Again I am at a loss for words to tell of this marvel. It was not a hole or opening, it was but an enclosed place on the wall, overlaid with a sheet of something so shiny and transparent that it must have been water frozen there forever by unthinkable sorcery. Beneath this motionless water, the figure of a woman looked out at us with calm unwinking gaze. She was dressed in fantastic furs, blue and emerald and gold, wrought in patterns that surely no one had ever seen before; her face, crowned by the gaudy feathers of a bird, was like those of my own people, being without hair and gentle-looking. After a long time of staring, I reached out to touch this wonder, and the still water over it felt cool and slick to my fingertips. The woman made no move as my hand passed before her. I was thunderstruck.
Dy-lee led me to the next enclosed place, and there was a man, clad as fabulously as the woman, with a stern look of resolution on his features. He seemed a curious hybrid, for while most of his face was as smooth as mine, on his chin was a fringe of dark hair such as covered Dy-lee's folk. Him I did not try to touch, for fear he should burst out of the frozen water at me.
With the third of these strange things I began to notice something else: namely, that the people—there were two behind this water—seemed very flat and completely without true substance. It is difficult to explain. It was as though a man could be pressed flat as a leaf, and still hold his form, his color, even his life (though this was in abeyance,suspendedas it were, yet waiting to break into movement at any second).
So we went down the long gallery, and I saw more multitudes of wonders than ever I can tell. There were many sorts of folk in even more awesome furs and pelts than the first; men clad entirely in what appeared to be metal, and women in garments that surely never came from the cave cat or doe or anything that walks our world today. There were scenes I could not comprehend, enclosed flat places on the wall which I could not make myself believe were flat places at all, but rather must be the holes on vistas I had first thought them. These showed tiny trees and brooks, figures of people smaller than my thumb, even portions of the sky with infinitesimal clouds hanging motionless therein. And it was after I had looked on two or three of these that the truth began to come to me, like a fiery jewel of knowledge shining murkily up through the black waters of my ignorance. For these were not real people at all, nor real vistas, nor was there anything real or magical about them at all; they were flat places on the walls, whereon some clever man had laid multihueddyes, so that when all were applied this representation of reality sprang to its mysterious, incredible, unmoving life!
I longed to ask Dy-lee if this was the true nature of the things, but could not think how to do it by signs. I therefore simply pointed at one of them and raised my brows questioningly.
"Peesha!" said he. "Peesha!"
It was, I gathered, a peesha. Whatever that might be.
He put a finger on a certain part of this peesha, and said, "Tree!"
I reeled. Literally I reeled, staggering back and dropping my jaw like a fool. "Tree?" I gasped. "Yes, yes, a tree!"
He made polite motions, asking me my word for it.
"Tree!" I shouted. I pointed to the beasts at our feet. "Dogwolves," I said, with one hand on my breast; then, aiming a finger at him and still indicating the two animals, "poort," I said. He understood that, for he nodded. I pointed to the wall. "Peesha," I cried, nodding to him, and then, "flat place with many dyes," I said in my own tongue. Finally, I waved at him and then at myself, and said, "Tree, tree. Tree,tree!"
He grasped it then. He was as amazed as I had been. We had at least one word in common. It suggested astonishing possibilities to me. Eagerly I touched the sky in the representation before us, the clouds, the earth, a small hillock; naming them and getting his names in return. Not until we came to a brook did our languages coincide again. Then I said, "Stream," and he said, as clearly as any man could, "River." "Yes, yes!" I shouted. "River, river!"
Babbling with excitement, he grasped my wrist and dragged me past several of the dye-images to a large one that was without the protecting rigid water, and which showed many men and women walking about between stone inclosures such as littered the ground above us. These inclosures, however, were not broken, but seemed whole and strangely beautiful, being decorated lavishly with carving and dyes. Some of them went up for hundreds of feet, as I could see by comparing them with the size of the people. Before this peesha he halted and proceeded to point out many things, naming them eagerly; but here we could not find anything for which we had a mutual name. Indeed, it was not remarkable, for most of the objects I had never seen until the day before, and then only in a ruined state.
And so we passed down the cavern until we came to the end, and crossed its narrow width to go back along the other side, looking at Dy-lee's uncanny "peeshas;" and at last we had seen them all, and I was too shattered for speech. Nothing like it had ever been thought of, had ever been dreamt of, had ever been seen by anyone in all my world, before today. That one could do this with dyes! Some of them had had no water—he called itglaa—over them, and these I had touched cautiously, finding their surfaces raised slightly here and there; and had come to the conclusion that the dyes had been mixed cleverly with harder substances, so that when they were put on the wall, they stiffened there and would not blur nor run together.
And nearly as wonderful as these things was the fact that there were points of contact in our languages, words which were the same in both tongues. "Hand" wasandto him, or it may have beenhandalso, as his aspirates were breathed as lightly as his sibilants were tongued.Tree,river, andowlwere the same. I grew quite wrought-up with the fascination of the game, and could scarcely wait to tell Lora all about it.
We went up the slanted stones to the surface, and after he had carefully hidden the entrance slab with the rubble again (I could not guess from what or whom), he led me across the ruins to another whole roofed inclosure. This one we entered by a hole far up in one wall, raising two logs for a kind of bridge from the ground. Into this place the dogwolves did not follow, but lay down outside to await us.
Dy-lee's torch was burning low. When we had dropped into the inclosure, he chose two more from a pile of them stacked neatly in a corner, and lit one from the first. It flared up redly, and again we raised a ringed slab and descended into another warm dry place of peeshas. By then, I may say, I had identified this with our own word "picture," which we use to describe several things, such as the images our minds form occasionally which seem to us very real, and also a distant view of a beautiful countryside, as perhaps from a hill; I felt certain thatpeeshawaspicture, and dimly I was wondering if our own race had once known this strange art of arranging dyes on walls. Certainly the similarity of the two words would indicate something of the sort.
