The Kar-Chee Reign

III

A stock animal had already been killed and was in process of being eaten when Lors, Duro, the young guest Tom-small and the younger boys arrived back at the Rowan homesite. But there did not seem to be much pleasure taken in the eating by anyone. Lors wondered, shortly, why guards had not already been posted and the gates secured — or why everyone had not fled inland and upland — but before long this became clear enough, though it never became acceptable, to him.

They found guest Jow, a very dark-brown man with a fleece of curly hair, off in a corner with old Ren Rowan: now Jow talked, intently, and Ren gnawed on a piece of meat; now Ren expostulated as Jow bit into his own victual. They shook their heads, they waved their hands, they took each other by the arms and elbows and shoulders. But they spoke so low that no one else could hear a word of what they were saying.

But moods, of course, are as contagious as maladies. Jow may have bottled up whatever was on his mind en route to Rowen homesite, but he had not bottled it up any longer than it took to bring his mouth next to Ren’s ear. Ren, clearly, was not disposed to take the matter as something light or easy. The arrival of the young men and boys caught at once the attention of the two older men, and a curious mixture of relief and apprehension came over their seamed faces as they spoke almost at once.

“Did you see anything?”—from Ren.

“What did you see?”—from Jow.

But before Ren’s sons or Jow’s son could answer, one of the little boys burst out with, “We saw the Devils — we saw two Devils!” and broke into tears and sobs of pent-up fright. A moment’s stunned silence. Women and girls ready to laugh and dispel the tension, thinking that the two elders were talking of some matter, perhaps, of a threatened and serious feud: a love affair discountenanced for weighty reasons, a disputed inheritance, a man-slaughter or serious injury done in anger, a land-quarrel — all sufficient to justify the mood of secretive agitation. It was a mood they would be glad enough to lighten; the women and girls ready to laugh looked up and over at the older men’s faces—

And saw no amusement in them, not even justified annoyance at boyish babbling; but saw the muscles of Jow’s mouth and throat writhing as if he had been struck by an arrow, saw a look of sick dismay upon the face of Ren Rowan. And as though it was death’s approach made visible and the women and the girls began to wail and weep. A log of wood collapsed into its own embers in the fire and the sudden shower of sparks flaring outward and upward illuminated the scene of ignorant alarm and confusion and fright — children screaming, dogs jumping up and barking, babies awaking to add their contribution to the clamor—

“Enough of this!” shouted Jow, his huge voice felling the turmoil like an axe a tree.

And, “Women, be quiet,” Ren growled, standing up and showing the flat of his hand. Noise did not altogether cease but it went from a scream to a murmur. “Better,” he rumbled. “I’ll give you more Devil, otherwise, than you can use. — You: little Tino, put some meat in your mouth. The rest of you, too. Now — my sons and Jow’s son — and you, Carlo”—he beckoned over his eldest, a married man whose skilled hands made up for his bad leg—“come over here.” Rapidly he made a decision. This was no mere inter-family matter. “And all the men and older boys, too. All of you. Over here.”

Lamps were brought, shallow shells of oil or animal grease, and sticks were thrust hastily into the fire and then pulled out again to make torches. Flames flickered and flared, breaths were drawn noisily, and finally all were settled around the two elders.

“Now,” said old Ren once more. “You, Tom-small; what did you see?” He didn’t ask him to mind his voice didn’t carry past the male circle, but pitched his own low enough to get his point across.

Tom-small gave a feeble, bashful smile, but went on with what he had to say firmly enough. “We saw all the game had gone upland and we smelled a bad smell none of us knew and we saw two creatures that none of us knew. They were big. We came back, host Rowan.”

“Well told. Short. Anything to add, any of you?”

None had, until Jow, his face now expressionless, asked, “These two strange creatures — what did they look like?”

Attempts to describe them were made, but were not successful. Then Carlo, Ren’s oldest son, said, “May I, then? So… so look here…” He took up a stick, broke it with a snap, scratched in the dirt with the now-sharp point of it. “Did what you see… did it look like this? Or like this? Anything like this? Or like this? Think before you answer, and don’t say it did unless you are quite sure that it did… Eh?”

