Savage Bride

Chapter Eighteen

The phantom tribesmen and their captives were going up the mountain now like figures in a dream. And he was one of them. Awake in that dream, yet unable to escape from it. They were going up the way that he and she had ridden so many times in the morning, up toward the spring, up toward the eventual cleft that she had once yearned so to attain.

They went single file, heads low, wending in a long serpentine procession under the night sky. The sky was dark, but the mountainside was white as borax under the starlight, and its sheen was strong enough and clear enough to reveal every changing play of muscle on their naked backs as they went laboring upward, to seam their sculpturesque spinal indentations with fluxing shadow lines. They were so photographically realistic to his fear-taut eyes, they were so unbelievable to his logic-demanding mind. They should have thinned out, faded away in the starlight; instead little stones and pebbles rocked uneasily under their tread, clods of earth were dislodged by their substantial passage and fell back to rest again.

They moved with the terrible, grim silence all war parties afoot had once had, in the days before the wheel was invented and war became explosive. Each one stepped in the same place and along the same way the one before him had trod, with never a variation, never an overlap. A little low-clinging dust spurted out at the sides of their course, like foam tracing backward from the prow of a ship.

The whole thing was horror incarnate. He was gorging on horror. Digesting it, sweating it. But horror had a central point, a focus. Horror wasn’t this long line of softly padding apparitions in whose midst he was being towed along. Horror wasn’t the binding of his hands behind his back. Horror wasn’t the blows he received every time he faltered or tried to get out of line. Horror wasn’t any of those things.

Horror was that palanquin swaying up ahead, and what it held in it. Borne shoulder-high at the very head of the procession, so that even this far back the starlight showed him the white form, the oblivious head nestled within it. A head that did not look back to see where he was. A head that held no thought of him, that did not know him any more. A form that sat content, in passive acceptance of its journeying and of its destination.

That was horror, for him. And every time he looked up there, he groaned.

They were clever. A shrewd, primeval intelligence directed these forays. There were no torches to light their way, to look from a distance like fireflies climbing up the mountainside and betray them to the enemy civilization below and behind them in the lowlands. They hadn’t fired the house, either. When it was come upon again, it would be as it had been last; untouched, unaltered. Only empty. Nothing to show what had happened. Only the stars would know.

A voice suddenly called out to him in English. It came from farther back, from somewhere at the very end of the long, toiling line. A hoarse voice, broken, frightened, just as he knew his own would be if he were to use it like that, rawly naked against the night. English; he’d never known before how beautiful one’s mother tongue could be. He’d never known how much he loved it. It must be hell, he thought, to die and not hear English any more. That must be worse than the fact of death itself.

The call was: “Jones! Jones! Where have they got my little girl? What have they done with Chris?”

And then, before he could answer, he could already hear the vicious blows falling, beating the voice quiet, smothering it to extinction. He knew if he spoke back, that was what he’d get too.

He braced himself, drew in his breath, and let go into the night.

“She’s up front, Mai. They’ve got her by — by that thing they’re carrying. She’s fastened to it, walking along beside it.”

The blows came down like rain — tough, leathery rain — and he went down first on one knee, then on both, then rolled over, but they kept following him like nettles clinging to him. The first few he could hold out against, but the ones that followed added their own pain to the pain of the first, until there was too much pain all at one time, and his voice seemed to break from him in shrill outcry, not through his mouth alone, but at every flaming, stinging pore.

He was dragged erect, thrust forward again, stuffed back into the long line, floundering at first like a weighted sack that threatens to fall first on this side, then on that, until at last he had steadied himself, regained the rhythm of the interlocking, piston-like ascent. He was conscious through it all of only one main thing: That form up there aloft had not shifted, that serenely held head had not turned to look back at the sound of his cries in the aboriginal night.

He groaned deep down inside him, but it wasn’t from the blows he’d just had.

