Warrior of the Dawn Part 21

"Into the jungle," was the calm reply. "To the house of Rydob!"

Seven men stood in a group at the mouth of a trail. Behind them lay a tract of matted jungle, over them towered the branches of forest kings, and directly before them was a small clearing containing a rambling, one-storied building of gray stone, weather-stained and unkempt.

"That must be the place, Jotan," said one of the men. "It answers the description you gave us."

Jotan nodded. "They must still be in there. Otherwise we should have met this Meltor on his way back. If only we have arrived in time.

"We must spread out, then come up to the house from all sides. Two of you go with Tamar and circle around to the east. Keep within the jungle's fringe that you may not be seen from the house. The rest of us will close in from this side. You have five minutes to reach your places. Go."

The minutes dragged by. None of the four appeared to feel an urge to talk. A heavy silence had fallen on the jungle about them. Even the hum of insects, the voices of the gaily-colored birds, the chattering monkeys, were stilled. The same strange tenseness that precedes a tropical storm, an atmosphere of impending conflict, seemed to hang over them.

Jotan straightened. "They've had time enough. Come on."

The four men stepped into the clearing, spread fan-wise, and headed for the building, moving at a half-trot.

The door was closed. In absolute silence they stepped over the heap of bones that once had been Rydob, mounted the steps and halted there.

Carefully Jotan closed his fingers about the latch. The heavy planks swung inward enough to satisfy him that there was no bar in place.

Suddenly Jotan drew back and drove his shoulder against the wood with all his weight behind it. The door flew open and the four men came piling into the room, knives of stone held in readiness.

That mad rush came to an abrupt halt, and what the men saw brought a chorus of astonished exclamations from their lips.

Flat on his back in the center of the room, partially hidden behind an overturned table, lay Meltor of Sephar. From his left breast stood the hilt of a stone knife, its blade buried deep. He was quite dead.

The girl was gone.

CHAPTER X

The Hairy Men

For several moons now, Urb, the Neanderthal, and his tribe had found it increasingly difficult to locate game in the neighborhood of the family caves. The reason could be any one of several: a nearby water-hole dried up until the rainy season came again; a family of lions holed up close by; an absence of adequate pasturage.

Urb sat crouched near the foot of a lofty escarpment that contained the tribal caves. His deep-sunk b.u.t.ton eyes, beneath beetling brows, indifferently watched the young ones of the tribe playing about the clearing between jungle and cliff. Below a flattened, shapeless wedge of nose, his thick pendulous lips worked in and out in worried and laborious thought. As leader of his tribe, Urb was concerned about the lack of game.

It had been comparatively cool here in the shadows of the scarp during most of the morning; but with noon growing near, the sun's direct rays began to penetrate the thick growth of black coa.r.s.e hair with which Urb's gross body was almost entirely covered.

And so he rose at last and, like the great bull ape he so closely resembled, clambered awkwardly but quickly to one of the caves.

Just inside the entrance he squatted his two hundred and fifty pounds on a boulder and fell to watching Gorb, his eldest son, put final touches to a flint spear head. After heating the bit of rock in a small fire for several minutes, Gorb would withdraw it, hastily touch a spot near the edge with a drop of water which caused a tiny bit of the flint to scale away, then repeat the entire process. It was a long and tedious task; but Gorb had that untiring patience given to those for whom time has no meaning. Eventually, his perseverance would reward him with a fine weapon.

Urb was secretly proud of his son. Even as a boy, Gorb had shown no interest in hunting or in war. Beneath his sharply receding forehead was the brain and soul of a true artist--a soul that found its expression by the creation of implements of the chase and of battle. No other member of Urb's tribe could even approach the artistry Gorb put into his work; no other could fas.h.i.+on a spear so true in balance; none could produce a flint knife so keen-edged and well-formed.

The half-finished spear head reminded Urb of his own immediate problem.

"Gorb," he said, "only two kills have our men made in the past five suns, although all have gone forth each day to hunt. It is not because Narjok or Bana or Muta run away before we can kill them. We cannot find them at all; only twice in those five suns have we come upon the spoor of any one of them."

Gorb paused at his work and drew a hairy forearm across his sweaty face.

