Night warriors, p.41
Night Warriors, page 41
‘Do you think we’re making a mistake?’ asked Tebulot, as they paused for a rest.
Samena shook her head. ‘There’s no mistake. He’s here someplace. But he’s probably trying to disorient us and tire us out.’
‘He’s not making too bad a job of it, either,’ said Tebulot.
Xaxxa said, ‘It’s going to take more than snow to put me off, man.’ Kasyx placed his hand over his forehead, and examined their surroundings with infra-red, to see if there were any tell-tale traces of heat – either Devilish or human. But all he could register were the glowing yellow-and-blue bodies of Tebulot, Samena, and Xaxxa, and the golden pulsing of Tebulot’s highly charged machine.
‘You still think we’re heading in the right direction?’ he asked Samena.
‘As far as I can tell,’ said Samena. ‘It’s stronger than it was, but it keeps breaking up and dividing, and sometimes it’s hard to say exactly where it is.’
Kasyx said, ‘All right. We’ll keep on going for another couple of miles. If we haven’t located anything by then, we’ll leave this dream and see If we can’t find Yaomauitl someplace else.’
Samena told him, ‘He’s here, Kasyx, I promise you.’ ‘Come on,’ said Kasyx, and they began to march slowly through the snowdrifts once more, four small figures in a huge whirling landscape of white. As he marched, it struck Tebulot as totally amazing that this entire world could exist Inside one man’s sleeping mind; and that this one man would only have to turn over in bed, and he could start dreaming about another world altogether, quite different, but just as vast. That was one thing that his experiences as a Night Warrior had taught him: that inner space was just as infinite as outer space, but far more complicated, because it obeyed none of the laws of the material world. In inner space a building could float in the sky, an animal could talk, a dead husband could come to life again. In inner space, snow could fall in the hottest month of the summer, and Devils could hide like Arctic wolves.
It was then that they heard a sudden and terrible clashing. The snow shuddered as it fell, and began to spin around in wild eddies. They heard whoops, and cries, and the shaking of dozens of small bells, and out of the snowstorm a huge sledge appeared, as large as a truck, drawn by over a hundred harnessed Polar bears. The sledge passed by them only fifty feet away, its wooden runners sliding over the snow with a chilling hiss. It was constructed entirely of yew, articulated in the middle so that it could turn quickly. The front section was three stories high, and heaped with hundreds of animal furs. The rear section was crowded with masked soldiers in breastplates and winged helmets that reminded the Night Warriors of the hordes of Genghis Khan and each soldier carried a strange wide-barrelled rifle. At the very back of the sledge there was a wooden tower, sixty or seventy feet high, whose sides were clustered with silver bells and ribbons, as well as the carcasses of dead wolves and snowshoe rabbits, and the flowing black scalps of human beings.
At the very top of the tower, in midnight-black armour that resembled a beetle’s carapace, stood a being whose eyes gleamed yellow and malevolent: the lord of all darkness, Yaomauitl.
Tebulot yelled, ‘Hit the deck!’ and the four Night Warriors plunged face down into the snow. The jangling sledge wheeled around them in a wide circle, and they could hear the harsh cries of the Tartar soldiers screeching through the snowstorm like strangled crows. Kasyx lifted his head, and immediately the snow all around them exploded into hundreds of powdery white plumes. He ducked down again, and glanced across at Samena, and said, ‘I think we take it all back. You found them all right.’
Tebulot eased back the T-bar of his machine. ‘If I can hit Yaomauitl himself, maybe we can get this over with.’
They heard the terrible sledge sliding closer. The paws of a hundred bears made the snow shake as if an earth-tremor were impending. Tebulot made a confident circle of finger and thumb and gave Kasyx a wink from behind his face-mask. ‘Here goes nothing,’ he said, and lifted himself up out of the snow.
Instantly, there was an ear-splitting barrage of fire from the soldiers at the rear of the sledge. Each shot made a sharp, breathy shriek, like a bicycle-pump drawing in air, only twenty times louder. As the sledge thundered past them, towering high above their hiding-place, Kasyx saw three soldiers lean over the sides of it and fire at them, and then he realised what the whistling noise was all about.
