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"Anyway, the god is near the edge of that ancient crater. It will be a pleasure to see the lake personally and not by report through the prism."
"A short-lived pleasure," the Yawtl said sourly.
The dreaded time arrived. The captives, excepting the two animals, were taken from the cabin and painted black. The cat and the dog, the shaman said, would be eaten after the tribespeople returned.
Deyv asked permission to say farewell to Jum and Aejip. He was refused. Weeping, calling out to the animals, Deyv was carried off. Vana wept, too, but she shouted that they would come back and free them. Jum howled, and Aejip hurled herself, roaring, against the door.
Their hands tied behind them, their ankles bound, they were put into individual, brightly painted, heavily feathered palanquins. Four males lifted each of these. Amidst wild music and piping voices, they were carried through the stockade gateway. Three sleep-times later, they reached the end of their journey.
By the light of a hundred torches, they saw that they were at the top of a long gentle slope. This leveled out to a rocky beach beyond which was open water. Torch-bearing Tsimmanbul stood on the beach, and others were scattered up and down the slope. Tremendous boulders, half-buried, lined the ridge of the slope; others stuck out of the slope here and there.
Tall thick-trunked trees grew at widely separated intervals on the hill. One tree, however, about sixty yards from the top of the slope, had been entirely uprooted. It was not erosion that had done this.
Something which had been buried deep under the tree had dug its way up under it and raised it from the soil, tearing out the roots and toppling the two-hundred-foot-high plant.
Sloosh, after studying the situation, said that the uprooter may have rolled up.
But if this were so, why hadn't the monster kept on going?
"I don't know," the plant-man said. "It does seem to have moved of its own volition, however. Yet, how could it? The god of the Tsimmanbul is stone. Could it be the mineral kingdom's bid for life?"
30
TEN warriors holding double-torches stood on each side of the god at a respectful distance. The blaze revealed Phemropit, a thing or a creature of a dark-gray shiny metal-stone. The body, if it was such, was a flattened oval, and must have weighed at least six hundred tons. It had no head, but its rounded front bore a number of depressions. Its means of locomotion, if it had any, was three endless tracks, one on each side of its body and one in the middle. The last came out of holes on the underside, the "belly."
Sloosh said, "I can't see any wheels. They must be inside the body or perhaps some other mechanism turns the tracks."
After a while, he said, "Well, maybe it's not living. Maybe it's just some sort of machine. I doubt it, though. I think that it came down with the meteorite. It should have melted while going through the atmosphere. If it somehow escaped that, then the energy released by the collision should have melted it."
"Who cares?" the Yawtl said. "In a little while we'll all be dead, past knowledge, past nonknowledge."
The captives were standing together on the top of the slope by a colossal boulder. Six guards stood behind them. Below them the whole tribe was dancing except for the drummers, harpists, and flutists.
The shaman was by himself, farther down the slope, leaping, whirling, screaming, shaking his rattle.
Below him was a short post rising vertically out of the earth. Deyv noted that it was in a direct line with the front of the god, which was twenty yards below.
The dancing went on for a long while, the participants dropping out from time to time to drink an acrid brownish liquid. And then the music and the motion stopped suddenly. The dancers froze, all piping,
"Phemropit!" After that, silence except for the cry of some animal in the jungle.
The shaman, crouching, stared down the slope at the stone-thing. Then he got down on his knees and bowed seven times, after which he rose and moved to one side of the post. A woman brought him a giant firefly in a cage. He removed it, and the woman ran back up the slope with the cage. Fat Bull walked close to the post and leaned over toward it, holding the firefly out.
"Great god Phemropit, lord of the fiery falling star and of the great inland sea, god of the
Naraka
His thumb pressed, and the tail of the firefly flashed in the half-dark cast by The Dark Beast above.
Deyv jumped and gasped, and many screamed. From one of the holes in the front of Phemropit a thin bright light had shot out. It spat just above the top of the post, bored into the earth above it, then disappeared.
The firefly flashed out groups of pulses of four lengths.
"Oh, great god! Here are your people again, come to worship you, to offer you more sacrifices! Take these, and this time may you be pleased to return with us to the holy House and dwell there forever and protect us from our enemies!"
Again the slim blindingly bright beam flicked out. This time it almost touched the firefly and the hand that gripped it. The shaman moved back a step, turned, and looked up the slope.
"Bring the first one!" he piped.
The captives waited in terror. They'd been told that the shaman had picked the order in which they would go, but he had not said what that was. Now the two giant males moved toward the group, halted, looked darkly at them. Deyv sweated and shook. Was this the end? After all he'd endured? If only he had his soul egg with him, he could at least stroke it and draw from it courage.
Suddenly, the two warriors grabbed Jeydee. Screaming, struggling, he was dragged down the slope.
Feersh, hearing his voice, knew what had happened. She cried out to him to be brave, to show the savages that he was not afraid. He should demonstrate that the child of the dreaded witch Feersh the
Blind was strong.
It was doubtful that Jeydee heard her. Even if he had, he wouldn't have acted any differently. His mother knew this, but perhaps she hoped that in his last hour he would pull from deep within him his manhood.
Jeydee continued to writhe and scream until he was tied to the post by ropes around his legs and waist.
Then he stood silent and trembling while his hands were untied. The shaman handed him the big insect and said something. Deyv could hear the piping faintly, but he couldn't understand what was said.
Doubtless, though, he was repeating the ritual questions to him. And promising again that if he could get the god to talk, he'd be saved.
Sloosh muttered, "Those stupid Tsimmanbul. They could talk to it if they'd teach it their language, I think. But not by standing someone directly in front of it. And they need referents, objects, to show it, so they can correlate words with these."
He shrugged, then said, "Still, maybe the thing has an intelligence which is so alien that it couldn't understand the correlation. If it indeed has a mind as we know minds."
Jeydee, very pale, held up the firefly. He pressed on the green spot, and the insect pulsed out its first message.
"Oh, god Phemropit, I want to speak with you. Your people worship you with fear and adoration. They have sent me, an enemy of the Naraka
Naraka
The Archkerri buzzed the equivalent of a snort of disgust. "What nonsense! And I must die for their stupidity!"