CHAPTER IV
Evil Mountain
In his vision, the coiling flame had left so brilliant an image upon his eyelids that for an instant he could see nothing but the blue-green scar of after-sight swimming upon his vision. Then that faded and he was staring up into Gerd’s darkly handsome young face.
Kern struggled to sit up, beating his wings a little to help him rise. The gust stirred Kern’s red hair and sent motes dancing in the beam of sunlight falling across the bed. Kern in the aftermath of amazement and terror forgot to dissemble his knowledge of the winged men’s tongue. The simple syllables raced off his lips.
“Gerd, Gerd, you’ve got to listen to me! I’ve been finding out things I didn’t suspect until now. Let me up. The townspeople are coming!”
Gerd put a hard palm against his chest.
“Not so fast. You seem to have learned our language in your sleep. No, stay there.” His voice rose. “Elje!”
She was a moment or two in coming, and Gerd stood back with his hand on his dagger and his pale, suspicious eyes unswerving as he watched Kern. When Elje came, bright-faced in the morning sun, her ashen braids wound in a coronet that glistened against the high arch of her wings, he spoke without taking his eyes from Kern.
“Our guest awoke this morning with a strangely fluent knowledge of speech. I told you before of the danger from spies, Elje.”
“All right, I do know more of your language than I pretended,” Kern admitted. “I just learned it faster than you believed, that’s all. That doesn’t matter now. Do you know the townspeople are coming to attack?”
Gerd bent forward swiftly, half-open wings hovering above him in the sunlight.
“How do you know that? You are a spy!”
“Let him talk, Gerd,” Elje said. “Let him talk.”
Kern talked....
In the end, he could see that they did not yet fully trust him. It was not surprising, for the tale would have bewildered anyone. But the prospect of an advancing army was enough to divide their thoughts.
“If I were a spy, would I warn you they were coming?” Kern demanded, seeing their dubious glances fixed on him at the end of his story.
“It isn’t the army you’d be spying for,” Gerd said reluctantly.
“Your other world—Earth,” Elje murmured, her eyes searching Kern’s. “If that were true, it could explain some things. But we know of no other worlds.”
Briefly Kern thought that it might be easier for one of Elje’s culture to believe in the existence of other worlds than for a denizen of some more sophisticated civilization. The people of this winged race had not yet closed their minds to all they could not see. It was not a race so sure of its own omnipotence that it denied all unfamiliar things existence.
“How could I hurt you now?” Kern said. “Why should I warn you, if I were on their side?”
“It’s the Mountain,” Elje said surprisingly. “Why do you suppose we kept you here in this bare room, without furnishings, without anything you could build into a weapon? Or do you know?”
Bewildered, he shook his head.
“We were not sure if you were a slave to the Mountain. If you were, a coil of wire, a bit of iron—anything—would have been dangerous to us in your hands.” Her eyes were questioning.
Again Kern shook his head. Gerd began to speak, his voice faintly derisive.
“A long story and an evil one. Perhaps you know it. At any rate, we’re the only free people in this world. Oh, there may be a few others, but not many, and they don’t live long. The Mountain is jealous of its slaves. Aside from our group, all the rest of mankind belongs to the Mountain. All!”
“This Mountain?” Kern said. “What is it?”
Gerd shrugged his red wings.
“Who knows? Demon—god. If we ever had a history, no one knows it now. No legend goes back beyond the coming of the Mountain. We only know that it has always been there, and from it, whispers float out to men in their sleep, and they become slaves to the whisper. Something happens in their minds. For the most part they live as they choose, in their cities. But sometimes that voice comes again, and then they’re mindless, doing as the Mountain bids them.”
“We don’t know what the Mountain is,” Elje said. “But we know that it’s intelligent. It can guide men’s hands to make weapons, when there’s a need for weapons. And it can send out storms, such as the one in which we found you. Not for a long, long while has there been a storm out of the Mountain. If you’re not a spy, how do you explain the fact that your coming and the storm happened in the same hour?”
He shrugged. About that, he also was puzzled.
