CHAPTER XIII
THE RAVISHED NEST
"It cannot be? Who says it cannot be? _Who dares stand out andchallenge me?_"
"I, H'yemba, the man of iron and of flame!"
Stern faced him, every nerve and fiber quivering with sudden passion.At realization that in the exact psychological moment when success layalmost in his hand, this surly brute might baffle him, he felt a waveof murderous hate.
He realized that the dreaded catastrophe had indeed come to pass. Nowhis sole claim to chieftainship lay in his power to defend the title.Failure meant--death.
"You?" he shouted, advancing on the smith.
His opponent only leered and grimaced offensively. Then without evenhaving vouchsafed an answer, he swung toward the elders.
"I challenge!" he exclaimed. "I have the right of words!"
Vreenya nodded, fingering his long white beard.
"Speak on!" he answered. "Such is our ancient custom."
"Oh, people," cried the smith, suddenly facing the throng, "will yefollow one who breaks the tribal manners of our folk? One who disdainsour law? Who has neglected to obey it? Will ye trust yourselves intohands stained with law-breaking of our blood?"
A murmur, doubtful, wondering, obscure, spread through the people. Bythe greenish flare-light Stern could see looks of wonder and dismay.Some frowned, others stared at him or at the smith, and many muttered.
"What the devil and all have I broken _now?_" wondered Allan. "Plaguetake these barbarous customs! Jove, they're worse than the taboos ofthe old Maoris, in the ancient days! What's up?"
He had not long to wonder, for of a sudden H'yemba wheeled on him,pointed him out with vibrant hands, and in a voice of terrible angercried:
"The law, the law of old! No man shall be chief who does not take awife from out our people! None who weds one of the Lanskaarn, theisland folk, or the yellow-haired Skeri beyond the Vortex, none suchshall ever rule us. Yet this man, this stranger who speaks such greatthings very hard to be believed, scorns our custom. No woman fromamong us he has taken, but instead, that vuedma of his own kind!What? Will ye--"
He spoke no further, for Allan was upon him with one leap. At sound ofthat word, the most injurious in their tongue, the fires of Hell burstloose in Stern.
Reckoning no consequences, staying for no parley or diplomacy, hesprang; and as he sprang, he struck.
The blow went home on the smith's jaw with a smash like a pile-driver.H'yemba, reeling, swung at him--no skill, no science, just a wild,barbaric, sledge-hammer sweep.
It would have killed had it landed, but Allan was not there. In pointof tactics, the twentieth century met the tenth.
And as the smith whirled to recover, a terrible left-hander met himjust below the short ribs.
With a grunt the man doubled, sprawled and fell. By some strangeatavism, which he never afterward could understand, Allan counted, inthe Folk's tongue: "Hathi, ko, zem, baku" and so up to "lamnu"--ten.
Still the smith did not rise, but only lay and groaned and sought tocatch the breath that would not come.
"I have won!" cried Allan in a loud voice. "Here, you people, takethis greun, this child, away! And let there be no further idle talkof a dead law--for surely, in your custom, a law dies when itschampion is beaten! Come, quick, away with him!"
Two stout men came forward, bowed to Allan with hands clasped upontheir breasts in signal of fresh allegiance, and without ceremony tookthe insensible smith, neck-and-heels, and lugged him off as though hehad only been a net heavily laden with fish.
The crowd opened in awed silence to let them pass. By the glare Allannoticed that the man's jaw hung oddly awry, even as the obeah's hadhung, in Madison Forest.
"Jove, what a wallop that must have been!" thought he, now perceivingfor the first time that his knuckles were cut and bleeding. "OldMonahan himself taught me that in the Harvard gym a thousand odd yearsago--and it still works. _One_ question settled, mighty quick; andH'yemba won't have much to say for a few weeks at least. Not till hisjawbone knits again, anyhow!"
Upon his arm he felt a hand. Turning, he saw Vreenya, the agedcounselor.
"Surely, O master, he shall not live, now you have conquered him? Theboiling pit awaits. It is our custom--if you will!"
Allan only shook his head.
"All customs change, these times," he answered. "_I_ am your law! Thisman's life is needed, for he has good skill with metals. He shalllive, but never shall he speak before the Folk again. I have said it!"
To the waiting throng he turned again.
"Ye have witnessed!" he cried, in a loud voice. "Now, have fear of me,your master! Once in the Battle of the Walls ye beheld death rainingfrom my fire-bow. Once ye watched me vanquish your ruler, even thegreat Kamrou himself, and fling him far into the pit that boils. Andnow, for the third time, ye have seen. Remember well!"
