The Gates of Creation

III

The fronds, sixty feet high, had hidden the object in the sky. Now he saw a mass at least a quarter-mile wide, fifty feet thick, and almost a mile long floating fifty feet in the air. It was drifting with the wind, which came from an unknown quarter of the compass. In this world without sun, north, south, east, and west meant nothing.

“What is that?” he said.

“An island that floats in the air. Hurry. We have to get to the village before the attack starts.”

Wolff set off after the others. From time to tune, he looked up through the fronds at the aeronesus. It was descending rather swiftly at the opposite end of the island. He caught up with Vala and asked her how the floater could be navigated. She replied that its inhabitants used valves in the giant bladders to release their hydrogen. This procedure required almost all the natives, since each bladder-valve was operated by hand. During a descent, they would all be occupied with the navigation.

“How do they steer it?”

“The bladders have vents. When the abutal want the island to go in one direction, they release gas from banks of bladders on the side opposite to that in which they want to go. They don’t get much power thrust, but they’re very skillful. Even so, they have to contend with the winds and don’t always maneuver effectively. We’ve been attacked twice before by the abutal, and both times they missed our island. They’ll drop sea-anchors—big stones on the ends of cables—to slow them down. The first attackers settled down close to our island instead of just above it and had to content themselves with an attack by sea. They failed.”

She stopped, then said, “Oh, no! These must be the Ilmawir. Los help us.”

At first, Wolff thought that the fifty craft that had launched from the floater were small airplanes. Then, as they circled to land against the wind, he saw that they were gliders. The wings, fifty feet long, were of some pale shimmering stuff and scalloped on the edges. A painted image of an eye with crossed swords above it was on the underside of each wing. The fuselage was an uncovered framework, and its structure and the rudder and ailerons were painted scarlet. The pilot sat in a wickerwork basket just forward of the monowings. The nose of the craft was rounded and had a long horn projecting to a length of about twenty feet in front of it. Like the horn of a narwhal, Wolff thought. As he later found out, the horns were taken from a giant fish.

A glider passed above them on a path which would make it land ahead of them. Wolff got a glimpse of the pilot. His red hair stood at least a foot high; the hair shone with some fixative oil. His face was painted like a red Indian’s with red and green circles, and black chevrons ran down his neck and across his shoulders.

“The village is about a half-mile from here,” Vala said. “On the extreme end of the island.”

Wolff wondered why she was so concerned. What did a Lord care what happened to others? She explained that If the Ilmawir made a successful landing, they would kill every human being on the island. They would then plant some of their surplus people as a colony.

The island was not entirely flat. There were rises here and there, formed by the uneven growth of the bladders. Wolff climbed to the top of one and looked over the fronds. The abuta was down to fifty feet now, settling slowly and headed directly for the village. This was a group of about one hundred beehive-shaped huts, built of fronds. A wall twenty feet high surrounded the village. It looked as if it were constructed of stones, bamboo, fronds, and some dull gray poles that could be the bones of colossal sea-creatures.

Men and women were stationed behind the walls and several groups were out in the open. They were armed with spears and bows and arrows.

Beyond the village were docks built of bamboo. Along them and on the shore were boats of various builds and sizes. The floater’s bottom was a dense tangle of thick roots. There were, however, openings in it, and from several of these large stones at the ends of cables of vegetable matter were dropped. The stones were white, gypsum-like, and carved into flat discs. They trailed in the sea as they were dragged along by the island, then struck the land. The cables of some caught under the docks.

Other anchors fell and struck against the walls of the village. They were snagged in the tangle of stuff forming the high-piled walls. They bumped along the grassless ground and slammed into the sides of the huts. These collapsed under the impact of the stones. At the same time, arrows were shot, spears and rocks dropped, and flaming objects cast from the hatches onto the people below. Some islanders were struck down; huts started to burn. The flaming objects exploded, and a dense black smoke rose from them.

The defenders, however, were not helpless. From a large central building came men and women with curious devices. They lit and released them, and they rose swiftly towards the underpart of the floater. They caught in the tangle of roots and burned there. Then they exploded, and fire spread among the roots.

The roof of a hut lifted up and fell over to one side, like the roof of a trapdoor spider. The walls collapsed in orderly fashion outwards, falling to the ground and forming a petal-figure. In the center of the hut was a catapult, a giant bow with an arrow made from the horns of the creature that had provided the booms on the noses of the gliders. To it were attached a number of flaming bladders. The bow was released, and the burning arrow shot upwards and buried itself deep within the under part of the floater.