His brothers and the young guest drew in their breaths, hissing. They nodded, lips drawn back from their teeth. And Lors said, pointing, “One of them did look like that — just like that.” He pointed to Carlo’s first sketch-figure, of something thin and somewhat stooping, standing on four thin limbs, with two stout limbs folded aloft. “And the other was like this other, yes, except that in this picture it’s upright, running on two legs… and when we saw it, it was walking, walking on all fours…

“But it’s them, all right, Carl… It’s them. It’s them.”

And he asked the same question his father now asked, voice upon voice. “How did you know?”

The oldest brother said, “In one of the caves, far, far to the back, up through a crack in the upper part, is a chamber… I think there’s more, even beyond there, but I never dared to look past there… and only once, when I was a boy and playing a game and hiding, I found my way there. But no one else came after me and I grew frightened. I had my fire things with me and I made fire. What I drew here — that’s what I saw on the wall in that chamber. Someone had drawn them there, with lamp-black and green clay mixed with lamp-black. Of course, when I saw them, I was even more afraid than ever, and I got out as fast as I was able. I even left my fire things there. They may still be in there, for all I know… Anyway, the second I saw those drawings, I felt in my heart that they had to be Devils. It was a long time ago and I never told anyone, but I’ve dreamed of them so often I never forgot them.”

All was so quiet upon the finish of his words that they could hear one of the llamas protesting in the stock pens. And old Ren said, “Well, now… You saw paintings when you were a boy, in a sort of secret, side-room in one of the caves; and you felt in your heart they must be Devils. Now, today, your younger brothers and some more young ones, they saw — seems clear enough, seems to be true enough — they saw, alive, what you saw drawn. And Tino, he said that what you saw was Devils. So. It seems to me that it’s natural enough, whenever a boy sees something strange and new and frightening, for him to call it Devil. But, after all, we don’t know what these creatures really are. Fear is easily come by.

“None of you, not even guest Jow, are old enough to remember my rogue uncle, Arno. Everyone was in fear of him, and largely it was because of a tale that nights, when it pleased him, he’d go and change his body into the shape of what they called a half-Devil, a sort of giant cat, all spotted, do you see. I never believed it, never believed any of it. Whichever body he was to die in, they said, he’d turn into the other. So. When news was brought me that he’d died at last, in the caves there, down I went; found him dead enough, and one of his women with him — a miserable thing, she was, fit for him, but she was loyal at least.

“ ‘Did he die as a man?’ I asked her.

“ ‘As a man,’ she said.

“ ‘And has he changed his shape yet?’ I asked her.

“ ‘Not yet,’ she said.

“So I had him brought out and we watched him, someone always watching him, by day and by night, till he began to moulder. Then I told them and showed them how the tale was nothing but a tale, and we buried him. So. Time passed. Years. And once, looking in some old bales and boxes from his time, Rogue Arno’s, I’ll tell you what it was I came across — it was a pelt, you see, the skin of a sort of giant cat, all spotted. Never I saw such a thing alive, nor don’t know where or when it lived or died. But it was not a Devil, any more than Arno was. It was a strange thing, and easy to fear. He knew it, he dressed himself with it by nights, played upon that fear…”

The words of old Ren, slowly, softly, calmly spoken, had gradually softened and calmed the mood of most of his listeners. But they had not calmed Jow, who said, shaking fleecy head, “You don’t mean us to think, host Ren, that whoever drew those pictures in the cave, and our boys, today — you don’t mean to have us think that what they saw were men? Men who put on strange hides to frighten us?”

Ren said, “I don’t know. I didn’t see them. The boys today didn’t see them close, either. I know this: for one thing, if a picture of them was made at the time or before the time that Carl was a boy, then the things the pictures were drawn of were either here then or had been here before then. Nothing happened then to make us fear them, so why should we fear them now? There are, of course there are, strange creatures on land and sea. What of it?”

