THE BATTLE IN THE DARK
For a time no word passed between them. Stern took the girl in
his arms and comforted her as best he might; but his heart told him
there was now no hope.
The old man had spoken only too truly. There existed no way of
convincing these barbarians that their prisoners were not of some
hated, hostile tribe. Evidently the tradition of the outer world had
long since perished as a belief among them. The patriarch's faith in
it had come to be considered a mere doting second childhood vagary,
just as the tradition of the Golden Age was held to be by the later
Greeks.
That Stern and Beatrice could in any way convince their captors of the
truth of this outer world and establish their identity as real
survivors of the other time, lay wholly outside the bounds of the
probable.
And as the old man's prophecy of evil--interrupted, yet frightfully
ominous--recurred to Stern's mind, he knew the end of everything was
very close at hand.
"They won't get us, though, without a stiff fight, damn them!" thought
he. "That's one satisfaction. If they insist on extermination--if they
want war--they'll get it, all right enough! And it'll be what Sherman
said war always was, too--_Hell!_"
Came now a long, a seemingly interminable wait. The door remained
fast-barred. Oppression, heat, thirst, hunger tortured them, but
relief there was none.
And at length the merciful sleep of stupefaction overcame them; and
all their pain, their anguish and forebodings were numbed into a
welcome oblivion.
They were awakened by a confused noise--the sound of cries and shouts,
dulled by the thick walls, yet evidently many-voiced--harsh commands,
yells, and even some few sharp blows upon the prison stones.
The engineer started up, wide-eyed and all alert now in the gloom.
Gone were his lassitude, his weakness and his sense of pain. Every
sense acute, he waited, hand clutching the pistol-butt, finger on
trigger.
"Ready there, Beatrice!" cried he. "Something's started at last! Maybe
it's our turn now. Here, get behind me--but be ready to shoot when I
tell you! Steady now, steady for the attack!"
Tense as coiled springs they waited. And all at once a bar slid,
creaking. Around the edge of the metal door a thin blue line of light
appeared.
"_Stand back, you!_" yelled Stern. "The first man through that door's
a dead one!"
The line of light remained a moment narrow, then suddenly it
broadened. From without a pandemonium of sound burst in--howls,
shrieks, imprecations, cries of pain.
Even in that perilous moment a quick wonder darted through Stern's
brain, what the meaning of this infernal tumult might be, and just
what ghastly fate was to be theirs--what torments and indignities they
might still have to face before the end.
"Remember, Beatrice," he commanded, "if I'm killed, use the revolver
on yourself before you let them take you!"
"I know!" she cried. And, crouching beside him in the half light, she,
too, awaited what seemed the inevitable.
The door swung open.
There stood the patriarch again, arms extended, face eager with a
passionate hope and longing, a great pride even at that strange and
pregnant moment.
"Peace, friends!" he cried. "I give you peace! Strike me not down with
those terrible weapons of yours! For verily I bring you hope again!"
"Hope? What d'you mean?" shouted Stern.
Through the opened door he caught vague glimpses in the luminous fog
of many spearmen gathered near--of excited gestures and the wild
waving of arms--of other figures that, half seen, ran swiftly here and
there.
"Speak up, you! What's the matter? What's wanted?" demanded the
engineer, keeping his automatic sighted at the doorway. "What's all
this infernal row? If your people there think they're going to play
horse with us, they're mightily mistaken! You tell them the first man
that steps through that door to get us never'll take another step!
_Quick! What's up?_"
"Come!" answered the aged man, his voice high and tremulous above the
howling tumult and the roar of the great gas-well. "Come, now! The
_Lanskaarn_--they attack! _Come!_ I have spoken of your weapons to my
people. _Come, fight for us!_ And verily, if we win--"
"What kind of a trick are you putting up on us, anyhow?" roared Stern
with thrice-heated rage. "None o' that now! If your people want us,
let 'em come in here and get us! But as for being fooled that way and
tricked into coming out--"
"I swear the truth!" supplicated the patriarch, raising his withered
hand on high. "If you come not, you must verily die, oh, friends! But
if you come--"
"Your own life's the first to pay for any falsehood now."
"I give it gladly! _The truth, I swear it!_ Oh, listen, while there is
still time, and come! _Come!_"
"What about it, girl?" cried Stern. "Are you with me? Will you take a
chance on it?"
"There's nothing else to do, Allan. They've got us, anyway. And--and I
think the old man's telling the truth. Hear _that_, now--"
Off somewhere toward the fortification wall that edged the beach,
sounds of indisputable conflict were arising. The howls, cries,
shrieks, blows were not to be mistaken.
Stern's resolution was instant.
"I'm with you, old man!" he shouted. "But remember your promise. And
if you fail me--it's your finish!
