CHAPTER XXVIII
THE BATTLE IN THE DARK
For a time no word passed between them. Stern took the girl inhis arms and comforted her as best he might; but his heart told himthere was now no hope.
The old man had spoken only too truly. There existed no way ofconvincing these barbarians that their prisoners were not of somehated, hostile tribe. Evidently the tradition of the outer world hadlong since perished as a belief among them. The patriarch's faith init had come to be considered a mere doting second childhood vagary,just as the tradition of the Golden Age was held to be by the laterGreeks.
That Stern and Beatrice could in any way convince their captors of thetruth of this outer world and establish their identity as realsurvivors of the other time, lay wholly outside the bounds of theprobable.
And as the old man's prophecy of evil--interrupted, yet frightfullyominous--recurred to Stern's mind, he knew the end of everything wasvery close at hand.
"They won't get us, though, without a stiff fight, damn them!" thoughthe. "That's one satisfaction. If they insist on extermination--if theywant war--they'll get it, all right enough! And it'll be what Shermansaid war always was, too--_Hell!_"
Came now a long, a seemingly interminable wait. The door remainedfast-barred. Oppression, heat, thirst, hunger tortured them, butrelief there was none.
And at length the merciful sleep of stupefaction overcame them; andall their pain, their anguish and forebodings were numbed into awelcome oblivion.
They were awakened by a confused noise--the sound of cries and shouts,dulled by the thick walls, yet evidently many-voiced--harsh commands,yells, and even some few sharp blows upon the prison stones.
The engineer started up, wide-eyed and all alert now in the gloom.
Gone were his lassitude, his weakness and his sense of pain. Everysense acute, he waited, hand clutching the pistol-butt, finger ontrigger.
"Ready there, Beatrice!" cried he. "Something's started at last! Maybeit's our turn now. Here, get behind me--but be ready to shoot when Itell you! Steady now, steady for the attack!"
Tense as coiled springs they waited. And all at once a bar slid,creaking. Around the edge of the metal door a thin blue line of lightappeared.
"_Stand back, you!_" yelled Stern. "The first man through that door'sa dead one!"
The line of light remained a moment narrow, then suddenly itbroadened. From without a pandemonium of sound burst in--howls,shrieks, imprecations, cries of pain.
Even in that perilous moment a quick wonder darted through Stern'sbrain, what the meaning of this infernal tumult might be, and justwhat ghastly fate was to be theirs--what torments and indignities theymight still have to face before the end.
"Remember, Beatrice," he commanded, "if I'm killed, use the revolveron yourself before you let them take you!"
"I know!" she cried. And, crouching beside him in the half light, she,too, awaited what seemed the inevitable.
The door swung open.
There stood the patriarch again, arms extended, face eager with apassionate hope and longing, a great pride even at that strange andpregnant moment.
"Peace, friends!" he cried. "I give you peace! Strike me not down withthose terrible weapons of yours! For verily I bring you hope again!"
"Hope? What d'you mean?" shouted Stern.
Through the opened door he caught vague glimpses in the luminous fogof many spearmen gathered near--of excited gestures and the wildwaving of arms--of other figures that, half seen, ran swiftly here andthere.
"Speak up, you! What's the matter? What's wanted?" demanded theengineer, keeping his automatic sighted at the doorway. "What's allthis infernal row? If your people there think they're going to playhorse with us, they're mightily mistaken! You tell them the first manthat steps through that door to get us never'll take another step!_Quick! What's up?_"
"Come!" answered the aged man, his voice high and tremulous above thehowling tumult and the roar of the great gas-well. "Come, now! The_Lanskaarn_--they attack! _Come!_ I have spoken of your weapons to mypeople. _Come, fight for us!_ And verily, if we win--"
"What kind of a trick are you putting up on us, anyhow?" roared Sternwith thrice-heated rage. "None o' that now! If your people want us,let 'em come in here and get us! But as for being fooled that way andtricked into coming out--"
"I swear the truth!" supplicated the patriarch, raising his witheredhand on high. "If you come not, you must verily die, oh, friends! Butif you come--"
"Your own life's the first to pay for any falsehood now."
"I give it gladly! _The truth, I swear it!_ Oh, listen, while there isstill time, and come! _Come!_"
"What about it, girl?" cried Stern. "Are you with me? Will you take achance on it?"
"There's nothing else to do, Allan. They've got us, anyway. And--and Ithink the old man's telling the truth. Hear _that_, now--"
Off somewhere toward the fortification wall that edged the beach,sounds of indisputable conflict were arising. The howls, cries,shrieks, blows were not to be mistaken.
Stern's resolution was instant.
"I'm with you, old man!" he shouted. "But remember your promise. Andif you fail me--it's your finish!