Jow had vigorous ideas as to what of it. The land they lived in, he pointed out, was an island, and they knew of — though they had not themselves visited them — other islands to the south and east. But they all knew well enough that this land and those other lands had once formed one great land, long ago, before (he used the common speech-figure which meant long, long ago)—“before the Devils came.”

“What did they do when they came?” Jow asked. “Didn’t they split the great land apart? Didn’t they sink most of it? Didn’t they hold it under the water to kill the folk, the way you’d hold a kitten under to kill it? No, Ren. No! You say that fear comes easy. True. But so does the fear of fear, I tell you. I’d rather be afraid for nothing, for then, by and by, we’ll find out it’s nothing — if it is nothing — than let danger slip up and find us unaware and unprepared. Wasn’t California sunk, too? Wasn’t the first Rowan my oldfather, too, as well as yours? Ren! Have you forgotten what it was that he said — the same thing as was said by the other oldparents already here:

“ ‘There is a thin Devil that has four limbs to walk with and two limbs to work with. And there is a thick Devil that walks on four limbs and runs on two: this is the thin Devil’s scout, spy, and dog. And the smell of each is strong, but the thin one’s stench is stronger. The thin Devil is all wicked mind and evil brain; the thick one is that, and teeth and claws as well. Flee before their coming: for the name of the one Devil is Kar-chee and the name of the other Devil is Dragon…’ ”

It was an old man, a net-maker in the days of his strength, and Jow’s near neighbor, who — restless from the thin sleep of old age — had gotten up groaning from his bed before dawn was more than a thin promise on the horizon. First he walked because he could not sleep, next he walked because he had in his mind a certain warm spring which he thought might relieve somewhat his aching bones. Then he walked because he decided he was hungrier than he was rheumatic and his intention was to return. And finally he walked and walked because he had gotten well lost. Then he saw what he had seen and hid half a day in terror and risked moving about only because it came to him at last that the terror of night is greater than the terror of day; and so he came upon Jow, off by himself inspecting his bee-hives.

Jow at first had inclined to disbelieve his frightened babblings, then sent him off home with strong advice to say nothing to anyone else. “I wasn’t convinced he was right,” Jow said later to old Ren; “but I wasn’t convinced he was wrong, either. So I thought I’d take advantage of your thatch-raising, late for that though it was, and come and talk to you about it.”

Now, his face taut and haggard in the fire- and torchlight, he said, “Flee… There is nothing else for us to do! Who can fight Devils? We must leave everything behind and sail to the other islands, Zonia or Aper or the others. If there is no wind, we must paddle. And if the people there will receive us as we received Rowan, then good — if not, we must fight them and take their land. We must—”

Ren sighed and gripped his friend’s knees. “Must. Jow… listen. ‘Who can fight Devils?’ No one. True enough. But how do you know for sure that we must fight? That we must flee? That the Devils are here to destroy either us or our land? Obviously they are here. Obviously they have been here before — but our land is still here. Isn’t it?”

Jow nodded, half-reluctant, half-reassured. “But… Ren… you know… lots of times I warn people against danger and they laugh and say, ‘Nothing has ever happened before.’ And I tell them… listen, Ren… I tell them: ‘Nothing ever happens until the first time it happens…!’ ”

This was so true as to require no comment. Ren therefore made none and went on, grave and calm as before, “It is dark now and we can do nothing. Stay with us, be our guests. And tomorrow you and I, Jow, you and I will see for ourselves whatever is to be seen. Our boys are good fellows, but they are only boys. Woman!” He got to his feet.

From beyond the fires came his wife’s voice. “Ren?”

“Our guests will stay the night. Get things ready for them.” The women visitors broke into louder talk, deploring face-saving… as the relieved note in their voices showed. They did not know what was wrong, but they accepted that they need not know until the men thought fit to tell them. Yet it was a long way back, they were tired, their younger children were sleeping, and they welcomed the invitation to stay.

