Ecce and Old Earth Page 7

  So went the affairs of Ecce, as Glawen flew through the dark yellow light of late afternoon. Syrene sank; Lorca and Sing cast a weird pink illumination over the river, and as they too approached the horizon, Glawen neared the closest approach of the Vertes to Shattorak.

  Across the river Glawen noted a low bald hummock, which upon investigation revealed no stone-tiger in residence. Glawen cautiously set down the Skyrie and erected a surrounding electric fence with enough potential to kill a stone-tiger and stun or disable anything larger.

  Glawen stood out in the dusk of Ecce for a few moments, listening, breathing the air, feeling the oppression of the humidity and heat. The air carried an acrid stink, which presently began to cause him nausea. If this were the ordinary air of Ecce, then he must be sure to wear a respirator. But a breeze from the river blew past, smelling only of dank swamp water, and Glawen decided that the stench was resident upon the hummock itself. Glawen retired into the cabin of the Skyrie, and insulated himself against the outside environment.

  The night passed. Glawen slept fitfully and was disturbed only once, when some sort of creature brushed against the electric fence. Glawen was awakened by the thud of the discharge, followed by a muffled explosion. He turned on a high floodlight to illuminate the area, and looked through the window. On the cropped turf lay a ruptured corpse from which drained a yellow ooze: one of the lumpish bristle-backed creatures he had seen browsing on another hummock. Steam created by the electric energy had burst the creature’s heavy gut; nearby a dozen other such creatures grazed undisturbed by the incident.

  The fence had not been damaged; Glawen returned to his makeshift couch.

  Glawen lay for a few moments listening to the night. From far and near came a variety of sounds: long low eerie moans, coughing grunts and hoarse snarling grinding noises; cackles and squeaks, whistles and fluting cries uncannily similar in timbre to the human voice. . . Glawen dozed, and woke only to the light of Syrene rising in the east.

  Glawen made a perfunctory breakfast of packaged rations, and sat for a few moments wondering how best to conduct his mission. Beyond the river rose the mass of Shattorak a low cone shrouded in jungle two thirds of the way to the summit.

  Glawen disarmed the electric fence and stepped from the cabin to fold it into a bundle. He was instantly struck with a stench of such immoderate proportions that he jerked back into the Skyrie, gasping and wheezing. At last he gained his composure and looked respectfully out toward the corpse. The usual plague of carrion-eaters: insects, birds, rodents, reptiles and the like, was nowhere in evidence; had all these creatures been repelled by the stench? Glawen reflected for a few moments, then consulted the taxonomic almanac included in the flyer’s information system. The dead creature, so he discovered, belonged to a small but distinct order, unique and indigenous to Ecce, and was known as a ‘sharloc’. According to the index, the sharloc was notorious for ‘an odorous exudation secreted by bristles along the dorsal integument. The odor is both repulsive and vile.’

  After a moment or two of reflection, Glawen donned his jungle-suit: a garment of laminated fabric which insulated him from exterior heat and humidity by means of a flowing film of cool air from a small air-conditioning unit. He stepped outside and with a machete hacked the sharloc corpse into four segments, grateful that the filters in his air-conditioning unit excluded all but a trace of the stench.

  One of the segments he tied to the forward end of the Skyrie’s frame with twenty feet of light cord; he similarly tied a second gobbet to the after end of the frame. The other two pieces he gingerly caught up in a bag and loaded upon the bed of the flyer.

  Syrene now stood an hour high in the east. Glawen looked to the north across the river, here two miles wide and marked only by drifting snags and detritus. Before him, at the back of swamp and jungle, rose the bulk of Shattorak, gloomy, brooding and sinister.