He led me to one of the pictures—I will use this other word from now on—and held up the torch so that I could see it well. There was none of the frozen water at all in this place. The things were done in large squares on the rock wall, just as in the first underground grotto, but there was noglaa, nor was any of the slippery curious stone set around them. These walls were rougher and less shining.
The first one was very old, faded, flaked here and there so that the barren rock showed through. It portrayed a scene in just such a place as the plain above had once been, and as I had seen in a number of the other pictures. Tall inclosures rose into the air, with more lines of openings across them than I could count. Strange birds flew above them, looking stiff and featherless and glittery. If there were people on the ground, they were too small to be seen.
Gently he urged me to the next. Here was a scene among the walls, with people moving about. They looked very like my glen-folk, excepting always for the odd garments they wore, which covered all of their persons but the faces and hands. Even upon their feet they seemed to have garments.
The third picture was terrible. In its ancient much-faded colors it showed many men fighting. Not fighting bears, or cave cats, butother men. Yes, here were dead men, with blood upon their breasts, and others were locked in fierce combat. I turned from this view with a sickness pulling at my belly, and Dy-lee felt much the same, for he threw a hairy arm over my shoulders and bent his head sorrowfully even as I.
The next few pictures were all the same, men slaying one another, often with strange stick-like things, the nature of which I could not imagine. From the attitudes it was plain that when one was pointed at a man, the man died. It was some form of magic, such as an ogre might dream of.
Then we came to a picture which defied my comprehension for many minutes. It was a place of high walls and inclosures, over which flocks of the curious stiff-winged birds flew; and many of the tallest inclosures were toppling, while fire raged in among them (I knew it was fire by the marvelous crimson and scarlet of the colors, dimmed though they were), and great clouds of smoke rolled out.
There were others. I disliked them, I loathed them, but I could not keep myself from looking intently at each one. It was impressed on me that this was no legend, but a true thing that had happened in the far olden times. These were my people dying, at the hands of others of my people. I could not understand, but I could feel the truth of this thing.
Men slaying men! The legend of Sunset Fields had not lied!
On the second wall there was an enormous picture, full seven paces long and as high as the roof, and this one I could not grasp though I studied it for a long time. It was a place such as this plain—once there must have been many such, in the far olden times—from the center of which there sprouted up a great mushroom, like those in the Fearful Forest, but all creamy-white and so big as to shatter the imagination. I cannot say how huge it was. All our glens and valleys would be hidden in the shadow of such a mushroom. Though I looked at it until my eyes watered, and Dy-lee had to light his third flambeau, still I could not understand how such a thing could grow in the midst of the tall inclosures.
The next picture I could grasp, however. They were of ruins, like those below which we stood, and all among the ramparts and broken walls were the bodies of men. Some calamity had laid its dreadful hand on the place. I wondered if the giant mushroom had been to blame, wreaking this havoc as it grew.
And now the pictures were different. No more men slaying men, or tall majestic structures spearing the very sky with their tops, but only ruins and blackened plains, raw cliffs and far-flung wastes, the wreckage of great metal things I did not recognize, and among them a few, a very few human figures, prowling like jackal-rats furtively in the chaos. These pictures were all very ancient, with their dye-stuffs flaked and marred by time.
There was a view of a prairie, waving with orange grass, on which moved men who might have been my own tribe. Naked, with bows and hatchets, they stalked an animal something like a cave cat, which had a great mane of hair all down its back. I touched this picture and nodded to Dy-lee. He pointed to me. He knew that these were my kindred. And this picture too was older than the oldest man of the glen-folk, for it was much dimmed and discolored.
Down the walls I went, and now the pictures seemed to be less ancient, and in them I saw a weird change coming over the race of men, for they grew more hairy, and leaving the fields and pleasant glens (why, I wonder?) they appeared to take up their homes in the blighted places and in the caves of the raw red cliffs. Time passed, the pictures were brighter and less flaked, and mankind was furred as a beast, growing little by little to look like my friend, Dy-lee.
This series of pictures I pored over for a long time, going back and forth along the wall, judging the age of each in relation to the others; and I could not apprehend why, but it was true—these men were the same race, but growing shaggier in every succeeding picture. How long was the time gap between the pictures? A generation, a hundred years, a thousand? I could not tell. I went back across the floor to look at the earliest pictures, those in which men fought together. They exuded the aura of an incredible antiquity. And what of those in the other cavern? Their dyes were more brilliant, newer looking; yet the people were dressed in the queer garments that I saw in the oldest portrayals here. Did it mean that there were folk existing even now like them—folk impossible to believe in!—or simply that the dyes in their pictures were better and lasted longer than these? There were many things here that I could not understand, and I felt small and stupid and as young as the youngest pink rabbit with still-blind eyes.
Dy-lee made a speech then, indicating that I should look at the final pictures; so I left my speculation and came to him and gazed.
