BOOK OF KHALK'RU
CHAPTER I: SOUNDS IN THE NIGHT
I raised my head, listening, - not only with my
ears but with every square inch of my skin, waiting for recurrence of the sound
that had awakened me. There was silence, utter silence. No soughing in the
boughs of the spruces clustered around the little camp. No stirring of furtive
life in the underbrush. Through the spires of the spruces the stars shone wanly
in the short sunset to sunrise twilight of the early Alaskan summer.
A sudden wind
bent the spruce tops, carrying again the sound - the clangour of a beaten
anvil.
I slipped out of
my blanket, and round the dim embers of the fire toward Jim. His voice halted
me.
"All right,
Leif. I hear it."
The wind sighed
and died, and with it died the humming aftertones of the anvil stroke. Before
we could speak, the wind arose. It bore the after-hum of the anvil stroke -
faint and far away. And again the wind died, and with it the sound.
"An anvil,
Leif!"
"Listen!"
A stronger gust
swayed the spruces. It carried a distant chanting; voices of many women and men
singing a strange, minor theme. The chant ended on a wailing chord, archaic,
dissonant.
There was a long
roll of drums, rising in a swift crescendo, ending abruptly. After it a thin
and clamorous confusion.
It was smothered
by a low, sustained rumbling, like thunder, muted by miles. In it defiance,
challenge.
We waited,
listening. The spruces were motionless. The wind did not return.
"Queer sort
of sounds, Jim." I tried to speak casually. He sat up. A stick flared up
in the dying fire. Its light etched his face against the darkness - thin, and
brown and hawk-profiled. He did not look at me.
"Every
feathered forefather for the last twenty centuries is awake and shouting!
Better call me Tsantawu, Leif. Tsi' Tsa'lagi - I am a Cherokee! Right now - all
Indian."
He smiled, but
still he did not look at me, and I was glad of that.
"It was an
anvil," I said. "A hell of a big anvil. And hundreds of people singing...
and how could that be in this wilderness... they didn't sound like Indians...”
"The drums
weren't Indian." He squatted by the fire, staring into it. "When they
turned loose, something played a pizzicato with icicles up and down my
back."
"They got
me, too - those drums!" I thought my voice was steady, but he looked up at
me sharply; and now it was I who averted my eyes and stared at the embers.
"They reminded me of something I heard... and thought I saw... in
Mongolia. So did the singing. Damn it, Jim, why do you look at me like
that?"
I threw a stick
on the fire. For the life of me I couldn't help searching the shadows as the
stick flamed. Then I met his gaze squarely.
"Pretty bad
place, was it, Leif?" he asked, quietly. I said nothing. Jim got up and
walked over to the packs. He came back with some water and threw it over the
fire. He kicked earth on the hissing coals. If he saw me wince as the shadows
rushed in upon us, he did not show it.
"That wind
came from the north," he said. "So that's the way the sounds came.
Therefore, whatever made the sounds is north of us. That being so - which way
do we travel to-morrow?"
"North,"
I said.
My throat dried
as I said it.
Jim laughed. He
dropped upon his blanket, and rolled it around him. I propped myself against
the bole of one of the spruces, and sat staring toward the north.
"The
ancestors are vociferous, Leif. Promising a lodge of sorrow, I gather - if we
go north... 'Bad Medicine!' say the ancestors... 'Bad Medicine for you,
Tsantawu! You go to Usunhi'yi, the Darkening-land, Tsantawu!... Into
Tsusgina'i, the ghost country! Beware! Turn from the north, Tsantawu!'"
"Oh, go to
sleep, you hag-ridden redskin!"
"All right,
I'm just telling you."
Then a little
later:
"'And heard
ancestral voices prophesying war' - it's worse than war these ancestors of mine
are prophesying, Leif."
"Damn it,
will you shut up!"
A chuckle from
the darkness; thereafter silence.
I leaned against
the tree trunk. The sounds, or rather the evil memory they had evoked, had
shaken me more than I was willing to admit, even to myself. The thing I had
carried for two years in the buckskin bag at the end of the chain around my
neck had seemed to stir; turn cold. I wondered how much Jim had divined of what
I had tried to cover...