“I wish I knew. But I’ll find out, if any human can. Do you mean the army that’s coming against you is sent by the Mountain? Why?”
“As long as we remain free, the Mountain will try to enslave us,” Elje said. “And we’ll fight the townsmen for the things we need, since we don’t dare fight the Mountain. We’ve stayed too long in this village—yes, Gerd, I know! We’ll return to the eyrie now. If an army of the townsfolk is coming, they’ll have weapons the Mountain made them build, and the weapons will be dangerous, whatever they may be this time.”
“The prisoner may know all this already,” Gerd said dourly. “That doesn’t matter. But it will matter if we take him to the eyrie. He could lead our enemies there, Elje.”
“Through the poison winds?” But Elje drew in her lower lip thoughtfully. “He tells a mad story, Gerd. I know that. Could it be true?”
“Well, what then?”
“These companions he spoke of. They sound like gods. And they talked of fighting against the Mountain.”
“Fight against the stars,” Gerd said and laughed. “But not the Mountain. Not even gods could win such a war.”
“They aren’t gods,” Kern said. “But they have powers none of us know. I think our coming marks a turning place in the history of your race, Elje—Gerd. You can kill us or abandon us and go on as you always have, or you can believe me and help us, and fight this time with a chance of winning. Will you do it?”
Elje was silent for a moment. Then she laughed and stood up suddenly with a flutter of her wings.
“I’ll go along with you and talk to your friends,” she said. “If they’re as you say—yes, Kern, I’ll believe you. For the Mountain never has changed human flesh. It can touch our minds, but not our bodies. I think in the beginning were men whose brains had some weakness that let the whisper come in, and those men were armed by the Mountain and killed their fellows, until only we outlaws remained.
“Our minds over the generations have been bred to resist invasion as the townspeople were bred to welcome it. I think—I know—if the Mountain could reach into our bodies and make that tiny change that would open our mind to it, then it would win. But it can’t. It can’t alter our bodies except by killing us. If I see with my own eyes these companions of Kern’s, I’ll know there is a power greater than the Mountain. And we’ll fight together, Kern!”
A little later, floating high above the nest of hills which cradled the village, Kern rocked on spread wings and pressed his eyes tightly shut, thinking with all the strength of his mind:
“Byrna, Byrna! Answer me, Byrna! Help me find you. Byrna, do you hear?”
Silence, except for the small noises drifting up from far below, distant shouts as Elje’s winged band collected in haste the loot they would take with them to their eyrie. Kern’s vision swam with the flecked clouds of sunlight on closed lids. Deliberately he blanked his mind to receive an answer. None came.
“Byrna! There may not be time to waste. Byrna, Kua, answer me!”
In his eagerness and impatience he remembered again what he had glimpsed dimly through Byrna’s memory, the ranks of armed fliers moving through the night on steadily beating wings toward the village. Perhaps from so far away they would not arrive for many hours—perhaps so near that the cloud on the horizon now was not mist, but armed men....
“Byrna! Do you hear me?”
“Kern!” The answer he sought came with sharp impact, like a blow in the face. As if she were almost at his side and speaking with dreadful violence. He caught terror in the contact of minds, cold, controlled terror that chilled him so the sunny air turned suddenly icy around him. He knew instantly that she had heard him before, had been hedging for just the right contact so that there need be no wasted moments of groping and finding focus upon one another. He caught the hard impact and the terror and the urgency in the moment their minds met. Then her thoughts tumbled into his mind:
“Kern! Hurry! No time to waste. Do you see the grove of blooming trees left on the horizon? Come! Make new contact there.”
She blanked as suddenly as she had entered his mind. And because thoughts are so infinitely more rapid than words she had conveyed those four ideas—identification, haste, locality and a promise of future contact—in almost no lapse of time at all. But in that brief instant while their minds did meet, something happened.
Kern rocked on shaken wings as if a blow had jolted him. He snatched his mind back from the brief touch with Byrna’s quickly, quickly, scorched with the incandescent hatred that had blazed in the void between them. For the coiled ribbon of fire which had swum so strangely through nothingness when he woke from his clairvoyant dream was awake and alive now, and terribly avid.
