The Complete Hok the Mighty Page 6

  Tremendous as was the glory of that lost land, more tremendous still was her doom. It beggars imagination, the rush and triumph of ocean, breaking the barrier and filling the sunken basin that was like an inverted continent, drowning forests, cities, nations. How could even one escape from the judgment? Yet some one did, and told his children of what he had seen and escaped, and they told those who came after them, down to the present day. How else could we know.

  Who was that survivor of Atlantis? He must have been a mighty man. He may even have been the hero we remember as Hercules.

  CHAPTER I

  The Horsemen and the Valley

  THE wolves had been chasing Hok for three days.

  Hok had become great, in body and in fame, since the days when he, barely past his boyhood, entered the northern game-lands and purged them of the inhuman Gnorrls.[1] Maturity had made him taller than ever, and more bull-strong and leopard-swift and lion-tawny. He wore a short, soft beard, like the fiber which his wife, the lovely Oloana, beat from autumn grasses and wove into baskets and pouches. He ruled a fighting tribe of valiant hunters and handsome women, and also was respected and deferred to by the allied clans of his brother Zhik and his father-in-law Zorr. His hunting grounds yielded fat game, and there were still Gnorrls to fight if the time passed heavily. Yet Hok had not out-grown his enthusiasm for exploration; and so, telling Zhik to command for him, he had gone away on a spring jaunt to the south and west, into country he and his did not know.

  And the wolves, a good forty of them, picked up his scent and hunted him through the forest for three foodless, sleepless days and nights.

  Now they gave tongue exultantly, for they were driving him toward a great cliff, against which he must come to bay; but Hok, who ran like the deer and fought like the lion, also climbed like the ape. He scaled the rocky wall nimbly, laughing backward at the famished howls of the pack, and dragged himself to the brow of the cliff in the bright morning. Standing erect, he gazed afar into a valley.

  But such a valley! It stretched down and down, gently but ceaselessly. He gazed into sloping meadows, with groves beneath them, and water-courses, and broken country, for the distance of many marches—falling down, down, down, gently but steadily. As for the valley’s other side, it was lost in far blue mist, as though it were hidden beyond a piece of the sky. Things were green and fresh, and Hok heard birds, saw the cautious motion of game in tall brush. It must be a good hunting land. If he had not cast away his two flint-headed javelins at the wolves—it was always that way when you had nothing to throw. Here came some horses toward him, around that thicket.

  No, not horses—men!

  No, not men—but not horses, either!

  Hok’s bright beard stirred with excitement. He shaded his blue eyes with a wide, hard palm. Surely the things had hoofs—four each—and horsey tails. But why did the heads and shoulders of men thrust up from each? And then Hok saw, and wondered still more. The horses were normal, and so were the men—but the men were riding upon the horses, as baby monkeys ride on their mothers’ backs.[2]

  It was almost too much for the caveman’s simple mind. To him, a horse was a toothsome creature that yielded much meat—no more. He had never thought of riding one. Yet, whatever his surprise, he did not fear. He moved forward to the rim rock that jutted above the valley, and gazed.

  Hok was naked except for leopard-skin kilt and moccasins of tough bison hide. At his girdle hung a pouch and a sheath that carried a finely worked dagger of deer-horn. He bore, too, a stone-headed axe, chipped of blue flint, its keen edge a full span in width. His body was tanned and superbly muscled but, save for his hair and beard, it showed as smooth as a peach. Not even in those fierce days was one apt to see a bigger or better specimen of manhood.

  The horsemen came close toward him, then halted their animals at a signal from their leader. There were as many of them as there had been hungry wolves below. Most of them seemed swarthy and bearded, and wore strange clothing, either pale or shining. If it was of leather or fur, Hok had never seen such beasts as yielded it.

  The leader came forward by a horse’s length—a trim, smooth-faced individual, in a close-fitting garment that seemed to be made of huge fish-scales.

  “You on the rock!” came a clear challenge, in a tongue not too dissimilar to Hok’s own. “Who are you?”

