CHAPTER XXIII
We had no time to decide what we should do. The monster saw us. Beneath us—almost in sight now—the black fishes were mounting. And further below them—dim and muffled in the distance—we heard Og’s voice shouting a shrill command to urge them on.
We darted out sidewise, away from the wall. Atar was leading, and single-file, we others followed. Then Atar turned suddenly and doubled back upon himself. Strung out in a line, we turned with him. Making straight for the jagged cliff-face, we passed close under the monster, between it and the mounting black fishes.
The monster was slow, ponderous in its movements. It was coming down, and as we darted under it I stared up and saw it plainly. A gigantic black thing. A spherical head, twenty feet broad; a thick, elongated body—a hundred feet or more in length. There were no fins, and no tail. The head had two great protruding eyes, gleaming green, and beneath them a circular mouth—a mouth which even undistended was large enough to suck in our bodies. And around the head, fastened to it—framing the face—were a dozen arms! They were waving tentacles with a sucker disk at the end of some, and a hook at the end of others.
A squid! you perhaps explain. It was, indeed, fashioned somewhat after the plan of the squid of your earthly waters. Let me call it then, a squid. It came down ponderously, waving its tentacles and floundering with its unwieldy body.
Avoiding it, we struck the cliff-face. A depression was there—a sort of ledge. On it we huddled, panting; Nona and I were almost exhausted.
“We must go on!” Caan whispered. “The black fishes—they will find us. And that giant thing—it can suck us up—”
But Atar silenced him. Atar knew what he was doing. And most of all, this momentary inactivity was allowing Nona and me to rest. We could not have gone much further in any event.
The giant squid had swung awkwardly to follow us. Then evidently it heard the yelps of the uprushing fishes. It hesitated, turned downward; it was below us, and out from the wall, but still in plain sight; and we saw the black fishes sweep up to attack it.
On every side the monster was assailed. There must have been two hundred or more of those ugly, squat little things. The bulk of the squid dwarfed them into insignificance; but like bull terriers worrying a prostrate elephant, they tore at it.
The squid floundered. Its lashing tentacles hooked the fishes and flung them away. Its mouth sucked them in and swallowed them. But scores of the fishes gripped the tentacles and clung; others bit and tore at the soft, puffy flesh; still others swarmed at the monster’s protruding eyes, gouging them. . . .
The squid was in distress. It pulled itself to the wall below us and clung with its suckers. Then it let go, and ejecting a great stream of water from its mouth, forced itself swiftly backward. But the swarm of fishes still tore at it. One of its eyes went out. Its lacerated flesh gave a stench to the water that sickened us. . . .
Caan was plucking at me. “We must go—now while we have the chance. Og may call his fishes—set them on us—”
Where was Og? I had forgotten him. He had fled, doubtless. Then we heard his voice. He was hovering off in the open water; we heard him screaming angrily to the fishes, trying to call them off the squid—to set them again on our trail.
We started upward, close to the cliff-face. Og would not see us perhaps.
“Faster!” urged Caan. “We swim like children.”
Atar again led us in single file. I was last, swimming just after Nona. I turned to look downward. The squid was lashing the water in desperate fury. The fishes, many of them, were floating downward—inert. But many others, ignoring Og’s commands in their lust for blood, were still attacking. I saw Og now, well off to one side. A dozen or so of the fishes were gathered around him.
The water down there by the squid was lashed white. It caught what light there was and I could see everything plainly. Then, as the squid rolled over with a last despairing effort, I saw a great stream of inky black fluid issue from it. The ink spread. Everything turned to blackness. The squid, as a last desperate measure, had emptied its inkbag and under cover of the darkness was trying to escape. The water down there was a bowl of ink, out of which came the snarls of the fishes, and Og’s shrill voice shouting commands.
We mounted swiftly, for Nona and I were refreshed by our brief rest. Soon we were within sight of the horizontal slit in the cliff—the entrance to home! But again beneath us, we heard Og’s shouts and the deep-throated cries. They were after us.
Atar, leading us, abruptly stopped. My heart leaped to my throat. Was it another monster ahead? It was something. There was something sweeping toward us! Not slowly, ponderously this time—but swift almost as a thrown spear! From up near the horizontal passage we saw it coming—small, a dim blob at first, with a little V-shaped white wake behind it. Larger, closer—a few seconds only, while we huddled together, wholly confused.