The catapult crew began to wind the string back. A man fell from an opening in the floater and was followed by ten more. They came down as if parachuting. Their descent was checked by a cluster of bladders attached to a harness around the shoulders and chest. An arrow caught the first abutal just before he struck the ground, and then three more of the ten behind him were transfixed.

The survivors landed untouched a few feet from the catapult. They unstrapped their harness, and the bladders rose away from them. By then, they were surrounded. They fought so fiercely, one got to the catapult, only to be run through with two spears.

The island-floater, driven by the wind, began to pass over the village. Other stones on cables had been dropped, and a few had caught in the tangle of the walls without breaking. Then ropes fell onto the fronds and the huge loops tightened around them.

Caught at the forward end, the floater swung around so that its bulk hung over this part of the surface island. By then, the gliders had made their landing, not all successfully. Because of the density of the vegetation, the crafts had to come down upon fronds. Some were flipped over; some crashed through several fronds before being caught and held. Some slipped down between the fronds and smashed into the tough thick bushes.

But from where he stood, Wolff could see at least twenty pilots, unhurt, who were now slipping through the jungle. And there had to be others.

He heard his name called. Vala had come back and was standing at the foot of the hill.

“What do you intend to do?” she said angrily. “You have to take sides, Jadawin, whether you want to or not. The abutal will kill you.”

“You may be right,” he said as he came down the hill. “I wanted to get some idea of what was going on. I didn’t want to rush blindly into this without knowing where everybody was, how the fight was going on.…”

“Always the cautious and crafty Jadawin,” she said. “Well, that’s all right; it shows you are no fool, which I already know. Believe me, you need me as much as I need you. You can’t go this thing alone.”

He followed her, and presently they came upon Rintrah, crouching under a frond. He gestured at them for silence. When they were beside him, Wolff looked at where Rintrah was pointing. Five abutal warriors were standing not twenty yards from them. The tail of a wrecked glider rose from behind a crushed bush to their left. They carried small round shields of bone, javelins of bone tipped with bamboo, and several had bows and arrows. The bows were made of some hornlike substance, were short and recurved, and formed of two parts that were joined in a central socket of horn. The warriors were too far away for him to overhear their conference.

“What’s the range of your beamer?” Vala said.

“It kills up to fifty feet,” he said. “Third-degree burns for the next twenty feet, and after that, second-degree burns up through a light singe to no effect.”

“Now’s your chance. Rush them. You can kill all five with one sweep before they know what’s going on.”

Wolff sighed. There would have been a time when he would not even have waited for Vala’s urgings. He would have killed them all by now and been tempted to continue the work with Vala and Rintrah. But he was no longer Jadawin; he was Robert Wolff. Vala would not understand this, or if she did, she would see his hesitation as a weakness. He did not want to kill, but he doubted that there was any way of forcing the abutal to call off their attack. Vala knew these people, and she was probably telling him the truth about them. So, like it or not, he had to take sides.

There was a yell behind them. Wolff rolled over and sat up to see three more abutal warriors about forty feet from them. They had burst out from behind a frond and were charging towards them, their javelins raised.

Wolff twisted around to face the three abutal, and he pressed on a plate on the underside of the three-foot long barrel. A dazzling white ray, pencil-thick, traced across the bellies of all three. The vegetation between and in back of them smoked. The three fell forward, the javelins dropping from their hands, and they slid on the grass, face down.

Wolff rose to one knee, turned, and faced the five. The two archers stopped and took aim. Wolff dropped them first, then the other three. He continued to crouch and looked about him for others who might have been attracted by the cries. Only the wind through the fronds and the hushed cries and muffled explosions of the battle at the village could be heard.

The odor of burned flesh sickened him. He rose and turned over the three corpses, then the five. He did not think that any were still alive, but he wanted to make sure. Each was almost cut in half by the beam. The skin along the gashes was crisped under the blood. There was not much blood, since the energy of the beam, absorbed by the bodies, had cooked their lungs and intestines. Their bowels, contracting, had ejected their contents.

Vala looked at the beamer. She was very curious but knew better than to ask Wolff if she could handle it. “You have two settings,” she said. “What can it do on full power?”

“It can cut through a ten-foot slab of steel,” he replied. “But the charge won’t last more than sixty seconds. On half-power, it can project for ten minutes before needing recharging.”

She looked at his pockets, and he smiled. He had no intention of telling her how many fresh charges were in his pockets.

“What happened to your weapons?” he said.