Why had he put
out the fire? Because he had known I was afraid? To force me to face my fear
and conquer it?... Or had it been the Indian instinct to seek cover in
darkness?... By his own admission, chant and drum-roll had played on his nerves
as they had on mine...
Afraid! Of course
it had been fear that had wet the palms of my hands, and had tightened my
throat so my heart had beaten in my ears like drums.
Like drums...
yes!
But... not like
those drums whose beat had been borne to us by the north wind. They had been
like the cadence of the feet of men and women, youths and maids and children,
running ever more rapidly up the side of a hollow world to dive swiftly into
the void... dissolving into the nothingness... fading as they fell... dissolving...
eaten up by the nothingness...
Like that
accursed drum-roll I had heard in the secret temple of the Gobi oasis two years
ago!
Neither then nor now had it been fear alone. Fear
it was, in truth, but fear shot through with defiance... defiance of life against
its negation... upsurging, roaring, vital rage... frantic revolt of the
drowning against the strangling water, rage of the candle-flame against the
hovering extinguisher...
Was it as
hopeless as that? If what I suspected to be true was true, to think so was to
be beaten at the beginning!
But there was
Jim! How to keep him out of it? In my heart, I had never laughed at those
subconscious perceptions, whatever they were, that he called the voices of his
ancestors. When he had spoken of Usunhi'yi, the Darkening-land, a chill had
crept down my spine. For had not the old Uighur priest spoken of the
Shadow-land? And it was as though I had heard the echo of his words.
I looked over to
where he lay. He had been more akin to me than my own brothers. I smiled at
that, for they had never been akin to me. To all but my soft-voiced,
deep-bosomed, Norse mother I had been a stranger in that severely conventional
old house where I had been born.
The youngest son,
and an unwelcome intruder; a changeling. It had been no fault of mine that I
had come into the world a throw-back to my mother's yellow-haired, blue-eyed,
strong-thewed Viking forefathers. Not at all a Langdon. The Langdon men were
dark and slender, thin-lipped and saturnine, stamped out by the same die for
generations. They looked down at me, the changeling, from the family portraits
with faintly amused, supercilious hostility. Precisely as my father and my four
brothers, true Langdons, each of them, looked at me when I awkwardly disposed
of my bulk at their table.
It had brought me
unhappiness, but it had made my mother wrap her heart around me. I wondered, as
I had wondered many times, how she had come to give herself to that dark,
self-centred man my father - with the blood of the sea-rovers singing in her
veins. It was she who had named me Leif - as incongruous a name to tack on a
Langdon as was my birth among them.
Jim and I had
entered Dartmouth on the same day. I saw him as he was then - the tall, brown
lad with his hawk face and inscrutable black eyes. pure blood of the Cherokees,
of the clan from which had come the great Sequoiah, a clan which had produced
through many centuries wisest
councillors, warriors strong in cunning.
On the college
roster his name was written James T. Eagles, but on the rolls of the Cherokee
Nation it was written Two Eagles and his mother had called him Tsantawu. From
the first we had recognized spiritual kinship. By the ancient rites of his
people we had become blood-brothers, and he had given me my secret name, known only
to the pair of us, Degataga - one who stands so close to another that the two
are one.
My one gift,
besides my strength, is an aptness at languages. Soon I spoke the Cherokee as
though I had been born in the Nation. Those years in college were the happiest
I had ever known. It was during the last of them that America entered the World
War. Together we had left Dartmouth, gone into training camp, sailed for France
on the same transport.
Sitting there,
under the slow-growing Alaskan dawn, my mind leaped over the years between...
my mother's death on Armistice Day... my return to New York to a frankly
hostile home... Jim's recall to his clan... the finishing of my course in
mining engineering... my wanderings in Asia... my second return to America and
my search for Jim... this expedition of ours to Alaska, more for comradeship
and the wilderness peace than for the gold we were supposed to be seeking -
A long trail
since the War - the happiest for me these last two months of it. It had led us
from Nome over the quaking tundras, and then to the Koyukuk, and at last to
this little camp among the spruces, somewhere between the headwaters of the
Koyukuk and the Chandalar in the foothills of the unexplored Endicott Range. A
long trail... I had the feeling that it was here the real trail of my life
began.
