He tried to stand. A fork-tail leaped out of nowhere, backed around, and thumped him with its tail-horns. He sprawled forward against the nest and barely missed poking an eye out on a jutting stick. "Stop it!" he shouted. Blood flowed from a gouge on his cheek, darkening his questing fingers.
Ray crawled on his hands and knees around the nest. The behemoth above them rolled its head lazily, watching. He stopped beside Peter, slumped against the pile of bricks, and raised the machete. "You dropped this," he said, and wiped blood from his lips.
"Are you all right?" Peter asked.
"I don't know," Ray said. "You?"
Peter shook his head. "Father!" he called out as loudly as he could manage, barely a croak.
"Peter!"
"We're in a pit."
"The big one's a queen, Peter," Anthony shouted. "She inspected us and then the workers put us over here. We've been here for hours."
"Wetherford's outside," Ray said. "We saw him on top of the mound."
Gray communisaur attendants slunk around them with obsequious, breathy skirls. They snuffled at Peter's boots. He raised the machete defensively, but they did not seem to notice or care. The behemoth queen groaned like a giant steam boiler and shifted her weight, showering broken twigs from around the edge of the nest and bringing her tail to bear. Attendants became frantic. Two of them climbed over Peter and Ray and raised their heads to cushion the fall of a brownish egg six inches long. The egg rolled from their snouts into Peter's lap. He lifted it and presented it to them. "Here," he said. The attendants took it gingerly in their mouths, cooperating with delicacy to carry it away. Another egg plopped down from the queen's tail and landed on Ray's shoulder, slipping between the two of them. More attendants appeared and nosed up to the egg, then retrieved it, nodding as if thanking the humans for their help.
"What do they want with us?" Ray asked Peter softly. "Why bring us here?"
"I was going to ask you that," Peter said.
Her egg-laying finished, the queen swung around again and dipped her immense snout to within inches of Ray's head. His hair lifted as she inhaled. At least a cupful of saliva dribbled onto his lap. He grunted and swung his head away from the sour-smelling fluid. "Makes you hate nature, doesn't it?" he said in disgust. "What do they want with us?" he called out.
"How in hell should we know?" OBie called back. "You stay there and tell us. Was anybody with Wetherford?"
"We didn't see anybody," Peter said. "Dad, there's an airplane—a flying boat. It flew north."
The queen showered more sticks on them and rolled to snuff at Peter's head. Then she lifted and extended her snout, casting a shadow over them, and gave a resonant belching roar. The roar seemed to end in hiccups. Civet smell descended in almost visible waves. Peter swung his arms to clear the stench and looked up directly into her tiny black eye. Her head stretched a full four feet from wrinkled, bunched yellowish neck to tip of blunt nose, and she was colored a uniform dusty orange, with blue rings around her eyes and red along her finely scaled lips. She looked like a heavily made-up floozy. She blinked down at him, mouth gaping. Her jaws bore small, wide-spaced teeth, no larger than those of her attendants.
Two medium-sized fork-tails lumbered to attention a few feet from Ray and Peter. They sucked in the hideous vapors, eyes closed and jaws slack in ecstasy. The queen withdrew her head.
"They must think it's awful cozy in here," Ray muttered. "Maybe we can crawl out." He made a move to get up and the fork-tails rotated and presented their persuaders again.
Peter knew he would suffocate if he didn't get some fresh air. He kicked out, booting the forked spikes of the nearest guard. The tail and fork were stiff as stone and did not move on receiving the blow. His toe ached, however.
The ground trembled. Peter looked up to see if the queen had rolled again, but she was not visible. "Did you feel that?" he asked Ray.
"Yeah," Ray said. "Earthquake?"
The nest fell silent. All the communisaurs seemed to be listening. A louder thump shook the bricks, and dust sifted from the chamber ceiling. The fork-tails spun in confusion like dancing bears.
The queen belched and roared and screeched all at once.
The attendants scrambled. The fork-tails rushed to the wall and clawed their way over.
"That's dynamite!" Anthony shouted from behind the wall. Peter and Ray pushed to their feet. The pit was in an uproar. Gray worker communisaurs flocked over the nest and queen. Defenders and guards, big and medium-sized fork-tails, rushed for the ramps and walls to move to the outside of the mound.
Peter slipped the machete under his belt and said, "We'd better get out while we can."
Ray seemed dazzled by the uproar.
"Over the wall, join my father and OBie," Peter suggested, nodding in that general direction.
"Christ," Ray said. "I'd give anything to—"
But there was no time to finish.
Chapter Eleven
Jostling, tumbling, flowing in lemming waves up to and around the nest in the pit and all around the ramps, workers and defenders shoved each other in no pattern discernible from the pit's floor. Ray and Peter had as much as they could do to stay upright. Still, their general progress was toward the outside of the pit, though not toward the voices of their friends.
A few yards of gray communisaur crowd separated Ray and Peter as they approached the surrounding wall. The air stunk of civet, belch, and vinegar, and vibrated with ear-ringing skirls. Peter could not shout loudly enough for Ray to hear. Peter was spun about by the mass and saw the nest and the queen, her head and tail upthrust like a contorting earwig. An egg fell from the base of her thick tail into the crowd. That did not seem to matter.
Peter faced the wall again and jumped. He could not keep a hold on the irregular brick surface, however, and fell back onto the animals, which squealed like pigs. Somehow he got to his feet again, closer to the wall, and reached up, fingers slipping into the chinks between the bricks. Ray was right beside him, a little higher up the barrier. Peter found a hold for one foot, then another, and with sweat-stung eyes and the vinegar smell burning in his nose and throat, he hoisted himself to the top. Ray helped him and they stood above the confusion.