Here, immediately after the series in which mankind grew hairy, was a large square with dyes that were still vivid and clear, though it still seemed quite an ancient picture. It portrayed a number of Dy-lee's folk crouching amid the ruins, perhaps of this very plain above our heads. Their attitudes showed perfectly that they were afraid, for they drew back, with arms about their females and young ones. Then, in a cleared space, there stood a man of my own race, smooth-skinned and wearing the raiment of a guardian, the long fringed black fox pelts hanging from his waist and the short mantle of white hares' skins about his shoulders. He faced away from the cave folk, with his arms lifted in just such a mystical gesture as I had often seen the guardians making; and beyond him, from the edge of an especially well-limned forest, there arose a being whose every line suggested evil—evil beyond the power of words. There was no definite outline to the thing. It appeared to change slightly even while I stared at it, as though the dyes had been mixed with smoke or mist. It seemed to have horns, and then when I looked again, the horns had vanished. There were great columns of legs, and arms that hung loosely before its chest with an indescribable air of menace. Perhaps there were two sets of arms. I could not tell. It is strange to speak of a picture this way, for after all it was but dyes of many shades laid upon rock; but all I could recall definitely about the evil being, when I had turned away, was that its color was that of a dead fish's belly, and that from its amorphous head there blazed out two terrible eyes of purest lambent flame.
The import of this whole picture was inescapable. Here were the shaggy folk, here was a guardian of my own people, and here was a representation of one of ...
The Nameless!
For long minutes I stared at my new friend Dy-lee, while the thoughts churned in my brain. At last I shook myself, as a bear does on coming out of a cold stream, and I began to try him with questions, partly in gestures and partly in words which I hoped he might understand. First I pointed to the shaggy folk. Yes, they were his people, he signed. Then I indicated the guardian. He pointed at me. I shook my head. Indicating my rough loincloth of cave cat fur, I showed him the rich black and white apparel of the little figure, and then touched my bow and quiver, my hatchet, my knife. No guardian carries a weapon of any sort, as the beasts will never molest one of their craft. Dy-lee seemed to know this, for he nodded vigorously, but then showed me where we were similar—the brown furless face and body. I said, Yes, that this man was of my people, but differing from me in profession. He understood this. I asked him, after several tries, whether he had often seen such men as this; and he signed to me, Yes, that there was a place of meeting on the plain. I then asked if he had thought I was a guardian when he first found me the afternoon before, and he answered, No, pointing to my bow and hatchet.
These folk having no weapons, I was at a loss to know how he had recognized what mine were for; because the instant I had thrown up my bow he had seen I meant to shoot, first him and then his tame dogwolves. But after a moment's thought I remembered that in two or three of the old pictures there were depictions of the bow and arrow. I went back down the wall and found them. Evidently these people had once known the use of such things, for here they were, rather hairy but not yet covered with the thick shag, stalking a deer with bows. Somewhere in their evolving they had either lost the art or found a better. Here, in a later picture, they were hunting a great knifetooth bear. Ah, that was it; they had domesticated the dogwolves, and given up the bow. I imagined that it might have come in handy to protect themselves, for surely they could not always travel amongst a howling pack of their canine friends; but obviously they had discarded it entirely.
I returned to the startling picture of the guardian, and pointing to the horrid figure of The Nameless, I bent my head in pantomime and gave an exaggerated shudder.
Dy-lee repeated my motions exactly, and pointed away to where I imagined they dwelt. He said something, apparently his name for the beings. I said, "The Nameless." Again he shivered—it was a real reaction this time—and pointed east.
East? But that was the direction in which lay the Fearful Forest, the three brooks, Sunset Fields, and my own glen. I had not realized this at his first motion, being somewhat confused by the underground cavern. I shook my head, pointing west.Theredwelt The Nameless.
He would have none of that. No, they lived to the east. I pointed west, he pointed stubbornly east.
ButIcame from the east! If there were such beings in that direction, would I not know it? I tried to tell him this, showing that I came from there; very well, said he in signs, so did the guardians, and I was obviously a relative, a son perhaps, or at least a member of the tribe of the guardians. Yes, I agreed, but....
I gave it up. Could I still be confused by this roof that shut out the sun? Hastily I looked at the last of the pictures, which were scenes of hunting and domesticity, with one more guardian at the end, though not with one of The Nameless; then I signed to him that we should leave the place. He scrambled up to the opening and I followed, the daylight from the high entrance hole of the inclosure above striking my eyes sharply after the torch's flickering gleam. The dogwolves roused themselves and nosed our hands as we came out among the broken stones.
"There!" I said, showing him the west; and, "There!" said he, in his own language, thrusting a dark furry finger eastward. Could we be talking of different things? No, there had been the guardian and the changing figure of horror.
The guardian?
What had a guardian been doing here? And the one picture had been old, but the other fairly recent, or I knew nothing of the manner in which dyes fade with age!
These hairy folk had seen guardians, not once in the dim past, but evidently often, and recently; had not my friend signed to me that there was a place of meeting, out on the blackened plain? No wonder that Dy-lee and his folk, while charmed with my singing and interested in me, had shown no overwhelming wonder. So the guardians knew, had perhaps always known, that here in the ruins and the raw red cliffs there lived another race of men!
I sat down on a flat rock and puzzled the matter over, beginning with what I conceived the early history of these people—of both our peoples—to have been. A terrible killing among men, with many strange weapons that spread slaughter wholesale, resulting in a leveling of their huge structures and a splitting of the race into two parts, one remaining in places like this, the other going into the distant glens and plains. The folk of the ruins gradually becoming hairy—could it be because nature saw they needed protection for their tender flesh, living as they did in caves? The thought made me open my eyes with my own cleverness! Then the discarding of weapons and the taming of the dogwolves. I wondered if they had thrown awayallweapons, or whether they had some secret slaying tool for their defense? Or a magic ointment to rub on their bodies? Or what?
To this point it all seemed clear, and while it was a thing to churn the imagination, still it was a plain and possible happening, not destroying any concepts or deepsunk training of my youth; because no man of my folk knew whence we had come, or anything of our history save that it had always been, so far as our elders knew, the same as it is now: easy and pleasant, with no enemies save the beasts of prey, and a mate for every man and woman.