Turning in an arc, this new thing swept at us—slowed down its flight, and stopped beside us. We shouted with the relief of hysteria. It was our Marinoid King—Atar’s father—alone in his sleigh, driving his dolphin-like animal which could pull it faster than any of us could swim.
We were safe!
Into the sleigh we climbed. Nona sat in the seat beside the king. Og and his black fishes were approaching; but we were away, gliding through the water with a speed that soon outdistanced them.
The sleigh itself was constructed to be slightly heavier than water, so that it could glide along the sea-bottom. But now it was buoyed by tiny air-pods fastened to it, so that of itself it would neither float nor sink. We started away after no more than the briefest of greetings with our king. We three men clung to the rim of the sleigh behind. Its rapid motion threw our bodies out horizontally, like men clinging to the tail of a speeding airplane in the rush of air.
Never before had I moved through water so fast. It roared in my ears, blurred my sight, and choked me. Dimly I saw the passageway speeding past beside us. We were paralleling it; not entering, but heading for its further end.
Then we seemed to go still faster. I coughed, choked. The press of water against my mouth stifled my breathing. My lungs were full and I could not exhale. I heard Atar’s voice—a shout: “Nemo—your arm—put it—before your face! You—”
The rushing water tore away his words. But I understood. I clung with my right hand to the sleigh; with my left arm crooked before my face, in the back-eddy of water behind it, I breathed again. And then I saw that all the others were doing the same. Had I not done it, I should have been drowned—as you perhaps have choked a fish to death by towing it rapidly through water.
We dashed onward, with the water roaring past. Then in a gentle arc we swung to the left and slackened to normal swimming speed. A mud-ooze floor was close under us; a ceiling came down overhead. We were in the slit, headed for the coral forest. The coral barrier! I gasped as I thought of it. How had the King come through that barrier with his sleigh?
I was now crouching, clinging to the sleigh at Nona’s side. I asked the question, but no one heard me. They were all talking.
The King had an arm about my Nona, paternally, affectionately. “I am glad you are safely returned, my child.”
Atar was asking: “My father—what made you come for us?”
The King answered very gravely: “Your mother—she was worried, Atar.” His eyes were laughing. “I had to slip away, unseen in the Time of Sleep. Our people would not like their monarch dashing off alone to possible danger. But though I am an old man, there is lust for fighting in me yet.”
Then I made my question heard. The King sobered instantly.
“Much is coming to pass in Rax—strange things I learn every hour—and all of danger to us and our people.”
He told us then that upon the heels of our own departure into the Water of Wild Things (it had been two eating times before, as I well knew by the hunger which possessed me) the Marinoid guards had noticed an open swathe cut through the coral forest. They found it, and reported it to the King—a thirty-foot-wide lane. Evidently it had been recently done by the Maagogs. In our own hasty search for an entrance, we three had overlooked it.
The King, hearing that, had decided to drive a short distance in to the Water of Wild Things and look for our return.
As he spoke, our sleigh reached the coral forest. We passed along it a short distance, and arrived at a grating thirty feet square. The situation was now plain to us, and hastily we told the King what we had learned from the Maagogs. Og, sure of the coming war and his own leadership, was preparing to strike at once. He had this lane cut through the coral to give free passage to his Maagog army in its attack on Rax. This grating Og had put there to keep the monsters from wandering into Marinoid waters. He was going to conquer those waters—and he wanted no monsters there to harass the future of the victorious Maagogs.
The grating was easily removable. The King had swung it aside to get his sleigh past; and we swung it now, to return. Soon we were speeding out across the cool, sweet Marinoid waters. They were dim with twilight. Peaceful, beautiful, a Garden of Paradise to us, returning now from that foul Water of Wild Things.
It was still the Time of Sleep in Rax when we arrived. Quietly, unobtrusively, we slipped unnoticed into the city.
And Nona was again with Boy! The joy of it! I am a mere man; I cannot describe—I know I cannot even appreciate—how my Nona felt to hold Boy again to her breast; to feel his baby arms about her neck; to hear his gleeful, welcoming cries. Only a mother can understand; and I, a man, could but stand and watch, and wonder.