The Valley of the Flame, Henry Kuttner [ready player one ebook .TXT] 📗

by the sudden, explosive violence it had roused, he released Parror. He felt oddly dazzled. He had never seen any human being, sane or mad, in the grip of a fury as sudden or as demoniac as Parror’s.

There was another thing, too. The closeness of the grip had revealed a new, totally unexpected feature. Under the muscular arch of Parror’s chest Raft had felt a steady throbbing that was unmistakable.

And yet—back in the base hospital—the man had had no heartbeat!

Parror drew back, shook himself, relaxed into an imperturbable dignity. Miraculously, the insane fury was gone as suddenly as it had been roused.

“You must not touch those of our race in such a way, Brian,” Janissa said softly. “If you must kill, then kill. But not maul.”

Raft’s own voice sounded strange to him.

“What is your race?” he asked, and his questioning gaze moved from the girl’s demure face to the man’s enigmatic dark eyes.

Parror said nothing. He only smiled, a long, slow, infinitely proud smile. And Raft read the answer. He had been seeing it more and more clearly every moment that passed, in every smooth, flowing motion of his body, even in his insane, inhuman fury at being touched. Inhuman indeed. Raft remembered what Parror had said in the hospital.

“I passed your ancestors, chattering and scratching themselves in the trees. And I passed my ancestors, too.”

Yes, Raft knew now that he had passed them in the jungle unseeing, many times. They had gone silently by in the underbrush, on great padding feet, the shadows of the forest gliding across the shadowy markings of their bodies. He had heard their roaring in the dark, and seen their lambent eyes in the firelight.

He thought he knew, now, what race Parror’s was. And Janissa’s.

Not human. They came from a different stock. As a physician who had done biological and anthropological work, Raft knew that the incredible thing was not theoretically impossible. Evolution is not rigid. It was an accident that had made man the dominant, intelligent race. Accident, and the specialization of opposing thumbs.

Our ancestors were simian, arboreal, using those flexible hands to build the foundations of civilization. But in a different setup, the ruling race might have descended from dogs or reptiles or cats.

Cats.

It struck Raft suddenly, and he was shocked by the realization, that of all animals there is, except for the rodents who do not use it, only one which shows signs of developing an opposing thumb. The domestic cat does occasionally have an extra toe on each forefoot. An opposing toe.

The owner names it Mittens or Boxer and thinks no more about the matter. But given a little flexibility in that extra member, and given time and a favorable environment, such as this secret world of Paititi he did not yet know, what miracles might now develop!

*

Feline stock. That, perhaps, explained a great deal, but it did not clear up the entire mystery by any means. Raft still had no idea of the connection between Parror and Dan Craddock, nor exactly what was the lens-mirror that had killed da Fonseca. There were many other problems as well. Too many.

He noticed a tenseness ripple through Janissa, as though she had bristled. The word sprang unbidden into his mind. Almost simultaneously, he caught a distant noise, the tramp of feet, the ringing of metal upon metal.

Parror did not seem surprised. He turned toward the translucent door, and shadows loomed against the pale panel. There was a knock.

“Parror?” Janissa said. Her voice held a question.

He spoke to her briefly in the tongue Raft did not understand. She looked quickly toward Raft. Her eyes grew blank. A veil of demure withdrawal dropped down upon her. Suddenly, with a smooth, lithe motion, she was on her feet and vanishing among the trees beyond the arched portal.

Parror called a command. The oval swept up and vanished. Across that threshold, silhouettes against faint light, came men. Men?

They wore close-fitting chain-mail, very finely meshed. Glittering caps of tiny metal links, interwoven into designs, protected their heads. There were ten of them, and each had at his belt a thin, bare blade like a rapier.

They had the same mingled strength and delicacy of features that marked Parror, the same lithe, flowing agility. The taint of the tiger was in the way they moved, and the way their slanted eyes glowed intently on Raft.

Parror had stepped back, with a little shrug, and the ten men, without pausing, closed in on Raft. He realized his danger, though none of them had drawn a sword. He sprang toward the wall where his rifle leaned, saw that he would be intercepted, and snatched out his revolver.

Thin, wiry metal burned like a hot brand about his wrist. Parror had lashed out with his whip. The gun spun from Raft’s grip. He felt the onrush of charging bodies, but, curiously, none of the soldiers touched him.

The shining rapiers were out, flickering, gleaming, weaving a deadly mesh all around him. Up and down, feinting, dancing, the steel sang, and Raft drew back, respecting the menace of those glittering swords. He swung toward Parror, but the bearded man had retreated and stood by the open archway, watching alertly.

“He speaks the Indio?” a deep voice asked.

Parror nodded. A soldier with a bronzed, scarred face gestured toward Raft.

“Will you come with us peacefully?”

“Where?” Raft countered.

“To the Great Lord.”

“So you’re not the big shot around here,” Raft said to Parror. “Okay, I’ll play it that way. Maybe it won’t turn out exactly as you expect.”

Parror smiled. “I said I thought I could find a use for you,” he murmured in Portuguese. Then he relapsed into the cryptic tongue of the cat-people, and the scarred soldier asked a quick question. Parror’s answer seemed to be satisfactory, for the man lowered his rapier.