In the night Lors awoke to find his father’s right hand on his shoulder, his father’s left hand over his mouth. No word was spoken as they slipped out into the chill night air, the drops of the first dew dripping like the lightest of rains from the trees; the very stars, huge and swollen with lights, seeming themselves to be swimming down upon the earth through a black and liquid sea of night. He followed Ren across the compound to the most distant fire-pit, and there sat down beside him. Warmth still arose in a faint mist. The father took a stick and brushed off the embankment of ashes and blew upon the coals; as they went from gray to red he placed a small twig on them. In the brief half-light, his face shown ruddy and haggard.

“Lors,” he said — and stopped. He swallowed.

“Popa?”

“Lors. Could… It is no disgrace to be mistaken…” His voice was a bare whisper. Lors leaned close to listen. “It would be about the wrongest thing possible to allow so many people to be frightened for an error… Or for a game… You would not — Lors? — is it not possible that you are not really sure that you did see what you say? Perhaps you jumped too quickly to conclusions. Perhaps—”

Lors put his hand on his father’s knee. “No, Popa. Don’t think that. It’s no game. It’s no error. We did see them. We saw the thing that Carlo drew. We did. We saw them.” His voice, despite his resolution that it would not, trembled. Not so much from fear of what he had seen as from his shock and grief at seeing and hearing his father so shaken. He gave a little sound of anguish as he heard his father moan at his reply, saw him rock back and forth.

“Popa — there were only two of them! Only two!”

Barely audibly, old Ren said, through the hand which covered his face, “There will be more. There will be more. There will be—”

Lors seized the hand and shook it. “Then we’ll do what Jow said — we’ll leave this land and go where they can’t find us!”

The hand came away from Ren’s face. His son felt the track of the tears upon it and, try as he would not to, began to weep, himself.

“Where is there a place where they can’t find us? And if we knew of such a place, how would we get there? In our fishing-canoes? They wouldn’t hold a hundredth-part of the people, boy. Are we to build more? Bark trees and wait for them to dry and cut them and hollow them and season them and prepare provisions — enough for who knows how long a voyage? Will they give us time? Or are we to try and make our escapes in boats of green wood and watch them founder under us? Jow didn’t think of this. He didn’t think!”

Ren wiped his face. “You see why, Lors? You see why you have to be wrong? Because even if there were the possibility of us all getting away, why? — what for? — to wait in some other island for the Devils to get around to coming for us? To spend the rest of our lives in that fear and then, if we die in our beds, to hand that fear down to our children like an inheritance?”

His son said, unsteadily, but not without courage, “But what’s the choice? Either we stay and fight, or we turn and we flee. What other choices are there?”

His father raked the ashes back upon the embers. His voice came from the darkness, thick and dull. “No choice. We can’t stay. We can’t escape. We can’t fight. We have no choices. None. None…” His voice died away. He did not move. Then, slowly, his head sank down upon his knees. But he moved no more than this. And he moved no more.

Lors stared. He swallowed. He wiped his nose with his hand. He could have sat, himself, or crouched, motionless for hours beside a game trail. But he could not sit still for this. It was horrible. Death was only a theory to him, and the deeds of Devils something he had merely heard of it. His mind could not encompass either his own destruction or the destruction of his land and family and friends. What tore at him now was the incredible and shocking spectacle of his father, that roof-pillar of strength, reduced to tears and to utter despair. This was intolerable. He jumped to his feet, filled with a childish urge to run away and run and run and stay away until he could come back to find everything in order once again, trouble forgotten. Even as he turned to set his feet, and even as he realized how useless and impossible this impulse was, the night vanished in a burst of rose-colored noise which ceased on the instant, leaving him blinded and deafened—

Again the blaze of ruddy light — his father’s face open and aghast and all the homesite — again the ear-shattering, mind-benumbing noise — Again the darkness and the thick, echoing silence.

From the house came the sound of a woman’s voice, a hooting, ululating, uncontrolled, almost sexual sound. And upon this breakthrough every conceivable human and animal noise followed. The people poured out of the house, stumbling, trampling, crying, calling, shouting, shrieking; children wailing, woman wailing, boys trying to assert manhood and courage but betrayed by breaking voices, men demanding to see the faces of their enemies—

“Earthquake!”

“Devils!”

“Attack!”

“Devils!”

“Raid!”

“Devils! Devils!”

