The Complete Hok the Mighty Page 20

  Romm never knew what death soared down out of the heavens. The darting shaft pierced him where his neck joined his shoulder, and drove on downward into his lungs. His throat filled with blood, he writhed upward from his knees to his feet, flourished his arms in frantic agony, and slammed down upon his face. He never moved again.

  HOK, gazing, heard the voices of the Gnorrls. They jabbered in a way he recognized—it was the worship-clamor. The ugly monsters still stood where Romm had halted them, though the fire had come almost to their shoulders. Their arms extended toward him, Hok. Their guttural cries were addressed to him.

  They were worshipping Hok, as they had worshipped Romm. The enemy who had slain their red god was greater—they turned to him now, with their prayers and terrors. They pleaded for deliverance from the fire.

  But Hok yelled again, to curse them. As if invoked by his curse, the fire suddenly whipped to greater and swifter banners of heat. It charged in among the Gnorrls, scorching and singeing. The things screamed in a way to deafen all the world, and began to run.

  The whole meadow, with its reed-tussocks and bush-clumps was flaming around them.

  Hok ran, too, far in advance of them. He did not turn back to see the destruction of his enemies. Changing direction, he came to the bluffs above the river, and sprang far out. The water hurried up to meet him, received him and closed over his head. He drove deep down into its troubled depths, but up he came in a moment, swimming hard with his free hand and trailing the bow behind him.

  The current carried him quickly past the old beach where his folk had once camped and which lately had been the sleeping-ground of the Gnorrl chief. It was ablaze now, all the refuse and grassbedding and trash having caught fire from sparks above. Below it the river widened and the current slowed; on the shore, the grass showed untouched by flame. Hok fought his way to the shallows, then to the waterside. Oloana came running to meet him.

  “You are safe,” she panted. “Yes—and you still have that thing you call a bow.”

  “It must dry carefully,” replied Hok, “for it has stood our good friend this day. Tomorrow I shall cut new arrows for it.”

  That night they made their beds on the sand of the fire-purged beach. Nothing but ashes remained of the enemy camp, and the day of heat had cleared the air of Gnorrl-scent. Far away to the north, the dark sky was lurid with the still-marching flames.

  “How many Gnorrls came alive out of that business?” wondered Oloana.

  “Few, very few,” answered Hok. “There are, of course, scouting parties south of here. We will avoid them on the way back, and lead warriors to surprise and swallow them. I doubt if the Gnorrls will have the numbers or courage to look us in the face for many years. And then we will have our bows.”

  “And we have our home again,” rejoiced Oloana, like the good housewife she was. “A few hours will rebuild the huts—and people from the south will strengthen our numbers more than ever—”

  She broke off and gazed anxiously at her husband. “Hok!” she cried. “What is the matter?”

  For he, chief and champion and conqueror, sat with his bearded face in his big hands. He shed the first tears his eyes had known since childhood. His body shook with great, racking sobs.

  “Oh, the young men of our people who have died because Romm would be worshipped by the beast-people!” he mourned brokenly. “Oh, my two young brothers, Barp and Unn—and the brothers of all the rest, brave men, good men, who live no more! How can all the hunters of all the southern forests ever fill their places?”

  [1] Comparison of skeletons shows that the Neanderthal man was heavy and clumsy, and certainly no speedy runner.—Ed.

  [2] With Hok’s people, as with many more recent savages, the term “ten-ten” signified a hundred.—Ed.

  [3] These may seem great distances for javelin-throwing; but the strength and constant practice of the cave men must be considered.—Ed.

  [4] Anyone who has even pegged a top with a cord will understand the method of Romm’s casting; a spinning spear, like a spinning bullet or football, will go farther and harder than a floating one.—Ed.

  [5] Such lamps, made of soapstone, arc often found among Palaeolithic remains.—Ed.

  [6] Neanderthal man certainly used such a device, as examination of his flint tools shows, sometimes even shaping a stone to fit in a deft stick for throwing. See Osborn, Aten of the Old Stone Age. —Ed.

