Tales of the Wold Newton Universe

  The first atomic bombs used conventional explosives to fire a radioactive bullet against a radioactive target. When the target was hit, there was a critical mass instantly assembled, and then, boom.

  This fact gave Peri some mixed feelings about the powder kegs the smugglers were carrying. He decided that it would be better to get closer to the smugglers, so he would be at hand to intervene if they tried something really stupid.

  The tunnel was quite dark. The men in front were carrying torches; those behind, with the gunpowder, had no light source with them, and just followed the reddish glow ahead. Peri surmised that if he stayed ten to twelve steps behind the hindermost man, he’d be virtually invisible in the darkness.

  In silence, he climbed down from the ledge. There were a few thick stalagmites the time traveler might use for extra cover, but he was convinced that it would not be necessary.

  He was wrong.

  Things started happening quickly.

  The river flowed down the middle of the corridor, and when his eyes were properly adjusted, Peri noticed that there was a thin blue glow in the waters. He supposed that it might be caused by Cherenkov radiation, a byproduct of the nuclear reactions taking place there, or perhaps a sign of the presence of trace amounts of the same kind of blue-glowing magnetic mineral the Aymorés used. He recalled that the mutant jaguar had the selfsame glow in its eye membranes. If the thing was being assimilated into the bodies of animals adapted to life near the reactor, he surmised it might offer some real protection. Evolution, after all, may be blind, but it is also economic and supremely efficient.

  So, he kept an eye on the river, deciding to rub his whole body with any blue-glowing sand he might find. Taking survival lessons from animals was almost second nature with him. His attention, however, was divided, thus explaining the extra second it took for him to register the long, thick shadow slithering under the water’s surface.

  There was a violent splash about twenty meters ahead, followed by an eruption of screaming, cursing, and shots, and the whole group was surging back in his direction.

  He had time to jump on and behind a stalagmite, but too late noticed that the cover was less than perfect.

  “There!” one ofthe smugglers cried. “Another glowing beast!”

  Shots came in his direction. The rate of fire was lousy—muskets and pistols—but it only took one hit to do a lot of damage. And now they were all crowded around the kegs.

  Glowing, Peri mused, as he felled two of his assailants with a couple of well-placed arrows. How am I glowing?

  “It’s a giant monkey!” another screamed. “Its tail is bright!”

  Now Peri understood; his fluorescent lamp had betrayed him. He’d made one so it would light up in the presence of intense radiation. It was in his bag. If the bag had been punctured, it might explain the “bright tail.”

  One arrow found its home through the eye of a gunman. Another one pierced the right arm of the man at his left. The rest of the group just fled, running blindly and forgetting all about big blue beasts dangling from the ceiling.

  “It’s not a monkey! Monkeys don’t shoot arrows!”

  He recognized the voice: Loredano, the bearded leader.

  “It’s just a fucking lousy Indian!” If the goal was to bolster the morale of his men, it didn’t work. Soon, even Loredano’s voice vanished.

  Gribardsun grabbed the last one to run, but the roar that echoed behind them made the time traveler forget the man. By the sound, this noise came from something very different from all the animals he had seen before.

  A few torches had been left behind, scattered on the floor. These puddles of yellow light, combined with the blue hue emanating from the water, did as little to assuage the darkness as the white glow of the lamp that he finally took from his bag and raised as a lantern. The lights, however, only seemed to accentuate the shadows.

  Now he felt a trembling of the ground; there were waves on the river. The beast emerged suddenly from the water, almost as if pushed from behind, and paused, standing head and shoulders taller than a black bear, in front of the two men. It was the biggest ugliest son of a bitch Gribardsun had ever encountered. Its fiery, flashing eyeballs didn’t actually seem to see, but were rolled up like the eyes of a blind animal. The creature’s claws flailed out, ripping chunks from the walls and the ground. Its fur seemed thick and sharp, as if small razors were growing from the end of each strand of fur. Snarling and undulating his bulbous head, moving back and forth along the ceiling, knocking stalactites, it moved its body violently to shake the river from its chinking fur, sending out a wave of blue river water and showering the men with a glittering mud.