“A volcano in the sea!”

“Wild men!”

But, louder, shriller, deeper, more often, more deeply felt because more deeply feared than any of these — again and again and again: “Devils! Devils! Devils!”

They fell upon their knees, fell and sprawled full-length, stumbled, were knocked down, and they bellowed like the beasts in the pens. And, looking up, they saw two trails of fire across the sky, greater than the greatest meteor, and again came the blast of light and the rose-flambeau of sound, and now, looking upward, in the instant brief as lightning-flash, they saw the huge black hulls of the Devil-ships as they wheeled—blaze! blast! — and circled—blast! blaze! — and wheeled — blazing! blasting! — inward, downward, turning, turning—

And vanished toward the south in one final smash of sight and sound and staying forever upon the seared eyes, only turning colors, on! off! as the astonished lids sprang down and up and down: blink, blank, red, black, hull, horror, chaos, Kar-chee, dragon, dark, fire, flame, burning light, Devils, Devils, death.

Daylight came at last, and when the morning mists had cleared away some strange disturbance in the air was seen toward the south, where the black sky-ships had gone.

This was the morning when Ren and Jow and the other men were to have gone to see for themselves the truth, if any, of the reports of the boys and the doddering oldfather.

They did not go.

Nobody went.

Nobody did anything.

Now and then a woman, movement automatic, perhaps more in response to habit or an aching breast, thrust her nipple into a tiny screaming mouth. Older children, not old enough to have quite succumbed as yet to the general paralysis of mind and body, either found food left over or went without. Now and then a groan or a sigh or whimper was heard, a rattling cough, a wordless and toneless murmur; nothing more. The wind spoke and the cattle complained, but nothing else. The very dogs were silent, scarcely bothering to crawl out of the sun. The very songbirds in their twig cages seemed to have caught the contagion and were silent.

It was close to noon when old Ren’s wife appeared in her doorway. She looked around, made a gesture of dreadful despair. Her hair hung in witchlocks, sluttishly about her pendulous cheeks. She walked with melting strides toward the tiny cages hanging under the eaves of thatch, one by one flung open the tiny doors. The little birds fluttered, but none fluttered out. She opened her mouth and breathed painfully. Then, as though each gesture cost her infinite effort and infinite agony, she reached her hand into every little pen and closed it around each bewildered creature and drew it out and flung it away from her. “Go,” she muttered. “Go… go…”

When the last of them had been released she looked around her once more; repeated her gesture of horror and hopelessness. For a moment only her expression changed to something approaching bewilderment and she shaded her eyes and peered as though looking for, as though missing something… someone… The moment did not long last. She melted back into her house. And all therein was silent.

Duro held his crossbow by the butt. He gazed, slack-mouthed, into space. Then his mouth closed, tightened, He swung forward on his knees and lifted the bow as though he were going to smash it into the ground.

Lors put his hand out. “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

The older brother’s face and hand and head did not move much, nor did his eyes. But Duro knew him well enough to understand that an answer existed and would be presently forthcoming. He sank back and waited.

“Listen,” Lors began after a long while. “When I was on my first overnight hunt, way out in the uplands,” he began, looking straight at his brother, no trace of condescension or rivalry in his voice: equal to equal, now; and Duro, for the first time since the trouble began, felt pleasure grow in his heart; “—you’ve heard me tell of that?”

Duro said he had. “But tell it again,” he said. The story was obviously intended to make a present point; besides, the hearkening to a story makes a pain to be forgotten (so the old proverb went).

A squall of snow, unseasonal and — peculiarly — driving downward from the middle upper ranges, had driven the hunting party even further up and out of their intended path. And up there in the clefts and rifts of the slope of Tihuaco they had come upon a hamlet of the dying and the dead and of the living-dead as well.

