Children of Tomorrow by Arthur Leo Zagat (little readers .TXT) 📕

was hurrying to throw itself over the Drop, just ahead—

Dikar dug heels to stop himself. Something in the water—Jimlane! Jimlane lay face down in the water, very still, and the water that swirled away from the still, small body was pink and dreadful. Jimlane lay in the water, but on the bank of the stream lay Billthomas, limp as an arrowed deer, his side red and terrible with blood.

Dikar dropped to his knees beside Billthomas, and inside him Dikar was cold, cold as ice. “My fault,” he heard himself groan. “I set you to watch Tomball, an’ Tomball had the gun hid in the woods, an’ he got it an’ shot you. My fault, Billthomas.”

Dikar touched Billthomas, and Billthomas moved under Dikar’s hand, Billthomas’ eyes opened and stared up into Dikar’s face, unseeing. Then they smiled. A faint smile touched Billthomas’ gray lips and they moved, but Dikar could not hear what they said.

“What?” Dikar’s voice was hoarse, strange to him. “What, Billthomas?” He bent, got his ear near Billthomas’ lips.

“What are you tryin’ to tell me?”

“Tomball—” the faint whisper came. “Went—over Drop—Took—Marilee—with him…” The whisper faded, Billthomas’ eyes closed.

“What?” Dikar yelled. “What was that about Marilee? Billthomas! Did you say Marilee-?” But he saw that Billthomas did not hear him.

Shouts, exclamations, above him told Dikar the Boys had meanwhile come up. “Jumped over the Drop!” someone exclaimed. “They must be smashed on the rocks—”

“No,” something shrieked inside Dikar’s head. “Not Marilee!” and he was on his feet, was twisting toward the edge of the Drop.

The stream rushed away from Jimlane’s still body, rushed down to the end of the woods. Not five paces away it leaped out—up from where it leaped slanted a thick rope of plaited vines to the great trunk of the last tree of all and it was wound round and round that trunk, tight-fastened.

Tomball and Marilee had not jumped over the Drop-!

Somehow Dikar was at the edge of the Drop, careless whether from below they saw him or not. Dikar was looking down, his eyes burning.

Down and down fell the white spume of the stream, down and down fell the awful wall of the Drop, gray-shadowed. Far, far below, the stream smashed itself on a great, jagged rock and joined the waters that brawled white and angry among huge rocks that might have been tumbled there by some unimaginable giants at play.

For a wide space from the foot of the Drop the ground was covered by the great rocks, and that space was made somehow fearful by the shadow of the Mountain that lay on it, but beyond it the sun still lay on a green forest that stretched away to the far land.

Dikar’s staring eyes found the edge of that forest, found two figures, small as the dolls the Girls used to make out of rags when first the Bunch came to the Mountain. Two figures clambered over the rocks, nearing the edge of the forest, and the one behind was chunky, black-haired, and the one ahead was brown with her mantle of brown hair!

Till now Dikar had clung to a hope that he had not understood Billthomas rightly, that Billthomas had been mistaken, but now that hope was ended. A terrible rage flared up in Dikar, a rage hotter than the heart of the fire on the Fire Stone. He snatched an arrow from the quiver hung on his shoulder, fitted it to his bow.

“This was why she asked me how I climbed down the Drop,” ran searing through his mind. “She planned it this mornin’ with Tomball. This mornin’ she stole from our bed to seek Tomball an’ warn him I’d set the kids to watch him, an’ they planned then to kill the youngsters as soon as they’d found out how to flee from the Mountain, together.”

He had Tomball on the angle of his arrowhead. The muscles in his arms swelled, the bow grew taut. Careful, now. Careful. The distance was great. He must not miss.

He might miss Tomball and hit Marilee.

What matter? She was as much to blame as he.

Dikar couldn’t! His fingers wouldn’t open on the bowstring, wouldn’t loose the arrow that might bury itself in the flesh of Marilee.

But he must! Not because they fled him. Not even because they had killed Billthomas, and Jimlane. Because even if they didn’t want to, the men in green would make them tell where they’d come from, make them tell about the Bunch. That thought opened Dikar’s fingers.

Whang!

Dikar’s arrow flew straight and fast and true—far out over the rocks it veered, was no longer a live and deadly dart, was a dead stick tumbling aimlessly down, a plaything of the wind.

Another arrow lay ready across Dikar’s bow, but he did not loose it. No use. They were too far—Marilee reached the woods, and Tomball. The woods swallowed them. They were making their way through those woods to Them—

Dikar turned to voices behind him, saw Danhall and Henfield, Johnstone and Bengreen, huddled just within the edge of the woods, pale-faced, mouths agape, eyes wide and dark. “Johnstone,” Dikar snapped, banging his bow over his shoulder. “Take over as Boss. Take care of Billthomas an’ Jimlane. I’m goin’ down.”