  Glawen climbed into the Skyrie, took it aloft, and flew at low altitude back across the river with the two gobbets of sharloc dangling below. Where swamp impinged upon the river he saw a tribe of mud-walkers, hoping and sliding, leaping and marching, from tuft to tuft, running high-legged across the slime with great finesse and style, pausing to thrust down their lances in hopes of harpooning a mud slug. Glawen saw that they were being stalked by a flat black many-legged creature which slid across the slime with stealthy movements. Here, thought Glawen, was a good test of his theory. He changed course, to drift over the flat black predator, the segments of sharloc hanging low. The predator writhed forward suddenly, but the mud-walkers had fled in bounds and jumps; and now, from a distance, inspected the Skyrie with astonished attitudes.

  The test, thought Glawen, had been indecisive. He flew on, toward the dark line of dendrons and water-logged trees where swamp merged with jungle. In one of the trees he noticed a monstrous serpent forty feet long and three feet in diameter, with fangs at one end and a scorpion’s sting at the other. It slid slowly down a branch, head dangling toward the ground. Glawen flew close above; it writhed and coiled and flailed its sting into the air and then slid rapidly away.

  In this case, thought Glawen, the trial had seemed to yield positive results.

  Skimming the treetops Glawen searched the area below and presently noticed a large hammer-headed saurian directly ahead. He lowered the Skyrie slowly above the mottled black and green back, until the sharloc segments dangled only three feet from the saurian’s head. It became agitated, lashed its heavy tail, roared and charged a tree; the tree fell crashing to the ground. The saurian pounded onward, whipping its tail to right and left.

  Once again the test might be interpreted positively, but whatever the case, Glawen deemed it prudent to delay his expedition up the side of Shattorak until mid-day, when – so it was said – the beasts of Ecce became torpid. In the meantime, he must find cover for the Skyrie, to keep it safe from molestation. He approached the edge of the jungle, and landed in a small open area.

  The mud-walkers had been watching with curiosity and a constant interchange of rattles and squeaks. With grotesque celerity they scampered around to the windward slide of the Skyrie, and slowly approached, beating on the ground with their lances and extending red ruffs to signal displeasure. Fifty feet from the Skyrie they halted and began to hurl mud-balls and twigs. In exasperation Glawen took the Skyrie into the air and flew back toward the river. A half-mile upstream he found a cove shaped by the current and dropped the Skyrie into the water, so it floated on its pontoons. He took it to a tuffet of thorn but was deterred from mooring the flyer by a horde of angry insects, oblivious to the submerged chunks of sharloc – of questionable efficacy in any case, after submersion.

  Glawen let the flyer drift on the current to a stand of black dendrons, all pulp, punk and scaly bark, but adequate for the mooring of the flyer, or so it would seem.

  Glawen made fast the flyer and took stock of the situation, which was neither the best nor the worst. The sky was overcast; the afternoon rains would shortly be upon him, but these could not be avoided. As for the predators, stinging and biting insects, and other dangers endemic to the country, he had prepared himself to the best of his ability, and now must take his chances.

  Glawen unclamped the swamp crawler from its chocks. The evidence seemed to indicate that sharloc stench was repellent, Glawen tied the remaining two segments to front and rear of the crawler, then winched it off the deck into the water, where it floated on its own pontoons. He loaded aboard his backpack and such equipment as he deemed useful, climbed aboard the crawler, and churned toward the shore.

  To Glawen’s annoyance the tribe of mud-walkers had arrived on the scene, where they watched his approach in agitation, ruffs displaying the bright red of displeasure and threat. Glawen steered so as to arrive at shore upwind, where he hoped that they might be dissuaded from approach by the stench of sharloc. He did not wish in any way to harm them: an act of incalculable consequence were it to occur regardless of precautions. They might either be driven away in terror or the
ir furious vengeful hostility incurred, against which, in the depths of the jungle, Glawen might have no control. He halted the crawler a hundred yards from shore and let it drift. As he had hoped, the putrid sharloc appeared to dissuade the mud-walkers from further hostile behavior. They turned away with a final barrage of insults and mud balls and wandered off. Of course, thought Glawen, they may simply have become bored.

  Cautiously Glawen approached the shore. Syrene was now halfway up the sky and the heat would have been debilitating save for the jungle-suit. A dead hush fell over the swamp, broken only by the whir and buzz of insects. Glawen noted that they seemed to veer away from the crawler, which saved him the necessity of activating the insecticide fogger.