  “Aye,” growled a deeper voice from the party of riders, “and tell us your people, and the name of your master.”

  “I am Hok,” shouted back the caveman. “My people are those who hunt to north and east, beating back the hairy Gnorrls. I have no master.”

  “The fellow flouts us, he is a madman,” grumbled the deep voice, and its owner sidled his horse out to join the leader. This second speaker was squat and black-bearded, and even at the distance Hok saw that he was fierce of face and sharp eyed.

  “If I am mad,” Hok threw at him, “I may come down and make you fear my bite.”

  With an oath, the bearded one lifted himself in his seat, whirled a spear backward, and launched it at the defiant Hok, who stood still to watch the course of the weapon. It was a sure cast, but not too strong, according to cave-man standards. As it came at Hok, he swayed his big, lithe body sidewise, shot out his right hand like a snake, and seized the flying shaft by the middle. Whirling it end for end, he sped it back the way it had come, with all the strength and skill of his mighty muscles behind it. Forty throats whooped in startled anger as the black-beard spun off of his beast, transfixed by his own weapon. Hok’s answering shout of laughter defied them. It had all happened in two breaths of time.

  FOR more than two breaths thereafter, the company hesitated. To them it seemed that the spear had bounced back from Hok and punished its hurler—a feat of magic. Nona cared to attack magicians in those times. Again the leader spoke:

  “I did not order my man to cast at you, and I do not take up his quarrel. Come down and make peace.”

  Hok did not stir.

  “Come down,” came the invitation a second time. “I swear by my honor, and by my god, the Many-legged Ghirann, that you will find only profit.” Hok felt sincerity in that oath. He scrambled down the face of the inner bluff, and strode forward. The leader trotted out to meet him, and Hok grew sure of what he had been suspecting—that the leader was a woman, young and of a certain sturdy beauty. Her jaw was square and her nose straight, and her hair and eyes were dark. Around her throat was a collar-like string of sun-glowing lumps. Hok’s own blue eyes met her dark ones, and he tossed back his lion’s mane of hair.

  “Hok, you call yourself?” said the horsewoman. “I am Maie, a chieftainess of Tlanis. Now, by your act, we ride one short. Will you make our band whole again?”

  “If I refuse?” he suggested, hand on her bridle-rein. “If I become your enemy?”

  She smiled, without showing her teeth. Her tight lips could be hard, he saw.

  “You cannot fling back all our spears, Hok. Be wise, take the horse and tackle of him you slew.”

  A man was leading the sturdy, shaggy brown beast forward. A gourd at its withers danced and gave forth liquid sounds. Hok, who feared not Maie or all her followers, was thirsty enough to let this item persuade him.

  “I seek new sights and peoples,” he consented. “I will ride with you.” And he vaulted upon the proffered animal, confidently though a bit clumsily. “Where do we go, warrior woman, and on what errand?”

  Like him, the mounted troop had been exploring. When she heard from him that beyond the rimrock was a great steep cliff, and only trackless forest beyond that, Maie gave a signal to turn. “We will ride back five days to our own place,” she said, “and if you are indeed a stone-chipper and cave-dweller, we can promise you your fill of strange sights.”

  They rode away. When they made camp that night, at a grove of palm-like trees with a spring at the center, Hok had learned to manage his mount in a way that bespoke his great courage and aptitude. There were other wonders harder for him to fathom. The drink in the gourd—
wine, Maie called it—was at once fiery and refreshing; the weapons of the man he had supplanted were of strange bright material, neither stone nor bone, but tougher and keener than either, and called bronze by his new companions. Their clothing, too, was partially of that material (Hok was a little scornful of the idea of armor) and partially of woven threads of plant fiber or animal fleece, a fabric like Oloana’s grass baskets, but finer.

  On the next day he rode beside Maie at the head of the party. The slope took them down and ever down, and as they descended the country grew richer and warmer. Hok, used to tough-grassed meadows, hardy bushes and cone-bearing trees, gaped with wonder upon feathery palms and shrubs with bright flowers a foot across, on clusters of red and yellow fruit, on broad-leafed, sky-aspiring groves, in which played gay-plumed birds and chattering monkeys. Yet his wonder was tinctured with a ghostly sense of familiarity, as though within him stirred the memory of his own dim ancestries, spent in such an environment.