A stir ran through the multitude. He felt its potent meaning, and heunderstood.
"I am the law!" he flung at them once more. "Declare it, all! Repeat!"
The thousand-throated chorus: "_Thou art the law!_" boomed upwardthrough the fog, rolled mightily against the towering cliff, andechoed thunderlike across the hot, black sea.
"It is well!" he cried. "One more sleep, and then--then I choose fromamong ye two for the journey, two of your boldest and best. And thatshall be the first journey of many, up to the better places that awaitye, far beyond the pit!"
Straining his eyes in the night, pierced onlyby the electric beam that ran and quavered rapidly over the brokenforest-tops far below, Allan peered down and far ahead. The fire, thesignal-fire he had told Beatrice to build upon the ledge--would henever sight it?
Eagerly he scanned the dark horizon only just visible in thestar-shine. Warmly the rushing night wind fanned his cheek; the roarof the motor and propellers, pulsating mightily, made music to hisears. For it sang: "Home again! Beatrice, and love once more!"
Many long hours had passed since, his fuel-tanks replenished from theapparatus for distilling the crude naphtha, which he had installedduring his first stay in the Abyss, he had risen a second time intothat heavy, humid, purple-vapored air.
With him he now bore Bremilu, the strong, and Zangamon, most expert ofall the fishermen. Slung in the baggage-crate aft lay a large seine,certain supplies of fish, weed and eggs, and--from time to timenoisily squawking--some half-dozen of the strange sea-birds, in ametal basket.
The pioneers had insisted on taking these impedimenta with them, tobridge the gap of changed conditions, a precaution Stern hadrecognized as eminently sensible.
"Gad!" thought he, as the Pauillac swept its long, flat-arc'dtrajectory through the night, "under any circumstances this must be aterrific wrench for them. Talk about nerve! If _they_ haven't got it,who has? This trip of these subterranean barbarians, thus flungsuddenly into midair, out into a world of which they know absolutelynothing, must be exactly what a journey to Mars would mean to me.More, far more, to their simple minds. I wonder myself at theircourage in taking such a tremendous step."
And in his heart a new and keener admiration for the basic stamina ofthe Merucaans took root.
"They'll do!" he murmured, as he scanned his lighted chart once more,and cast up reckonings from the dials of his delicately adjustedinstruments.
Half an hour more of rapid flight and he deemed New Hope River couldnot now be far.
"No use to try and hear it, though, with this racket of the propellersin my ears," thought he. "The searchlight might possibly pick up agleam of water, if we fly over it. But even that's a small index to goby. The signal-fire must be my only real guide--and where is it, now,that fire?"
A vague uneasiness began to oppress him. The fire, he reckoned, shouldhave shown ere now in the far distance. Without it, how find his way?And what of Beatrice?
His uneasy reflections were suddenly interrupted by a word fromZangamon, at his right.
"O Kromno, master, see?"
"What is it, now?"
"A fire, very di
stant, master!"
"Where?" queried Stern eagerly, his heart leaping with joy. "I see nofire. Your eyes, used to the dark places and the fogs, now far surpassmine, even as mine will yours when the time of light shall come. Whereis the fire, Zangamon?"
The fisher pointed, a dim huge figure in the star-lit gloom. "There,master. On thy left hand, thus."
Stern shifted his course to southwest by west, and for some minutesheld it true, so that the needle hardly trembled on the compass dial.
Then all at once he, too, saw the welcome signal, a tiniest pin-prickof light far on the edge of the world, no different from thesixth-magnitude stars that hung just above it on the horizon, save forits redness.
A gush of gratitude and love welled in the fountains of his heart.
"Home!" he whispered. "Home--for where _you_ are that's home to me!Oh, Beatrice, I'm coming--coming home to you!"
Slowly at first, then with greater and ever greater swiftness, thesignal star crept nearer; and now even the flames were visible, andnow behind them he caught dim sight of the rock-wall.
On and on, a very vulture of the upper air, planed the Pauillac. Sternshouted with all his strength. The girl might possibly hear him andmight come out of their cave. She might even signal--and the nearnessof her presence mounted upon him like a heady wine.
He swung the searchlight on the canyon, as they swept above it. Heflung the pencil of radiance in a wide sweep up the cliff and downalong the terrace.
It gave no sight, no sign of Beatrice.
"Sleeping, of course," he reflected.
And now, Hope River past, and the canyon swallowed by the denseforest, he flung his light once more ahead. With it he felt out therocky barrens for a landing-place.