The Tartar’s rifles, instead of firing a projectile, sucked in whatever they were aimed at, over a distance of nearly a hundred metres. When they missed, and aimed at the ground, a thin bullet of snow would be plucked up and zapped backwards into the gun’s barrel. It took only a little imagination to picture what would happen if they managed to aim straight at a human being.
With the sledge almost past them, Tebulot rolled on to his back, and fired a single dazzling blast of concentrated energy at the wooden tower. The energy-bolt screamed in through one of the tower’s windows, and for a moment nothing happened. Then the tower blew up, in a tumbling shower of shattered wood and scorched wolf carcasses, and a ball of orange fire rose up over the sledge, then vanished. Two rear runners collapsed, and the giant sledge ground to a halt in a spray of ice. Immediately, the Tartar soldiers began to swarm down the sides of the sledge, and drop into the snow, so that the Night Warriors would find them more difficult to hit. One of the Tartars ran around and cut loose the bears, waving a bright red flare at them to frighten them away. Samena watched this particular Tartar for a while, and then unhooked a single arrowhead from her belt. She crossed her arms, and fired the energy-arrow zip! along the side of the sledge. The arrowhead pierced the soldier’s hand so that he dropped his flare. Immediately, two of the bears turned around, and shuffled towards him, snarling and roaring. The Tartar cried out, and began to run, but the bears could run much faster. They came up behind him like two white locomotives, and knocked him down in a spray of blood. One of them went for his head, and from two hundred feet away the Night Warriors could hear his skull crunch.
The flare, meanwhile, had dropped among the furs, and the front of the sledge began to burn. Within three or four minutes, the whole sledge was thundering with fire from end to end. Kasyx kept a lookout for Yaomauitl, but there was no sign of him. He said to Xaxxa, ‘How about making a quick pass overhead? Do you think you can do that without getting hit? I want to see where Yaomauitl’s hiding.’
Xaxxa said, ‘You got it,’ and lay flat on his back in the snow. Then he covered his face with his mirror-like mask, and double-somersaulted backwards right out of the pit in which they were sheltering, streaking up into the snowy sky on a slide of shining gold.
For a moment, Xaxxa disappeared completely, and they waited anxiously for his return. The wooden sledge crackled and popped, and there was a thick nauseating smell of burning fur. The Tartars kept their heads well down, especially since Tebulot was ready for them with his machine fully cocked and ready to fire a multiple horizontal burst.
Samena said, ‘You don’t think he’s lost, do you?’
But before Kasyx could reply, they heard that familiar jet-plane whistle, and Xaxxa came flashing across the snow, only two or three feet above ground-level, crouched on his shining slide like the greatest surfer that ever was.
One of the Tartars lifted himself out of the snow, and aimed at Xaxxa with his wide-barrelled rifle. But Xaxxa weaved and ducked in mid-air, and kicked the Tartar straight in the jaw with a perfect two-footed drop-kick that must have had an impact velocity of three hundred miles an hour. The Tartar was flung bodily across the snow, and his rifle dropped and fired straight at one of his comrades, who had been crouched next to him. It was then that the Night Warriors saw what the weapons could do. A six-inch plug of living flesh was snapped out of the soldier’s thigh, and sucked bloodily into the rifle’s open barrel. The soldier screeched, and dropped to the snow, clutching his leg.
Xaxxa made another fly-past, and then circled around and rejoined the other three Night Warriors.
‘Terrific kick,’ Kasyx complimented him. Then, ‘Any sign of Yaomauitl?’
‘I don’t think that creature we saw was Yaomauitl himself,’ Xaxxa panted. ‘I saw his armour lying in the snow, empty, and something lying next to it that looked like that Devil we burned at the Scripps Institute, only smaller and redder. Whatever it was, it was dead meat.’
‘One of Yaomauitl’s new offspring,’ Kasyx breathed. ‘While they dream, they can take on his grown-up appearance, but when you destroy them, in their dream, they revert back to what they really are. Embryos, undeveloped demons. What did Springer call them? Joeys.’
Samena said, ‘How about the rest of the soldiers? Do you think we can manage to beat them?’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Xaxxa. ‘They’ve dug themselves in pretty good. It’s going to take a lot of energy to shift them.’