But then came the problem of the guardians. These folk knew them too. They passed between us, it was clear, living with us of the glens but visiting these of the caverns. I tried Dy-lee with a question: did he know there were many, many more like me, living beyond the Fearful Forest? I made a mark in the gritty dirt with my knife point, showed him that it stood for myself, then made a great number of similar marks beside it and pointed east. He understood. He could scarcely believe at first, but after a period of astonished grunts and reassurances, he believed. There were many like me, over yonder to the east.
Then something took him with eagerness, so that he nearly burst with what he could not tell me; and at last he ran furiously away to his cave, leaving me to sit with eyes popping till he returned with a bag made of hide. From this he took a number of little bones, hollowed and corked with plugs of wood, and some sticks tipped with carefully-trimmed stiff feathers. Sensing that I would be curious, he handed me one of the bones. I pried out the plug and saw that the hollow was full of a green-blue dye, mixed, as I had suspected, with something to make it stiff and thick. As I sniffed at it and touched my fingertip to it gingerly, he set to work on the flat stone beside me, dipping his feathered stick into first this bone and then that one, making marks upon the cold rock. I watched the dyes spread and grow into the shape of a man.
Dy-lee, my friend, was a maker of pictures!
I embraced him. I was overcome with his genius. That this animal-looking fellow could himself make the wondrouspeeshas!
Impatiently he motioned to me to be seated while he worked. I sat down and, hoping to repay him for the pleasure I took in his craft, I began to sing. He nodded vigorously and chuckled. We were enchanted with each other's accomplishments.
Watching him, I saw the roughly outlined form of a man grow into a tiny likeness of myself, with hunter's loincloth and bow. He prodded me with the stick, quite unnecessarily. I could see that it was Ahmusk there on the flat stone.
Then hastily he made pictures of two others, one of which seemed to be his conception of a female of my race. Hesitantly then, he pointed east.
I told him, Yes, and flickered my fingers to show that there were many of us there. His thatch-shaded eyes blinked with amazement.
The next picture was that of a guardian, with black and white furs and stern mien. I said the name aloud, and he said something like "rees," which I took to be "guardian" in his tongue.
With this series of pictures to aid us, we could make our queries clear to one another. I asked how many of these guardians he had seen or knew; and he answered, Fifteen or twenty. There being twenty-four guardians living in our glen, I knew that all of them, or nearly all, must at one time or another come here to commune with the hairy folk.
I asked whether they ever lived with his people, and he said, No, that they lived beyond the woods somewhere, he thought perhaps in the sky. I managed to make him understand that they lived among my people, and he seemed surprised that they had never told his folk of us.
Then he made a curious little vague shape beyond his row of pictures, which I could not fathom until he had dyed in two glowing fiery eyes; when I knew that this was meant for one of The Nameless. I asked if he had seen such an ogre, and he signed, No, that no man ever had except the guardians; and that to see them was death.
Then as well as I could I showed him that we knew of these things too, calling them The Nameless. His word for them I could not dominate, though he said it several times.
I wondered how he knew what they looked like, having never seen one; but remembered the picture in the second underground inclosure. Then I thought of the shadowy outlines of that thing, and it occurred to me that this was possibly but a common symbol for the beings, as no man knew their exact form. It was such a picture as a man might make, who knew only that The Nameless were terrible, evil, beyond all thought malignant.
I then asked him whether the guardians protected his people from The Nameless, and he said that they did. I told him by signs that this was their function among us. He did not seem surprised, but again signaled that they had never spoken of me and my tribe, and over this omission he shook his head till the lank hair nearly stood on end.
I told him that we, too, had not known ofthem. He sat with his chin in his palm, biting his lips over this.
I stared at the lightly-dyed portrayal of The Nameless. I pointed to it and to the west.
He laid a hand on my shoulder, as one might to a child when it is making up a wild tale, and pointed eastward.
We sat looking at each other and making these silly gestures back and forth, until in one fearful flash of knowledge it came to me what the truth was.
The taste of this knowledge was at once bitter and sweet to me: sweet, because it blotted out in an instant the only great fear of all my race; bitter, because it showed me that for many generations both this man's people and my own had been hoodwinked, shamed and overlorded by the members of a single useless profession. For it had come to me that now I knew who The Nameless truly were.
Dy-lee was one of The Nameless, and so was Zheena his mate, and great grizzled Dy-veece, and every member of that merry clan with whom I had eaten and slept the night before....
Dy-lee was one of The Nameless, and so was—Ahmusk the hunter.
It must have taken me an hour to tell my friend this terrible, wonderful truth which I had discovered. But finally he realized it, and at first his wrath was dreadful to behold, and then he saw the happiness in it and he danced for joy among his dogwolves.
The simple fact was that for no-one-knew-how-long, the guild of guardians had kept our two races apart and in horror of the things they called The Nameless, for reasons I could not then even begin to guess; had kept us apart by tales of monsters which existed only in their own minds. For the first time in my life I knew pure black hatred of fellow humans. Had I had the guardians there at that moment, I would have slain them all.
Yes, Dy-lee's people were The Nameless; and my glen-folk were The Nameless to him, under whatever exotic name he called us. Nothing could be plainer, for why else would he think The Nameless lived to the east, while I had been taught they lived in the west?
Now in my rage it came to me why Laq had shot at me in the Fearful Forest, and later had pinked Halfspoor with an arrow to make the bear attack me. He did not dare allow me to make friends here with the hairy folk. It would topple him and his entire crew of liars and rascals. He might have halted me yesterday afternoon with a word, but there was Lora, whom he coveted. He had had a bow, a thing no guardian ever owned—he must long ago have stolen it and some arrows, to practice until he thought himself skilled enough to slay me. It did not seem incredible now that he would plan to kill me for her. Nothing seemed strange in the light of my new discovery. The world was topsy-turvy, and surely all things must be possible to one of his loathsome breed.
