savages in their own idiom, and their words, coming to his ears, would be resolved by his brain into English terms and phrases.
At the moment he wished ardently for an all-purpose telepathor, which would enable him to read the thoughts of his new acquaintances—an achievement which could be very useful. However, one cannot have everything.
“Ah-poonay—rise,” so commanded Doody in a deeply impressive voice. The rapport linking of his mind with the linguistic centers of his listeners’ brains brought the alien words easily to his lips. “I will not harm any of you.”
Tremblingly, abashedly, the seven kneeling warriors clambered to their feet and stood facing Doody in obvious unquiet—half a dozen fierce, mighty hunters of the woods, any one of whom, given a hold, could practically have torn the man of the twentieth century apart. Yet their glances were sidelong, and they fidgeted before him like small boys caught throwing spit-balls in school. Doody was surprised, although gratified. Most primitive races have at least a modicum of healthy doubt respecting their gods—enough to make them somewhat wary of accepting to readily anyone representing himself as such.
“Take your weapons without fear,” he said reassuringly; then added, as an inspired afterthought, “I do not need them; I have means of slaying my enemies far more potent.”
The savage leader advanced a step hesitantly, his shoulders hunched as if to ward off a blow, and knelt again to fumble with jerky fingers at the pile of arms.
“That we know, O Man,” he faltered fearfully, eyes on the ground. “We know that your lightning strikes dead whomever you will.”
Doody himself was slightly thunderstruck at the moment; his jaw dropped as he stared at the seven sturdy, humbly bowed figures before him. “Man,” the savage had called him! If they did not believe him a god, why did they submit to him?
He made his voice steady, confident, as he said, not daring to make any inquiries for fear of betraying a lack of divine omniscience—one of the great drawbacks to being a deity among primitive peoples—“You must take me to your village at once.” Since the translator told him that they had a word for village, he knew they must have villages.
“At once, O Man.” The leader repeated the mystifying term, which he pronounced as if it were a title of honor. “We will take you to Kuvurna, and you shall speak with him.”
“Who is Kuvurna?” demanded Doody, unable to suppress the question this time. “Your . . . chief—king?”
The eyes of the barbarian opened wide in obvious surprise, which he with equal obviousness endeavored to mask. Those eyes were large and brown in color, Doody noticed, with a curious wistful expression—hardly as fierce and bold as the eyes of an independent primitive man should be. “Do you not know who Kuvurna is? He is the Lord. He is our master, who rules over our village and over us all.”
This was a shock, because it sounded very much like competition. But Kuvurna could be dealt with when the question of Kuvurna came up. “Lead on!” said Doody.
As he trudged northward through the parklike woods in the midst of his barbarically armed escort, which moved in a subdued, respectful silence, Doody found time to notice the curious uniformity displayed by these people. They were of even stature, about five feet six or seven; their hair and eyes were always reddish-brown; different, he thought, from any hair or eyes that he had ever seen before, yet somehow vaguely familiar
. Their skin was quite white, though browned by the sun to which it was largely exposed. They were strangely different, less noisy and garrulous than any savages whom Doody had ever met before, utterly unlike the hairy Paleolithic brutes who had wanted to make living sacrifices to him forty thousand years before—yet for some odd reason he could not rid himself of the nagging conviction that somewhere he had seen these people before.
“Time traveling gets a man mixed up like the dickens,” he growled to himself in English, passing a hand through his own curly black hair.
The village huddled about the base of a low, partially tree-clad hill; the ocean glinted, barely visible, beyond the slope on which it lay. It was about what you might expect of a backward bronze-age people—a squalid, degraded-looking assemblage of huts, built in this case of fairly substantial logs and timbers, in the manner of early American blockhouses, but with straw-thatched roofs, such as one still finds once in a while on European peasant cottages. The size of the dwellings clearly indicated that, like Dyak long houses, they were meant to hold several families.
The thatch, of course, meant an agricultural community rather than a hunting tribe; and, indeed, fields of tasseled maize were apparent beyond the village on the seaward slope of the island. For meat, however, they still depended on wild game, as was evidenced by the hunting party which Doody had encountered, and the fact that no livestock, or corrals or pens for livestock, were in evidence.
Another feature which Doody noted with mild surprise was the total absence of the usual canine riffraff of savagely barking, cowardly mongrel dogs which usually greet visitors to a savage kraal. In lieu thereof, innumerable naked and unbelievably dirty brats played and squabbled in the sun-baked mud of the crooked streets, while their fond mothers—clad quite as insufficiently as their mates in a single garment of coarse fabric which was draped from the waist to an undefined distance above the ground—stood about in chattering clusters, comparing extravagant notes on the spectacularly precocious attainments of their own particular offspring. A few males were in evidence, idling in doorways and conversing in rough voices, occasionally whittling lazily at sticks which might some day become spear shafts or ax handles; under the noontide heat, activity was at its daylight low.
The hamlet was laid out according to no humanly understandable plan; in fact, it had apparently never been laid out at all, having merely grown Topsy fashion. The little party consisting of Doody and his guard of honor stumbled through the tortuous lanes that twisted erratically among the hovels, and at last debouched unexpectedly, at least so far as the visitor was concerned, into a wide, grassless clearing in the midst of the village. This, though far from tetragonal, evidently passed for a town square.
Doody, who had until now remained wholly unimpressed by the sights of the village, drew in his breath in sharp surprise when he saw what occupied the middle of this naked, dusty space. He had been totally unprepared for a ten-foot stockade of sharpened stakes, sunk deep into the earth, which was heaped breastwork fashion around their bases; a hundred by fifty feet, it might be, laid out in a great rectangle. It looked like a palisaded fort, formidable to the primitive tribesmen; or perhaps—Doody’s quick mind leaped over the possibilities—it was a barrier to prevent mere mortals from trespassing on sacred ground.
