Vault of the Ages (4 page)

“They aren’t so terrible,” whispered Owl. “They’re people just like us—not very many of them, either. I don’t see any devils or ghosts.”

“Have the old stories lied?” wondered Tom.

“Maybe,” said Carl. He was too unsure of his own thoughts to go on.

Ronwy led them to his own dwelling, a long room with high ceilings on the first story of an ancient tower. There was a marble floor, Carl saw wonderingly, and some of the old dishes and glasses and metal ornaments stood on the crude wooden tables of this age. Had the world really sunk so far from greatness?

Ronwy lit candles, chasing the gloom back into the corners, and motioned them to chairs. “Be seated,” he said. “My servants will take care of your horses and bring food shortly. I’m glad of your company. My wife is long dead and my sons are grown men and it’s lonesome here. You must tell me what is going on in the Dales.”

Tom shivered in the evening chill and Ronwy began to stoke the fireplace. It had been built in later days, with the chimney going up
through a hole in the cracked ceiling. “In the ancient time,” said the Chief, “there was always warmth in here, without fire; and if you wanted light, it came from little glass balls which only had to be touched.”

Carl looked at the table beside his chair. A book lay on it, and he picked it up and leafed through the yellowed pages with awe in him.

“Do you know what that is?” asked Ronwy.

“It’s called a book,” said Carl. “The High Doctor in Dalestown has a few.”

“Can you read?”

“Yes, sir, and write too. I’m the Chief’s son, so I had to learn. We sometimes send letters—” Carl puzzled over the words before him. “But this doesn’t make sense!”

“It’s a physics text,” answered Ronwy. “It explains—well—how the ancients did some of their magic.” He smiled sadly. “I’m afraid it doesn’t mean much to me either.”

A serving-woman brought dishes of food and the boys attacked it hungrily. Afterward they sat and talked of many things until Ronwy showed them to bed.

He liked the City, Carl decided as he lay waiting for sleep to come. It was hard to believe in this quiet place that war and death waited outside. But he remembered grimly that the Lann had hunted him to the very edge of the tabooed zone. The witch-folk wouldn’t let him stay long here, in spite of Ronwy—and the Lann swords would be waiting, sharp and hungry, for him to come out again.

I
N THE
morning, at breakfast, Ronwy told the boys: “I will gather the men of the City in council today and try to get them to vote for making the things you need. These northern invaders are a savage people, and the Dalesmen have always been our friends,” His smile was a little bitter. “Or as nearly our friends as we outcasts have.”

“Where is the meeting held?” asked Tom.

“In the great hall down the street,” said Ronwy. “But by our law, no outsiders may attend such councils, so you might as well explore the City today. If you aren’t afraid of ghosts and devils—and I, in all my life here, have never met any—you should be interested.”

“The City!” Carl’s heart thudded with sudden excitement. The City, the City, the wonderful magic City—
he
would be roaming through it!

“Be careful, though,” said Ronwy. “There are many old pits and other dangerous places hidden by brush and rubble. Snakes are not unknown either. I will see you here again in the evening.”

Taking some bread and meat along for lunch, Carl and his friends wandered outside and down the streets. Whatever fear they had was soon lost in the marvel of it all; but a great awe, tinged with the sorrow of a world’s loss, took its place.

The witch-folk were about their daily business, sullenly ignoring
the strangers. Women cooked and spun and tended babies. Children scrambled through empty houses and over great heaps of rubble, or sat listening to the words of an old teacher sitting under a tree. Men were doing their various tasks. Some worked in the little gardens planted in open spaces, some were in smithies and carpenter shops, some drove wagonloads of goods down wide avenues which must have carried more traffic in the old days than Carl could imagine. The boy was struck afresh by the pitiful smallness of this life, huddled in the vast wreck of its godlike ancestors, puzzling dimly over things it could never understand—much less rebuild. He sighed.

A great gong boomed solemnly down the air, echoing from wall to wall. It was Ronwy’s first summons, telling the witch-men that a council would meet in the afternoon.

“Look, Carl. Look up there!”