  Gribardsun let his inner beast take control of his body and acted without thinking. Two jumps took him away from the first attack, and placed him far from the claws. For his next move, he grabbed his knife and pressed his legs against the wall, creating the necessary tension to propel himself, bouncing like a rubber ball, under the legs of the creature. As he rolled under the animal’s hindquarters, he raised the blade, forcing it against the soft flesh of the beast’s underbelly. Blood and guts spilled all over the place.

  The wound was deep, but the animal became more ferocious as the scent of blood reached its sensitive nose. Turning its huge body around with far more speed than Gribardsun considered it capable of, the monster dog howled and, with a twist of its giant forepaw, caught Gribardsun on the side, marking his torso with four red cuts.

  Snarling in pain and fury, Gribardsun jumped on the same paw that had wounded him and, climbing the limb faster than the creature could react, got to its neck, opening it from chin to breast, stopping at the breastbone with a loud crack. The large jaw snapped three times, searching for Gribardsun and missing, but the claws of the free paw opened four more bloody scratches, now on his back.

  Gribardsun didn’t let go and pressed the knife against bone till the last breath of the hideous beast. Then, after its final shudder, Gribardsun pressed his foot over the carcass and howled as if he were a big cat claiming its prey. Blood and blue dust merged, forming rivulets that covered his bruises, and it felt good.

  Then, the whole world came down on his head.

  A great explosion sent Gribardsun reeling into the river as the ceiling fell. Even in a state of semi-consciousness, the reflexes conditioned by a thousand previous adventures made him hold his breath before submerging. He rolled in the water, the gentle flux made violent by the sudden impact of the heavy stones and stalactites. The vicious speed probably saved the time traveler’s life, since the creatures that might’ve been attracted by his bleeding wounds were themselves caught by the violence of the current.

  In a sudden movement, the wild waters made him break the surface for some seconds, allowing him to fill his lungs with a welcoming breath. Fighting to keep his head above the ferocious river, he became aware of a white-yellow light some distance ahead. The rest of the dizziness then left him. It was the light of dawn or early morning, he knew, which meant that the cave ended somewhere ahead. Could it be possible that he was rushing toward a high waterfall?

  He searched for something to grab on to. Then he saw a rock outcrop, in the form of a crescent moon, which marked the mouth of the fall. Gribardsun struggled against the current to reduce his speed as he approached it.

  The time traveler grabbed the rock with his remaining strength as the rushing water tried to yank him out. For a moment he thought his arms would be disjointed at the shoulders, but then all he had to support was his own weight and the bag was yet dangling from his shoulder.

  Gasping for air, he pulled himself into a sitting position on the rock crescent. He was battered, cut, bleeding, bruised. His aches had aches. He concluded that the laggard smuggler, upon hearing the awful victory scream Gribardsun had let loose, had decided that he’d rather be blown to pieces than be eaten alive by the beast responsible for the beastly cry, and had thrust the flaming head of a torch into one of the barrels.

  But he still liv
ed! As fresh air filled his lungs and he caught the cold wind on his face and saw the sun rising gloriously over the sierra, Gribardsun knew, once more, the ecstasy of living a life on the edge. He’d partaken of such joy countless times in thousands of years, and it still energized him.

  The ecstatic peak fading, he evaluated his situation: the bag was still with him, its contents somewhat shaken, but the most precious parts of his equipment were intact. Those things were sturdy, made to last the centuries. He’d lost bow and arrows, but still had the knife.

  He noticed that the rock he was sitting on was getting warmer. There was also some steam coming, under pressure, from the waterfall, as if the falling water itself was becoming hotter.

  He looked down.

  Gribardsun was perched high above Dom Antônio’s fortress, and could survey the whole area around it. The tactical situation was crystal clear: the castle was under siege by the Aymorés. There was a skirmish at the rearguard of the attacking Indians—he surmised that the surviving smugglers had tried to return to the white man’s refuge and found the path blocked by the native force.