"Come, Beta! Stick close to me! If we fall, we'll go down together.It's both or neither. _Come on--come on!_"
Out into the glare of the great flame they issued warily, out into thestrangely glowing mist that covered the incredible village as with avirescent pall.
Blinking, they stared about them, not knowing for a moment whither torun or where to shoot.
But the patriarch had Stern by the arm now; and in the midst of aconfused and shouting mass of the Folk--all armed with spears andslings, knobbed clubs and battle-maces--was pushing him out throughthe circle of those ghastly posts whence dangled the headlessskeletons.
"Where? Which way?" cried Stern. "Show me--I'll do the rest!"
"Thither!" the old man directed, pointing with one hand, while withthe other he shoved the engineer forward. Blind though he was, he knewthe right direction. "_Thither--to the wall!_"
For a second Stern had the thought of leaving Beatrice in the cell,where she might at least be safe from the keen peril of battle; butgreater dangers threatened her, he knew, in his absence.
At all hazards they must keep together. And with a cry: "Come!Come--stick close to me!" once more he broke into a run toward thesea.
Through the mists, which grew darker as he neared the wall withBeatrice close beside him and the troop that followed them, he couldcatch glimpses of the battle.
Every hut seemed to have poured forth its inhabitants for now theplaza swarmed with life--men, women, event children, running this wayand that, some with weapons rushing towards the wall, others runningwildly hither and yon with unintelligible cries.
A spear pierced the vapors; it fell clashing at Stern's feet and slidrattling away over the black stones, worn smooth and greasy byuncounted feet.
Past him as he ran a man staggered; the whole side of his head wasbashed in, as though by a frightful blow from a mace. Up the woundedman flung both arms, and fell twitching.
The fog covered him with its drifting folds. Stern shuddered thatBeatrice should see such hideous sights; but even now he almost fellover another prostrate body, hideously wounded in the back, and stillkicking.
"Ready, now!" panted Stern. "Ready with the pistols!"
Where was the patriarch?
He no longer knew. About him the Folk pressed, but none molestedeither him or Beatrice.
In the confusion, the rush of the outskirts of battle, he could haveshot down a score of them, but he was reserving his fire. It might,perhaps, be true, who could tell--that safety lay in battling nowagainst the Lanskaarn!
All at once the captives saw vague fire-lights in the gloom--seeminglyblazing comets of blue, that tossed and hurled and disappeared.
Then came the nearer sound of shouting and the clash of arms.
Stern, with the atavistic instincts of even the most civ
ilized man,scented the kill. And with a roar he whirled into the confused andsweltering mass of men which now, emerging from the darkening mists,had suddenly become visible by the uncanny light of the cressets onthe wall.
Beside him the girl, her face aglow, nostrils dilated, breath quick,held her revolver ready.
And then, quite suddenly, they found themselves at the wall.
"Shoot! Shoot!" bellowed Stern, and let drive, pointblank, at an ugly,grinning face that like a nightmare-vision all at once projected overthe crest. His own revolver-fire was echoed by hers. The facevanished.
All down there, below him on the beach, he caught a dim, confusedimpression of the attacking swarm.
Subconsciously he realized that he--he a man of the twentiethcentury--was witnessing again a scene such as made the whole historyof the Middle Ages sanguinary--a siege, by force of human strength andrage!
Even as he vaguely saw the swift and supple men, white-skinned yetlarger than the Folk, which crowded the whole beach as far as he couldpierce the mists with his straining sight, he knew that here was abattle of huge scope and terrible danger.
Up from the sea the attackers, the Lanskaarn, were swarming, fromtheir dimly seen canoes. The place was alive with them.
At the base of the wall they were clotted in dense hordes; andsiege-ladders were being raised; and now up the ladders the lithe menof darkness were running like so many ants.
Automatically as the mechanism of his own gun which he pumped intothat dense mass as fast as he could pull trigger--while beside him thegirl was shooting hard and straight, as well--he seemed to berecording these wonderful impressions.
Here he caught a glimpse of a siege-ladder hurled backward by theFolk, backward and down to the beach. Amid frightful yells and screamsit fell; and a score of crushed and mangled men lay writhing thereunder the uncanny glare of the cressets.
There he saw fire-bales being hurled down from the walls--these, thecomet-like apparitions he had seen from a distance--hurled, blazing,right into the brown of the mob.
Beyond, a party had scaled the wall, and there the fight was hand tohand--with gruntings, thrustings of spears, slashings of long knivesthat dripped red and cut again and rose and fell with hideousregularity!
He jacked his pistol full of shells once more and thrust it into thegirl's hand--for she, excited beyond all control, was snapping thehammer of her weapon on empty steel.