  He also learned about the people of Tlanis.

  THEY lived, said Maie, in a stronghold near the ocean, and had neither to hunt nor to steal for sustenance. This great valley, many days’ journey across, was full of subject tribes who provided food and other necessities for their rulers in Tlanis. Hok heard in half-comprehending wonder that other animals besides horses were kept captive, and fed fat for leisurely butchering; and that fields were planted with seeds, to bring forth vegetable stores that Tlanis gathered far more surely and easily than the women of Hok’s people gathered fruits and nuts in the forest.

  He was full of questions, that lasted even to the fifth and final morning of the ride. Maie answered them all.

  “And now, great wielder of stone,” she asked him at length, “are you not convinced that our way of living is better and softer than yours, among caves and wild beasts?”

  “I think,” he replied, “that soft living makes soft men.”

  “But is there not an advantage?”

  “I cannot yet say that, Maie.”

  She smiled as she heard him speak her name. “You might say, at least, that you like me, Hok.”

  “I do not know yet if I like you,” he replied. And no more he did, although he had loved and wanted Oloana within the first instant of seeing her. This woman, Maie, was beautiful and wise, and so far had treated him with more than fairness; but Hok reserved judgment upon her.

  He looked again at the collar of gleaming yellow objects she wore. They were beads, curiously worked and engraved, and strung on a thread or wire of the same substance.

  “What are those?” he asked Maie.

  “They are gold.”

  “What is gold?”—And she sighed, as though she must give up trying to instruct him.

  They rode in silence through a lush, sweet-smelling forest, and before noon came out in open country.

  A height of rock and earth rose against the horizon. It extended to left and right, beyond reach of the eye, and beyond it shone, or seemed to shine, a bright blueness—water, more water than Hok had ever seen.

  Directly ahead of the riders, lifting from the level of this barrier, appeared a broken peak. From its top floated a wispy plume of dark smoke, as of a great beacon fire.[3] And beneath the barrier, at the point where the peak crowned it, lay heaped and clustered strange mineral shapes, of various angles and sizes and plans, but somehow ordered in their relationships. Hok stared.

  “What things lie there at the foot of the cliff?” he demanded.

  “They are houses,” said Maie. “Walls and palaces and streets. Did I not promise you wonders? Yonder is the city of Tlanis, which rules the world.”

  CHAPTER II

  A Summons from Cos

  TO DESCRIBE the city of Tlanis, words and comparisons are needed which were utterly strange to Hok as he rode with his new friends down the broad paved trail.

  Built at the “end of the world”—that is, under the lee of a mighty barrier that held back the high-piled wastes of the ocean—it was far below sea level, nestled against the steep slopes and lower ledges of the great natural dam of volcanic rock that kept the valley from being flooded. On the landward side, a great artificial wall of stone, cut and mortared, defended the place, with green meadows, orchards and grain-fields close to its foot. Within mighty gates of hewn logs, each a cunning interlacement like a giant’s mat-weaving, were squares and clumps of houses, one and two and three stories high. The passage-spaces between—Hok must learn to call them streets—were faced with fiat slabs of stone, and thronged with men, horses, litters, woodenwheeled carts. Maie pointed out to him the various classes of citizens, the laborers, merchants, soldiers, farmers, nobles, beggars.

  The city rose on a succession of broad ledges or terraces. Each of these was strung with buildings, a lengthwise street or two, and occasional ramps to other levels. Passing upward, the company came to the market level, in which great arcades and small shops were filled with foodstuffs, fabrics, weapons, utensils, jewelry and other wonders, over which merchants and customers chaffered in yelling multitudes. Hok listened to Maie’s explanation of commerce, but the idea of money—pieces of metal, sun-yellow or moon-white—he could not grasp. Maie’s gold beads he understood. They were ornaments, such as women prized. Beyond that, gold was nothing—not good to eat, too soft for weapons.

