The Kar-Chee Reign (19 page)

Before them, the rim was wet. Behind them, the rim was dry.

The two men reached up their hands and arms, took hold, and took the last few steps upward.

The rail itself was no simple single bar of metal curved into a circle. It received part of the engine carriage deep within itself and retained it as the engine or engines crept around with deliberation and slow determination. Liam crept up himself as close behind the retreating third as he could. He peered within, and seemed to see the glint of wheels…. He thrust his hand within the bosom of his shirt, pulled it out. Something flashed with a blue glint of fire. Liam’s, hand, moving dreadfully carefully, vanished within the continuous cavity which was the inside of the railing. It emerged. He repeated the gesture. Again. Again. Again. At last his hand groped within his shirt and found nothing. He grunted then descended. Lors took his place.

The engine had moved only a few inches in this time.

Blue fire flashed again, flashed many times. There remained nothing more inside of Lors’ shirt, either. He got down from the rail. And now, alternately moving more quickly than they had in going up and, caution overcoming fear, more slowly, they made their way down and across. Once only, before taking earth, they allowed themselves one last glimpse into the abyss. But they could discern no new things: the three black-hulled spaceships, the tiny dots which were the swarming Kar-chee, the dull flaring-flickering glow as the mysterious gateways into the subcavernous cavern were briefly opened and quickly closed — all was as before.

And of Rickar himself they could see nothing.

“Here we go,” Liam said, pointing to an opening in the rock wall.

“That’s not the way we came in,” Lors said.

“Well, that’s the way we’re going to go out,” Liam answered, making his way toward it. “If we get to go out at all, that is…. You coming?”

“Don’t move so slowly,” said Lors.

J
OW WIPED
sweating forehead with his forearm and looked at his son. “We’ve been doing nothing but make boats,” he said, partly annoyed, partly alarmed … and not a little confused. “And for what, if not to put them on the water and ourselves inside of them? Now you come along and tell us, Stay
away
from the water!”

“I’ve told you good reason for it, haven’t I? — Popa, there isn’t much time.
There isn’t much time!”

His father gave a deep sigh. Then he said, “I’d better believe you. Come on, then, boy!” He leaped to his feet, seized a length of wood which was only partly fashioned into a paddle, and rushed across to where the great wooden gong hung from the branch of a tree. He struck it once … twice … a third time.
Attention!
All around, all work ceased, all looked up, started rising to their feet. Fishermen heard it along the shore and commenced pulling in their nets. Women gathering shellfish in the shallow coves straightened up and began moving in toward shore. Boatmen about to launch another new canoe at the beach hesitated, slid it back a bit … listened. Everyone listened.

Jow struck the echoing wood once-twice, quite quickly. He sounded the double-note again. Again he brought down the improvised gongstick; and again.
Doom-doom … doom-doom … doom-doom…
.

Danger!

The fishermen froze, a shell-gatherer stopped with one foot in the air, the canoe-launchers rolled their eyes at one another and did not otherwise move. They waited. Waited.

Doom-doom … doom-doom … doom-doom…
.

Danger!

Then the great hollow sounding-board gave forth three slow notes. And another three. And another three. Then once again it sounded Danger; then once again three slow notes and for a third time three slow notes. Then it fell silent. Jow, Tom, the boatbuilders, the fishermen, the shell-gatherers, the canoe-launchers, treecutters, old men, children — everyone and everyone — understood the meaning of the last signal.

The hills…
.

The hills…
.

The hills…
.

The net lay where it had been dropped. The basket floated and bobbed about and the shellfish began to be dimly aware that they were in water once again, the canoe lay on its side and was aware of nothing. A pot boiled over and quenched the untended fire. A parrot called out querulously, cocked its head at the silence, finally flew off, muttering.

• • •

The day was unusually clear. Away and away, off in the Uplands, three men who had gone out to scout for guanaco turned aside from their quest a moment and glanced below. After a moment one of them spoke.

“I see many persons moving very fast,” said Nephi.

