Beneath the Eye of God (The Commodore Ardcasl Space Adventures Book 1)

by Payne, Lee

  He rose to leave. The little girl sat stunned and pale. "I don't understand," she whispered.

  "It's really very simple. We have ridden a long way. We have come to the edge of the sea. The rest of our journey will be by aircar. There will be no room for the horses."

  "Couldn't you leave them with us? We would take good care of them."

  "I'm sure you would but I choose not to leave them with those who have no honor." He turned and strode down the beach.

  The mat was spread as before but now the children came riding up with hard-shelled crab-like creatures that they roasted over the fire and cracked open to reveal a succulent white meat. It was with great reluctance that they brought the horses in to the twins to be staked and tied so everyone could sit down to eat.

  The children were filled with chatter and still excited by their day of horseback riding. They didn't notice that Malie was silent and withdrawn. The Commodore watched her closely. "There was talk last night of your being nightbird warriors," he said. "Is that a game you children play?"

  The oldest boy, Kholran, answered proudly. "It is not a game, sir. The nightbird warriors were the honorary fighting class of the forest empire. In the last great battle, they defeated the invaders on this very shore. We have studied their sacred books and dedicated our lives to their code."

  "Is that the same code that establishes the rules for ritual combat?"

  "It is, sir."

  "What is the penalty for breaking that code?"

  The boy looked surprised. "A warrior would not break the code, sir. The penalty would be the taking of his skin, without ceremony and without honor."

  "Then it is as I thought. You are children playing a game."

  "Sir?" The boy was genuinely puzzled.

  "Explain it to him, Malie," the Commodore said.

  All eyes turned to the little girl. Her face was ashen but she spoke calmly. "Feathered Shield says the strangers must leave and I am not to pay my debt."

  There was a shocked silence. "That's not fair," Alira, the youngest girl, said.

  Malie smiled mirthlessly. "The Commodore has already explained to us about fairness."

  The big man cleared his throat loudly. "This Feathered Shield fellow, the one you take your orders from, was he or is he a king?"

  "He was the last great king of the forest empire," Malie replied.

  "And was the king subject to the warrior's code?"

  "Yes."

  "And did the king or indeed, anyone, have the power to order a warrior to violate the code and lose his honor?"

  ". . . I . . . I'm not certain."

  "No one could take a warrior's honor," replied Kholran firmly. "Not even the king."

  The Commodore leaned across the mat and looked squarely at the little girl. "Malie, who speaks to the dead, sometimes forgets that she is still a child. Yet we are dealing here with adult matters. You have a debt, my dear. A debt to me. I collect that which is due me. Isn't that so, Leahn?"

  Leahn, startled, replied, "He doesn't let you forget what you owe him, Malie."

  The Commodore leaned closer to the pale child. "You owe me a skin, to be taken without ceremony, without honor. I intend to collect tomorrow—after I have finished with the horses."

  "What about the horses?" Malie's younger sister, Alira, demanded.

  The Commodore turned to her. "Malie has ordered us to leave. Our aircar will be here at dawn. There is no room for the horses and I will not leave them with so-called warriors who play at games of honor but are unwilling to pay up when they lose. We must butcher them."

  Alira's eyes grew round with fury. She stood and faced her older sister. "You think you're so smart just because that pile of bones talks only to you. But look at what you've done. You were going to get a horse. You could beat anybody, especially an old fat man. Now you've lost them all. Well, they can have your skin if they want it. But they can't have my horse. Take them to see your old skeleton. Let them argue with him." The knuckles on her clenched fists had gone white as she glared at her sister. "Do it now!" she screamed.

  "Wait a minute," Elor interrupted, turning to Malie. "Is your sister saying the Feathered Shield is an actual being, rather than a disembodied voice that only you can hear?"

  Malie sighed. "That was one of the things he didn't want you to know."

  "If somebody is going to start ordering me around," the Commodore rumbled, "telling me where I must go and when I must leave, I prefer to hear him directly, rather than through an underling."

  "I agree," Kholran said. "This is between these people and Feathered Shield. Let them face each other. That is the warrior's way."

  "He's not going to like it," Malie insisted.

  "Do it!" Alira and the others said.

  ***

  The ruined temples were farther down the beach. An overgrown trail cut through the sand hills and into the forest. The children led the way through the trees. The gloom of the forest blotted out the last light of the setting sun. The first building they came to was neither as large nor as carefully constructed as those at the lost city but were similar in design and ornamentation. There were several scattered among the trees.

  As they mounted the broad steps to one of the ruined buildings, Ohan had to step past trees that were coiling their tendrils around the cut stones, lifting them away, filling the gaps with their own roots. Obviously the two old men the children spoke of had not been as diligent in destroying seedlings as Alexander.

  A sound had been troubling him as he climbed. At first he thought it was the waves on the beach. Then it seemed like the sighing of the wind through the leaves. But it rose in intensity as he approached the open door and the wind was not rising. It was a muttering, a rumbling sound and it was coming from the doorway in front of him.