Not more than twenty minutes later, followed by Bremilu and Zangamon,Stern was making way through the thick-laced wood and jungle.
Awed, terrified by their first sight of trees and by the upper worldwhich to them was naught but marvel and danger, the two Merucaansfollowed close behind their guide. Even so would you or I cling to theMartian who should land us on that ruddy planet and pilot us throughsome huge, inchoate and grotesque growth of things to us perfectlyunimaginable.
"Oh, master, we shall see the patriarch soon?" asked Bremilu, in astrange voice--a voice to him astonishingly loud, in the clear air ofnight upon the surface of the world. "Soon shall we speak with himand--"
"Hark! What's that?" interrupted Stern, pausing, the while he grippedhis pistol tighter.
From afar, though in which direction he could not say, a vague, dullroar made itself heard through the forest.
Sonorous, vibrant, menacing, it echoed and died; and then again, asonce before, Stern heard that strange, hollow booming, as of somemighty drum struck by a muffled fist.
A cry? Was that a cry, so distant and so faint? Beast-cry, or call ofnight-bird, shrill and far?
Stern shuddered, and with redoubled haste once more pushed through thevague path he and Beatrice had made from the barrens to SettlementMiffs.
Presently, followed by the two colonists who dared not let him for amoment out of their sight, he reached the brow of the canyon. His handflash-lamp showed him the rough path to the terrace.
With fast-beating heart he ran down it, unmindful of the unprotectededge or the sheer drop to the rocks of New Hope River, far below.
Bremilu and Zangamon, seeing perfectly in the gloom, hurried closebehind, with words of awe, wonder and admiration in their own tongue.
"Beta! Oh, Beatrice! Home again!" Stern shouted triumphantly. "Whereare you, Beta? Come! I'm home again!"
Quickly he scrambled along the broken terrace, stumbling in his hasteover loose rocks and debris. Now he had reached the turn. The fire wasin sight.
"Beta!" again he hailed. "O-he! Beatrice!"
Still no answer, nor any sign from her. As he came to the fire henoted, despite his strong emotions, that it had for the most partburned down to glowing embers.
Only one or two resinous knots still flamed. It could not have beenreplenished for some time, perhaps two hours or more.
Again, his quick eye caught the fact that cinders, ashes andhalf-burned sticks lay scattered about in strange disorder.
"Why, Beatrice never makes a fire like that!" the thought piercedthrough his mind.
And--though as yet on no very definite grounds--a quick prescience ofcatastrophe battered at his heart.
"What's _this?_"
Something lying on the rock-ledge, near the fire, caught his eye. Hesnatched it up.
"What--what can _this_ mean?"
The colonists stood, frightened and confused, peering at him in thedark. His face, in the ruddy fire-glow, as he studied the thing he nowheld in his hand, must have been very terrible.
"_Cloth!_ Torn! But--but _then_--"
He flung from him the bit of the girl's cloak which, ripped andshredded as though by a powerful hand, cried disaster.
"Beatrice!" he shouted. "Where are you? Beatrice!"
To the doorway in the cliff he ran, shaken and trembling.
The stone had been pushed away; it lay inside the cave. Ominously theblack entrance seemed staring at him in the dull gleam of thefirelight.
On hands and knees he fell, and hastily crawled through. As he went,he flashed his lamp here, there, everywhere.
"Beatrice! _Beatrice!_"
No answer.
In the far corner still flickered some remainder of the cooking-fire.But there, too, ashes and half-burned sticks lay scattered all about.
To the bed he ran. It was empty and cold.
"Beatrice! Oh, my God!"
A glint of something metallic on the floor drew his bewildered,terror-smitten gaze.
He sprang, seized the object, and for a moment stood staring, whileall about him the very universe seemed thundering and crashing down.
The object in his hand was the girl's gun. One cartridge, and onlyone, had been exploded.
The barrel had been twisted almost off, as though by the wrenchingclutch of a hand inhuman in its ghastly power.
On the stock, distinctly nicked into the hard rubber as Stern held theflash-lamp to it, were the unmistakable imprints of teeth.
With a groan, Allan started backward. The revolver fell with a clatterto the cave floor.
His foot slid in something wet, something sticky.
"_Blood!_" he gasped.
Half-crazed, he reeled toward the door.
The flash-lamp in his hand flung its white brush of radiance along thewall.
With a chattering cry he recoiled.
There, roughly yet unmistakably imprinted on the white limestonesurface, he saw the print, in crimson, of a huge, a horrible, abrutally distorted hand.
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