  He took a moment to sort out his equipment and materials, adjusting his camera in a nook close to the tip of the crescent and pointing it in the general direction of the source of the rushing water. Judiciously placing pebbles on and around the shutter button, he created a system that, he believed, would take a series of a dozen snapshots as soon as the ground moved in response to some big upheaval. He then decided to enter the fray on the side of the smugglers. The Aymorés, after all, were a threat to Cecilia, and if the warming rock and steaming water meant what he thought, any second there could be their last.

  So, knife firmly grasped in his clenched teeth, he jumped.

  * * *

  The first Aymoré never knew what killed him. The knife went into his spine at the bottom of the skull and he fell instantly, dead silent. Gribardsun then used a trick he had learned back in his infancy, when he had wanted to mock the savages that had slain his ape-mother. For a whole month he had played the role of a trickster jungle spirit. After each attack, Gribardsun jumped back to the nearest tree, far from the sight of the Indians.

  In this jump-kill-jump routine, it took him less than forty-five minutes to wipe out a sizeable part of the Aymoré troop. Enough to give the smugglers a fighting chance to get behind the walls, but only barely: the war party was huge. He might have kept the game going for a while more, but the tree cover was becoming scarce as they approached the walls, forcing him to do longer and longer jumps. And, in one of them, someone grabbed his left ankle and dashed him to the ground.

  The impact caught Gribardsun in the shoulders, not on the head, which was partially luck and partially well-honed reflexes. Even so, the knife fell from his hand.

  He was back on his feet in almost no time, quickly slipping back into his Peri persona, automatically assuming the typical crouch of the Indian wrestler. Facing him, equally crouched and with a maniacal light in his eyes, stood Aymberê, the giant of the Aymorés.

  And, with a roar, the giant plunged to the attack.

  The roar gave Peri an unwanted taste of Aymberê’s breath, enough for his awareness to register a peculiar scent, an acetous edge. The man had gorged himself on ant-poison liquor. He was drugged into a berserk rage.

  And, of course, behind the red haze of fury that clouded his mind, he recalled the previous humiliating defeat at Gribardsun’s hands.

  His plunge was not that of a wrestler: the crouch propelled him forward with balled fists, his thighs stretching like high-tension coils. His powerful blows caught Peri’s face and midsection, knocking the air out of him.

  Aymberê was possessed and powerful, and Peri was tired, dazed by the sudden fall and still sore with the many wounds he had sustained in the caves. Aymberê’s mad punches were hurting him more than they should; and his counter-punches had no effect he could discern.

  So, Peri went down, felled like an old oak.

  The glee in his opponent’s eyes was fearful to see. Aymberê’s smile was a hideous rictus, and spittle drooled from his lower lip as he loomed over Peri’s body, the eyes closed, the head turned to the side.

  He came closer, savoring the moment, the berserk rage fueling a sadistic, anticipatory pleasure, a monstrous gloating. He would do unmentionable things to this inert body before dismembering it. Power surged to his loins.

  It was when Aymberê’s shadow fell on Peri’s face, blocking the red glare of the sun that filtered through his eyelids, that the time traveler, who had been pretending defeat, flashed into action, raising his bent knee with the speed, strength, and determination of a Norse god brandishing his magic hammer, smashing his enemy’s genitalia.

  Blood shot into Aymberê’s eyes, and his crazed wide-eyed rictus was turned into a desperate, thin-lipped scowl as he fell to the ground. Rolling to one side, Peri connected his elbow with the Indian’s jaw, and Aymberê was knocked unconscious, his face broken.

  Peri then started hearing explosions. The smugglers couldn’t have had time to reload their muskets and pistols, but finally there was someone at the walls using the cannons.

  There was an explosion quite close, and chips of broken rock and hot lead embedded themselves in Peri’s cheek.

  Someone, it seemed, had found the time to reload.

  “Die, pagan bastard!” cried Loredano, a brace of pistols in his arms. Two guns, two barrels per gun, one shot fired. Three to go then.