"Last night," he said, "long after Dyta had found his lair, I heard Sadu roaring and growling among the trees. It was the noise of a hungry Sadu; he, too, was angry because there is no meat."

Urb grunted. Since the day before, he had been turning an idea over in his slow-moving mind, and now he sought to put it into words.

"Tomorrow," he said, "when Dyta first awakens, some of us will look for caves far from here. I will go; Boz and Kor and Tolb and you, Gorb, will go with me. There are many hills; there will be many caves in them, and much meat in gra.s.slands nearby. When we find a good place we will come back for the others of our tribe."

"Good!" approved Gorb, turning back to his labors. "It has been many suns since I have eaten all the meat I can hold. I will go with you, Urb."

Early the next morning a little band of Neanderthal men descended the escarpment and set out toward the rising sun. They were six; besides those named by Urb, Mog, the sullen, had been taken. All were armed with huge flint-studded hardwood clubs, so heavy that only an arm of great strength might wield one; rude knives of flint and short-shafted spears completed their armament.

They moved along with the curious shuffling gait peculiar to their kind alone. Their pa.s.sage seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of terror and dread, striking dumb the countless denizens of the teeming jungle. Urb was in the lead, his small black eyes darting about for the first sign of danger, ears and nose alert lest Sadu or Jalok or Tarlok find him and his fellows unprepared. But if any of the more formidable beasts were near, they remained concealed. Only Pandor, the elephant, neglected to give the Hairy Men a wide berth when several were together--Pandor, who feared no creature that walked or flew or wriggled.

The s.h.a.ggy-coated males moved steadily ahead, their objective a group of low mountains far to the east, the upper portions of which were clearly discernible on the few occasions the band crossed a clearing of any consequence.

At noon they halted on the reed-covered banks of a shallow river; and while Urb and Tolb hunted game, the others rested beneath the broad boughs of a jungle patriarch.

Soon the two hunters returned, bearing between them the still warm carca.s.s of Muta, the wild boar. Each of the six hacked off a juicy portion and devoured it raw, blood matting the hair of face and chest.

After drinking at the river's brink, the brute-men stretched out beneath the trees, covered their faces with huge fronds of a palm tree and slept until mid-afternoon. Urb roused them, then, and once more the savage band took up their march.

Darkness was near when the six pa.s.sed through a fringe of jungle and paused at the foot of a lofty cliff. Urb, deciding too little daylight remained for them to attempt scaling the vertical slope, ordered the Neanderthals back into the forest.

Here they supped on flesh of the boar killed earlier in the day, then sought couches among the tree branches. During daylight it was all very well to sleep in comfort on the jungle floor; but during the night it was safer aloft. The great cats usually laid up during the day, digesting the previous night's kill; but once Uda, the moon, made an appearance, the forest abounded with hungry carnivora.

With the first rays of the morning sun the six men began the perilous climb. Slow-moving and awkward, they made hard going of the ascent, but their tremendous strength aided them where lesser muscles would have failed altogether, and finally the crest was reached.

Here they stood at the edge of a great tableland, clothed with primeval forest from which, in the distance, loomed four low mountain peaks.

Game seemed plentiful; as they watched, a herd of antelope grazing to their left caught their scent and bounded away across a narrow ribbon of gra.s.sland which lay between the forest and the plateau's edge. A band of monkeys chattered and scolded at them from the safety of middle terraces, while a cloud of raucous-voiced birds rose with a whirring beat of wings and flew deeper inland.

Not far to their right was the entrance to a narrow deep-worn game trail leading into tangled mazes of brush, creeper, vine and trees. It was toward this trail that Urb turned his footsteps, motioning for his companions to follow.

"Here is food enough," he exulted. "If we can find caves in those hills, we will go back to fetch the rest of our people."

In silence the six frightful, man-like creatures faded into the black shadows of the overhanging forest, their goal the towering heights at the far end of this plateau.

And directly between them and their objective lay Sephar, mysterious city of an unknown race.

Dylara lay face down on a broad branch, her head pillowed on a heap of moss, biting her lips to keep back tears of bitter anguish. The swollen ankle throbbed steadily, its pain almost unbearable.