A ray of the
rising sun struck through the trees. Jim sat up, looked over at me, and
grinned.
"Didn't get
much sleep after the concert, did you?"
"What did
you do to the ancestors? They didn't seem to keep you awake long."
He said, too
carelessly: "Oh, they quieted down." His face and eyes were
expressionless. He was veiling his mind from me. The ancestors had not quieted
down. He had lain awake while I had thought him sleeping. I made a swift
decision. We would go south as we had planned. I would go
with him as far as Circle. I would find some pretext to leave him
there.
I said:
"We're not going north. I've changed my mind."
"Yes.
Why?"
"I'll tell
you after we've had breakfast," I said - I'm not so quick in thinking up
lies. "Rustle up a fire, Jim. I'll go down to the stream and get some
water."
"Degataga!"
I started. It was
only in moments of rare sympathy or in time of peril that he used the secret
name.
"Degataga,
you go north! You go if I have to march ahead of you to make you follow...” he
dropped into the Cherokee...”It is to save your spirit, Degataga. Do we march
together - blood-brothers? Or do you creep after me - like a shivering dog at
the heels of the hunter?"
The blood pounded
in my temples, my hand went out toward him. He stepped back, and laughed.
"That's
better, Leif."
The quick rage
left me, my hand fell.
"All right,
Tsantawu. We go - north. But it wasn't - it wasn't because of myself that I
told you I'd changed my mind."
"I know
damned well it wasn't!"
He busied himself
with the fire. I went after the water. We drank the strong black tea, and ate
what was left of the little brown storks they call Alaskan turkeys which we had
shot the day before. When we were through I began to talk.
CHAPTER II: RING OF THE KRAKEN
Three years ago,
so I began my story, I went into Mongolia with the Fairchild expedition. Part
of its work was a mineral survey for certain British interests, part of it
ethnographic and archeological research for the British Museum and the
University of Pennsylvania.
I never had a
chance to prove my value as a mining engineer. At once I became good-will
representative, camp entertainer, liaison agent between us and the tribes. My
height, my yellow hair, blue eyes and freakish strength, and my facility in
picking up languages were of never-ending interest to them. Tartars, Mongols,
Buriats, Kirghiz – they would watch while I bent horseshoes, twisted iron bars
over my knees and performed what my father used to call contemptuously my
circus tricks.
Well, that's
exactly what I was to them - a one-man circus. And yet I was more than that -
they liked me. Old Fairchild would laugh when I complained that I had no time
for technical work. He would tell me that I was worth a dozen mining engineers,
that I was the expedition's insurance, and that as long as I could keep up my
act they wouldn't be bothered by any trouble makers. And it is a fact that they
weren't. It was the only expedition of its kind I ever knew where you could
leave your stuff unwatched and return to find it still there. Also we were singularly
free from graft and shake-downs.
In no time I had
picked up half a dozen of the dialects and could chatter and chaff with the
tribesmen in their own tongues. It made a prodigious bit with them. And now and
then a Mongol delegation would arrive with a couple of their wrestlers, big
fellows with chests like barrels, to pit against me. I learned their tricks,
and taught them ours. We had pony lifting contests, and some of my Manchu
friends taught me how to fight with the two broadswords - a sword in each hand.
Fairchild had
planned on a year, but so smoothly did the days go by that he decided to
prolong our stay. My act, he told me in his sardonic fashion, was undoubtedly
of perennial vitality; never again would science have such an opportunity in
this region - unless I made up my mind to remain and rule. He didn't know how
close he came to prophecy.
In the early
summer of the following year we shifted our camp about a hundred miles north.
This was Uighur country. They are a strange people, the Uighurs. They say of
themselves that they are descendants of a great race which ruled the Gobi when
it was no desert but an earthly Paradise, with flowing rivers and many lakes
and teeming cities. It is a fact that they are apart from all the other tribes,
and while those others cheerfully kill them when they can, still they go in fear
of them. Or rather, of the sorcery of their priests.