The Chief’s son craned his neck as Owl pointed. Up the sheer wall of an ancient tower, up, up,
up,
unbelievably far up. The stories said these buildings had been called skyscrapers, and indeed, thought Carl wildly, their heights seemed to storm the heavens.

The scarred brick facing was gone after the first few stories, and only a skeleton of giant rust-red girders was left above, a dark net of emptiness through which the wind piped its mournful song. Clambering around on those mighty ribs were the tiny forms of men. The sound of their hammers and chisels drifted faintly down to the boys, and now and then the flame of a crude blowtorch would wink like a star caught in the steel net. The heavy ropes of a block and tackle reached from the heights down to the weed-grown street.

“What are they doing?” whispered Tom.

“They’re tearing it down,” said Carl, very softly. “Piece by piece, they’re ripping out the steel to sell to the tribes.” A shivering wind rippled about his words and blew them down the hollow canyon of the avenue.

There was a huge sadness in it—the little men of today, gnawing apart the mighty works they no longer understood. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, what did it matter? Nothing would be left, nothing but rubble and waving grass and the wild dogs howling where men had once lived.

Sorrow wrestled in Carl with a slowly gathering anger. It was wrong, it was wrong. The ancient wisdom was
not
accursed! Men should be trying to learn it and use it to rebuild—not let time and the
witch-folk eat it away. Already a priceless heritage was gone; if this greed and ignorance were not halted, nothing would be left for the future.

His gloom deepened as the three prowled further. So little remained. The buildings were gutted long ago. Nothing remained but empty shells and the clumsy things of today’s dwellers. Beyond this central part where the people lived, everything had simply been stripped of metal and left to crumble. The forest had grown far into the town.

Owl would not be stopped from climbing several stories up one of the towers, and Tom and Carl followed him. From that windy height they could look miles over the dead City and the hills and woods beyond. To the north a broad river ran through the toppled ruin of a great bridge. Today, thought Carl bleakly, they had only a couple of wooden scows for getting over. He looked south too, after some sign of the Lann, but could see only waving, sunlit green of trees. They were waiting, though. They were waiting.

It was nearly noon when the boys found the vault which was to mean so much to them. They were exploring the southern edge of the inhabited section, skirting a wall of bush and young trees that screened off the long low sides of caved-in buildings, when Tom pointed and cried, “What’s that?”

Carl approached the thing gingerly, afraid in spite of himself. A pole stuck in the ground bore the skull of a horse—a common sign to keep off evil spirits. Beyond this were the two sides of a house otherwise fallen to heaps of brick and glass. At the rear of those parallel walls was a curious gray object like nothing he had seen before.

“It’s magic,” said Tom, holding fast to his lucky charm. “The witches put up that sign because they’re afraid of whatever it is.”

“Ronwy said there weren’t any ghosts here,” replied Owl stanchly. “He ought to know.”

Carl stood for a moment thinking. In spite of having no great faith in the old stories of evil, he could not keep his heart from mumping. The thing brooding there in the hot, white sunlight was of the unknown. But—it was that fear which had kept men from learning what their ancestors had to teach. “Come on,” he said swiftly, before he could have time to get really frightened. “Let’s go see.”

“Maybe—” Tom licked his lips, then tossed his red head. “All right! I’m not scared either.”

“Not much, anyway,” said Owl.

They moved carefully through the grass-grown mounds of rubble, poking ahead with Tom’s spear in case of snakes, until they were at the rear of the old house. Then they stood for a long time staring at the mystery.

It was a concrete block, about ten feet square and seven feet high, with a door of age-eaten bronze in the front. There were letters engraved in the gray cement above the door, and Carl spelled them slowly out:

TIME VAULT

“What’s a vault?” asked Tom.

“It’s a place where you keep things,” said Carl.

“But you can’t keep time,” said Owl. “Time’s not a thing. It’s a—well—it’s
time.
Days and years.”

“That’s a very strong magic,” said Tom, his voice trembling a little. “Or else whoever made this was crazy. Let’s go.”

“I wonder—that door—” Carl pushed against the heavy green metal. It creaked slowly open, and he saw concrete steps leading down into a great darkness.