  Malie lit a torch. It made more smoke than light. The building seemed to hold a single narrow room which they had entered at one end. Its high ceiling was lost in shadow. One wall was unfinished except in one corner where plaster had been applied. Roots had found their way through and were tentatively exploring the dark interior. But the other wall was plastered and painted in the same style as the passage inside the pyramid. From what Ohan could see of the artist's work in the flickering torchlight, it seemed less finished and these were scenes of battle rather than of gods and strange beasts.

  The sound he had been hearing came from the far end of the room. As he cautiously followed the others inside, it rose to an eerie high-pitched wail that danced across his spine and made his skin crawl. "I told you he wouldn't like this," Ohan heard Malie mutter from somewhere ahead.

  He peered between several of the others who had stopped in a cluster ahead of him. There in the sputtering torchlight, seated on a stone bench at the far end of the room was a figure, robed in white. Unmoving among the flickering shadows, it filled the room with a melancholy wail. Ohan pushed a little forward for a better look, then gasped and fell back. There were skeletal fingers on the stone arm of the bench and a grinning skull where the figure's head should be.

  Those around him stood rooted in their tracks as the wailing rose in pitch and intensity to become a keening that echoed through the room—through Ohan's soul.

  "This cannot be the mighty Feathered Shield." The Commodore's angry voice cut through the wail. "Son of Bluestone Mask, son of Nightbird Talon, emperor of the forest people, conqueror of the alien invaders, whose great roads and cities still stand to confound all the works of lesser men to this very day. This whining bag of bones who sits moldering here in the dark—hiding behind the skirts of children—cannot be that great king."

  The Commodore stopped speaking and there was silence. The keening had stopped. All eyes were on the figure at the far end of the room. Even Ohan stared. It was moving. It was trying to stand, its motions halting and jerky—like a marionette tangled in its strings. The white cape fell aside. Sparks of blue fire danced over its bones and flickered through the empty eye sockets in the hollow skull. It stood poised for an instant,
halfway up. There was a blood-chilling shriek and it fell clattering back on the bench, its fire gone.

  A long silence followed. It was broken when the Commodore muttered, "On the other hand, I could be wrong. We may well have just met the illustrious Feathered Shield himself."

  "He cursed you pretty good," Malie said.

  "I'm sure he did. And I have been cursed by experts. Is he gone?"

  "I don't think so, just tired. His bones have been here forever. The old men said he died here in the last battle but he never spoke to anyone until I came along."

  "Why does he not die?"

  "They took his skin. The invaders took his skin. He will not die until it is returned."

  "But it must have been destroyed or rotted away centuries ago."

  "I don't know." Malie turned back to the figure. "We used to talk a lot but I never asked him about that. He may not want to talk to me anymore," she added sadly.

  "The white robe he wears appears to be made of the skins of his enemies," Elor said. "Skin such as Leahn's."

  "And I think I know where his skin is," Leahn said almost inaudibly. The others turned to her. "It's on the wall in my father's study. It's always been there. I saw it when I went there in my dream. Why else would anyone save a thing like that?"

  Malie turned to the Commodore, blue fire flashing in her eyes. "You could get it for me," she said slowly in a voice that was not hers.

  The others drew back in surprise, then horror. "You tried to take the child's honor," the Commodore cried incredulously. "Now you take her body?"

  Malie blinked and the fire was gone. "Oh dear," she gasped. "I didn't know he could do that."

  ***

  They sat the child down against the wall, her brothers and sister anxiously around her. "It was him, wasn't it?" Alira asked. "What did it feel like?"

  Malie looked up at them wide-eyed. "It was as if he was standing beside me, but inside. We were both looking out and he just said what he wanted to and then he left." She paused and thought a minute. "I knew him. It was just like when he speaks to me except there seemed to be more of him. He was awfully excited." She looked up at the Commodore. "You will get his skin back for him, won't you?"

  "It must be my destiny to live a complicated life," the Commodore said sourly. "All we had left to do was copy some old books, drop Leahn off at her uncle's and go spend our money. Now we have a case of demonic possession to deal with. Why are things never simple?"

  Leahn was surprised. "You were going to take me to my uncle?"

  "Of course. What are friends for? I was even going to hold your coat while you sliced off his head or whatever grisly vengeance you have in mind."

  Elor returned to the Commodore's side and said in a low voice, "We have examined the room thoroughly. If this was a trick, it was skillfully done. We find no wires, speakers or any kind of control devices. Our measuring device has suffered a meltdown. If this is indeed Feathered Shield, the last priest-king of the forest empire, he would have been the final repository of centuries of sacred lore concerning the summoning and management of the inner power of this world. It is not beyond credence that he became so enraged at being skinned alive that he called upon that power, concentrating it here in his physical being in a residual focus so strong that we monitored it as a hot spot on a planet which is itself, unusually strong in these emissions."

  "Look at the mural on the wall," Leahn said. "It must be of the last battle between the colonists and the forest empire. And look at what's painted over the doorway where we came in."

  There above the door on the wall facing the skeleton was a crude painting of a figure in a spacesuit hanging upside down from a rafter.