Seldom had
Uighurs appeared at the old camp. When they did, they kept at a distance. We
had been at the new camp less than a week when a band of twenty rode in. I was
sitting in the shade of my tent. They dismounted and came straight to me. They
paid no attention to anyone else. They halted a dozen feet from me. Three
walked close up and stood, studying me. The eyes of these three were a peculiar
grey-blue; those of the one who seemed to be their captain singularly cold.
They were bigger, taller men than the others.
I did not know
the Uighur. I gave them polite salutations in the Kirghiz. They did not answer,
maintaining their close scrutiny. Finally they spoke among themselves, nodding
as though they had come to some decision.
The leader then
addressed me. As I stood up, I saw that he was not many inches under my own six
feet four. I told him, again in the Kirghiz, that I did not know his tongue. He
gave an order to his men. They surrounded my tent, standing like guards, spears
at rest beside them, their wicked long-swords drawn.
At this my temper
began to rise, but before I could protest the leader began to speak to me in
the Kirghiz. He assured me, with deference, that their visit was entirely
peaceful, only they did not wish their contact with me to be disturbed by any
of my companions. He asked if I would show him my hands. I held them out. He
and his two comrades bent over the palms, examining them minutely, pointing to
a mark or a crossing of lines. This inspection ended, the leader touched his forehead
with my right hand.
And then to my
complete astonishment, he launched without explanation into what was a highly
intelligent lesson in the Uighur tongue. He took the Kirghiz for the
comparative language. He did not seem to be surprized at the ease with which I
assimilated the tuition; indeed, I had a puzzled idea that he regarded it as
something to be expected. I mean that his manner was less that of teaching me a
new language, than of recalling to me one I had forgotten. The lesson lasted
for a full
hour. He then touched his forehead again with my hand, and gave a command
to the ring of guards. The whole party walked to their horses and galloped off.
There had been
something disquieting about the whole experience. Most disquieting was my own
vague feeling that my tutor, if I had read correctly his manner, had been right
- that I was not learning a new tongue but one I had forgotten. Certainly I
never picked up any language with such rapidity and ease as I did the Uighur.
The rest of my party
had been perplexed and apprehensive, naturally. I went immediately to them, and
talked the matter over. Our ethnologist was the famous Professor David Barr, of
Oxford. Fairchild was inclined to take it as a joke, but Barr was greatly
disturbed. He said that the Uighur tradition was that their forefathers had
been a fair race, yellow-haired and blue-eyed, big men of great strength. In
short, men like myself. A few ancient Uighur wall paintings had been found
which
had portrayed exactly this type, so there was evidence of the correctness
of the tradition. However, if the Uighurs of the present were actually the
descendants of this race, the ancient blood must have
been mixed and diluted almost to the point of extinction.
I asked what this
had to do with me, and he replied that quite conceivably my visitors might
regard me as of the pure blood of the ancient race. In fact, he saw no other
explanation of their conduct. He was of the opinion that their study of my
palms, and their manifest approval of what they had discovered there, clinched
the matter.
Old Fairchild
asked him, satirically, if he was trying to convert us to palmistry. Barr said,
coldly, that he was a scientist. As a scientist, he was aware that certain
physical resemblances can be carried on by hereditary factors through many
generations. Certain peculiarities in the arrangement of the lines of the palms
might persist through centuries. They could reappear in cases of atavism, such
as I clearly represented.
By this time, I
was getting a bit dizzy. But Barr had a few shots left that made me more so. By
now his temper was well up, and he went on to say that the Uighurs might even
be entirely correct in what he deduced was their opinion of me. I was a
throwback to the ancient Norse. Very well. It was quite certain that the Aesir,
the old Norse gods and goddesses - Odin and Thor, Frigga and Freya, Frey and
Loki of the Fire and all the others - had once been real people. Without
question they had been leaders in some long and perilous migration. After they
had died, they had been deified, as numerous other similar heroes and heroines
had been by other tribes and races. Ethnologists were agreed that the original
Norse stock had come into North-eastern Europe from Asia, like other Aryans.