  “I think that some of these people work too hard, and others too little,” he announced. “That man with the curly beard and the red cloak, whom you call a rich merchant, is too fat. So is that other, who comes and talks to him. They are short-breathed and flabby-muscled. I have a son at home, a little boy, who would live longer than they in the forest.

  “This is not a forest,” Maie reminded him. They mounted to a higher level, where only soldiers marched or lounged on the street, and dwelt in the sturdy barracks buildings of stone and timber. Here, Maie ordered her horse and Hok’s to be led away.

  “Come,” she said to him. “I will show you places of delight in this city.”

  They went down a ramp on foot, passed through a howling market—the voices were too shrill to please Hok—and came to an open-fronted, palm-thatched shop with tables, benches, and the scent of food and wine. At Maie’s motion, Hok entered, and they both sat down. A slender youth with curly hair brought them steaming portions of meat and vegetables on clay platters, also metal mugs of wine.

  “Thank you,” Hok said cordially to the waiter. “It is kind for you to give a stranger food and drink.”

  “Strangers must pay, like others,” was the reply, and Maie took coins from her belt-pouch.

  “Why is gold given for food?” demanded Hok when the waiter had gone. “It is a matter too deep for me.”

  “I am afraid you hate gold,” smiled Maie.

  “All except the beads you wear. They are beautiful.”

  “You like them?” And at once Maie undid the collar from her neck, and held it out. “They are yours.”

  Hok was about to refuse, with thanks, when it occurred to him that his wife, Oloana, would demand a present when he returned to the caves. And so he accepted the present, and fastened it around his corded wrist, where it hung like a bangle.

  “I have many such beads,” Maie told him. “I am rich, I have lands and servants and warriors.”

  “I never before saw a woman who led fighting men,” said Hok.

  “My father had no sons, and when he died I became a chief in his place. Is that strange? Will not your little son, of whom you spoke, be chief after you?”

  “I hope he will,” replied Hok, “but he must earn and prove his right to lead, when he is a man. No son stands on his dead father’s legs with us.”

  THE two ate and watched the passing market-crowd. Many a gaze answered theirs, admiring and appraising the stalwart tawniness of the cave chieftain. Hok listened as Maie continued her explanations of the government, the organization and life-ways of Tlanis.

  “I still think it is bad,” he said, when she had finished. “From what you say, many are poor—some even h
ungry—in this big sunken valley, which to my notion is the fullest and finest place in the world. There must be food enough for everybody, almost for the taking.”

  “But there can be no taking without paying,” Maie assured him patiently. “All this belongs to our rulers—to Cos.”

  “Who is Cos?”

  “The master of Tlanis, and of the great valley. Of all the world.”

  “He is not my master,” replied Hok doggedly. “I never heard of him. But he must be tremendously big and hungry to eat all the good things I have seen.”

  “He is a great man, and his appetite is good,” admitted Maie.

  “But to feed this one man, many go hungry and wretched,” argued Hok.

  “He has soldiers to feed, and slaves, and more than fifty women,” Maie elaborated.

  “Fifty women!” cried Hok, and shook his head in refusal to believe. “One is enough for any man.”

  Maie was thoughtful. “Cos does not think so,” she said. “He is always taking more. Just now he wants me, he has asked me to enter his palace. I will be his favorite if I will leave off adventuring and exploring, and give myself to him.”

  “You love him?” asked Hok.

  “My family is great in Tlanis. Since my father died, I have become chieftainess of many men, horse and foot, with other property. Yet, if I accept Cos, I may be even greater.”

  “Why should you want to be greater?” demanded Hok, and Maie seemed unable to answer. “I do not know if I like Cos,” Hok went on. “He takes food from others, and to starve is a bad death. He should go hungry himself, to learn how it feels.”

  As they finished their food and wine, a tall, lean man in a long robe came up to them. He had a face like a wise eagle, and a tag of beard on his chin. “Greetings, Maie,” he said in a high, disagreeable voice. “Cos has heard that you are in Tlanis.”