CHAPTER XXVI. THE VENGEANCE OF NORHALA
Norhala's hand that had gone from my wrist dropped down again; the otherfell upon Drake's.
Kulun loosed his hood, let it fall about his shoulders.
He stepped forward, held out his arms to Norhala.
"A strong man!" she cried approvingly. "Hail--my bridegroom! Butstay--stand back a moment. Stand beside that man for whom I came toRuszark. I would see you together!"
Kulun's face darkened. But Cherkis smiled with evil understanding,shrugged his shoulders and whispered to him. Sullenly Kulun steppedback. The ring of the archers lowered their bows; they leaped to theirfeet and stood aside to let him pass.
Quick as a serpent's tongue a pyramid tipped tentacle flicked outbeneath us. It darted through the broken circle of the bowmen.
It LICKED up Ruth and Ventnor and--Kulun!
Swiftly as it had swept forth it returned, coiled and dropped those twoI loved at Norhala's feet.
It flashed back on high with the scarlet length of Cherkis's sonsprawled along its angled end.
The great body of Cherkis seemed to wither.
Up from all the wall went a tempestuous sigh of horror.
Out rang the merciless chimes of Norhala's laughter.
"Tchai!" she cried. "Tchai! Fat fool there. Tchai--you Cherkis! Toadwhose wits have sickened with your years!
"Did you think to catch me, Norhala, in your filthy web? Princess!Queen! Empress of Earth! Ho--old fox I have outplayed and beaten, whatnow have you to trade with Norhala?"
Mouth sagging open, eyes glaring, the tyrant slowly raised his arms--asuppliant.
"You would have back the bridegroom you gave me?" she laughed. "Takehim, then."
Down swept the metal arm that held Kulun. The arm dropped Cherkis's sonat Cherkis's feet; and as though Kulun had been a grape--it crushed him!
Before those who had seen could stir from their stupor the tentaclehovered over Cherkis, glaring down at the horror that had been his son.
It did not strike him--it drew him up to it as a magnet draws a pin.
And as the pin swings from the magnet when held suspended by the head,so swung the great body of Cherkis from the under side of the pyramidthat held him. Hanging so he was carried toward us, came to a stop notten feet from us--
Weird, weird beyond all telling was that scene--and would I had thepower to make you who read see it as we did.
The animate, living Shape of metal on which we stood, with its forest ofhammer-handed arms raised menacingly along its mile of spindled length;the great walls glistening with the armored hosts; the terraces of thatfair and ancient city, their gardens and green groves and clusteringred and yellow-roofed houses and temples and palaces; the swinging grossbody of Cherkis in the clutch of the unseen grip of the tentacle, hisgrizzled hair touching the side of the pyramid that held him, his armshalf outstretched, the gemmed cloak flapping like the wings of a jeweledbat, his white, malignant face in which the evil eyes were burning slitsflaming hell's own blackest hatred; and beyond the city, from whichpulsed almost visibly a vast and hopeless horror, the watchingcolumn--and over all this the palely radiant white sky under whose lightthe encircling cliffs were tremendous stony palettes splashed with ahundred pigments.
Norhala's laughter had ceased. Somberly she looked upon Cherkis, intothe devil fires of his eyes.
"Cherkis!" she half whispered. "Now comes the end for you--and for allthat is yours! But until the end's end you shall see."
The hanging body was thrust forward; was thrust up; was brought downupon its feet on the upper plane of the prostrate pyramid tipping themetal arm that held him. For an instant he struggled to escape; Ithink he meant to hurl himself down upon Norhala, to kill her before hehimself was slain.
If so, after one frenzied effort he realized the futility, for witha certain dignity he drew himself upright, turned his eyes toward thecity.
Over that city a dreadful silence hung. It was as though it cowered, hidits face, was afraid to breathe.
"The end!" murmured Norhala.
There was a quick trembling through the Metal Thing. Down swung itsforest of sledges. Beneath the blow down fell the smitten walls,shattered, crumbling, and with it glittering like shining flies in adust storm fell the armored men.
Through that mile-wide breach and up to the inner barrier I glimpsedconfusion chaotic. And again I say it--they were no cowards, those menof Cherkis. From the inner battlements flew clouds of arrows, of hugestones--as uselessly as before.