Their migration might have occurred anywhere from 1000 B.C. to 5000 B.C. And
there was no scientific reason why they should not have come from the region
now called the Gobi, nor why they should not have been the blond race these
present-day Uighurs called their forefathers.
No one, he went
on to say, knew exactly when the Gobi had become desert - nor what were the
causes that had changed it into desert. Parts of the Gobi and all the Little
Gobi might have been fertile as late as two thousand years ago. Whatever it had
been, whatever its causes, and whether operating slowly or quickly, the change
gave a perfect reason for the migration led by Odin and the other Aesir which
had ended in the colonization of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Admittedly I was a
throwback to my mother's stock of a thousand years ago. There was no reason why
I should not also be a throwback in other recognizable ways to the ancient
Uighurs - if they actually were the original Norse.
But the practical
consideration was that I was headed for trouble. So was every other member of
our party. He urgently advised going back to the old camp where we would be
among friendly tribes. In conclusion he pointed out that, since we had come to
this site, not a single Mongol, Tartar or any other tribesman with whom I had
established such pleasant relations had come near us. He sat down with a glare
at Fairchild, observing that this was no palmist's advice but that of a
recognized scientist.
Well, Fairchild
apologized, of course, but he over-ruled Barr on returning; we could safely
wait a few days longer and see what developed. Barr remarked morosely that as a
prophet Fairchild was probably a total loss, but it was also probable that we
were being closely watched and would not be allowed to retreat, and therefore
it did not matter.
That night we
heard drums beating far away, drumming between varying intervals of silence
almost until dawn, reporting and answering questions of drums still further
off.
The next day, at
the same hour, along came the same troop. Their leader made straight for me,
ignoring, as before, the others in the camp. He saluted me almost with
humility. We walked back together to my tent. Again the cordon was thrown round
it, and my second lesson abruptly began. It continued for two hours or more.
Thereafter, day after day, for three weeks, the same performance was repeated.
There was no desultory conversation, no extraneous questioning, no
explanations. These men were there for one definite purpose: to teach me their tongue.
They stuck to that admirably. Filled with curiosity, eager to reach the end and
learn what it all meant, I interposed no obstacles, stuck as rigorously as they
to the matter in hand. This, too, they seemed to take as something expected of
me. In three weeks I could carry on a conversation in the Uigher as well as I
can in English.
Barr's uneasiness
kept growing. "They're grooming you for something!" he would say.
"I'd give five years of my life to be in your shoes. But I don't like it.
I'm afraid for you. I'm damned afraid!"
One night at the
end of this third week, the signalling drums beat until dawn. The next day my
instructors did not appear, nor the next day, nor the day after. But our men
reported that there were Uighurs all around us, picketing the camp. They were
in fear, and no work could be got out of them.
On the afternoon
of the fourth day we saw a cloud of dust drifting rapidly down upon us from the
north. Soon we heard the sound of the Uighur drums. Then out of the dust
emerged a troop of horsemen. There were two or three hundred of them, spears
glinting, many of them with good rifles. They drew up in a wide semi-circle
before the camp. The cold-eyed leader who had been my chief instructor
dismounted and came forward leading a magnificent black stallion. A big horse,
a strong horse, unlike the rangy horses that carried them; a horse that could bear
my weight with ease.
The Uighur
dropped on one knee, handing me the stallion's reins, I took them,
automatically. The horse looked me over, sniffed at me, and rested its nose on
my shoulder. At once the troop raised their spears, shouting some word I could
not catch, then dropped from their mounts and stood waiting.
The leader arose.
He drew from his tunic a small cube of ancient jade. He sank again upon his
knee, handed me the cube. It seemed solid, but as I pressed it flew open.
Within, was a ring. It was of heavy gold, thick and wide. Set in it was a
yellow, translucent stone about an inch and a half square. And within this
stone was the shape of a black octopus.
Its tentacles
spread out fan-wise from its body. They had the effect of reaching forward
through the yellow stone. I could even see upon their nearer tips the sucking
discs. The body was not so clearly defined. It was nebulous, seeming to reach
into far distance. The black octopus had not been cut upon the jewel. It was
within it.