  Glawen arrived at the first banks of slime; the crawler churned doggedly forward. He made ready the guns at each side of the crawler, setting the range of response at thirty yards, and setting the mode to ‘automatic,’ and not a moment too soon. From the slime only twenty feet to the right of the crawler an optic tentacle reared high. Instantly the gun responded, aiming at the motion and destroying the tentacle with a burst of energy. The slime heaved and sucked as the creature below tried to decide what had happened to it. At a distance of a hundred yards the mud-walkers watched in awe, and presently set up a screeching outburst of vituperation, and threw sticks which fell far short and which Glawen ignored.

  The crawler slid across the slime and without further incident entered the first fringes of the jungle, and now Glawen was faced with a new problem. The crawler capably negotiated thickets and bushes, tangles of vines, and was even able to push over a small tree. However, when trees with dense and heavy trunks grew so closely as to deny the crawler access, then Glawen was forced to choose a new route, which was often a time-consuming procedure. He discovered, to his discomfiture; that neither the time of torpidity, nor the sharloc stench, nor the automatic gun, nor all three together were enough to protect him from harm. By chance he noted on a branch under which he was about to pass a crouching back creature all maw, fangs, claws, and sinew. It poised immobile and the gun failed to detect its presence. If the crawler had proceeded below, the creature could have dropped directly upon him. Its bulk alone would crush him, even though the automatic gun by that time would have killed it. Glawen destroyed the thing with his handgun and thereafter proceeded in a much more cautious state.

  Up the slope of Shattorak went the crawler, occasionally finding an easy avenue for fifty or sixty yards, but more often Glawen was forced to dodge right or left, squeeze through narrow gaps, sidle along declivities, moving far more slowly than he liked.

  The afternoon rains came, and thrashed down upon the jungle. Glawen’s visibility was much reduced, as was his margin of safety. At last, toward middle afternoon, he arrived at a gully choked with a growth too dense for the crawler to penetrate. At this point the summit was visible, less than a mile upslope. With resignation Glawen alighted from the crawler, slipped into his backpack, made sure of his weapons, and set off on foot: scrambling through the gully, killing a hissing gray bewhiskered creature which sprang at him from the dank shadows, fogging a nest of slinging insects, and finally arriving breathless at the uphill side of the gully. The slope thereafter became less difficult, with vegetation less fecund and with longer perspectives of visibility.

  Glawen climbed across outcrops of decayed black rock, through copses of giant fuzz ball trees, around solitary horsetail ferns sixty feet tall and barrel trees with boles ten to twenty feet in diameter.

  As Glawen approached the summit, ledges of the rotten black stone began to appear and presently, halting behind a copse of mitre dendrons, he looked out on a strip of open hillside a hundred yards wide, isolated from the flat summit by a stockade of posts woven with saplings and branches ten feet high. Along the strip a number of rude huts could be seen, either built into the crotch of a barrel tree or on the ground. These were protected by makeshift stockades of their own. Some were in use as habitations; others were dilapidated and rapidly decaying to the onslaughts of rain and sun. A few plots of ground had been brought under desultory cultivation. Here, thought Glawen, was the Shattorak jail; prisoners could escape any time the desire came upon them. Now then: where was Scharde?

  Most of the huts were clustered about a gate through the stockade: the more distant from the gate, the more dilapidated their condition.

  Glawen moved through the shadows, to station himself as close to the gate as he dared.

  There were six men within range of his vision. With the afternoon overcast providing relief from the direct rays of Syrene, one man mended the roof of his tree hut. Two worked dispiritedly in their gardens; the others sat with their backs to the boles of the barrel trees, eyes focused upon nothing. Five of the prisoners seemed to be Yips. The man who worked on the roof of his hut was tall, gaunt, black of hair and beard, hollow-cheeked, with a pale ivory complexion which seemed to show a lavender undertone around the eye-sockets.