  [7] The word “bow” comes to us through Old English and before that through early German and Sanskrit, from some unthinkably old root; undoubtedly it is onomatopoeia—formed in imitation of the sound of a bow drawn and loosed, exactly as described here.—Ed.

  [8] The Neanderthal brain was extremely developed at the rear, where many psychologists say that the social impulse has its basis; and it is certain that they lived in great hordes, while both Holes people and more recent savages tend to gather in small communities.—Ed.

  [9] The almost universal superstition that night-born persons can move surely at night seems to have some foundation in fact.—Ed.

  [10] Frontiersmen often saved themselves from prairie fires thus.—Ed.

  FOREWORD

  THEIR names still clash in our ears, the great swords of old—Arthur’s Excalibur, Roland’s Durandal, Siegfried’s Gram. They make lurid light across the centuries, whether in David’s hand, or in D’Artagnan’s, or Custer’s. The last of them is not yet sheathed or sated.

  A mighty warrior and artificer was he who first fashioned and wielded such a blade. The Bible calls him Tubal Cain, the Greeks named him Vulcan. Actually he was Hok, who lived by battle but had no taste for battle’s sake, who never tortured a weak foe or feared a strong one; who glimpsed not only the promised strength of cold, sharp iron, but the woe as well.

  In those days of man’s first youth, hardly anything happened that was not of consequence. The complex brain, the eloquent tongue, the skilful hand, made this two-legged animal ruler of his world. He knew a ruler’s joys, sorrows and cares. Not least of the things which embody joy, sorrow and care is the sword, bom in fire, baptized in blood, mirroring the light and dealing the darkness. Nor has its horror and fascination vanished from the Earth we know.

  CHAPTER I

  THE gift seemed first to be a threat, an assault, hurled from the very cope of the dawn sky in a swaddling of fire to land between two parties of stone-axe warriors intent on bloody battle.

  That battle was coming as a logical sequence of the sudden self-importance of Djoma the Fisher, chief of a tribe that dwelt and seined at the seashore. He felt himself the invincible leader of a terrible community of fighting men. Vaingloriously he sent a messenger over wooded hills to the north and east, to inform a certain smaller settlement there that he wanted at once, in tribute, every specimen it owned of that powerful new weapon its chief had invented and called the bow.

  But the settlement in question was of the Warlike Flint People, and its chief was Hok the Mighty, who respected nothing save the worship of the Shining One and feared nothing save being bored,. Sitting above his village of mud-and-wattle huts, on the threshold of the cave he had won in combat from overwhelming masses of the fierce sub-human Gnorrls,[1] he grinned in his sun-colored beard and heard out the blustering demand of the envoy. Then he gave the boys of the village leave to drive the stranger away with sticks and stones. In due time the fellow limped home to the seaside, and Djoma led every fighting man he had—more than a hundred—to take the bows by force.

  Warned by his scouting hunters to the southwest, Hok marshaled sixty of his own stark fighters on a rise of ground where the invaders must pass. Djoma, marching by night with intent to surprise the Flint People around their breakfast fires, came just at the first gray flush of autumn dawn upon a ready skirmish line of warriors, brawny and bearded, clad in skins of lion, wolf and bear, ready to shoot with the bow or strike with the axe.

  In front of these defenders strode Hok himself, taller and broader than any man on the field. The skin of a cave-lion was s
lung around his powerful loins, moccasins of bull-hide shod his feet. The wings of a hawk were bound to his temples, and he bore in one hand a bow with arrow ready on string, in the other a war-axe with a blade of black flint a full span wide. This latter he tossed high in the air like a baton, catching it deftly as it descended.

  “Hai, you strangers, you eaters of fish!” he thundered his defiance. “What do you seek here?”

  “We seek those things you call bows,” replied Djoma, quickly and to the point. He, too, came forward from his horde, and he showed almost, if not quite, as tall as Hok. Sunlight on the water had long ago burnt him as brown as a field stone, and his black beard spread in a sooty cascade over his broad, bare chest. He carried a stabbing-spear, with a shaft as thick as his wrist and longer than his body. “I sent a man to get them, but—”

  “Ho! Ho!” laughed Hok. “Does that man’s back still tingle from the drubbing our little sons gave him? We surrender none of our things when proud strangers command them. Come and take them if you can, Djoma the Fisher. I think it is something else you will get, less to your liking than bows.”