It had been waiting, he knew in the instant while his mind leaped back in recoil from that burning contact. It had found them as he waked slowly from the long, leisured conversation in the seance.
Since that moment it had lain, coiled, in waiting. It?
Folding his wings, he dropped forward in a long, breathtaking dive, the air screaming past his ears. From a tiled rooftop far below, he saw two figures rise, one on pale wings, one on glossy red. He spread his own pinions then, exulting in the strain on his chest-muscles when the broad surfaces checked his dive, bore him up in a steep arc that made the air feel warm and solid as he carved a long curve through it.
“That way,” he told Elje, pointing, when she rose within hearing. “We’ll have to hurry. There’s something wrong. I think perhaps the Mountain, or Something in the Mountain, knows we’re here.”
Elje’s clear bright color blanched in the sunlight. Behind her, Gerd’s eyes flashed sideward in the dark face, suspicious, mistrusting still.
“Why do you say that?”
Kern told them as they flew, the grove of blossoming trees on the horizon seeming to slip rapidly down the edge of the skyline and draw nearer far below. It was not easy to talk and fly. Kern’s breath began to come fast, and his chest and wings ached with the speed, after so many days of inactivity. When he finished speaking there was silence.
“The eyrie lies that way,” Elje said presently, in a controlled voice. She pointed right with a smooth bare arm. “I’ve sent most of the men on with our loot. Gerd chose twenty to follow us. You don’t know where or how far the Mountain’s men are?”
Kern shook his head. “Maybe I can find out at the next meeting with Byrna.”
He glanced behind them and saw the little band of Elje’s bodyguard flying a few minutes in their rear, big men all of them, with stolid, hard-eyed faces. Several carried light wicker squares looped up with straps.
“Seats for your friends, Kern,” Elje explained. “We need them when we carry our young people or our old ones, who no longer have the power to fly.” Her face darkened, as Kern knew their faces always did when the winged people thought of the days in which they would no longer travel the lanes of air.
It occurred to him then that their battles might be ferocious things, fought by men as fanatic in their own way as those who fought on Earth for entry into an imagined paradise. For these men fought their own old age as surely as they fought an enemy. No one who has once spread wings upon the air-currents willingly faces a life without wings.
The blooming grove was beneath them now.
“If you make contact this time with—it—again, Kern, I think it will know more easily where to direct its men,” Elje said. “There is great danger. Will you let this meeting with your friends go for awhile? You may be doing them harm as well as us. The army of the Mountain may be very near now.”
Kern hesitated. He had been dreading with every wingbeat the moment when he must open his mind again to that coiled and scorching malevolence. For an instant he toyed with the idea of postponing searching for Byrna’s mind, but he knew it would only mean putting off the inevitable. Grimly he shook his head.
“Byrna!” he called out mentally. “Byrna, what next?”
As before, for long moments there was no answer. Then briefly, like a gasp, he caught the touch of Byrna’s mind—only briefly and very incoherently, because between them in the instant of contact flashed the blinding hatred of the—the interloper. Only when their minds touched, apparently, could the white-hot malevolence reach them, but it lay ambushed and ready, and this time it seemed to flare out between them almost before Byrna’s voice could speak.
Reeling back, shaken and stunned by the thing between them, Kern caught only a ragged thought or two from Byrna’s mind.
“Three hills—hurry—army!”
That was all that got through. For an instant the void flamed with the blankness of sheer hatred. Then Kern opened his eyes and caught himself on reeling wings. Elje and Gerd watched him without speaking as he controlled his shaken faculties with a great effort. Elje was white with terror, but on Gerd’s face suspicion was still predominant.
Three hills in a shadowy row cut the horizon line. Kern gestured toward them and in silence the little group flew on. If Byrna’s gasp of “—army—” meant the enemy were nearly upon them, there was nothing to do except fly as they had been flying, in the hope of reaching the mutants before disaster overtook them all.