Night & Demons (35 page)

“Right, let’s go,” the Dane muttered. He broke into a heavy-footed jog, the best speed of which he was capable. Cormac matched him in an easy lope. The Gael bent his right arm so that the swordblade swayed gently in front of his body.

The servant guide cowered beside the entrance as the reivers passed. When Cormac looked back to check possible pursuit, he saw the Atlantean couple hugging one another in the doorway.

The earth chuckled to itself. Blocks of the courtyard’s paving chipped their edges together and hopped a hand’s breadth in the air.

Cormac extended his stride to enter the temple just ahead of his companion. There was no one present in the nave, though legions could have concealed themselves in the pillared aisles.

The dome was a thunderous echo chamber, but the source of the vast booming was in the vaults underneath. The door from which the Greeks had initially appeared was at the far end of the building. It hung open again.

“This way,” called Cormac. He realized that he couldn’t hear his own voice, though that didn’t matter: Wulfhere had seen the doorway on his own.

The men paused to right and left of the portal, bringing their breathing under control before they went to the next stage. A spiral staircase led down. The metal was lustrously silver in color but untarnished through the ages since it was built. The backless treads and slender balustrades vibrated like hummingbirds’ wings in the noise surrounding them. The reivers couldn’t see the floor from the angle at which they stood.

Cormac slipped through the doorway an instant before Wulfhere committed himself. The helical staircase was only wide enough for one man at a time.

The treads augered down for hundreds of feet to a surface of water lifted into standing waves by thunderous vibration. Purple-green lights like miniatures of the false sun depended from nodes on the walls. They were shaking also.

Huge silvery spheres spun in the hollow volume without any material support. The water had risen to bathe their lower sides, making the rotation noticeably erratic. Froth whipped by the globes’ touch flew as high as the doorway.

Cormac would have missed Creon and Antheia in the chaotic hugeness were it not for the spiteful blue light that drew his eyes. The Greeks’ tiny figures and their undamaged power device were near one side of the circular chamber.

The walls had begun to buckle under the thrust of water filling the dockyard caverns beyond. Water shifted blocks inward and spewed between the interstices. Antheia was attempting to push the heavy stones back into place with threads of blue fire.

The scale of the catastrophe was beyond the capacity of the Greeks’ remaining tool. For so long as someone’s life force energized it, the device could withstand the pressure; but the water was patient and omnipresent. If one path was blocked, it would find another . . .

A form that must be Creon’s bobbed on the surface beside the device. The tool had stripped him to a husk that floated like pith.

Antheia, as shrunken as a fly drained in a spider’s web, stood at the controls. She turned her face toward the doorway above. She tried to lift an arm, but she lacked the strength.

Cormac thought of Loughra in the jaws of the centipede. He did not smile, but there was no pity in his heart.

The blue glare vanished. A hundred feet of wall burst inward before a rush of water. Balls spun into one another, disintegrating in vivid violet light.

Wulfhere tugged the Gael’s arm insistently. The reivers retreated into the nave.

Cormac slammed the door closed, but the rumbling sound was the whole world. A pillar fell from somewhere in the clerestory. It shattered on the floor like a bomb. The reivers ran by mutual instinct toward an aisle. That was the shortest distance out of the huge structure, though there was no certain safety outside either.

The floor beneath the dome buckled upward in a rolling motion, like that of a hound shaking its loose skin. Massive hexagonal paving blocks flipped and fell. The pillars began to sway.

Cormac sprinted across the thirty-foot aisle. The parallel lines of columns nodded their tops together, then away. The nave imploded as trusses cracked. Chunks of the coffered dome cascaded down like snowflakes in a blizzard. The flat roof above the aisle ripped along its axis.

The outer line of columns shook a few of its ornate capitals onto the courtyard beyond, then rocked inward again and collapsed toward the ruin of the nave. Stone barrels weighing a half-ton each bounced and danced in the rubble, dwarfed by the scale of destruction around them.