  Djoma roared to his swarthy following, which roared back and charged. At once Hok gave an order of his own, and the Flint People lifted their bows. A blizzard of arrows met the onslaught full and fair, striking down men on all hands. The charge wavered, while the defenders quickly set new shafts to their strings. Another deadly volley might have turned Djoma’s threatening advance into a rout.

  But then there fell from heaven a fiery thing that for the instant made all the dimness of heaven as bright as noontide—fell hard and heavy upon the rise of ground which Hok’s men held and up which Djoma was trying to charge. It struck where an outcropping of a certain soft black stone showed.

  AS the prodigy rocketed down to earth, the two opposing throngs, defending bowmen and rushing Fishers, gave a concerted yell of amazed terror and flung themselves flat on the earth. Only Hok, in the forefront of his party and nearest of all to the place where the thing struck, remained on his feet and gazed. The earth reeled under him, like a treetop in a gale. Next instant, an upflung lump of the soft black stone struck him hard in the face, so that he seemed to whirl away into an emptiness as black as the stone itself.

  When his senses crept back into him, the sun was up and bright, and he was alone. Apparently the battle had rolled away from him—he saw only dead, both of his own folk and of the Fishers. It was hot, too. The heat was what had awakened him. It seemed that the earth was afire near by, and a morning wind had sprung up, enlivening the blaze and straining it toward him.

  Blinking and snorting, Hok got to his feet. His head ached from the chance blow that had Stunned him, but he had been stunned before, and like the later Athenians always treated headaches with contempt. He gazed about him, wondering again which way the battle had gone. Beside him lay his own bow and axe—his own side must have triumphed, else surely he would have been killed and plundered as he lay helpless. Thus allaying any anxiety, he turned back to the strange fire.

  It filled the rift in the slope where the outcropping of black stone had been, now torn open as if by the blow of a mighty axe. The breeze blowing into the opening, fanned the flame to an intense pallid heat. Hok came as close as the scorching air would allow, peering. He could see the thing that had fallen from the sky, in the very midst of the furnace. It was a round, glowing lump, bigger than his head.

  “The Shining One hurled it,” he remembered in his heart, “for it came from the sky, his home. Was he displeased with me, or was it a warning?

  Had he truly wished to, he could have killed me like a fly.”

  Hok stooped and picked up a piece of the outflung black stone. Tentatively he tossed it at the glowing lump in the hottest heart of the fire. It seemed to him that the black stone vanished at once.

  “Hai! The thing eats black stones,” he mused. Some paces downhill from the fire showed another outcropping. Going there, Hok pried out great brittle chunks of the stuff and filled his arms with them. They blackened his chest and ribs, but he bore his burden to the fire and threw it in.

  “If you are a living thing, from the Shining One, Hok is your friend,” he announced. “I will bring you all you wish of the black stone.”

  He did what he could to fulfill this promise. Again and again he brought as much as he could carry, ripping out great dusty boulders of the material with his huge hands, later by prying at it with the stout handle of his axe. High he piled the dark heap, shutting away the flames. It made a cairn as high as his chest, and wider across than he could have spanned in three strides. “That should satisfy the thing,” he decided.

  But he was wrong. There was a crackling and a steaming. Between the bigger lumps darted tongues of the inner fire. As Hok gazed, fascinated and wondering, the whole heap suddenly burst into roaring holocaust. He was forced to retreat before it.

  “The black stones bum!” he cried. “Yes, and more hotly than wood!”[2]

  SO small a thing as a battle with invaders was now driven from his mind. The Shining One had thrown down a marvel to him, and it behooved him to see it out. See it out Hok did, while the sun climbed higher and higher, and the blaze shot up higher than a tall tree, died down. Hok was able to approach again. At length there came a rain, a spatter that was brisk but not heavy. The fire, burning itself out, perished. He walked close, his moccasins squelching in the damp.

  “Where is the gift of heaven?” he asked the smouldering ashes. With reverent insistence, he poked among them with the butt of his axe.