  Scharde was nowhere to be seen. Might he be in one of the huts? Glawen inspected each in turn, but discovered nothing significant.

  Rain suddenly struck down on Shattorak, producing a muffled drumming sound that filled all the horizons. The prisoners without haste went to their huts and sat in the doorways with the rain sluicing from the thatch in front of their faces and into collection pots. Glawen took advantage of the rain to slip furtively across the slope to one of the deserted huts, which provided a degree of shelter. Nearby he noted a hut perched thirty feet high in the first crotch of a huge barrel tree; this would provide him an even better vantage point. He darted through the downpour to the ladder and clambered up to the rickety porch of the tree hut. He looked through the door, and finding no one, took refuge within.

  The hut afforded good visibility indeed: over the walls of the stockade and across the width of the summit. The rain blurred details but Glawen thought to see a group of ramshackle structures built of posts, branches and thatch, much like the tree huts. The structures were to his right, on the eastern side of the summit. To the left, the ground humped up in a series of rocky ledges. A pond fifty yards wide occupied the center of the area. No living creature could be seen.

  Glawen made himself as comfortable as possible and set himself to wait. Two hours passed; the rain stopped; the low sun flashed for a few instants through the clouds. The time of torpidity had ended and no longer deterred the creatures of Ecce; once again they set forth upon their missions: to attack and rend, to sting, kill and devour, or to avoid such an eventuality by whatever desperate tactics served them best. From his perch in the tree Glawen could see far and wide over the jungle, over the bends and loops of the mighty Vertes River and far to the south across the swamps of Ecce. From below came a variety of sounds, some muted, some ominously close at hand: choking, gurgling roars; staccato grunts; ululations and screams; hoots and resonant drumming sounds.

  The gaunt dark-haired man descended from his tree hut. With an air of purpose he went to the gate which led into the summit compound. Putting his hand through an aperture he manipulated a latch; the gate opened and he stalked through, crossed the compound to a nearby shed, into which he disappeared. Odd, thought Glawen.

  Now that the rain had stopped, his view across the central compound was unhindered, but he saw nothing markedly different than before, except on the highest point of the ground to the left a low structure had been built which, in Glawen’s estimation, would seem to house a radar installation, to provide warning of approaching aircraft. Glawen noted no movement through the windows; the installation would seem to be automatic. Glawen studied the area with care. According to Floreste, five flyers, or perhaps more, were stored here on Shattorak. They were nowhere evident – an eminently reasonable situation, thought Glawen. The shacks, the stockade and the huts of the prisoners would never be noticed by any but the most careful observation; the textures and irregularities would function as camouflage – but where could five flyers be hidden?

  Glawen noticed that the terrai
n at the western edge of the area showed a rather unnatural conformation, and it might well be that storage space had been carefully roofed over with imitation soil and stone. As if to validate his theories, a pair of men came briskly into sight from over the side of the western slope and climbed to the small hut which Glawen assumed to be a radar transceiver. These men seemed not to be Yips, although as he watched, four Yips appeared from the far side of the summit and came to the shed which the black-haired man had entered. These Yips, Glawen noted, wore hand weapons at their waists, though they seemed oblivious to the prisoners out on the strip.

  Half an hour passed. The two men remained in the observation station. The four Yips returned the way they had come: across the summit and out of Glawen’s sight. The two occupants of the observation tower now came down to stand beside the pond, looking into the northern sky.

  Several minutes passed. Low in the sky to the north a flyer appeared, approached and settled to a landing beside the pond. Two men alighted, a Yip and another: this one slight of physique, dark of complexion, with a scruff of dark beard. The two brought from the flyer a third man with arms shackled behind his back and a loose hood over his head. The three were joined by the two from the observation tower; the entire group of five went to the largest of the sheds, the prisoner hunching disconsolately along, propelled by a man to either side of him.

  Half an hour passed. The Yip and the bearded non-Yip emerged from the shed, went to the flyer and departed into the northern sky. The remaining two brought out the prisoner, led him across the summit and out of sight past the rock outcrops.