“You dare not,” Danhill gasped. “Dikar, you dare not. The Old Ones will strike you—”

“Damn the Old Ones,” Dikar snarled and was in the stream, had hands on the rope. He was lowering himself over the edge of the Drop. His legs caught around the vine-rope.

The water battered Dikar. The water filled Dikar’s mouth and his eyes and his nose, so that he could not see nor breathe nor hear anything but the roar of the waters. The water had a hundred clubs that pounded Dikar, bruised him. Suddenly the water was only a stinging cold spray on Dikar’s naked skin, and he was swinging free between the wet-black face of the Drop and the roar of the stream as it fell, and he was climbing down the rope of plaited vines.

This was as it had been that other time Dikar had climbed down this rope of plaited vines, but that time it had been night and once he had gotten through that first rush of waters it had been black-dark. Bad enough it had been to climb down into dizzy dark, but now there was light, and Dikar could see how the Drop came down from nothingness above and went straight down to nothingness below.

He could look down, endlessly down the swinging frail thread of the rope, down to where the jagged points of rock waited for him if he fell, and the stream smashed itself on the rocks as Dikar would smash if he fell.

From the rocks, so far below, there reached up hands that Dikar could not see, and they pulled at him, pulled him down to the rocks, his climbing too slow for them. Dikar wanted to let go of the rope, wild the desire was in him to let go and fall, fast and faster, down to those gray painted rocks.

Dikar was sick, sick with the terror that he would let go and with the wanting to let go. Suddenly his arms and his legs were without strength to move. He clung to the rope, unmoving, knowing that in the next moment, the very next, he would no longer have even the strength to hang on. “Dikar!” His name came through the mists that swirled around him. “Go on, Dikar. Go on.” Dikar looked up to the voice, and he saw that it came not from far above, as it ought, but from the rope itself, from Danhall, hanging on the rope not far above him.

Down through the seething waters at the top of the rope, Bengreen climbed, the water streaming from him! They were following Dikar down. Danhall and Bengreen were following him where he went, in spite of their fear of the Old Ones, in spite of their fear of what might await them down below the Mountain. He was their leader, and they followed him—

Strength was back in Dikar’s legs and his arms and he was climbing down again, but he kept his eyes on the wall of the Drop and did not look down. And at last his feet found rock beneath him and Danhall was beside him, and Bengreen; and then Henfield dropped off the rope.

“We wouldn’t let Johnstone come,” Danhall said, squeezing water from his brown beard, “because you said he should be Boss. What do we do next, Dikar?”

Dikar looked across the waste of tumbled rock to where Tomball and Marilee had been swallowed by the woods. “We go after ‘em an’ bring ‘em back,” he said through tight lips, “or we don’t go back ourselves. Come on.”

They climbed across the stony space, slipping and falling. When they reached the woods, that seemed no different from their own woods, it was easy at first to follow the trail of those they followed, by the small growth they had trodden down, by twigs bent with their passage. Marilee and Tomball had gone carelessly, not knowing they would be followed.

The shadow of the Mountain lengthened with the fast-dropping sun, and it grew dim about the four who hunted a Boy and a Girl. The green faded out of the bushes about them, the brown out of the tree trunks. All color grayed in the dimness, and suddenly there were no marks by which the four could tell which ways Marilee and Tomball had passed.

They cast around, their keen eyes searching each depression in the mossy floor of the woods, the way each tiny leaf hung on the brush, but they could find no sign of where Tomball and Marilee had gone, no sign that they’d ever been farther than where a twig pressed into the last mark of Tomball’s foot.

The four Boys from the Mountain came together again, and huddled close, and they became aware that the graying air was chill against their skin, and the forest seemed strangely hushed about them.

“I don’t like it here,” Henfield said, and it seemed right that he spoke low-toned, as though someone were near to overhear what he said, someone or some thing no one could see. “There’s somethin’ wrong about these woods. They’re too—too quiet.” He was yellow-haired as Dikar, his chin fuzzed with what would soon be a beard like Dikar’s. “The birds are still, an’ the insects, an’ I’ve not seen or heard a rabbit or a squirrel, or anythin’ livin’.”

“I don’t get it.” Bengreen was the shortest of the four, his face sharp, his eyes black and deep as a forest pool at night. “I don’t get it at all. It’s like—like Tomball an’ Marilee got this far an’ then—an’ then were not.”

“The Old Ones!” Henfield’s voice was thin and piercing, louder it would be a scream. “The Old Ones have taken ‘em an’ they’ll take us. We’re lost! Dikar, we’re dead an’ worse than dead!”