They were traveling steadily upward to meet the sun, which was coming up toward them unseen on the other side of the mountains. The sky along their crests was paling to an electric blue, bright against the eyes. It was like looking at a sheet of smooth gas flame, spread out in curtain form. They began to throw shadows on the ground, the long line of them, where there had been only even darkness before.

Day was coming between two centuries. Breaking on the mountaintop, midway between two ages. And these people in whose hands he was were hurrying back to regain their own, before the day came.

His eyes centered on the heel of the individual directly before him. Coppery red; rising, falling, rising, falling. It had blood on it. It was alive. It left an impress. It was real. Where had it come from? Where was it leading him to?

They had entered the cleft now, that secretive tuck in the living rock flesh of the mountain along which he had followed Mitty that day to where she stood wreathed by smoke, signaling to the unburied past. Her palanquin for a while skimmed the surface of the ground — or seemed to — the bearers under it hidden by the cleft in which they trod. It was like a skiff or boat sailing on solidified waves of rocky earth. The top of an occasional feather cropped up before or behind it. The figure in it was motionless as a doll; motionless as the living idol it had been transmuted into. The sun, about to blaze upward into untrammeled space, was filling the air with golden motes now, like a sort of vaporized pollen.

Then suddenly the slow-coursing litter was submerged, sank from sight, as perpendicularly as if it had been sucked into quicksand. It had been ahead of him around a curve, so that he could mark its going at a tangent, as on a curving train one can sometimes see something ahead before one’s own car has breasted it.

When finally this turn, the last convolution of all along the trail they were following, had straightened out and was no more, he received for a moment a startling impression that the toiling line ahead of him was telescoping itself into nothingness, consuming itself individual by individual until soon there would be nothing left of it. For the mountain face, obliterating the cleft, rose squarely before them; no one was going up that surface, and yet the distance between himself and it kept lessening man by man.

But this was just for a moment, and because the shoulder before him impeded full perspective ahead. At second glance he discovered the palanquin standing empty and at a tilt on the upcurving ground to one side of the defile, with two members of the party who had detached themselves bending over it, rapidly dismantling it into its original components of staves and branches. Evidently they wished to leave no telltale vestige of it behind.

A few paces beyond them, marking the party’s actual extinction point, which had baffled him until now, a curious slab of rock, tapering, triangular, and looking almost planed in its smoothness of surface, rested upright against the frontal rise that blocked off further advance, that choked off the sunken defile. Beside it was its complement, a black chasm in the rock face, which matched it in every detail of proportioning, as though one had been pried away from the other. Which it obviously had. Into this needle-like fissure, little more than hip-wide, one by one the marauders blotted themselves out, lowering their heads to a point at which they could safely be trusted to pass through. Two of their number, larger and more powerful than the rest, stood waiting by the reversed slab or rock, to draw it around after them and seal the fissure up after the last of their cohorts had gone in. He balked instinctively as this terminus of light and of the known, this maw of the past and the unknown, crept up flush with him. It was not the fear of suffocation that gripped him, made him rigid with recalcitrance; it was rather the premonition of entering upon some totally different plane from this point on, of leaving the world behind in a sense even worse than that of physical death.

The heel before him that he had watched was gone now; a curtain of darkness fell over it. It was his turn now. He bucked and tried to bolt sideways. The tilt of the defile facing would have defeated him even had he been unhindered. He went up it two, three steps by sheer momentum, then started to fall back again, pulled down by gravity. A hand seized his bound arms, wrenching him back to his starting place. Another caught at his neck, forcing his head down low. He was propelled forward.

The lips of rock narrowed over him, sucked him in. Darkness.

For a little while, as he went stumbling on, propelled like that, there was a little ghostly light behind him, where the opening was; the memory of light, glinting feebly on the moist rock walls and chill rock floor of this tunnel passage.

Then suddenly it was blotted out, too suddenly for lengthening distance alone to have killed it. There was a grinding and hollow reverberation, back there where it had been, carried forward along the bore, and the entrance slab had been drawn into place, sealing the opening up.

A drop of sweat rolled down his face, chilled before it had even left his pores. The present was gone. The past had claimed him for its own.