Vala cursed and said, “They were stolen while we slept. I don’t know whether Urizen or that slimy Theotormon did it.”

He started to walk towards the battle; the two followed close behind. The island above threw them into a pale shadow which would be deepened soon when the night-bringing moon covered this side of the planet. Ilmawir, men and women both, were still dropping out of the openings in the bottom. Others, buoyed up by larger clusters of bladders, were working on the bottom as fire-fighters. They used many-faceted objects that, when squeezed, spurted out water. “Those are living sea-creatures,” she said. “Amphibians. They travel on land by spurting out jets of water and rolling with the thrusts.”

Wolff set the beamer at full power. Whenever they came near a rope tangled in a tree or a stone anchor, he cut the cable loose. Three times he came across abutal and set the beamer on half-power. By the time he was a few yards from the village, he had severed forty cables and killed twenty-two men and women.

“A lucky thing for us you came when you did,” Vala said. “I don’t think we could have driven them off if you hadn’t arrived.”

Wolff shrugged. He ejected a power-pack and slipped another of the little cylinders into the breech. He had six left, and if this continued he would soon be out. But there was nothing he could do to conserve them.

The village was surrounded on the land side by about ninety abutal. Apparently, those who had dropped into the village had been wiped out, but the villagers were busy putting out fires. However, they no longer had to worry about attack from directly overhead. The Ilmawir island had been affected by the cutting of so many cables. It had slipped on downwind by a quarter-mile and only because a hundred other ropes and anchors had been used had it managed to keep from losing the surface-island altogether.

Wolff beamed the group of officers who were standing on top of the only hill near the village. Presently, the other abutal became aware of what was happening. Half left the siege to surround the hill. The area bristled with spears and arrows. The Lords would have been open to a concentrated fire of arrows, but they were protected behind a group of four white stone idols on the hill.

Vala said, “They’re on the defensive now. If they don’t know it now, they soon will. And that will be good for us. Perhaps…”

She was silent for a while. Wolff shot three men as they ran towards a hollow in the hill. He said, “Perhaps what?”

“Our beloved father left a message for us on this island. He told us some of what we have to do if we hope to get within his castle. Apparently, we have to find the gates which lead to him. There are none on this island. He says there is a pair on another island, but he did not say just where. We have to find them by ourselves, so I was thinking…”

A roar arose from the abutals, and the front lines rushed the hill. The archers sent a covering fire of at least thirty arrows per volley. Vala and Rintrah cowered behind an idol, as Wolff had told them to do. Much as he hated to expend his power, he was forced to do so. He put the beamer on full and shot over the heads of the front lines.

Smoke arose from vegetation and flesh alike as he described a circle with the white ray. The archers had had to expose themselves to get good shots, and so most fell.

Arrows rattled around Wolff, leaping off the stone idols. One creased his shoulder; another ricocheted off stone and flew between bis legs. Then, there were no more arrows. The abutal in the second ranks, seeing those crumple before them, smelling the fried flesh, wavered. Wolff began on them, and they fled back into the jungle.

“You were thinking?” he said to Vala.

“We could search a thousand years, using this island as our ship, and not find one island that has the gates. Perhaps that is Father’s idea. He would enjoy seeing us in a futile search, enjoy our despair. And the friction and murder that such long association would make inevitable among us. But if we were on an abuta, which would enable us not only to travel faster but to see far more from its altitude…”

“It’s a fine idea,” he said. “How do we talk the abutal into letting us accompany them? And what guarantee is there that they would not turn on us the first chance they got?”

“You have forgotten much about your younger sister. How could you, of all who have loved me, not remember how persuasive I can be?”

She stood up and shouted at the seemingly uninhabited jungle. For a while there was no response. She repeated her demands. Presently, an officer walked out from behind a frond. He was a tall well-built man in his early thirties, handsome behind the garish circles on his face. Besides the black chevrons down neck and shoulders, he was decorated with a painted seabird on his chest. This was an iiphtarz, and it indicated a commander of the glider force. Behind him came his wife, clad in a short skirt of red and blue seabird feathers, her red hair coiled on top of her head, her face painted with green and white lozenges, a necklace of fingerbones around her neck, an iiphtarz painted across her breasts, and three concentric circles of crimson, black, and yellow painted around her navel. As was the custom among the abutal, she accompanied her husband in battle. If he died, it was her duty to attack his killers until she slew them or died herself.

The two advanced up the hill until Wolff told them to come no further. Vala began talking, and the man began to smile. His wife, however, watched Vala closely and scowled throughout the conversation.