Cormac, his long Roman blade quivering in his right hand, leaped off the temple slab in a flat dive. It was ten feet down from the slab to the courtyard when he leaped, six feet as the ground heaved up to meet him when he was halfway through the maneuver, ten feet again when he tucked and rolled. The slabs shook themselves and lifted the Gael to his feet as though he and the dying world were a pair of practiced acrobats.

The dome and its support columns had plunged into the vaults beneath the temple. Now a gout of high-pressure steam lifted thousands of tons of shattered stone back from the pit. Tunnel ceilings ruptured in a web of fog and destruction, displacing foliage and buildings already ruined by time.

“Wulfhere!” Cormac shouted vainly. The sound was a cataclysmic pressure that drove the very breath from his lungs. The Gael stumbled forward. Slabs slid one by one into the expanding crater which had already engulfed the temple.

The false sun grew dim—shaded by the gush of steam, Cormac thought; but more than that as well. The light’s hue had changed from purple-green to saffron as pale as the flames above ill-vented coal.

“Wulfhere!”

The Dane’s huge hand groped his. They clutched each other, left to left, because each had his weapon out in his right fist. There was nothing to fight here, but a man clings to what matters to him in the hour he knows to be his last.

An axe, a sword, and a friend as the world ends.

The false sun faded until it gave no more light than the moon does in daytime. A distant roar penetrated from all directions, riding over the crackling destruction of the last of Atlantis.

The surface ruptured again at the edge of the courtyard. A pine hundreds of feet high toppled over and smashed to the ground a few yards from where the men stood. They didn’t run. The tree was only a hint of motion in the non-light and besides, there was no place to run.

The sky shattered like a giant eggshell. The light of a normal sun, filtered by the mists of the northern seas of Earth, dissolved the tumbling shards. A foam-toothed wave surged from all margins of what remained of Atlantis, swallowing the land down inexorably.

Atlantis was sinking forever.

Cormac sheathed his sword with a clang of guard against the iron lip of its scabbard. They had a moment before the ground crumbled beneath them.

“Come on!” he cried to Wulfhere, tugging the Dane with him toward the tree which had nearly crushed them a moment ago. There was light now to move by.

The reivers threw themselves into the branches of the pine. Cormac thought of binding himself in with his sword belt, but he couldn’t tell the attitude at which the tree would float. Besides, there wasn’t enough time.

There was no time at all. A salt wave surged over them, pounding and washing the reivers clean of the taint of a world that should have died millennia before.

The tree surged, twisted, and started to roll. Cormac bellowed as the trunk rotated down. Saltwater drowned what he expected to be his final shout of defiance. The massive trunk didn’t crush him against the marble pavement after all. The ground had already vanished into the depths of the present sea.

The tree shuddered in decreasing arcs around its axis until it stabilized, bobbing slightly in the choppy waves. Cormac crawled to the upper side. The tree weighed scores of tons, and the branches acted as natural outriggers. The weight of a man, even a big man in iron armor, wasn’t enough to significantly affect its balance.

He had been looking for Wulfhere ever since the wave struck. A hand reached out of the sea and clutched a branch ten feet down the trunk.

Cormac hopped to his feet, balancing on the log as he had often done on a ship’s rail. Before he could reach out to help, Wulfhere’s other hand, then his head and shoulders shot up from the sea. The Dane took a higher grip and threw himself astride the tree the way he mounted a horse when required to: accomplishing the task by main strength and awkwardness, but accomplishing it nonetheless.

“I was beginning to think you’d deserted me,” Cormac said.

Wulfhere took the axe from under his belt and sank the blade deep in the soft wood between them. The helve gave the men something to grip with their hands besides the coarse bark.

“What do you mean,
me
desert?” he said. “I’m the captain, remember?”

Something raised itself from the nearby waves and dived again. Possibly a fish—really only a flash of movement in the corner of Cormac’s eyes. But very likely a Kronosaur or two had survived the collapse of the bubble world also.

He began to laugh. To survive
that,
and still to be swallowed whole by a lizard!

“It wasn’t
that
funny,” the Dane grumbled. “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to eat in that wallet of yours?”