  Something gleamed up, like water, but hard—like ice, but warm. Grunting in his new amazement, Hok scooped the ashes away to either side.

  The meteor that had fallen and set so great a fire was reduced by its own works to a jagged piece of fused clinker. But from the heart of it had issued something long and lean and straight, like a sleeping snake. The thing was still hot as Hok touched it, and he had to drag it forth in a fold of his lion’s skin—it was as broad as his three fingers, and well longer than his arm, tapering to a point and harder than any flint he had ever known. Yet, hard as it was, it had a springy temper to it that no stone had ever displayed.[3] Holding the broad end in wrappings of skin, Hok hefted it.

  “The gift of heaven!” he called it again. “This is a weapon, then. But how to use it?”

  The rain had abated. Hok bore his find way toward his village, studying it intently with the eye of a master workman.

  It already had the beginnings of an edge to either side of it, sharper than his sharpest chipped stone, and its point was finer and leaner than any dagger he knew. As with flints, Hok tried to improve the thing by chipping with a small, heavy hammer-stone. The substance rang to a tone he had never heard before, but showed no breakage or other great effect. He learned to rub and whet, and this made the edge keener. So Hok labored as he strolled on toward home, and as he came thither in the late afternoon he had finished the blade to his liking—with a keen point, a slicing edge, and at the broad end a grip for his hand wound tightly with rawhide thongs slit from his lion’s skin.

  He grinned and chuckled over the thing. First he would show it to Oloana, his comely wife, who always shared his triumphs and enthusiasms—her midnight eyes would glow like stars at the sight of this new thing. And he would let Ptao, his bright-haired little son, try to lift the thing’s long weight . . .

  “Hok! Hok!”

  HIS brother Zhik, sub-chief under him, was running toward him from the direction of the village. “You live!” he panted.

  “Of course I live,” said Hok, laying his sword across his arm for easier carrying. “How went the fight after I was knocked over? Did you kill many of the Fishers before they ran?”

  “Before—they ran?” Zhik repeated, and shook his tawny head. “But they did not run, Hok—we did.”

  Hok straightened up and glared, his teeth showing. “Ran? We? How was that, Zhik?”

  His brother spread helpless hands. “It was that thing that fell a
nd struck you down. Because it fell toward us—”

  Hok clutched Zhik’s arm to calm him. “What happened? Speak clearly, and briefly.”

  The words came out in a tumble. “We were frightened. The Fishers yelled to each other that the spirits fought on their side, and came at us. They drove us before them. You were thought to be dead, and nobody touched you, since heaven itself had claimed your life—”

  “But I am alive,” Hok assured him again. “Well, and after you ran from them?”

  “We ran, thinking the Shining One hated us. But Oloana, when we told her at the village, insisted on going to find your body.” Zhik shook his head ruefully. “We tried to make her stay, but she would go—she and Ptao, your son.”

  Hok suddenly grew chill, as though new and cold rain had fallen upon him. He sensed worse news to come. “Why have I not met them, then?” he asked.

  Zhik grimaced wretchedly over what he must say. “The—the Fishers had followed us for some distance, picking up some bows dropped by our wounded.

  And they came upon Oloana and Ptao, carrying them back toward their village by the sea.”

  The glare in Hok’s blue eyes grew paler and hotter. His big right hand closed upon the hide-wrapped hilt of the sword that was cradled on his left arm. “They captured Oloana and Ptao?” he repeated. “And no man tried to stop them—not even you, my brother?”

  “We thought it was the will of the Shining One, grown angry. We did not know that you were alive—” Zhik broke off, and put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Come to the village. Eat and rest. We will rally the warriors that are left. When they see that you live, they will follow—”

  “There is not time. Go back, and say that I have followed Djoma and his skulking Fishers.” Hok suddenly lifted the sword. It caught the glow of the sun in blinding flashes. He flourished it above his blond head bound with the hawk wings.

  “The Shining One gave me this,” he cried, “and gave me also a deed to do, worthy of such a weapon—I want no help from the others. This sharp Widow-maker will cut me a way through the Fishers, and gain back what I have lost! Good-by, Zhik!”