After we had stamped about for a while, talking furiously and incomprehensibly to each other and shaking hands with fervor and startling the dogwolves into howling many times, we went up to Dy-lee's cave, where he called in all those of his folk who were nearby, and laying his hand on my chest, he solemnly told them that I was one of those creatures whom they had all feared for so many years. The turmoil was frightful. Then, before they could flee, he shouted to them what he had discovered. Of course it took much less time than it had when I explained it to him, for he shared his language with them and needed no elaborate signals. You never heard such a roar as went up when he had finished.
It was decided, to be brief, that Dy-lee should accompany me back through the Fearful Forest to the glens, and there we two would confront the guardians and fling their lifetime of lies into their teeth. I gathered also that he would protect me on the journey from wild beasts, though how without weapons he could do this, I did not see. At any rate, he bade farewell to Zheena and I shook hands all round and we started out across the ruins, with Dy-lee's two poorts, the tame dogwolves, running before us with their scarlet tongues lolling out and their noses in the air.
As we went toward the Fearful Forest, I struck up a song; and to its rhythm we marched bravely and in high genial comradeship.
The oppressive woodland closing in upon us, at about the first hour after the zenith of the sun, my song died away on my lips; and we began to converse together, partly in signs and partly in words. Besides those our languages shared, we had learned a number of one another's common words, and now questions and answers were more readily understood.
I asked him if the guardians had ever seen the pictures which he had shown me. He said that he was not sure, but that he believed not, at any rate not in his lifetime. They never seemed interested in anything except being fed and catered to, and did not spend their nights in the caves as I had done, nor had they ever sung to the hairy folk. I gathered that Dy-lee had shown me the pictures out of gratitude for the delight he had taken in my songs. It was the first time I had ever gotten anything for my voice except a kick in the rump. I was exceedingly pleased.
Then he put to me a number of questions about my people, and as well as I could I answered them. We discovered another mutual word, which was "thorn," when I pried one from his foot with my knife.
Then I thought of weapons, and showing him my metal blade, I asked if he had not seen such things before. He examined it—I think he had wanted to for hours, but was too polite to ask for it—and said that such a knife was unheard of. I had already noticed the flint daggers his people used, which were flaked to make a cutting edge of a sort, but were really sharp only at the tip. My bow and arrows and my hatchet he had seen in his ancient pictures, but mine were the first he had ever handled. His hands were clumsy on them, and I should have hated to let him loose a shaft anywhere in my vicinity.
By signs and a few phrases I told him how we heat and mold the metal for our few needs, and he was intrigued but a little skeptical. Did he never hear of heating metal to make anything? No, he said, never.
But surely he knew of metal? Yes, he said, there were metal instruments in use among his folk, but these had always been in existence, and no man living knew the trick of making them. Then he brought out from some hidden pouch or repository under the long hair on his side a thing like a bright bronze bone, a small tube of metal with a hole at each end, curiously shaped and carved with tiny marks that made no sense, for they did not seem to be pictures or designs of anything at all. With this, he told me, as I examined it, he would protect me if animals should attack us; but when I asked him, How, he only smiled and laughed to himself. I presumed he meant to surprise me, and did not press him for details; which must have made him feel rather disappointed, for he put away the tube with a snort.
And these, I asked then, were the only weapons his folk had? Yes, he said, they needed no others. But if he should lose his? There were others, many others, hidden in the caves. But in time, I said, surely all of the mysterious instruments would be gone, some lost, others destroyed by accident; and then what would his people do? For they could not make others, that was obvious.
Well, I could not make him understand this query. He did not seem to be able to visualize the distant future in the slightest degree. There had always been the tubes, and so far as he knew, there always would be the tubes.
I gave it up, and privately decided that I would make him and Dy-veece, and some of the other males, learn the rudiments of archery, whether they liked it or not.
We tramped on, and the Fearful Forest depressed us with its grim dark trees and lack of sunlight, until at last we spoke no more to each other, but traveled as silently as the two great dogwolves. And so it was that we came upon Halfspoor where he sat in a glade feeding on the body of a jackal-rat, and did not warn him of our coming until we stood face to face with him across some twenty paces of the rotting carpet of vegetation.
Halfspoor gazed at us, and we, paralyzed, gazed upon Halfspoor; and he gave a grunt and a bellow, and leaping to his hind feet he came charging down at us.
I sent one arrow into his chest before I turned to dash back down the trail. I had it in mind to get amongst the trees before I fought, for here there was nowhere to dodge, and dodging was my only defense against the giant brute. Dy-lee was fumbling at his side, and the dogwolves were leaping toward the knifetooth bear. I shouted to Dy-lee to seek cover, though I knew he would not understand the words. I saw a man in pelts of black and white moving furtively from the path some hundred feet behind us, and I knew that a guardian had been following us eastward. Then something took me across the shoulder blades with a slap like a tree falling, and I was hurled six times my own length into a patch of stabbing briers.
Even as I hit I was scrambling sideways, intent on reaching the other side of the nearest tree; a hundred thorns were ripping my flesh, and my back felt as though it were half broken. My ears were throbbing, I supposed from the jolt of Halfspoor's blow. I tore myself out of the briers, leaped with a pounce like a cave cat's across an open space and took up a position of belligerent waiting behind a lichen-wrapped trunk.