“The sickness had come on them,” Lors said, recollection making his mouth twist, “and it was still on them, so — you can imagine — we didn’t stay. But we stayed long enough for me to get the picture of it in my mind. Later on, hearing the older ones talk about it, I got it all clear and fixed. There’s no cure for the sickness — either you recover or you don’t. But those who were already sick just lay there as though they were already dead, and those who weren’t sick just lay there as though they already were. They could have left, but they didn’t. And not because they didn’t want to risk infecting others, either, because they never opened a mouth to warn us off when they heard and saw us coming. It wasn’t, either, that they stayed there to tend to the others, because we saw them begging for help and no one fetched them water.

“They just stayed and waited to die the way a rabbit does when it’s face to face with a big snake. It trembles but it doesn’t run. Even a rat will run or fight if it’s cornered.”

He paused and took a deep, shuddering breath.

“I saw Mia on my way out before,” he said. “She just lay against the wall and breathed… Yesterday you said I was in a hurry to get back and get on top of her. Well, I could have gotten on top of her right then and there and she wouldn’t have said No, Yes, or Oh, more. But it would’ve been like mounting a corpse.

“Is it like this everywhere, Duro? It must be. If even Popa and Moma have given up, then who hasn’t? They’re all just waiting to die. They seem to think they’re already dead.”

Duro’s head bent lower and lower. Then he lifted his hair out of his eyes as though it were very heavy, and said, “Who hasn’t? You haven’t. And I haven’t. Thanks for not letting me smash the bow. If there’s only one bolt left in all the world, then, brother, there’ll be one dead Devil.” And, just as Lors had made no stand of being older and in command, so Duro now made no stand of being younger and defiant. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” Their eyes met in perfect understanding. They had never been so close before. They would never again be as far apart as they had been.

“I don’t know what to tell you to do,” Lors said, softly. “I don’t know what you should do or what I should do. Something happened yesterday and something happened last night and something is happening today and probably they’re all connected.

“But I don’t know…

“And even if they are connected, I still don’t know… We heard our fill of oldfathers’ tales about Devils and big Devils and little Devils. What does it mean? Maybe no more than the ones about Arno Half-Devil — and there are still people who’d stake their privates on his changing into a giant cat in the night! What can I tell you to do? I don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong. I only know what I’m going to do.”

He got to his feet. Duro did the same. They both knew.

They hadn’t gone far when someone swung onto the trail beside them. It was Tom-small, but not the placid Tom-small of the day before. They exchanged looks. “You’re going south to see what’s there,” he said. It was a statement.

“Yes.”

“So am I.” That was a statement, too.

It did not fail to occur to them that if they were capable of smelling the dragon-Devils, the dragon-Devils might be equally capable of smelling them. The thing, then, was to keep the wind in their favor… but this was a figure of speech: they could not of course keep the wind, they had to keep with the wind. At the moment there was none discernable, and this gave them time to reflect on the other part of the equation, which was the matter of where the Devils, thick or thin, might now be.

“Maybe along the beach-coast,” Duro suggested. There they had seen them yesterday, after all. Lors pointed out that it was no mere disinterested desire to find the creatures which alone had brought them, all there, upon the trail.

“There’s a way down to the beach not far from here, at Goat Rock,” he said. “And that’s all the way, either up or down, from here on south, until you get to the caves… which is quite a ways.”

Duro didn’t see what he meant. “It’s no ways at all; we can walk it in an hour…”

“And suppose we get caught half-way? How long would it take us to run? We can’t sprout wings and fly, you know. And I wouldn’t want to have to try swimming, either.”

The point was conceded. Here and there, almost automatically, one or the other of them pointed out clumps of hair frayed against a tree; but no move was made or intended to pursue these signs of game. It was not venison that they were after now, descending the forest trails — indeed, none of them was quite sure what they were after. A sight of the strange creatures, to be sure… a safe sight, certainly. But then what? And after then, what? Such questions were equally unspoken and unanswered. Now and then, warily crossing open terrain, they felt the sun hot upon their heads and shoulders; but in short moments they were back in the shade once more. It soon became obvious that Lors was not intending to make for the beach by the nearest way, if at all. Duro and Tom-small said nothing; they followed. Few signs of life were observed, but now, so close to noon, when most live things favored rest and shade, was never a propitious time of day for such observations. Now and then a faint taste of the sea came on the light and intermittent breeze, or the familiar smell of sap and grass and rotting leaves; once, a stronger scent, a musky one, of some male creature’s harboring or staling. But these were of only negative significance. The wind — such wind as there was — was still toward them, and it carried no warning on it.