“You boys! Get away!”

The boys whirled, and saw a witch-man standing just outside the pole. He held a drawn bow in his hands, the arrow pointing at them, and his angry face made it plain that he meant business.

“Come out!” he shouted. “It’s forbidden!”

Carl and his friends scrambled back, secretly a little glad to be ordered from the vault. “I’m sorry,” said Carl. “We didn’t know.”

“If you weren’t guests, I’d kill you,” said the witch-man. “That place is taboo. It’s full of black magic.”

“How do you know, if you can’t go in?” asked Owl impudently.

“People have been in there,” spat the man. “It’s full of machines and books and things. The same black magic that brought the Doom. We don’t want it to get loose again.”

He watched them go down the street and muttered charms against the devils in the vault.

“I’m sorry,” said Ronwy, when the boys returned to his house in the evening. “My folk are afraid to deal with anyone till they see
how this war with the Lann comes out. I couldn’t convince them otherwise. And they said you could stay here only three more nights. If the enemy hasn’t given up by then, you’ll have to try sneaking past them.”

Carl nodded absently, too full of the day’s discoveries to think of his own danger right away. He had to talk to someone, and Ronwy’s wise blue gaze invited faith.

Carl spilled out the story of what he had seen and thought, and Ronwy tugged his white beard and smiled sadly.

“I’ve spent my life reading the old histories and other books we’ve found, and thinking about them,” he said. “I believe I know what the Doom really was.”

“There was a war,” said Tom eagerly.

“Yes. The tribes—they called them nations—were much bigger then. This whole land, farther than any man has traveled today, was owned by one nation called America, and there were other lands too—some of them even across the sea. They had many wars and were very cruel, destroying whole cities from the air and laying the country waste. Finally, one great war ruined so many cities and machines, and killed so many people, that things couldn’t go on. There was plague and famine. By that time, too, so much of the land had been used up that people couldn’t go back to a simple life in the country, so many of them starved to death; and the others fought over what was left, bringing themselves still lower. Finally only a few remained and the land could feed them, so things got better after a while. But there were those who believed the old machines and powers had brought this evil to pass. If men hadn’t had machines that ran over the ground, and sailed, and flew, and destroyed, they wouldn’t have been able to hurt each other so much. These people convinced the others that the old wisdom—science, they called it—was bad and should be forbidden. Since very few were left who even understood science, it was easy to kill them or make them keep still.

“That was about five hundred years ago. Since then, the forests and the soil have come back and more people can live off the land than could right after the Doom. We have rebuilt until we live as you see today. But because of the taboos and the fear, we have not gone on to rebuild all that our ancestors had.”

Carl nodded slowly. “I thought it was something like that,” he said.

“But maybe the taboos are right,” said Tom. “If it weren’t for
the—the science, there couldn’t have been the Doom and all the suffering.”

“Neither could there have been many good things,” answered Ronwy. “The ancients were not afraid of smallpox and the coughing sickness and other diseases which plague us today, because they had conquered them through science. Men lived in a plenty we cannot imagine today, and they had so much to do and see and think about that they were like gods. They lived longer and happier lives than we. Drought in one place did not mean that the people starved, for they could bring food from somewhere else in the world. The cold weather which has driven the Lann south against the Dales would not have mattered to them. Oh, there was so much they did, and so much they were about to do…

“Yes, they were cruel and foolish and brought the Doom on themselves. But why can we not learn from their mistakes? Why can we not use their science to live as they did, and at the same time be kinder and wiser? The world today is a world of want, and therefore a world of war; but we could build a future in which there was no hunger, no fear, no battle against man and nature. Think it over, boys! Think it over!”

Carl woke instantly at the touch on his shoulder and sat up in bed. Gloom of night filled the chamber, but he could dimly see the City Chief’s tall form bending over him.

“What is it?” he breathed, fumbling for the dagger he kept under his pillow.

“Uh—ugh—
whoof!”
Tom and Owl stirred in the double bed they shared and sat up, blinking into the night. Carl saw them as deeper shadows in the slowly stirring murk.