Halfspoor, had he followed me up at once, could have slashed me apart before ever I got out of the clutch of the thorn bushes. He had stopped, however, on the spot where he had slapped me, and was hovering over Dy-lee making angry swipes at him. I thought for a moment that Dy-lee was dead or unconscious, for he was huddled down in a dark mass at the bear's feet. The dogwolves were harrying Halfspoor, one snapping at his legs, the other leaping to get at his throat. I made a grab over my shoulder and discovered that the quiver was empty. My arrows had been scattered on the ground when I flew into the briers.
As the bear was not even looking my way, I ran into the open to get a shaft or two. I would have attacked him with my hatchet, but since the vital spots of his skull and neck were a good twelve feet off the ground, it would have been a futile and stupid gesture.
An arrow discovered, I drew back the cord and sank another shaft in the bear's massive chest. Even as I shot I realized that something was singular indeed. Although Halfspoor towered over Dy-lee, who crouched unprotected on the earth, and though the bruin was cuffing in his direction, yet the blows were missing Dy-lee by several feet at the least. All that the bear need do was take one step forward on those gigantic pads and bend his back a trifle ... and there would be no more Dy-lee. But that step and that bend he did not seem able to accomplish! Like a fox caught in a trap, he swayed and screamed his fury, but did not touch my friend Dy-lee.
It would take more than one arrow to slay the huge Knifetooth. Could he do the impossible?
It would take more than one arrow to slay the huge Knifetooth. Could he do the impossible?
It would take more than one arrow to slay the huge Knifetooth. Could he do the impossible?
When my arrow struck, he turned toward me and gave a bawl of horrible anger. Even as I snatched up the only other arrow I could see and darted for my tree, I caught a glimpse of Dy-lee jumping to his feet, evidently unhurt. The dogwolves hampered Halfspoor, and I made the tree a second before the old devil reached it.
He came round it after me, and I dodged about to keep it between us, taunting him loudly. This was a game at which I was past master. I could dive and scuttle all afternoon, if need be.
Then with horror I saw that Dy-lee was coming toward us. I bawled at him to go back—he would not know the words, but surely my frantic motions could not be misunderstood—and then in desperation stood my ground and shot my bolt at Halfspoor at a range of about five feet. It was the third one to flesh itself in the barrel of his chest, but I doubted that any of the three would prove mortal. Ribs and iron-hard muscles would stop them from penetrating too deeply.
Dropping like a stone, I then bounded straight between his charging legs; was struck glancingly by one hind paw and whirled over and over in the rotten humus. My hatchet found its way by old instinct into my hand as I rolled. Then I leaped to my toes and—collided with Dy-lee!
Memory of that instant is muddled. I know that I almost struck my friend down before I realized who he was. I saw Halfspoor in a kind of bloody haze, seeming to fill the world above us. Then Dy-lee put a hand to his mouth and the great bear fell back a pace, snarling and swatting the air. My head rang and I realized that there was blood in my eyes. I wiped them clear and lifted the hatchet as I backed away. The hairy man gripped my wrist and would not let me leave his side. I thought that he had gone mad, and tugged at him frantically. But he stood rock-firm, with one hand holding me steady and the other at his mouth.
All this took but a second or two, and then I ceased to struggle and only stared at our terrible ursine foe. Halfspoor stood just out of reach, and his actions were brainless, idiotic. He would slash at us viciously, missing us by a foot or so; slap at the side of his head with blows that would have split open a less solid skull; then back up a little, moan, bellow, gnash his tusks, make as if to charge at us—and beat his head again!
I glanced at Dy-lee, who seemed calm and detached. The glint of the bronze tube caught my eye. It was in his mouth and he was blowing into it. I thought of the wooden whistles we make for our children; but there came no noise out of this instrument. My head was, indeed, ringing and pounding from the fight; yet I knew I was not deaf, for Halfspoor was raising the dead with his uproar and I could hear that very well.
It was hardly the time for investigation of mysteries, however. Impatiently I pulled at Dy-lee's arm. The bear would charge. Dy-lee grinned (at least the hair on his cheeks moved as though he had grinned), and throwing back his shoulders and inflating his lungs, appeared to blow a tremendous gust of wind through the metal tube. The dogwolves, who had been snapping at Halfspoor's toes, writhed on their bellies and screeched piteously together, as if they had been disemboweled. Magic! The poor brutes seemed in their last agony.
The knifetooth bear gave one frightful, indignant, stentorian yell, which echoed weirdly from every tree around the glade. He administered a final pummeling to the sides of his tormented head. And he turned and made off into the forest as if all the cave cats in the world were nipping at his tail!
At the same time my eardrums were assailed by the most piercingfeelof noise that they had ever experienced. And yet there was no sound from the tube in Dy-lee's mouth.
Now he removed it, stowed it in his secret pouch, laughed quietly to himself, and walking across the mold, bent down and began to gentle the groveling dogwolves. Slowly they responded, sitting up, nuzzling his hands, and whining as if ashamed of their recent performance.
Listening with one ear while rubbing the other, I heard old Halfspoor smashing his way through the woodland, complaining bitterly to himself in a loud voice. I could not blame him. If the stalwart dogwolves were reduced to impotence by the sorcery of Dy-lee's tube, even bruin must be pardoned for running from it.
And then I heard a cry of pain and terror, a human sound that rose and wailed and died to a hideous moaning; and without hesitation I ran off on the bear's trail. He had found someone else in his mad career, and that one had not escaped by magic!
It was easy to see where he had passed. Thickets were crushed, even small trees shattered off, and the bark of the giants shredded by angry clawings. Perhaps I went two hundred yards. Then I found the man, where Halfspoor had found him and snatched him up and flung him aside, broken and dying, into a heap of touchwood.