"Come, Beta! Stick close to me! If we fall, we'll go down together.
It's both or neither. _Come on--come on!_"
Out into the glare of the great flame they issued warily, out into the
strangely glowing mist that covered the incredible village as with a
virescent pall.
Blinking, they stared about them, not knowing for a moment whither to
run or where to shoot.
But the patriarch had Stern by the arm now; and in the midst of a
confused and shouting mass of the Folk--all armed with spears and
slings, knobbed clubs and battle-maces--was pushing him out through
the circle of those ghastly posts whence dangled the headless
skeletons.
"Where? Which way?" cried Stern. "Show me--I'll do the rest!"
"Thither!" the old man directed, pointing with one hand, while with
the other he shoved the engineer forward. Blind though he was, he knew
the right direction. "_Thither--to the wall!_"
For a second Stern had the thought of leaving Beatrice in the cell,
where she might at least be safe from the keen peril of battle; but
greater dangers threatened her, he knew, in his absence.
At all hazards they must keep together. And with a cry: "Come!
Come--stick close to me!" once more he broke into a run toward the
sea.
Through the mists, which grew darker as he neared the wall with
Beatrice close beside him and the troop that followed them, he could
catch glimpses of the battle.
Every hut seemed to have poured forth its inhabitants for now the
plaza swarmed with life--men, women, event children, running this way
and that, some with weapons rushing towards the wall, others running
wildly hither and yon with unintelligible cries.
A spear pierced the vapors; it fell clashing at Stern's feet and slid
rattling away over the black stones, worn smooth and greasy by
uncounted feet.
Past him as he ran a man staggered; the whole side of his head was
bashed in, as though by a frightful blow from a mace. Up the wounded
man flung both arms, and fell twitching.
The fog covered him with its drifting folds. Stern shuddered that
Beatrice should see such hideous sights; but even now he almost fell
over another prostrate body, hideously wounded in the back, and still
kicking.
"Ready, now!" panted Stern. "Ready with the pistols!"
Where was the patriarch?
He no longer knew. About him the Folk pressed, but none molested
either him or Beatrice.
In the confusion, the rush of the outskirts of battle, he could have
shot down a score of them, but he was reserving his fire. It might,
perhaps, be true, who could tell--that safety lay in battling now
against the Lanskaarn!
All at once the captives saw vague fire-lights in the gloom--seemingly
blazing comets of blue, that tossed and hurled and disappeared.
Then came the nearer sound of shouting and the clash of arms.
Stern, with the atavistic instincts of even the most civilized man,
scented the kill. And with a roar he whirled into the confused and
sweltering mass of men which now, emerging from the darkening mists,
had suddenly become visible by the uncanny light of the cressets on
the wall.
Beside him the girl, her face aglow, nostrils dilated, breath quick,
held her revolver ready.
And then, quite suddenly, they found themselves at the wall.
"Shoot! Shoot!" bellowed Stern, and let drive, pointblank, at an ugly,
grinning face that like a nightmare-vision all at once projected over
the crest. His own revolver-fire was echoed by hers. The face
vanished.
All down there, below him on the beach, he caught a dim, confused
impression of the attacking swarm.
Subconsciously he realized that he--he a man of the twentieth
century--was witnessing again a scene such as made the whole history
of the Middle Ages sanguinary--a siege, by force of human strength and
rage!
Even as he vaguely saw the swift and supple men, white-skinned yet
larger than the Folk, which crowded the whole beach as far as he could
pierce the mists with his straining sight, he knew that here was a
battle of huge scope and terrible danger.
Up from the sea the attackers, the Lanskaarn, were swarming, from
their dimly seen canoes. The place was alive with them.
At the base of the wall they were clotted in dense hordes; and
siege-ladders were being raised; and now up the ladders the lithe men
of darkness were running like so many ants.
Automatically as the mechanism of his own gun which he pumped into
that dense mass as fast as he could pull trigger--while beside him the
girl was shooting hard and straight, as well--he seemed to be
recording these wonderful impressions.
Here he caught a glimpse of a siege-ladder hurled backward by the
Folk, backward and down to the beach. Amid frightful yells and screams
it fell; and a score of crushed and mangled men lay writhing there
under the uncanny glare of the cressets.
There he saw fire-bales being hurled down from the walls--these, the
comet-like apparitions he had seen from a distance--hurled, blazing,
right into the brown of the mob.
Beyond, a party had scaled the wall, and there the fight was hand to
hand--with gruntings, thrustings of spears, slashings of long knives
that dripped red and cut again and rose and fell with hideous
regularity!
He jacked his pistol full of shells once more and thrust it into the
girl's hand--for she, excited beyond all control, was snapping the
hammer of her weapon on empty steel.