  As his mind evaluated the tactical aspects of the situation, Peri kept rolling on the ground, hoping the smuggler would keep firing at a moving target, wasting shots. The smuggler then raised his right arm above his head, and started, slowly, to lower it, bringing the barrels in line with the blurring motion that was the half-naked savage in front of him.

  “Die, and Cecilia will be mine!”

  Not today, thought Peri, changing direction and using his legs as pistons to jump over Loredano’s head, passing so close to him he could smell the stink of old layers of dry sweat. As he passed over the man’s oily hair, Peri grabbed the still raised weapon—barely taking notice of Loredano’s scream when his forefinger, caught in the trigger guard, was broken by the sudden lurch—and, on landing behind the enemy, crouched, turned, and used its heavy wooden handle as a club, cracking Loredano’s right knee.

  “Nor ever.”

  Turning Loredano with a shove of his left hand and grabbing him by the hair before he fell, Peri launched two punches from his right into Loredano’s nose and left eye, blinding him and cutting off his breathing. The man even tried to claw at Peri’s eyes with his muddy nails, but failed and started to choke.

  Peri finally smashed Loredano’s face against the nearest tree, cutting the blabbing and gurgling off and leaving a red blot on the trunk.

  He felt the earth trembling under his feet. He knew that if the sequence of collapses and landslides happening right now in the caves ended up creating a critical mass of uranium, the possible outcomes would be a “China syndrome”—the fissile material boring a hole into the earth and burying itself—or an explosion. Whichever would happen, might happen quickly.

  Now his goal was to take Cecilia, and if possible her family, out of this doomed land.

  The time traveler had a way paved with dead bodies in front of him. The Aymorés had been scattered by the cannon fire from the castle, and demoralized by the second defeat of Aymberê, but apparently not before slaughtering all of the remaining smugglers.

  Which meant that Cecilia would be alone in the fortress, with only her father and the servants, and maybe one or two other bandits who perhaps had remained behind when Loredano’s party ventured outside to find the mine. But would anyone wish to be left behind? These men were cutthroats, and none would trust the others with the secret location of the silver, Peri surmised.

  He ran.

  * * *

  There were no more defenses on the walls. The gates were closed, but the cannons were silent, and Gribardsun got there wit
hout being challenged or hailed. He climbed the stone barrier with the ease of one long adjusted to steep hills and even steeper trees, jumped inside, breaking his fall by grabbing a wooden shaft that projected at an angle from the structure, and landed, silently, on his two feet and left hand.

  He thought of inspecting the inside of the walls, finding out what may have happened to the men who had manned the artillery, but his priority was to locate Cecilia and, if possible, Dom Antônio. The rest could wait.

  As he ran into the castle, the great hall seemed empty. This first cursory impression almost cost Peri his life. He moved quickly toward the stairs, failing to notice the giant snake slowly uncoiling from the roof beams to the floor behind him, ready for the attack.

  It was only Gribardsun’s almost unconscious, instinctive attention to every scrap of information around him that allowed him to detect the barely audible sound of the reptile slithering on the flagstones of the floor. He turned just in time to see the monster launching two coils of its scaly body around his torso and legs, and to use the heel of his left hand to stop its jaws from closing on his head.

  The thing had the thickness of an old tree, and a body as hard as mahogany. The general appearance was that of a gigantic boa constrictor, but the head was triangular—an almost sure signature of the venomous snake. The eyes had the eerie blue glint of the radiation-immune animals, and with both hands employed in keeping the thing’s mouth open, he was able to feel the swelling poison bags behind the needle-like teeth.

  The poison started to flow onto his hands and down his wrists as he pressed the jaws open and back. The liquid was dark-golden, like honey, and burned at the touch. At the same time, the muscular coils were closing around him: his breath became short and, suddenly, his ribs seemed quite brittle. He’d taken his knife back after the fights with Aymberê and Loredano, and even had a charged two-shot pistol in his sash, but both were useless now.