It was the guardian Laq, and he was dying if ever I saw a man die, with a broken back and a leg that bent sideways in a way no leg was ever meant to bend. I knelt beside him and he opened his eyes and recognized me, and he spat feebly, for there was still hate in the man. I could do nothing for him, could not even straighten his limbs or ease his head, for motion would have slain him.
"Lie easy, Laq," I said. "You must rest a while, and then I will help you home."
"When I have rested, I will slay you, Ahmusk the hunter," said he with a curse. His hand moved feebly, and I saw he wished to pull the bow closer, the bow that he had stolen and practiced with until he thought he was skilled enough to murder me. I put it into his fingers, noticing without much surprise that it was one which I had made and believed I had lost somewhere. I gave him one of the arrows from his quiver, too, and that was a mistake, for he stared sharply at me with his filming dark eyes. "You think I am crippled," he said huskily, "but I will show you when I have rested, Ahmusk. Lora will never come to your platform and your mating furs."
I said nothing, for one cannot grow angry with a dying man, and there was no kind word that my tongue could lay hold on; and so presently he began to talk in a quiet, sane voice.
"Of course I cannot let you live. You braved the land of the shaggy people, and made friends with them; and you have a knowledge which must never be given to our tribes. Men must have something to fear. It keeps them decent."
I do not know, even yet, whether he believed what he said; and I have often pondered on it. Perhaps he had made himself believe it, for the peace of his soul.
"The legend of The Nameless goes on," he said, the bright froth dripping from his lips. "Ahmusk dies.... My father was a guardian. He preached to me that some dreadful calamity would occur if we allowed the two races to come together. All the guardians were taught that. It was dinned into them from their birth. Only the intelligent ones saw what that calamity would be. Our craft would lose its privilege, its honor, its reason for being."
It was the same thought I had held. The guardians fattened on adulation, and if that was taken from them, there would be nothing left, for they were so accustomed to it that they could not conceive becoming as other men.
"It does no harm to tell you these things, Ahmusk, for you will shortly die. Yes ... you understand, I saw very early that the basic ideas of my craft were wrong, all wrong. There was no harm in letting you know of the shaggy people, for they are as innocent and affectionate as you; the harm lay in the breaking-up of our guild, and the...." He was silent for so long that I thought he had lapsed into insensibility, but after a while he repeated what he had said about mankind needing something to fear. He used the same words, as though it were an excuse he had learnt by rote long ago.
"That is an untruth," I said. "Fear is evil, fear of anything is all wrong. It is wickedness, Laq."
He looked up at me, and I think the naked truth came to his lips then, and would not be denied; for he said, with a horrid gasp, "Ah, but the reverence given us, Bear-throat! This is not lightly to be lost. Think of it! In all the world we alone are above mankind. A hunter is the same as a singer, the night watcher gains no more thanks, no more prerogatives than the weaver of garlands. Only the guardian walks clothed in honor and mystic glory! Do you think I can let you smash us to the level of common clay, after so many generations of being exalted?"
He stopped again, and I thought of the first of his breed, those early guardians who must have arisen after the terrible slaughters, when all was hatred and terror and confusion. Did they then invent the legend of The Nameless, to capitalize on the mutual fear of the two peoples? Did they, perhaps, force the hairy folk into the wastes and caves, looking ahead to a reign of vicious knowledge over ignorance? And were all their descendants as cynical and utterly selfish as this Laq?
"What of your brothers?" I asked him. "Do they know that no true harm would come if the people knew the truth of The Nameless?"
He laughed, horribly. "My fellow guardians are in the main sublimely unaware of their futility," he said. "The dogmatic teachings of bigoted fathers have made unthinking sons.... You understand, Ahmusk, that I will slay you when I have rested."
"Yes, Laq," I said, as he lay dying.
"Ah, but how I would love to see their bubble of self-importance pricked!" he muttered. Evidently he felt no kinship with them, but sneered at them and us alike. "How they would flounder if the facts were forced upon them!"
I heard Dy-lee come up behind us, and the dogwolves snuffled at my shoulders. Laq raised himself with a superhuman effort and cried, "The bear! The knifetooth bear! Ahmusk, the bear comes! My whistle ... my whistle! I cannot find my whistle ..." and so died, his fingers clutching weakly at the broken bow that he had stolen so long ago, when he first plotted to kill me for the sake of Lora.
I took the arrows from his quiver, and covered Laq with branches and dead leaves, for I had no strength to bury him. Returning to the glade, we managed to find the three arrows I had lost in the fight; then we turned our faces eastward once more.
We crossed the Crimson Brook and the Blue, and then at last we began to talk with our signs and our halting phrases.
"What is the tube?" I asked Dy-lee. "How did it drive off Halfspoor?"
As well as he could, he showed me. It was a whistle, of a sort, and though we men could not hear its note, he explained that the animals could. A low sound, made by barely breathing into it, brought the dogwolves barking happily to our sides; but a stronger puff caused them to howl dolefully. I had seen what a really powerful blast on it could do to even a knifetooth bear.
"And the guardians have these whistles?" I asked him, and he answered, Yes, they did, though Laq must have lost his. That was why they needed no weapons when they strode the Fearful Forest. A man would not have to slay a carnivore when he could chase it away in fright, with its ears splitting.
And yet, all I sensed when Dy-lee blew the thing was a tingling of the eardrums. Strange and new! That an animal could hear a sound which a man could not!
But still I thought a bow and a few good arrows were not to be sneered at, and resolved again to teach my friends their use, in preparation for the time, even though it be hundreds of years hence, when all the whistles shall be lost.
I pictured Halfspoor in my mind, and how he had stood off from Dy-lee and swung blows at the air when the whistle blew. I saw him run again, cuffing his own ears to beat away the tearing, bone-rending sound of the to-me-silent tube. What a host of miracles I had to tell to Lora!
