Read Manly Wade Wellman - Hok 01 Online
Authors: Battle in the Dawn (v1.1)
Manly Wade Wellman - Hok 01
Contents
STONE-AGE Europe was spacious,
rich and un- crowded; but there could be only one race of rulers.
Homo Neanderthalensis
must have grown up
there from the beginning, was supreme and plentiful as the last glaciers
receded. His bones have been found from
Germany
to
Gibraltar
, and his camps and flints and fire-ashes.
We reconstruct his living image—burly and stooped, with a great protruding
muzzle, beetling brows, no chin and no brow. Perhaps he was excessively hairy—hardly
a man, but were
Homo
Sapiens
,
in body and spirit like us, their children. They could not parley with the
abhorrent foe they found; there could be no rules of warfare,
no
truces or treaties, no mercy to the vanquished. Such
conflict could die only when the last adversary died.
It
must have been a struggle generations long. Was it not full of daring, despair,
sacrifice, triumph? Was not the conquest the greatest, because the most
fundamental, in the history of the race? No champions of mankind ever bore a
greater responsibility than those first little bands
who
crossed, all unaware, the borders of Neanderthal country.
With
one such band, at the moment of such crossing, our story begins:
CHAPTER I
The Land of the Gnorris
THE
southern country had come to hold too few game herds, too many hostile bands of
fellow- hunters; hence the family’s spring migration, many days
5
journey
into the north which these days grew warmer than
their fathers had known it.
This
particular bright morning found the whole nine scattered. A foolish deer,
grazing too close, bounded away with a javelin in its shoulder, and the
swiftest runners led the chase with the rest trailing behind.
So from horizon to horizon and beyond, with flecks of blood to
point the way across rich green meadows, and hunger to quicken moc- casined
feet.
The sun had reached zenith and passed when the first of the
hunters, gaining the top of a little knoll, saw that the prey had fallen and
died just beyond.
That
first-comer was the eldest son of the wandering household, and the tallest and
swiftest. He was as strong as the leopard whose pelt he wore for single
garment, and his smooth young skin showed tanned and healthy with good outdoor
living. His lion-tawny hair had been cut shoulder length and was bound back
from his shrewd face with a snakeskin fillet. His chin, plucked clean of beard
as custom decreed with bachelors, jutted squarely. His mouth was wide and
good-humored beneath a straight nose, and his gray eyes opened widely, clearly.
In one hand he swung a stone-bladed axe, and a loop at his shoulder held the
mate to the javelin that had pierced the deer. His
name,
and he hoped to make it great, was Hok.
Pausing
thus, Hok grinned triumphantly for just the half of an instant. Then his eyes
narrowed and his lips drew tight. Something dark and shaggy crouched on the far
side of the fallen animal.
A bear?
Hok’s free hand
flashed backward, twitching the second javelin from its strap.
Behind
came the patter of other feet, and a comradely panting. That was Zhik, a
younger half-brother and favorite companion. Not as tall as Hok, nor as old by
three years, the stripling nevertheless was sturdy and handsome. Hurrying from
behind, he poised a spear of his own.
At
that moment the shaggy thing rose from the side of the deer, rose on two legs
to face them. It was not a bear.
Barely
thirty paces separated the youths from the creature that disputed their right
to the meat.
It
had hands and feet, coarser and larger than Hok’s own; it was a head shorter
than he, but broader; it wore no clothes, and coarse hair thatched shoulders,
chest and knotted limbs. Then its eyes grappled Hok’s across the intervening
space.
Shrewd
were those eyes, in a broad, shallow skull like the skull of a hairy lizard.
Fire was in them, and intelligence and challenge. The two bright crumbs of
vision, under their coarse brows, did not falter before Hok’s gaze as would a
beast’s. Meeting the stare, startled and fierce on his own part, the
hunter-youth was aware only vaguely of the rest of the face—out-flaring
nostrils, a sagging lip, a hideous rank beard and forelock, ears that seemed to
prick like those of a wolf.
Zhik
drew in his breath, as if setting himself for the cast. “Wait,” interposed Hok
quickly, he did not know why.
A
third human figure had come from behind—the Chief, their father and head of the
party, a hunter still vigorous and swift but unable to match forever the pace
of these two eldest sons. He, too, balanced a javelin ready, and at sight of
the creature before them his heavy, fulvous beard gaped open in amazement.
As
for the curiosity itself, this last reenforcement daunted it. Slowly, clumsily,
it backed away. They saw that it moved with knees bent, back hunched, arms
hanging forward like an ape’s. Its eyes still turned to Hok, and it was at him
it blurted a sudden gutteral sound of defiance. Then, turning upon broad, flat
feet, it made off with awkward speed. It dropped into a fold of the meadow,
remained invisible for moments,
then
reappeared
beyond, well out of javelin range, to plunge into a thicket.
Zhik,
the youngest, recovered his high spirits first.
“Gnorrl!”
he shouted after the fugitive, in imitation of its
throaty cry. Hok laughed, and repeated, “Gnorrl!” A new word was born into man’s
language, a word that would be used often and fearfully in days to come.
All three moved forward, tensely cautious.
It was as though
they expected the slain deer to spring up, alive and savage. But it was dead
enough. The
Chief
turned it upon its back,
then
drew a knife of ground
buckhom. Hok knelt to help him open the belly and peel the hide, but Zhik gazed
searchingly around the horizon for long moments.
“That
Gnorrl left a bad stink here,” announced the Chief. “Let us drag the meat
away.” They did so, but still smelled, or fancied that they smelled, the
vanished monster.