There was no river in the land worthy of the name, but there was a point within sighting from their route where within a short distance a number of streams joined to make what was called, as it ran coursing through the savannah, the Spate. Such was its noise that they were long in hearing the other one, and did not recognize it when they did. They slowed their gait, they moved more cautiously, they frowned in concentration… Logs, perhaps, thudding against each other or against rocks… logs perhaps escaped from woodcutters in the farther uplands, or perhaps intended by them to be thus moved downward… or trees, it might be, dislodged by the undercutting of some distant embankment by the eternal action of the streams…

Such notions did not long bemuse them, for, the Spate and the savannah coming suddenly and alike into sight, they saw far off and below down the gentle incline three huge black hulks pointing blunt snouts at the silent skies.

They rested there as the three points of a wide-based triangle and it seemed in that second that each one was an eyeless face from which protruded a long and rippling tongue. One rooted up rocks and earth and licked them along, one sucked up water, and one conveyed the mixture into a single black cube from which, it seemed, the rhythmic thudding came. It seemed to them that things moved in the open side of this cube, tall things, thin things, things with other things in their great claw-hands… it seemed… shock and the distance made semblance uncertain. The wind shifted.

The rank and alien odor struck them like a blow, so benumbing them that they looked all around ahead for the source before it occurred to them that it was against the crawling hairs of their napes and the backs of their heads that the breeze now blew. And therefore the dragon was behind them—

To cock and load and aim and fire a crossbow while lying on one’s back is probably not the most difficult thing in the world, but neither does it rank among the easiest. The dead and heavy tree limb still dangling from the breach in the branch was just within bow-shot. Lors’s bolt split the flap of bark; almost the instant the small sound of this reached them they saw the bulk of withered wood fall and saw the dust spiraling in the beam of sunlight, and then they heard the sound of the crash. Hard upon this, forgetful of harsh spikes of grass or roots or stones against their flesh as they embraced the ground, they heard another sound: a hiss, louder than the hiss of the largest serpent they could conjure fantasy of. They heard it so short a time that they might almost have imagined that they had imagined it, but even as the sound vanished in their ears they felt along the whole supine lengths of them the ground shudder (they felt it, did not hear it), saw the great green-black form move so delicately diagonally toward the place where the limb had fallen from the tree that although they could not see they could imagine with dreadful detail and probable truth how the grained webbing between each great toe would fold in as the foot was silently lifted and then expand as each great foot was silently, swiftly set down again.

Oblivious of pain or anything else but flight — instant flight! — they crawled upon their bellies backwards and sideways and vanished into the concealing covert of the thickets. Thorns tore at them and took toll, bushes resisted parting, but they pressed onward and away.

The Devil-dragon must have found the crossbow bolt — they afterward agreed on this — must, in that moment of sight, have understood everything: that there was nothing there of itself to draw a shot and even if there had been they would not have ventured to shoot at it so close to the alien encampment, and that therefore the bolt had been loosed for no other reason than to part the heavy branch and use the noise of its fall to draw away pursuit. Upon understanding came rage — at least rage; perhaps more — a signal, an alarm, an appeal—

— From behind came the hiss again, this time not cut short, and, after the air had ceased to quiver from the hiss, came a great burst of guttural sound, the coughing of a giant; and then noise for which no words existed for them. Roaring? Bellowing? Thundering? They had no need for names or words. They responded by the shrinking of their cullions and the swelling of their hearts and the cold sweat upon their skins. And by pressing on, writhing, sliding, ever away. Long after the noise behind them ceased they still had not dared rise up to run like men: and perhaps they owed to this that they were still live men.

And they did not rise to their feet until Duro saw before him the tumbled, fissured mass of rock like half-melted honeycomb, which he knew ran on and on and on, if not forever, at least for long enough for him to breath deep and know he would draw at least a several few breaths safely thereafter:

The caves!