We crossed the Gray Brook and came to Sunset Fields, and the sun was less than an hour from its setting in the west. There was a figure running toward us, now in the waning sunlight, now in the dappling shade of the tree ferns. I cried out joyfully, for it was my Lora.
She neared us, and seeing Dy-lee and the dogwolves, cried out with horror. "Ahmusk! Fly, or they will slay you!"
"Come here, little fearful one," I said, "and I will open your mind to a thousand new things!"
She stood there, regarding me, and the fear went out of her eyes, to be replaced by a vast relief. "Then this creature will not harm you?"
"Nor you either. This is my friend Dy-lee," I told her, and taking her hand, put it into his. He shook it, and she smiled uncertainly. "Ahmusk—the dogwolves?"
I patted the biggest on the head. Oh, but that was my hour! "I have made them gentle as fawns," I said, stretching the facts somewhat.
Then she knew that all was well, and she leaped into my arms and kissed me until I thought she would never be done; and yet truly I was sorry when she stopped. "What has happened, Bear-throat? Where have you been for two days, and who is this, and how does it come that the dogwolves do not bite, and why are you all blood-smeared, and—"
"Lora, Lora," I said, "I have a thousand things to tell you, but we can never begin on them if you must chatter endlessly—"
"And Halfspoor, did you find his track, and where will he spend the night, and—"
"Lora!" I shouted, enfolding her in a fierce embrace. "Listen to me, and I shall tell you! Great Halfspoor ranges the Fearful Forest, where I will meet him again one day. This is Dy-lee—"
"Andwhatis Dy-lee?" she asked, her voice rather muffled against my chest.
I gave up. "I will tell you one thing," I said, "and then I will let you babble until you run out of queries. I am like a man who has feared lightning all his life, and has now been struck; and I not only survive, but have found it a pleasant experience—"
"Where were you hit by lightning? Where did you get all the thorn scratches?" she asked.
Dy-lee put his hand on my shoulder and said, pointing to Lora, "Zheena! Zheena!"
By which I think he meant to say that females are all alike, and so, patting my girl on her shining head, I grinned across at him and replied, "How right you are, Dy-lee, how very right you are!"
"What did he say?" asked Lora.
"He said that there is nothing in all the fine green world like a woman."
"Well!" said she, "you've learnt a little wisdom in your traveling, I must say!"
"A little," said I, "a little."
And so we journeyed homeward to the glen and our people, we three good new companions, and the dogwolves went before us and gamboled with pleasure in the soft grass of the fields.
That night Dy-lee and I sat together on my platform, in the tawny-cream light of a full autumn moon. Much had been told that evening, at a council of all our glen-folk; much had been speculated, much had been argued over. Some men had been shocked, some elated, some hurt—those last were the guardians, most of whom could not believe my tale until I showed them Dy-lee and repeated what Laq had said as he lay dying. My shaggy comrade had dyed a picture for the folk on a big rock, and astonished them all beyond measure. Our finest singers had performed for him, and now he knew that Bear-throat was not such a marvelous being after all.
Lora and I had announced our mating time. I had three days in which to find a cave cat and make our rug. Yes, a cave cat; I had decided to give Halfspoor a rest for a while....
After the initial surprise of Dy-lee's appearance, our people had all become very much interested in him. He was laden with gifts to take home to the caves: bone tools and hatchets, metal knives, fine arrows and bows, skins of white deer and sleek owl feathers, everything they could think of which he might like.
So now we sat together on the platform of my tree, our legs covered with rugs against the chill of the night, and our eyelids drooping with fatigue. Yet must I chatter a while longer, being reluctant to see this glorious day end.
"Dy-lee," I said, "many wanings of the moon will pass before we see an end to the changes that are going to happen among our folk, yours and mine. We will all be one folk soon." He nodded and smiled, just as though he could understand me. "We have been kept a simple people, naive and guileless; and that may be good. I think it is, and I think we will not change our simplicity. We will only see things more plainly. And there will be less fear."
"Ahmusk," said Dy-lee. "Friend Ahmusk!"
I gripped his hand in the gesture I found so satisfying. "And with time, Dy-lee, we will find the answers to all sorts of questions, questions that intrigue me so that I can scarcely wait till morning to begin searching for the answers! Those whistles of yours, for instance—who made them, and how, and is the secret of them truly that their noise pierces the ears and maddens an animal with fear, or what?
"And your pictures, Dy-lee, and our music: we will trade these to each other and spend a thousand thousand contented hours with them!"
He yawned, and lying down, pulled the furs up to his chin. Still would I talk a few moments longer.
"And some day, Dy-lee, we will know what caused your folk to grow all shaggy, while we remained smooth-skinned. Maybe we will find out how the men of the far olden times moved their great stones, and why they made the tall inclosures.
"First of all, of course, we must learn to speak to one another. I shall learn your language, and you shall learn mine...."
"But," put in a grumbling voice from the next tree, "if you do not close your mouth and go to sleep, Bear-throat, I fear you will not live to see tomorrow's sun, and so will miss all the fun. Go to sleep!"
I chuckled. It was Lora's father. "Good-night, then," I said. "I shall wake you early in the morning."
"I'm sure you will. Good-night!"
I rolled over beside Dy-lee and composed myself in my furs for the night. At once a vast comfortable weariness came over me.
"Perhaps," I murmured, "perhaps we shall even discover some day why it is that the bones of Sunset Fields do not decay!"
Dy-lee answered me with a soft grunt and then a snore. I laughed to myself with happiness, and fell asleep in the light of the full tawny moon.