The
rest of the party came up as the butchery went on—first Asha, latest wife of
the Chief, a plump, handsome young woman in a doe-skin tunic, with a naked
boy-baby straddling her hip; next Barp and Unn, half-grown sons of Zhik’s dead
mother, carrying on their unwilling shoulders part of the camp-luggage; after
that Eowi, full sister to Hok, a slim and agile maiden also loaded with
bundles; finally Asha’s other child, the little girl Nohda, old enough to walk
but not to carry any burden save her clout of hare’s fur and a necklace of red
seeds. As these arrived, they helped in cutting up the meat. Under the Chief’s
direction the four quarters, the loin and tenderloin, the heart, the liver and
the kidneys were detached and wrapped in the new hide. The ribs, head, shins
and entrails remained for hyenas and ravens.
BY
now it was mid-afternoon, and the party went no further than a willow-fringed
creek before the Old Man uttered the laconic order “Camp.” At once Hok and Zhik
produced axes and cut long, supple willow poles. Several of these were thrust
into the ground and bent together for central lashing. Over them Asha and Eowi
drew the tent- cover of sewn hides. Barp and Unn gathered kindling and heavier
wood, and the Chief reverently produced from his belt-pouch the long, charred
fire- spindle. A piece of soft, punky wood served as hearth, and upon this he
twirled the spindle-point, crooning the while the ancient prayer to the fire
god.
When
a bright blaze had been kindled, the meat was apportioned. The Chief got, as
was his right, the tenderloin. Next choice, a steak from the rear quarter, went
to Asha. Hok’s turn came third, and he cut slices of liver and impaled them on
a green willow withe. As he put them to the fire, his sister Eowi came and
squatted beside him.
“What
happened?” she asked. “None of you have told, but—”
“Gnorrl!”
cried Zhik, whipping himself erect and standing at gaze.
They
all saw it then, far down the stream. It had crept up to watch them, and at the
chorus of bewildered shouts from the campers it now shrank back into a little
clump of bushes—a broad, repulsive shagginess that blended into the leafy
shadow.
Hok
had dropped his liver into the fire and had sprung to where javelins were
planted,
tip in earth, for a quick snatch. His back tingled
and crawled, in the place where, with his long-ago ancestors, a manelike strip
of hair had bristled. His eyes measured the distance to the bushes. He ached to
throw a spear.
Eowi
came to his side again. She had rescued his dinner from burning, and was
touching it with a gingerly forefinger. “I know now without being told,” she
said softly. “That was the danger. What was it, a man?”
“No,” returned Hok, his eyes still prodding the clump.
“It
was a Gnorrl. Zhik made the word.”
The
Chief was laughing loudly and carelessly, for the sake of the frightened
children. After a moment, the others joined in his merriment. Barp and Unn
whooped bravely at the silent bush- clump, waving their axes and exhorting the
Gnorrl to show himself and be slain.
Hok
returned to his cooking, tried a lump of liver experimentally, and finally ate
with relish.
BUT
as the sun drew to the horizon’s edge, Hok’s uneasy mood came back upon him.
The Chief and Zhik betrayed something of the same feeling, for they brought
wood in great billets and built the small fire into a large, bright one. Hok
sought serenity in toil, looking to his weapons. Did not the edge of his axe
need retouching to make it sharper? With a bone chisel he gouged away a tiny
flake of flint. But this aided neither the appearance nor the keenness of the
weapon. He started suddenly.
It
had grown dark as he handled his gear, and he thought that something heavy and
stealthy moved outside the patch of firelight. He felt as he had felt in
childhood, when his mother, the Chief’s first wife, still lived and told of how
her dead grandfather had moaned outside the tent to be let in.
The
Chief, who likewise felt the need for occupation, tightened the already perfect
lashings of his javelin. “We shall sleep outside tonight,” he decreed.
“Zhik, too.
The women and children in the tent, and a big
fire kept up until morning. One of us will watch.”
“Well
said,” agreed Hok. “I am not sleepy. I shall watch first.”
It
developed that Zhik was not sleepy, either, but Hok was the elder and had made
first claim. The Chief then raised his voice, calling “Silence!” At this
customary signal for bed-preparations, Asha, carrying her baby, entered the
tent. Eowi and little Nobda followed, and then Barp and Unn, who took their
places at either side of the doorway. The Chief and Zhik lay down by the
fireside.
Hok,
left to his vigil, fought hard against the perplexing sensation of being
watched. He tried to say that these were fancies. The chill at his backbone
came because it was a spring night, and he had come farther north than ever
before.
The uneasiness w
r
as because of the
strangeness.
Any prudent hunter did well to watch, of course; if the
Gnorrl came. . . .
It
did not come, and at last he grew sleepy. The stars overhead told him that
night’s
noon
was at
hand. He nudged Zhik into wakefulness, and lay down.
He
dropped into sound slumber, for moments only as it seemed—then started to his
feet with a wild, tremulous wail for fear and pain ringing through his head.
Catlike, he commanded himself upon the instant of rousing, could see, stand and
clutch at his javelin.
It
was dawn. The crying came from the direction of the tent. Something huge and
dark was carrying something small that struggled and screamed. The Chief, too,
was there running with axe uplifted.
But
a shaggy arm drove out like a striking snake. Hok saw the Chief spin and fall
heavily. The Gnorrl—it was that, of course—fled with its prize.
When
Zhik and Hok had gained their father’s side he was dead. His skull had been
beaten in, as though by the paw of a bear.