“Many, many persons, moving very, very fast,” said Lehi. He paused, shaded his eyes, frowned. “And also, he said, “Many, many dragons also,” he said. “many, many dragons also moving very, very fast. I fear that they will catch and destroy the persons.”

“Only maybe not,” said Moroni.

From the Rowan homesite the retreat to the hills had proceeded somewhat less precipitately, it being rather more removed from the water than Jow’s place was. Not many people, in fact, were there — some had gone to join Jow’s people and some had gone to join the Knowers. But old Ren and his wife were there, and their son Carlo and his family, and several others.

Ren seemed very old, very uncertain. Indeed, if his wife had not joined with her sons in pulling him onto this feet, he might not have moved at all.

“Up, up, Popa!” cried Duro. “Haven’t you heard what I’ve been saying? Don’t you believe me?”

His father did not resist, but neither did he much cooperate. “I don’t know….” he groaned, allowing himself to be pushed along. He reached out and grasped the pannier of a loaded llama, perhaps not so much for physical support as for the comfort of a familiar object. “I don’t know … I suppose it will make no difference…. Here, there … today, tomorrow…. What does it matter? Mmm…. It doesn’t matter.”

The land had begun perceptibly to slant upward and they could see Mount Tihuaco for once all free of cloud, when they heard in the middle distance the cry of a questing dragon. Old Ren sucked his breath in between his teeth, fearfully, and trembled.

Duro took his arm, pressed him gently, firmly forward. “It’s far away, Popa,” he said, reassuringly. “And it’s certainly not after us.” The small caravan continued.

But when they heard the second dragon, and the third, and then the fourth, each nearer, and each from a different angle, Carlo voiced the inescapable conclusion: “Duro, they may or not be after us, but they seem bound to cut across our path. We’d better leave our path — “As if to confirm or to confound him then, it seemed as though every dragon in the world gave voice, from everywhere and all about, a pandemonium of hissing, roaring, bellowing. The old woman gave a little cry of fear and one of the babies started wailing.

Duro seized the lead llama and turned it at right angles to the path and pulled it along after him. The beast protested but it obeyed, and the other ones followed after. Duro, for the moment, was torn between the need to aid his trembling old father and his brother Carlo, whose lame leg was not well-suited for tripping through undergrowth and climbing steep inclines.

It was Ren who made the decision for them. “Help your brother, then,” he said. His face was suddenly resolute.

“They may catch up with us, but we’ll give them a chase before they do!”

Through bushes and thickets which tore at their legs and stones which tore at their feet, bent over and clutching at any support, between boulders which barely allowed the laden llamas to pass, the party went on, went up, and finally reached a bare place which allowed them to turn once again onto still upward-slanting but somewhat more level land; and here, as though ordered to, they all looked below….

The dragons were moving in somewhat broken but clearly purposeful formation, in an irregular line at an angle of forty-five degrees. Now and then one of them reared up and stretched its neck and looked all about, its long and bifurcated tongue flashing as it flickered in and out to taste the air, and the unobscured sunlight glittered many colors from the faceted eyes. Fortunately, their change of route had taken them out of the direct line of the dragon advance; fortunately, too, the wind was in their favor.

And then the ground trembled and shook. “Down!” cried Duro. “Down, down, everybody!”

The noise came rolling, thundering, roaring. The earth fell away beneath them, rose up and struck them, tossed them to and fro. Then, for a moment, all was still. Carlo gasped, pointed out to sea….

In its place, for a long, long, very long way, was land which none had ever seen before. And beyond that was a great whirlpool. There were three sudden, sharp thunderclaps behind them. They turned just in time to see Mount Tihuaco blow off its top and vanish from their sight behind black clouds through which the lightnings which had slept in the earth now flickered and blazed like the tongues of giant dragons. They saw a vast plateau dissolve before their eyes and a valley vanish, shattered like a board whose back has been broken against a rock. Then onrolling dust and darkness veiled all of this from them and, crawling toward each other for a comfort which was more than spacious safety, they looked out again toward where the sea had been, and there they saw that which made them — breathless as they were and dumbstruck as they had been — cry out, less at that moment in fright than in utter wonder: for the waters of the ocean, as though piled and heaped high upon themselves by a colossal hand, now came rolling and rushing and galloping in to reclaim their lost terrains once more.