‘Energy is one thing I don’t want to waste,’ said Kasyx. But then Tebulot lifted his hand and said brightly, ‘I’ve got an idea. Listen! I read it in a cowboy book once. It was something the Cheyenne Indians used to do, to distract their enemies.’
‘I hope you realise the Cheyenne Indians got beaten, in the end,’ said Xaxxa.
‘Well, come on, it’s only an adaptation of what the Cheyennes did,’ Tebulot explained. ‘What we could do is this: pick up that Tartar soldier, the one who’s been wounded in the leg, and fly him down the whole length of the Tartar lines, spraying them in blood. Then we round up the rest of those bears, and drive them back here. As soon as they smell that blood – well, they’re going to go crazy, aren’t they?’
‘When you say we, you mean me, if I understand you right?’ Xaxxa asked him. ‘I mean, seeing as how I’m the only one who can fly.’
Tebulot said, ‘We’ll be covering you.’
Xaxxa looked at Kasyx. Kasyx said, ‘It’s a good idea, but you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.’
‘No, I’ll do it,’ said Xaxxa. ‘I just wanted to make sure that nobody here was taking me for granted.’
‘Are you kidding?’ smiled Samena.
Without any further delay, Xaxxa flashed off through the falling snow, and vanished once more. This time, when he came back, he was travelling so fast that they didn’t see him until he reached down out of the blizzard and snatched up the wounded Tartar like a buzzard picking up an injured gopher. The other Tartars lifted their weapons, and fired a sharp shrieking salvo at him, but he managed to fly the whole length of the Tartar lines with his victim hanging bleeding from his arms, without being hit.
He dropped the hapless Tartar into a deep snow-drift, and then climbed away into the sky to round up the Polar bears.
Kasyx waited impatiently as minutes passed by. The snow was still falling thickly, covering his crimson armour like white wool. Samena sat beside him, her face calm, turning around now and again to make sure that the Tartars hadn’t yet decided to attack them. Tebulot kept his weapon ready and humming but he knew that there was nothing he could do, not at the moment.
Samena said, ‘I hope Xaxxa isn’t lost. He doesn’t have the same directional senses that I have. Not in this kind of weather, anyway.’
‘He’ll be all right,’ said Kasyx, although he wasn’t completely convinced of it. Xaxxa was a little too fast and a little too flamboyant. If he had accidentally run into another of those articulated snow-sledges, then he could have been killed without any of them knowing about it.
Ten minutes passed. Then Samena said, ‘They’re advancing, look.’
Kasyx raised his head, and changed his sight to telescopic. Samena was right. The Tartars were rising up from the snow, their winged helmets showing black against the blizzard, their masked faces expressionless. A shot screeched past Kasyx’s head – not a bullet, but a thin column of air, sucked back into the rifle at twice the speed of sound. He dropped down, and said, ‘There have to be thirty of them, at least. Do you think you two can hit them all?’
‘We’ll try,’ said Tebulot. ‘We hit ten times that number of corpses when we fought them on the plain.’
‘Sure you did,’ said Kasyx. ‘But those corpses weren’t armed with suck-guns, the way that these jokers are.’ Samena said quietly, ‘We have to take the risk, Kasyx. Xaxxa took the risk.’
‘Well, I know,’ Kasyx replied. ‘It’s just that you’re-’ ‘Young?’ smiled Samena. ‘Yes, we are. But warriors have always been young. That’s what makes their sacrifice so much greater.’
Tebulot lifted his head. The Tartar soldiers had fanned out, and were now making their way across the snow towards them in a wide pincer-movement, dark and sinister, their rifles held high. Tebulot aimed his machine, and fired three bright energy-bolts that burst into jagged ‘shrapnel’ – uncontrolled electrical charges that could tear their way through armour-plate. With a crackling sound, six or seven Tartars dropped to the ground. Smoke drifted through the falling snow.
Samena dropped two of them with wire-flailing arrowheads, immaculate shots that killed them with scarcely any waste of energy at all. But then the remaining Tartars began to fire at them from three sides, and they had to drop back down into the snow.
‘Where the hell is Xaxxa?’ Tebulot demanded, more to the snow in front of him than to anyone or anything else.