He did not need to inquire. “This, O Man of the forest, is the dwelling of Kuvurna, in which he remains always, hearing our every prayer, granting such as are right, refusing such as are evil. Kuvurna knows all, sees all, hears all, smells all.”
Before Doody could even attempt to grasp the significance of the curious final clause of the formula, having reference to Kuvurna’s olfactory prowess—phew, thought Doody, I wouldn’t care to be that sharp-scented—the chief hunter had detached himself from the escort and advanced toward a small gateway, closed by a heavy lattice of wood, which opened into the nearest face of the rampart.
Pausing, he knelt before the gate, laid his spear carefully on the bare earth, and dropped his knife beside it, even as he had upon prostrating himself before Doody. To the mind of the American, it became plain that whoever passed with these ignorant people as a god was not exactly carefree in his high office. He was evidently irked by the possibility of assassination.
The hunter rose and stooped to pick up a long-handled stone hammer which leaned against the stripped poles beside the entrance. Powerful muscles rippled under the brown hide of his back and shoulders as he raised it above his head and swung it in a deafening blow upon a great bronze gong which hung above the gateway. The dully musical booming echoed through the village, woke the sluggish afternoon echoes, penetrated into the secret interior of the forbidding fortress temple.
As Doody watched narrowly for signs of the reception awaiting him, a chain rattled audibly and the lattice swung slowly inward, the person performing the office of gatekeeper remaining invisible from outside. Doody, straining, caught a glimpse of dim green shadows beyond the gate; then the seeker of admittance, with one more profound genuflection, rose, straightened his shoulders, and with the resolute caution of one goose-stepping over a parade ground cobblestoned with rotten eggs, marched into the inner courtyard. The gate swung rapidly shut behind him.
Doody, still puzzled, turned on one of the savage warriors at his elbow. The fellow leaned heavily on his spear, his long red mane falling about a rugged, open face from which frank, undeceitful brown eyes turned questioningly toward the other.
Again Doody felt the overpowering sensation of having seen these people—those curious, worshipful eyes, in particular—somewhere, sometime, long ago. He put the ridiculous feeling from him and inquired brusquely:
“This Kuvurna of yours, friend. What is he like—-what does he look like?”
The hunter’s gaze was startled. “He is like you. He is like me,” he illustrated correlatively. “He is a Man, and you are a Man; but I am not a Man. Because he is a Man we serve him, all of us, and give to him our best fruits and game, and make for him the drink of Men which is not permitted to us.” “Drink of the gods,” muttered Doody quizzically to himself, trying to absorb one statement at a time. But—he wondered—was he going batty, or were his ears wronging him? “Listen,” he said more loudly than was necessary. “If you aren’t a man, then what the devil are you?” He was quite past worrying about suspicious queries; anyway, he ought to see Kuvurna, whoever Kuvurna was, right away, and then he might get straightened out. At the moment he felt a marked sensation of floundering—
The inquiring brown eyes were shocked at his question. “Are you not a Man, and do not Men know everything? But I am only a dog.”
Doody felt faint, and somewhere a wholly primitive and probably unjustifiable fear crawled out of hiding and started up his back, beginning at his lowest spinal ganglion and squirming toward the base of his skull, to raise the short hairs there and pour ice water down his back with demoniac abandon. Abruptly everything around him seemed far away, alien, and unreal. The motionless, patiently waiting village hunters around him, the crowds which were timidly gathering against invisible barriers of apprehension in the freakish bystreets—the seeming women who stood watching the scene stolidly with babies parked on their ample hips, the seemingly human children who sprawled out into the square, noisily seeking new worlds to conquer in the making of mud pies—all were like creatures of an uncanny dream. For Doody knew how where he had seen those great appealing brown eyes, that particular quality of straight red-brown hair. Certainly he had known these people before. He had hunted with them, talked to their uncomprehending ears when he held their silky heads between his knees, on many an occasion in the past when they had gone on four feet instead of two—
It was only for the moment that the primitive fear held the fort in the region of Doody’s medulla oblongata. Then he gave a snort of disgust and forced it back down into the realm of suppressed instincts, where it belonged. The statement which the creature who regarded him so worriedly had just made might be almost incredible, but it was not necessaril
y terrifying. The sense of strangeness persisted, though, as his conscious mind checked off one little-remembered item after another—tiny earmarks, unnoticed at the time, of the veiled unhuman.
Doody realized that his silence was growing awkward. He made himself speak again to the being that was not a man:
“Er—what does Kuvurna want of me?”
The warrior’s gaze was that of a puzzled dog. “Does not a Man wish to speak to a Man? It is not for us to know what they will say.” He paused, then added eagerly, “Perhaps now we will have two Men to rule over our village.”
“If you think that, my boy,” commented Doody in the private recesses of his own mind, “you don’t know your men.” He was framing a reply suitable for the other’s ears, when its necessity was obviated by the return of the messenger who had vanished into Kuvurna’s stronghold.
It was the sudden hushing of the subdued crowd murmur that caused Doody to wheel and behold the dogman who had entered emerge from the gate and stride swiftly toward the visitor and the hunting pack which had brought him, standing in an isolated huddle halfway between the edge of the wide, sundrenched square and the high, bare palisade of Kuvurna’s temple.
The silence was funereal by the time he reached the group. He knelt in the dust before Doody, and announced, his head bowed, but his voice raised to reach the breathlessly waiting hundreds about the southern side of the square:
