Джеффри Ллойд - Liberator Of Jedd

One thing he was positive about — he would build himself a platform in a tree and he would sleep there.

Blade made a stick calendar and notched the days on it. His crude bow worked well enough at short range and he fletched his arrows with the obovate leaves of a tree he could not name. He made a spear and hardened the point in fire. He killed two more of the giant hares and an iguanalike creature, a miniature dragon whose belly flesh — the only part he could eat — tasted like chicken. In three days of trekking through the interminable dark forest he did not see a single bird. There was always the silence, vast and brooding, broken only by the sound of his passage, of his footsteps on the springy undermass of needles and leaves and rotten vines.

He built large fires every night and slept in trees, binding himself into a crotch or fork with vines so he would not tumble down.

Always the terrain rose in a gradual slant. A rough calculation told him that he had climbed some three thousand feet since leaving the cliff rim.

On the morning of the fourth day he was awakened by a harsh cawing, similar to that of crows in H-Dimension, but louder and more abrasive. He stretched and groaned as he cut away the vines binding him — there was no comfortable way to sleep in a tree — and searched for the source of the strange noises.

Birds!

Gulls. Or gull-like, for they were huge and had transparent leathery wings and cruel hooked beaks One of them was carrying a fair-sized fish in its beak. They circled over him, apparently aware of his presence and not liking it, raucous in their disapproval. Blade thumbed his nose at them and cooked breakfast. Thoughtfully. Gulls meant a fairly large body of water. That could mean people, of some sort, and that meant danger. That day he traveled with more caution than usual.

About mid-afternoon he came to a path. Long disused, overgrown, faintly traced, but definitely a path. His caution increased. He lay in the brush for half an hour before venturing onto the path and stepping up his pace. The going was infinitely easier.

The path dipped suddenly into a long, narrow and dark ravine. As he traversed it, noting that it was his first descent since the trip began, he also noticed that the forest was beginning to thin out. When he emerged from the ravine, climbing again, the path made an abrupt right-angle turn and he saw the barrow, or tumulus, about a mile ahead. And saw what stood atop it.

The gulls had long since left him. Blade approached the high mound, covered with weeds and grass, with an arrow notched to his bow and his spear and knife ready. For this barrow, and the towering stone figure atop it, was definitely the work of men. Intelligent men. Engineering men. At a hundred yards he paused and contemplated it.

The idol, or statue, was some two hundred feet high. The great pillars of the legs, of cunningly worked stone, stood wide astride and the stone arms were crossed on the gigantic chest. The body faced Blade; the head looked away from him.

He made a wide circle around the mound and the idol, moving quietly and on the alert, and got into position to see the face of the thing. A chill traced down his spine. The stone visage still bore traces of paint, scarlet and blue, and the great empty eyes glared at him. It was a grotesque, a combination of skull and devil mask and something else he could not identify — an eerie and terrifying ethos of its own. Blade did not like the thing, nor his own reaction to it. He shook his fist at it and moved in closer. With each step the silence of centuries closed in on him, silence that was palpable, had weight and substance.

Blade strode between the colossal legs. In one foot, near the big toe, was a black rectangle. A door. Blade slung his bow over his shoulder and, with his knife and spear ready, stepped into semidarkness. He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and sniffed about. After a moment he relaxed. Nothing but the musty, dusty smell of slow decay. There was nothing here. Nothing but the rotten detritus of the years.

The inside of the foot was a chamber of brick — the stonework was only facing — from which the mortar had fallen in great chunks. In the heel was another door leading to a flight of twisting stone steps that climbed steeply upward. Blade started to climb.

On the first landing he found the first skeleton. Bones so rotted by time that when he touched a thighbone it crumbled to dust at his touch. Blade contemplated the thing. His association with Lord Leighton had been long enough — and Blade was a good student when he chose — to inform him that these bones had once been a human being as he knew them. The skull was that of modern man.

«What happened?»

Blade asked the question as he edged around the bones and began to climb again. There were four more such landings before he reached the top, and on each was a skeleton. Just bones. No weapons, no jewelry or adornments, only bones.

He reached the top landing. A door led into the inner skull of the idol. It had been of wood, so rotted now that when he approached, the slight vibration caused the wood to turn to powder and fall away. He gazed into the chamber beyond, at the stone altar.

Atop the altar were two skeletons, bones now linked in their long death. He did not need to be an expert to know that the slighter set of bones had belonged to a woman and the larger bones over her were those of a man. In what weird, perhaps sexual, ceremony had they died so? He shrugged and went about his exploring.

Scattered about the chamber were three more altars, smaller and in the form of lecterns. On each one was a massive book of yellowed parchment or vellum bound in hide. He touched a page and it vanished in powder. He bent to scan the strange cuneiform scribble, so faded that only by looking at it slantwise and using the light refraction could he discern traces of ink. At last he turned away. This mystery he would never solve.

Once again the crying of the gulls startled him. Blade went to one of the hollow eyes and peered out. Nothing. He went to the other eye and saw it: a lake. A greenish-blue soupbowl of a lake, not more than two miles away. The birds were circling over it, crying, and now and again diving for fish. Blade paid no attention to the birds. There were huts in the lake. Thatched and wattled huts on stilts, each with a landing platform built around it. Gray smoke curled from several of the huts. Women, bare-breasted and wearing skins to cover their genitals, worked at various chores. One was pounding a clublike stick into a large bowl. Pestle and mortar. Grain. Flour. Blade nodded. These lake people were certainly a cut above Ogar's tribe, though far down the scale from the men who had built the idol from which he now spied. And they were dangerous.

Blade spent the remainder of the afternoon, while the light lasted, studying the lake village. He did not like what he saw.

The lake people, from what he could see at his far vantage, were not true men. Lord L would have labeled them apemen. Pithecanthropus. Yet they walked like men, had weapons of stone and wood, used fire and had built the stilted huts in the lake. They built round, cuplike boats of withes and mud and used them to scuttle between the huts and the shore. And they were cultivators! Around the edges of the lake was a narrow littoral of cultivated fields extending to the edge of the forest. Perhaps half a mile.

The lake people used slaves in the fields. And scarecrows to keep the gulls away from the crops. Blade did not at first grasp the nature of the scarecrows, nor feel any particular pity for the slaves. When he did understand it he decided, then and there, to stay well away from the lake. These were a cruel and brutish people. More intelligent than Ogar, hence more to be feared.