Then out from the opened gates poured regiments of horsemen, brandishingjavelins and great maces, and shouting fiercely as they drove down uponeach end of the Metal Shape. Under cover of their attack I saw cloakedriders spurring their ponies across the plain to shelter of the cliffwalls, to the chance of hiding places within them. Women and men ofthe rich, the powerful, flying for safety; after them ran and scatteredthrough the fields of grain a multitude on foot.
The ends of the spindle drew back before the horsemen's charge,broadening as they went--like the heads of monstrous cobras withdrawinginto their hoods. Abruptly, with a lightning velocity, these broadeningsexpanded into immense lunettes, two tremendous curving and crablikeclaws. Their tips flung themselves past the racing troops; then likegigantic pincers began to contract.
Of no avail now was it for the horsemen to halt dragging their mounts ontheir haunches, or to turn to fly. The ends of the lunettes had met,the pincer tips had closed. The mounted men were trapped withinhalf-mile-wide circles. And in upon man and horse their livingwalls marched. Within those enclosures of the doomed began a franticmilling--I shut my eyes--
There was a dreadful screaming of horses, a shrieking of men. Thensilence.
Shuddering, I looked. Where the mounted men had been was--nothing.
Nothing? There were two great circular spaces whose floors wereglistening, wetly red. Fragments of man or horse--there was none.They had been crushed into--what was it Norhala had promised--had beenstamped into the rock beneath the feet of her--servants.
Sick, I looked away and stared at a Thing that writhed and undulatedover the plain; a prodigious serpentine Shape of cubes and sphereslinked and studded thick with the spikes of the pyramid. Through thefields, over the plain its coils flashed.
Playfully it sped and twisted among the fugitives, crushing them,tossing them aside broken, gliding over them. Some there were whohurled themselves upon it in impotent despair, some who knelt before it,praying. On rolled the metal convolutions, inexorable.
Within my vision's range there were no more fugitives. Around a cornerof the broken battlements raced the serpent Shape. Where it had writhedwas now no waving grain, no trees, no green thing. There was only smoothrock upon which here and there red smears glistened wetly.
Afar there was a crying, in its wake a rumbling. It was the column, itcame to me, at work upon the further battlements. As though the soundhad been a signal the spindle trembled; up we were thrust anotherhundred feet or more. Back dropped the host of brandished arms, threadedthemselves into the parent bulk.
Right and left of us the spindle split into scores of fissures. Betweenthese fissures the Metal Things that made up each now dissociate andshapeless mass geysered; block and sphere and tetrahedron spike spun andswirled. There was an instant of formlessness.
Then right and left of us stood scores of giant, grotesque warriors.Their crests were fully fifty feet below our living platform. Theystood upon six immense, columnar stilts. These sextuple legs supporteda hundred feet above their bases a huge and globular body formed ofclusters of the spheres. Out from each of these bodies that were at oneand the same time trunks and heads, sprang half a score of colossal armsshaped like flails; like spike-studded girders, Titanic battle maces,Cyclopean sledges.
From legs and trunks and arms the tiny eyes of the Metal Hordes flashed,exulting.
There came from them, from the Thing we rode as well, a chorus of thinand eager wailings and pulsed through all that battle-line, a jubi
lantthrobbing.
Then with a rhythmic, JOCUND stride they leaped upon the city.
Under the mallets of the smiting arms the inner battlements fell asunder the hammers of a thousand metal Thors. Over their fragments andthe armored men who fell with them strode the Things, grinding stone andman together as we passed.
All of the terraced city except the side hidden by the mount lay open tomy gaze. In that brief moment of pause I saw crazed crowds battlingin narrow streets, trampling over mounds of the fallen, surging overbarricades of bodies, clawing and tearing at each other in their flight.
There was a wide, stepped street of gleaming white stone that climbedlike an immense stairway straight up the slope to that broad plaza atthe top where clustered the great temples and palaces--the Acropolis ofthe city. Into it the streets of the terraces flowed, each pouring outupon it a living torrent, tumultuous with tuliped, sparkling littlewaves, the gay coverings and the arms and armor of Ruszark's desperatethousands seeking safety at the shrines of their gods.
Here great carven arches arose; there slender, exquisite towers cappedwith red gold--there was a street of colossal statues, another overwhich dozens of graceful, fretted bridges threw their spans fromfeathery billows of flowering trees; there were gardens gay withblossoms in which fountains sparkled, green groves; thousands uponthousands of bright multicolored pennants, banners, fluttered.