“Well, Craddock, will you come?” The guard looked at Raft and spoke in Indio.

Craddock? Raft started to answer but Parror cut him off. There was another quick, enigmatic exchange.

Raft interrupted.

“My name’s not Craddock. I’m Brian Raft, and I came here after Craddock. That man—” He pointed at Parror “—kidnapped him.”

“I’m sorry,” Parror said. “Such a trick won’t work, and I cannot help you now. The Great Lord rules here. You must talk to him. Best to go with Vann.”

Vann, the scarred soldier, grunted.

“He’s right. Lies will not save you. Come! As for you, Parror…”

He spat out a few words Raft could not understand. Parror’s eyes narrowed, but he made no reply.

A point pricked Raft’s back. With a longing glance toward his fallen gun, now, with rifle and rucksack, in the hands of the soldiers, he moved unwillingly forward. Over his shoulder he looked hard at Parror.

“I’ll be back,” he said, a world of promise in his tone.

Then he stepped through the oval portal and was in Paititi.

CHAPTER V. VALLEY OF WONDERS

AGAIN, AND EVER after that, he was conscious of the indefinable strangeness about the lost land that set it apart from any other of which he had heard. Raft had read tales of hidden civilizations, of Atlantis, Lemuria, and fantastic survivals from the past.

But in Paititi he found nothing of such arabesques—no jewel-city set down on an uncharted sea, no isolated world cut off from the earth outside. Nevertheless Paititi was as secret, as isolated, as if it had been on another planet.

It was too alive to be regarded as anything but a vivid, vital reality. Mixed with mat tremendous vitality which pulsed through Paititi was the strangeness that hung like an intangible veil between earth and sky, the thing that had made mis secret valley a place blessed and cursed as no spot on earth ever had before been.

Something had leaned down and touched the soil of Paititi, the trees of Paititi, the very air that breathed through alien leaves, and there had come a change. It was as though the touch of that unearthly thing had altered all that dwelt here, changing and transmuting until what remained was different.

It was a valley, probably a meteoric one, Raft thought, remembering that fifty-mile-wide circle of jungle he had seen from above. But it was well camouflaged. No earthly trees could have fulfilled that task, and no earthly trees grew here. Looking out across that dim twilit land, he was reminded of the columnar pillars that had marched across the hall where Itoe invisible tube ended. Pillars of Karnak—but dwarfed by comparison with these trees that might have upheld the sky itself.

Yggdrasil is the tree of life which Norsemen say supports the world.

Only the largest California redwoods could have approached their sheer magnitude. For each one, in diameter, was as thick as a city block is long. They grew at irregular intervals, a half-mile or more apart, and they towered up to a luminous green ceiling which was incredibly far above. A tree five miles high!

Up they plunged into that green sky, and down into the depths those vast columns fell, like arrows of titan gods deeply embedded in the earth.

Then-roots, Raft thought, might tap the very roof of Hell. Without branches, smooth and straight, they grew until, at then-tops, they burst into a rank lushness of green.

Yet that green vault was translucent. At one point, almost directly overhead, an emerald brilliance told of the noonday tropic sun. But in the valley itself hung a clear, cool dawnlight that hid nothing.

Transparent as the air was, the trees themselves made a barrier. Raft could see a curving arch winding down from where he stood, fifty yards or more to a path that disappeared into that mighty forest. From far away came a very low, scarcely audible rumble, almost below the threshold of hearing.

That was all. Except that Vann tilted back his head and stared up questioningly. Raft followed his example.

Behind him were smooth walls and towers, the bulk of Parror’s palace that jutted out from the base of a rock cliff, an escarpment which swept up and up till it vanished amid the ceiling of green. And dropping toward them with nightmare slowness was a cloud of rubble and stone.

“It’s only a landslide,” Vann said casually. He pushed Raft forward. “There’s no danger.”

“No danger!”

“Of course not.” The soldier was surprised. “Surely you know why.”

Again Raft looked up. The avalanche was perceptibly nearer, but by no means as close as it should normally have been. A great boulder struck a ledge, bounded out, and Raft fixed his gaze upon it.

It fell slowly—slowly!

It drifted down, revolving gently as it fell, floating out in an arc that ended briefly at one of the castle’s turrets. It rebounded, doing no harm to the structure that Raft could see. It dropped past him, so sluggishly that he could make out every detail of its craggy surface, and embedded itself in the ground below.

*

That boulder had not been featherlight. Yet it had floated down as slowly as any feather.

“Move, Craddock,” Vann said, and pushed Raft away from a watermelon-sized rock that struck the ramp and bounded away gently. The other soldiers, looking up, shifted casually to avoid the falling stones. Raft, utterly dumbfounded, stared up.

“I thought it would wreck the castle,” he said.

“No. The ones who built here built for an eternity,” Vann told him. “Not our race, but they were very great once.”

“What the devil made those rocks fall so slowly?”

The soldier shrugged.

“They fell faster now than in the days of our fathers. But they are still not dangerous. Only living things can harm one of us. Now we’ve talked enough. Come.”

He took Raft’s arm firmly and led him down the aerial pathway. The soldiers followed,