Tebulot needn’t have worried. For suddenly, the shrieking of suck-guns died away; the three Night Warriors heard confused shouting, and then screams. Cautiously, they looked up out of the snow, and there was Xaxxa, floating towards them through the snow, twenty feet up in the air, his arms outspread, his mirrored face inscrutable and terrifying, even to them.
Ahead of him, roaring and rumbling, jogged sixty or seventy full grown Polar bears, the remains of the ice-sledge’s harness-team. At first, they had run this way because Xaxxa had frightened them, looping from side to side in shining figures-of-eight. But now they could smell the fresh blood that he had spattered all over the Tartar soldiers, and their hunger drove their legs like superheated pistons.
Kasyx rose to his feet, and so did Samena and Tebulot. The sight was extraordinary. Each of the Polar bears must have weighed close to a ton, yet they all shambled forward at nearly twenty miles an hour, their teeth bared and their black lips curled back and their yellow eyes staring with mindless hunger. The Tartars opened fire on them. Bloody strings of flesh were snatched from the flanks of four of them, and three of them collapsed on to the snow, but the rest began to canter forward even more quickly, their breath smoking, their claws scratching on the ice-crust. The Tartars wavered, and then dropped their rifles and began to run.
With a last unstoppable rush, the bears brought down the soldiers in showers of bloody fury. The four Night Warriors watched with a mixture of horror and relief as their enemies were overtaken one by one and clawed down on to the snow, where their bodies were ripped and their helmets were scattered and their entrails were dragged blue-grey and steaming for yards across the snow. The bears circled and circled their prey, their yellowish fur streaked with red, their snouts dark and glistening, shreds of soldier meat hanging from their jaws.
A little way off, almost hidden by the thickly falling snow, the ice-sledge had been burned down now to a trough of ashes. A wind rose and began to blow away the sparks.
The Night Warriors cautiously retreated from the scene of the battle, so that they wouldn’t disturb the bears. Following Samena’s instincts, they trudged their way off through the snowstorm again, and within minutes, when they looked back, all trace of the sledge and the bears and the bodies of the Tartars had vanished.
For over an hour, they walked blindly through the snow. Kasyx asked Samena several times if she was sure that Yaomauitl was near, but each time she assured him that he was. ‘I feel it, Kasyx, he’s here. He wants to fight us to the bitter end this time. He won’t run away.’
‘I wouldn’t even mind if he ran to meet us,’ Xaxxa complained. ‘He might save us a walk.’
Strangely, although it reduced visibility to little more than a few feet, the snow was neither wet nor particularly cold. It was more like thickly falling feathers – the way snow ought to be, in dreams, rather than the way it actually is. Xaxxa’s and Samena’s costumes were very brief, but neither of them felt affected by the blizzard. Their body temperature, in fact, was exactly the same as that of the dreamer himself, as he lay in his black satin bed.
After a little while longer, the Night Warriors found that they were descending into a wide valley, and that the snow was beginning to clear. The sky, however, remained deep red, almost maroon, and the clouds that moved through it, stately and slow, were tinged with pink. As the snow dissipated altogether, they looked up and saw that flamingos were flying around the clouds, their wings beating lazily on unseen air-currents, and that on some of the clouds there were colonies of untidy nests.
The snow beneath their feet began to clear away, too, and soon they found that they were walking through bracken, interspersed with wild flowers, and that the sun was beginning to shine. Below them, the valley spread out wide, with a silvery river looping its way through sparkling meadows, and willows sadly washing their hair from grassy banks.
It was difficult to decide where this place actually was; whether it was in the West or in the Orient, or somewhere else altogether different. They knew that the dreamer was Japanese, or half-Japanese, but this landscape was nothing like Japan. Nor was it anything like California, either. It was still and warm and regretful, a landscape of memories and lost loves, but there was also some vaguely threatening quality about it, some indefinable instability.
The Night Warriors reached the river and slowly forded it, up to their thighs. The water glittered in the sunlight, and ran thick with fish. They climbed the muddy bank on the other side, and sat down beside one of the rustling willows to rest for a minute or two, and to look around at this extraordinary world in which they had found themselves. High up above them, the flamingos still idly circled, and the clouds sailed past them with all the dignity of old-time Spanish galleons leaving Cadiz. ‘Isn’t this the most peaceful place you’ve ever been?’ asked Samena.