I was aware of a
curious mingling of feelings - repulsion and a peculiar sense of familiarity,
like the trick of the mind that causes what we call double memory, the
sensation of having experienced the same thing before. Without thinking. I
slipped the ring over my thumb which it fitted perfectly, and held it up to the
sun to catch the light through the stone. Instantly every man of the troop
threw himself down upon his belly, prostrating himself before it.
The Uighur
captain spoke to me. I had been subconsciously aware that from the moment of
handing me the jade he had been watching me closely. I thought that now there
was awe in his eyes.
"Your horse
is ready again he used the unfamiliar word with which the troop had saluted me.
"Show me what you wish to take with you, and your men shall carry
it."
"Where do we
go - and for how long?" I asked.
"To a holy
man of your people," he answered. "For how long - he alone can answer."
I felt a
momentary irritation at the casualness with which I was being disposed of. Also
I wondered why he spoke of his men and his people as mine.
"Why does he
not come to me?" I asked.
"He is
old," he answered. "He could not make the journey."
I looked at the
troop, now standing up beside their horses. If I refused to go, it would
undoubtedly mean the wiping out of the camp if my companions attempted, as they
would, to resist my taking. Besides, I was on fire with curiosity.
"I must
speak to my comrades before I go," I said.
"If it
please Dwayanu" - this time I caught the word -”to bid farewell to his
dogs, let him." There was a nicker of contempt in his eyes as he looked at
old Fairchild and the others.
Definitely I did
not like what he had said, nor his manner.
"Await me
here," I told him curtly, and walked over to Fairchild. I drew him into
his tent, Barr and the others of the expedition at our heels. I told them what
was happening. Barr took my hand, and scrutinized the ring. He whistled softly.
"Don't you
know what this is?" he asked me. "It's the Kraken – that super-wise,
malignant and mythical sea-monster of the old Norsemen. See, its tentacles are
not eight but twelve. Never was it pictured with less than ten. It symbolized
the principle that is inimical to Life – not Death precisely, more accurately
annihilation. The Kraken - and here in Mongolia!"
"See here,
Chief," I spoke to Fairchild. "There's only one way you can help me -
if I need help. And that's to get back quick as you can to the old camp. Get
hold of the Mongols and send word to that chief who kept bringing in the big
wrestlers - they'll know whom I mean. Persuade or hire him to get as many able
fighting men at the camp as you can. I'll be back, but I'll probably come back
running. Outside of that, you're all in danger. Not at the moment, maybe, but
things may develop which will make these people think it better to wipe you
out. I know what I'm talking about, Chief. I ask you to do this for my sake, if
not for your own."
"But they
watch the camp -” he began to object.
"They won't
- after I've gone. Not for a little while at least. Everyone of them will be
streaking away with me." I spoke with complete certainty, and Barr nodded
acquiescence.
"The King
returns to his Kingdom," he said. "All his loyal subjects with him.
He's in no danger - while he's with them. But - God, if I could only go with
you, Leif! The Kraken! And the ancient legend of the South Seas told of the
Great Octopus, dozing on and biding his time till he felt like destroying the
world and all its life. And three miles up in the air the Black Octopus is cut
into the cliffs of the Andes! Norsemen - and the South Sea Islanders - and the
Andeans! And the same symbol - here!"
"Please
promise?" I asked Fairchild. "My life may depend on it."
"It's like
abandoning you. I don't like it!"
"Chief, this
crowd could wipe you out in a minute. Go back, and get the Mongols. The Tartars
will help. They hate the Uighurs. I'll come back, don't fear. But I'd bet
everything that this whole crowd, and more, will be at my heels. When I come, I
want a wall to duck behind."
"We'll
go," he said.
I went out of
that tent, and over to my own. The odd-eyed Uighur followed me. I took my rifle
and an automatic, stuffed a toothbrush and a shaving-kit in my pocket, and
turned to go.
"Is there
nothing else?" There was surprise in his question.
"If there
is, I'll come back for it," I answered.
"Not after
you have - remembered," he said, enigmatically.
Side by side we walked to the black stallion. I
lifted myself to his back.
The troop wheeled
in behind us. Their spears a barrier between me and the camp, we galloped
south.