In the momentary silence of the earth and the volcano they could hear very clearly the roaring of the on-rushing, in-striding, all-devouring sea.

• • •

Liam and those with him had taken refuge on a gaunt and treeless ridge. He recapitulated it all in his mind. The triple engine so slowly and deliberately inching its way ponderously around the inner rim of the dome. He and those at the Knowers’ camp trying to reach refuge in the heights of land. Not all of those at the Knowers’ camp, though, for — He urging that no one run and thus exhaust himself before reaching safety, but to proceed at a rapid walk. And the engines below racheting their slow, slow way around the inside of the dome. The first intimation that the Kar-chee, forgetting nothing, forgiving nothing, were intent both on their work of repairs below in the pit and on their work of punishment here on the surface via the dragons. The dragons relentlessly advancing. The engines relentlessly circumambulating. And then, before sight, before sound, the first forewarning quiver of the ground.

The engines, returning on their circuit around the track, had at last reached and touched and crushed the first of the blue fireheads.

Immediately, the earth shaking …

Sliding …

Trembling …

The first detonation setting off the second … the third … Explosion upon explosion there below —

Below, the Kar-chee trying to flee….

Above, the dome, all repairs now annulled and more than merely that, the dome cracked and riven and shattered, and above the dome the tremendous pressure of the ocean no longer in the least restrained — the dome crushed forever, the ocean falling in —

The pressure of the air alone in that first second as it was compressed by the incoming water behind it must have killed them all and swept them and crushed them to the floor and wall and spread their ichorous blood and splashed and splattered it all about —

Only to be washed up and away in another second, and all their works, their engines, their great black-hulled ships crushed and twisted as the sea came thundering, rolling, twisting in, air as heavy as a wall of rock rushing into every tunnel and corridor and killing and expelling any Kar-chee found there.

And Rickar? Had he been still then alive? Poor Rickar —

The pit become one gigantic whirlpool and the waters of his maelstrom forcing their way down into the subcavernous cavern-way which, hot and steamy and lit with flaring light led — where?

When Mount Tihuaco erupted, Liam knew where.

The sea receded, made contact with that underground river of lava, that molten lake so deep beneath sea and earth alike, turned it into steam with a sound there was no one to hear, a sound which must have been at first like the hissing and then like the roaring and bellowing of a hundred million dragons —

Sea and Earth locked in violent embrace, spending their spasms, crying out, threshing and writhing and trembling. A moment quiescent. And then the sea cannonading in upon and against and over the land, climbing higher and higher and higher and higher —

The land shaking in every limb but holding, finally, firm, and so finally casting off the sea, casting it back …

The land lying spent and lacerated and bleeding and weary.

• • •

There were those who were never seen again, living or dead, and so had to be assumed to have perished in the destruction. Of those who rejected Mother Nor’s counsels as a betrayal of the true and pure doctrines as preached by Gaspar and by Lej — rejecting, too, the very evidence of their dead elders’ flayed hides as mere deceitful phantoms — and who in the face of all warning launched their arks and put out to sea, defiantly: of them no conclusive trace was ever found, either. Shattered timbers which washed eventually ashore, and shattered bodies as well, might as well have belonged to the arks un-launched and to those who had sought refuge in the heights of land but had not found it before the sea had found them.

It was days before the last reaction and counter-reaction subsided; weeks before anything resembling coherence returned to human life. But eventually most of those who survived were found by Liam’s messengers and most of these attended at the great council which he summoned. It followed the pattern of preceedings which he had laid down for it — a recapitulation of all which was known of the suffering of mankind at the hands of the Devils and the helplessness of mankind before the superior strength of the Devils began the talk; Liam delivered it. He spoke of how he had been among the first of men to resist the Devils in this age and of his first battle against them in Britland and of how he had led the bravest of the brave therefrom unto this land; and Cerry confirmed this, her eloquence undiminished by her recalling that this had not been precisely the way things had occurred in every particular….