A fair, a lovely city was Cherkis's stronghold of Ruszark.
Its beauty filled the eyes; out from it streamed the fragrance of itsgardens--the voice of its agony was that of the souls in Dis.
The row of destroying shapes lengthened, each huge warrior of metaldrawing far apart from its mates. They flexed their manifold arms,shadow boxed--grotesquely, dreadfully.
Down struck the flails, the sledges. Beneath the blows the buildingsburst like eggshells, their fragments burying the throngs fighting forescape in the thoroughfares that threaded them. Over their ruins wemoved.
Down and ever down crashed the awful sledges. And ever under them thecity crumbled.
There was a spider Shape that crawled up the wide stairway hammeringinto the stone those who tried to flee before it.
Stride by stride the Destroying Things ate up the city.
I felt neither wrath nor pity. Through me beat a jubilant roaringpulse--as though I were a shouting corpuscle of the rushing hurricane,as though I were one of the hosts of smiting spirits of the bellowingtyphoon.
Through this stole another thought--vague, unfamiliar, yet seeminglyof truth's own essence. Why, I wondered, had I never recognized thisbefore? Why had I never known that these green forms called trees werebut ugly, unsymmetrical excrescences? That these high projections oftowers, these buildings were deformities?
That these four-pronged, moving little shapes that screamed and ranwere--hideous?
They must be wiped out! All this misshapen, jumbled, inharmoniousugliness must be wiped out! It must be ground down to smooth unbrokenplanes, harmonious curvings, shapeliness--harmonies of arc and line andangle!
Something deep within me fought to speak--fought to tell me that thisthought was not human thought, not my thought--that it was the reflectedthought of the Metal Things!
It told me--and fiercely it struggled to make me realize what it wasthat it told. Its insistence was borne upon little despairing, rhythmicbeatings--throbbings that were like the muffled sobbings of the drums ofgrief. Louder, closer came the throbbing; clearer with it my perceptionof the inhumanness of my thought.
The drum beat tapped at my humanity, became a dolorous knocking at myheart.
It was the sobbing of Cherkis!
The gross face was shrunken, the cheeks sagging in folds of woe; crueltyand wickedness were wiped from it; the evil in the eyes had been washedout by tears. Eyes streaming, bull throat and barrel chest racked by hissobbing, he watched the passing of his people and his city.
And relentlessly, coldly, Norhala watched him--as though loath to losethe faintest shadow of his agony.
Now I saw we were close to the top of the mount. Packed between usand the immense white structures that crowned it were thousands of thepeople. They fell on their knees before us, prayed to us. They tore ateach other, striving to hide themselves from us in the mass that wasthemselves. They beat against the barred doors of the sanctuaries; theyclimbed the pillars; they swarmed over the golden roofs.
There was a moment of chaos--a chaos of which we were the heart.Then temple and palace cracked, burst; were shattered; fell. I caughtglimpses of gleaming sculptures, glitterings of gold and of silver,flashing of gems, shimmering of gorgeous draperies--under them aweltering of men and women.
We closed down upon them--over them!
The dreadful sobbing ceased. I saw the head of Cherkis swing heavilyupon a shoulder; the eyes closed.
The Destroying Things touched. Their flailing arms coiled back, withdrewinto their bodies. They joined, forming for an instant a tremendoushollow pillar far down in whose center we stood. They parted; shiftedin shape? rolled down the mount over the ruins like a wideningwave--crushing into the stone all over which they passed.
Afar away I saw the gleaming serpent still at play--still writhingalong, still obliterating the few score scattered fugitives that someway, somehow, had slipped by the Destroying Things.
We halted. For one long moment Norhala looked upon the drooping body ofhim upon whom she had let fall this mighty vengeance.
Then the metal arm that held Cherkis whirled. Thrown from it, thecloaked form flew like a great blue bat. It fell upon the flattenedmound that had once been the proud crown of his city. A blue blot upondesolation the broken body of Cherkis lay.
A black speck appeared high in the sky; grew fast--the lammergeier.
"I have left carrion for you--after all!" cried Norhala.
With an ebon swirling of wings the vulture dropped beside the blueheap--thrust in it its beak.