  The Commodore laughed out loud. "For 500 years he sat here and stared at this image of his last victory—a victory won even after his death—while his enemy's body slowly turned to porridge inside the pyramid Feathered Shield built as his own tomb." He turned back to Malie who had risen unsteadily to her feet. "That was Feathered Shield's enemy we found inside the pyramid, wasn't it?"

  Malie replied in her own child's voice. "His father, Bluestone Mask, chose to live in peace with the aliens. They were few in number and they did not want to live in the forest. Their weapons were very powerful and worked on principles his people did not understand. The aliens settled far away. Bluestone Mask chose to ignore them and to concentrate on building his empire based on the water that suddenly became plentiful when the ground shook and the gods opened the great water pit.

  "Feathered Shield continued his father's work. He even changed his people's religion so that human sacrifice—the taking of skins—did not play so prominent a part. But the aliens remained in his mind. As the power and extent of the forest empire was growing, theirs seemed to decline. Many of their weapons no longer worked and they turned to sword and spear."

  "Technological regression," Elor said. "Colonists often try to take the technology of their home planet with them. But machines, especially complicated ones, eventually break. And without the factories and foundries to keep them supplied with spare parts, they slowly become useless. It usually takes two generations."

  "So their technology was falling apart just as the forest empire was reaching its peak," the Commodore said. "It must have made the colonists uneasy."

  "Some of them wanted to live in peace," Malie said. "But many did not. And by then they had horses. The great beasts had never lived here before. That made their dreadful white warriors as swift as the wind. And they called down the pillar of fire from the sky. Though the warriors of the empire were far greater in number, in valor and in honor, the aliens would call down their pillar of fire and burn hundreds to death."

  "Ah," said the Commodore. "The colonists decided to attack while they still had an ace in the hole—their spaceship. They didn't have the manpower so they decided to take on the forest empire while they still had the firepower."

  "The white warriors fought without honor," Malie said. "They killed for the joy of it. They took skins without ceremony and trampled them in the dirt. They killed women and children. When they took the capital, Feathered Shield scattered his people throughout the forest where the pillar of fire could not see them. Then he and his nightbird warriors laid in wait along the roads, they struck at night, they crept through the treetops as quietly as cats. They struck and ran and struck again. They killed the white warriors one and two at a time.

  "They even struck back into the heart of their captured city and killed the fierce captain of the aliens. His warriors dressed him in his white suit with no face so that the worlds to come would know him always as an alien. As a final insult, they laid him with ceremony in Feathered Shield's own sarcophagus.

  "Their captain's death made the fury of the aliens even greater. They called down the fire from the sky again and again, driving the nightbird warriors back and back, finally to this place at the very edge of the sea.

  "Here Feathered Shield would retreat no farther for he had learned the secret of the pillar of fire. There was one alien who spoke to it, who called it down to pour its death upon the people. This one alien was always in the rear of the battle with white warriors all around to protect him.

  "Feathered Shield called half his warriors here to await the final battle. The rest he sent out to strike and draw the enemy here. When the aliens saw where Feathered Shield had gathered his men, they went to call down the pillar of fire. That is when he struck. He and a small group had laid in ambush. They struck through the white warriors while all his men attacked. They went straight at the alien who talked to the pillar of fire and killed him and killed his machine as well. When they saw what he had done, the white warriors rode down on Feathered Shield and trampled him. Their fury and cries were terrible to behold.

  "They took Feathered Shield while he was still alive and they skinned him and while they were doing that, his nightbird warriors attacked and many more on both sides were killed. The body of Feathered Shield was saved but his skin was lost and taken away b
y the white warriors in their retreat. For without their pillar of fire, their valor left them. They ran away through the forest. The nightbird warriors followed and killed every one they could find and attacked the last of them in the capital and hung the alien captain's body from the rafters of Feathered Shield's death chamber.

  "When it was over, the forest people conferred. They knew that aliens still lived beyond the edge of the forest. But would they now attack and did they also had the ability to draw fire from the sky? The people decided to remain as they were, scattered among the trees where the fire could not see them. They decided never to return again to their great cities. And they never did."

  There was a moment of silence in the darkened chamber as Malie finished her story. Then the Commodore spoke. "And the sacred books the priests rescued from the lost city were brought here for safekeeping?"

  "Yes. Feathered Shield says you may do with them what you will if only you will recover his skin. Without it he can never truly die."

  "How many books are there?"

  "Eleven."

  "Well, I should really see them first, but I'm a pushover for a sad story. You tell Feathered Shield it's a deal. As one warrior to another, if his skin is still around, I'll find it and bring it to him."

  "And since your serpent warriors have discovered it already," Malie said, "Feathered Shield will show you the alien machine that he killed." She nodded to Erol who was sitting on the floor beside the skeleton's stone bench. He reached beneath it and withdrew something. The others pressed cautiously nearer to see what it was.

  A mummified hand severed at the wrist still gripped the handle of a square metallic box. A stone ax was sunk deep inside the mechanism.

  The Commodore whistled. "A 500-year-old calldown box. They were operating their ship by remote control, using the fusion exhaust to fry their enemies. Without this, they couldn't bring it out of orbit. They were marooned here forever. No wonder its loss took the fight out of them."

  Chapter 12