“I don’t—” the Gael began, but the words choked as motion again glimmered in his peripheral vision. He jumped to his feet.

Wulfhere braced Cormac’s stance with a hand on his knee. “If you go over,” the Dane warned, “you’re on your own.”

“I
don’t have anything to eat,” Cormac said, “but I’ll bet
they
do. It’s our ship, and a lubberly lot they look, too, with half the oars shipped and no sail set though the weather’s turned fair.”

He drew his sword and waved it overhead in a glittering steel arc. “Hey! You farmers. Hey!”

Wulfhere rose, stretched, and bellowed, “Ahoy the ship! Hakon, you lazy scut! Get a proper stroke going!”

The wallowing longship was a quarter-mile away and the breeze was at best neutral. Despite the conditions, someone aboard the vessel heard their captain’s shout. Crewmen waved. More of the oars hit the water.

Cormac and Wulfhere sat down again, waiting for the rescue neither of them had dared imagine. “Glad you decided to come along,” the Dane said without looking at his companion. “Thanks.”

Cormac gave a harsh, mocking laugh. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” he said.

And he could almost believe the words as he spoke them, except that a vision of little Loughra veiled his sight of the returning longship.

CHILDREN OF THE
FOREST

Many years ago I mentioned that I was a Fortean to a careful reporter who was taping the interview. My several psychiatrist friends were hugely amused when the printed version stated that I was a Freudian. Since then I’ve been careful to give an explanation of what I mean by the word.

Charles Fort collected reports of anomalous events from periodicals (largely from scientific journals) and published them in four volumes from 1919 to 1932. These include reports of things which are now accepted as true (for instance, giant squid and ball lightning) but which orthodox science at the time rejected as observer errors; matters which are unexplained but aren’t especially controversial (for instance, unconfirmed sightings of astronomical bodies by respectable observers); and utterly bizarre things like a rain of frogs in England or a rain of shaved meat in Kentucky. Fort didn’t write about UFOs, but they’re part of modern Fortean interests.

Now—the fact that I’m interested in such things doesn’t mean I believe in all of them. There are people who do, just as there are people who believe that disproving a report of spontaneous human combustion disproves all such reports. I consider both groups delusional (and I consider people who think you get real science or real history from a TV show to be deeply ignorant, but that’s a slightly different matter).

One of the most entertaining writers on Forteana (and on natural history generally) was Ivan T. Sanderson. He was capable of modifying his data to improve a story, but he was a fine writer and a man of great culture and intelligence.

One of Sanderson’s essays was on wudewasas, woodhouses (yes, that’s what the name of the humorist P.G. Wodehouse comes from): the drawings of wild men found in the margins of medieval manuscripts. He speculated that there’d been a European version of the Sasquatch, but that it was man-sized rather than a giant like the wild man of the Northwest United States.

The likelihood that this is true (or for that matter, the likelihood that Bigfoot is running around Northern California) didn’t matter for my purposes. I thought the notion would work for a story, so I wrote “Children of the Forest.”

The form goes back to the fairy tales which I loved even before I could read. It’s become fashionable to give fairy tales a modern slant or to twist them. I wasn’t trying to be clever, but I did try to treat the realities of medieval life and its class structure with the same sort of realism that I’d bring to a story set in Viet Nam.

When “Children . . .” was first published in F&SF, it brought me two angry letters. (Only one other story of mine from the ’70s aroused any comment at all.) I’m not sure what that means, as the letter writers were incensed about completely different aspects of the story (and both were wrong). It may simply indicate that when I’m on, my fiction arouses an emotional reaction in readers.

If so, well, that’s what I’m trying to do.

* * *

W
hen Teller came in from the field, gnarled as his hoe-handle and looking twice his forty years, his wife said, “The cow has gone dry, man.” Teller scowled. She had slapped out her words like bolts from a crossbow. He understood them, understood also why she was whetting the black iron blade of their only knife. From his wife, warped and time-blackened by the same years that had destroyed him, Teller turned to his daughter Lena.

And Lena was a dazzle of sunlight in the darkened hut.