"Give it to 'em! Shoot! Kill!" he yelled. "Our only chance now! If
they--get in--we're dead!"
He snatched her weapon, reloaded, and again rained the steel-jacketed
bolts of death against the attackers.
In the tumult and wild maelstrom of the fight the revolvers' crackling
seemed to produce little effect. If Stern expected that this unknown
weapon would at once bring panic and quick victory he reckoned without
the berserker madness and the stern mettle of this horde of raging
Lanskaarn.
White men, like himself, they yielded not; but with strange cries and
frightful yells, pressed on and on, up to the walls, and up the
ladders ever; and now came flights of spears, hissing through the dark
air--and now smooth black rocks from the beach, flung with terrible
strength and skill by the slingers below, mowed down the defenders.
Here, there, men of the Folk were falling, pierced by the iron spears,
shattered by the swift and heavy rocks.
The place was becoming a shambles where the blood of attackers and
attacked mingled horribly in the gloom.
One ladder, pushed outward, dragged half a dozen of the Merucaans with
it; and at the bottom of the wall a circling eddy of the Lanskaarn
despatched the fighting Folkmen who had been hauled to their
destruction by the grappling besiegers.
Blows, howls and screams, hurtling fire-bales and great rocks flung
from above--the rocks he had already noted laid along the inside of
the wall--these, and the smell of blood and fire, the horrid, sweaty
contact of struggling bodies, the press and jam of the battle that
surged round them, all gave Stern a kaleidoscopic picture of war--war
as it once was, in the long ago--war, naked and terrible, such as he
had never even dreamed!
But, mad with the lust of the kill, he heeded nothing now.
"Shoot! Shoot!" he kept howling, beside himself; and, tearing open the
bandoliers where lay his cartridges, he crammed them with feverish
fingers into the girl's weapon and his own--weapons now burning hot
with the quick, long-continued firing.
The battle seemed to dance, to waver there before his eyes, in the
haze of mist and smoke and stifling air. The dark scene, blue-lit by
the guttering torches, grew ever more sanguinary, more incredibly
hideous. And still the attackers swarmed along the walls and up them,
in front and on both sides, till the swirling mists hid them and the
defenders from view.
He heard Beatrice cry out with pain. He saw her stagger and fall back.
To her he leaped.
"Wounded?" he gasped.
She answered nothing, but fell limp.
"God of Battles!" he howled. "Revenge!"
He snatched her automatic from beneath the trampling, crowding feet;
he bore her back, away from the thick press. And in the shelter of a
massive hut he laid her down.
Then, stark-mad, he turned and leaped into the battle-line that swayed
and screamed along the wall.
Critical now the moment. In half a dozen places the besiegers had
got their ladders planted. And, while dense masses of the
Lanskaarn--unminding fire-balls and boulders rained down upon
them--held these ladders firm, up the attackers came with a rush.
Stern saw the swing and crushing impact of the maces and iron clubs;
he saw the stabbing of the spears on both sides.
Slippery and red the parapet became.
Men, killed there, crawled and struggled and fell both outward and
inside, and were trampled in indiscriminate heaps, besieged and
besiegers alike, still clawing, tearing, howling even in their death
agony.
Now one of the ladders was down--another fell, with horrid tumult--a
third!
An automatic in each hand, Stern scrambled to the glairy summit of the
fortification.
A mace swung at him. He leaped sidewise, firing as he sprang. With a
scream the ax-man doubled up and fell, and vanished in the gloom below
the wall.
Raking the parapet with a hail of lead, he mowed down the attackers on
top of the fourth ladder. With a mighty shout, those inside staved it
away with iron grapples. It, too, swayed drunkenly, held below, pushed
madly above. It reeled--then fell with a horrible, grinding crash!
"Hurray, boys! One more down! Give 'em Hell!" he screamed. "One more!"
He turned. Subconsciously he felt that his right hand was wet, and
hot, and dripping, but he felt no pain.
"One more! Now for another!"
And in the opposite direction along the wall he emptied his other
revolver.
Before the stinging swarm of the steel-jacketed wasps of death the
Lanskaarn writhed and melted down with screams such as Dante in his
wildest vision never even dreamed.
Stern heard a great howl of triumph break from the mass of defenders
fighting to overthrow the fifth ladder.
"Hold 'em! Hold 'em!" he bellowed. "Wait till I load up again--I'll--"
A swift and crashing impact dashed sheaves of radiant fire through his
brain.
Everything leaped and whirled.
He flung up both hands.
Clutching at empty air, then suddenly at the slippery parapet which
seemed to have leaped up and struck him in the face, he fell.
Came a strange numbness, then a stabbing pain.
And darkness quenched all knowledge and all consciousness.