"Give it to 'em! Shoot! Kill!" he yelled. "Our only chance now! Ifthey--get in--we're dead!"
He snatched her weapon, reloaded, and again rained the steel-jacketedbolts of death against the attackers.
In the tumult and wild maelstrom of the fight the revolvers' cracklingseemed to produce little effect. If Stern expected that this unknownweapon would at once bring panic and quick victory he reckoned withoutthe berserker madness and the stern mettle of this horde of ragingLanskaarn.
White men, like himself, they yielded not; but with strange cries andfrightful yells, pressed on and on, up to the walls, and up theladders ever; and now came flights of spears, hissing through the darkair--and now smooth black rocks from the beach, flung with terriblestrength and skill by the slingers below, mowed down the defenders.
Here, there, men of the Folk were falling, pierced by the iron spears,shattered by the swift and heavy rocks.
The place was becoming a shambles where the blood of attackers andattacked mingled horribly in the gloom.
One ladder, pushed outward, dragged half a dozen of the Merucaans withit; and at the bottom of the wall a circling eddy of the Lanskaarndespatched the fighting Folkmen who had been hauled to theirdestruction by the grappling besiegers.
Blows, howls and screams, hurtling fire-bales and great rocks flungfrom above--the rocks he had already noted laid along the inside ofthe wall--these, and the smell of blood and fire, the horrid, sweatycontact of struggling bodies, the press and jam of the battle thatsurged round them, all gave Stern a kaleidoscopic picture of war--waras it once was, in the long ago--war, naked and terrible, such as hehad never even dreamed!
But, mad with the lust of the kill, he heeded nothing now.
"Shoot! Shoot!" he kept howling, beside himself; and, tearing open thebandoliers where lay his cartridges, he crammed them with feverishfingers into the girl's weapon and his own--weapons now burning hotwith the quick, long-continued firing.
The battle seemed to dance, to waver there before his eyes, in thehaze of mist and smoke and stifling air. The dark scene, blue-lit bythe guttering torches, grew ever more sanguinary, more incrediblyhideous. And still the attackers swarmed along the walls and up them,in front and on both sides, till the swirling mists hid them and thedefenders from view.
He heard Beatrice cry out with pain. He saw her stagger and fall back.
To her he leaped.
"Wounded?" he gasped.
She answered nothing, but fell limp.
"God of Battles!" he howled. "Revenge!"
He snatched her automatic from beneath the trampling, crowding feet;he bore her back, away from the thick press. And in the shelter of amassive hut he laid her down.
Then, stark-mad, he turned and leaped into the battle-line that swayedand screamed along the wall.
Critical now the moment. In half a dozen places the besiegers hadgot their ladders planted. And, while dense masses of theLanskaarn--unminding fire-balls and boulders rained down uponthem--held these ladders firm, up the attackers came with a rush.
Stern saw the swing and crushing impact of the maces and iron clubs;he saw the stabbing of the spears on both sides.
Slippery and red the parapet became.
Men, killed there, crawled and struggled and fell both outward andinside, and were trampled in indiscriminate heaps, besieged andbesiegers alike, still clawing, tearing, howling even in their deathagony.
Now one of the ladders was down--another fell, with horrid tumult--athird!
An automatic in each hand, Stern scrambled to the glairy summit of thefortification.
A mace swung at him. He leaped sidewise, firing as he sprang. With ascream the ax-man doubled up and fell, and vanished in the gloom belowthe wall.
Raking the parapet with a hail of lead, he mowed down the attackers ontop of the fourth ladder. With a mighty shout, those inside staved itaway with iron grapples. It, too, swayed drunkenly, held below, pushedmadly above. It reeled--then fell with a horrible, grinding crash!
"Hurray, boys! One more down! Give 'em Hell!" he screamed. "One more!"
He turned. Subconsciously he felt that his right hand was wet, andhot, and dripping, but he felt no pain.
"One more! Now for another!"
And in the opposite direction along the wall he emptied his otherrevolver.
Before the stinging swarm of the steel-jacketed wasps of death theLanskaarn writhed and melted down with screams such as Dante in hiswildest vision never even dreamed.
Stern heard a great howl of triumph break from the mass of defendersfighting to overthrow the fifth ladder.
"Hold 'em! Hold 'em!" he bellowed. "Wait till I load up again--I'll--"
A swift and crashing impact dashed sheaves of radiant fire through hisbrain.
Everything leaped and whirled.
He flung up both hands.
Clutching at empty air, then suddenly at the slippery parapet whichseemed to have leaped up and struck him in the face, he fell.
Came a strange numbness, then a stabbing pain.
And darkness quenched all knowledge and all consciousness.
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