"Where?" Peter gasped.
"There, I think," Ray said, and pointed to a spot halfway around the pit's circumference, directly opposite where they stood. A defender vaulted up beside them, glanced at them with tiny black eyes, and leaped into the shadows on the other side of the wall.
"Look!" Ray shouted. Peter turned and saw two men on the wall, arms held out, balancing precariously.
"Over here!" Peter shouted.
OBie and Anthony walked along the pit's perimeter, arms out for balance, swaying like acrobats on a tightrope. The top of the wall was almost as wide as a sidewalk but not as flat, and the confusion on either side made balancing difficult.
There was little time for rejoicing when they joined. Anthony seemed to know where they all needed to go, and that was not back along the furrow between walls, but around the perimeter a few more yards, to where they could climb onto a ramp.
Once on the ramp, Anthony kicked aside a few gray workers, which gnashed out with their beaks and ripped at the humans' pants legs before conceding, hissing, and moving on.
Anthony grinned like a fiend at Peter. "Anything for clean air!" he cried as if yelling a Musketeer oath, and led them to a hole in the wall. A tunnel, empty but for two uncertain, blinking workers, led into darkness.
"Are you sure this is it?" Ray asked, his voice cracking. The tunnel smelled fetid.
"Positive," Anthony replied. They skirted past the workers, who stood in a shivering daze, and bent over to creep down the tunnel. Peter pulled the machete from his pants to keep from emasculating himself in this posture.
About twenty yards in, the tunnel sloped down at a thirty degree angle. They had to turn and back down to keep from tumbling forward. This seemed a final fillip in a mixed up nightmare: reunited, but descending backward in
to an unknown, rank-smelling darkness, their hands and feet sinking into a spongy dryness that might have been fungus or moss or dung, their boots sliding over the fingers of those behind.
"Watch it!" Anthony called up to Peter as boot treads rolled over knuckles.
They came into another chamber, where they could stand. Clustering together, they examined the place in the dim light of two vent holes. The floor seemed lumpy. The air smelled sickly sweet. The lumps began to move.
"Babies!" OBie exclaimed. He stooped and picked up a squirming, piglet-sized infant communisaur. Its eyes had not yet opened and it mewed in his hands and snapped its small beak. OBie hoisted it for their inspection. Ray patted its bald, finely scaled head. Anthony grimaced.
"Where are the nurses?" OBie asked, replacing the infant gently on the floor.
"Is this the way out?" Peter asked his father.
Anthony shook his head. "Beats me. I was sure—"
A shadow moved from the darkness and a forked tail swung out sideways, whacking OBie in the gut. He toppled with an oof and landed in a pile of babies crawling over mounds of moldy leaves. The floor came alive with squeaks and hisses. The tail swung again, taking Anthony across his back and staggering him into Peter. They both fell.
"Nurse!" OBie said weakly. Ray danced away from another sweep, and then they faced the head and beak of the hissing beast. They retreated toward the light of a vent hole. "On my shoulders!" Anthony told Peter, and hoisted him quickly to the hole. Peter's shoulders barely fit. Anthony shoved him like a cork into a bottle, and his head poked up into sunlight and air. He dropped the machete. Anthony shoved him again and he wrenched his arms free and pushed down from the top.
His legs finally emerged and he knelt beside the hole. Anthony tossed the machete up. Peter caught it deftly. "Dig it out—make it wider!" his father shouted from below.
Peter hacked at the hole furiously. The bricks rang like stone at first, but the surface gradually crazed, revealing straw-like fibers in a mud matrix, and the hole got a little larger. He dropped the machete into the hole and Anthony began hacking from below, standing on somebody's back.
Ray came up next, and then OBie, who could barely fit through. Ray and Peter pulled on his arms until his belly compressed and he groaned. Out he came with an almost audible pop. Ray held on to Peter as he dropped back into the hole and offered himself as a human rope. Anthony clung to his legs and now it was Peter's turn to be stretched; Ray and OBie lifted Anthony up by hauling on Peter's arms and trunk. Peter gritted his teeth at the pain in his shoulder.
When they all stood in the open, Anthony whooped like a drunken soldier on liberty. "My God, that air breathes sweet!"
OBie did a quick jig, grinning like a fool, an unraveled strand swinging from the rude strip of cloth that bandaged his chewed arm.
They all sobered and took their bearings. They stood on the eastern side of the mound, on the second step. Fewer than a dozen communisaurs were visible from their vantage. A dissipating cloud of dust blew to the south from the opposite side of the mound.
"Wetherford," Ray said.
"He's not the type to come here alone," Anthony said.
"We'll never know unless we go look," OBie said. They walked to the corner and Anthony peered around, then Peter and Ray. OBie hung back, sitting and nursing his leg.
A hole had been blown out of the mound thirty feet away. Dazed and injured communisaurs, including some big fork-tails, crept slowly or dragged themselves around the hole. Peter smelled the unmistakable acrid, powdery odor of dynamite.
"Somebody brought some security with them," Anthony said. "I don't see Wetherford or anybody else. Hope they haven't blown themselves up."
Small communisaurs began removing the injured and a kind of order returned to the damaged side of the mound. A steady stream of animals clambered down the walls, claws digging in to the steep slopes as they descended tail-first. More animals appeared bearing clumps of masticated leafy matter, and some communisaur "masons" began pushing muddy balls over the edge of the hole, mixing the leaf matter in, and patting them into irregular bricks with stolid dedication.
"For the time being, we're being ignored," Anthony said, "but if we stay here much longer, the queen's minions are going to grab us again and take us below for her amusement. Only this time, I don't think she's going to be very amused. We must smell a lot like the folks who did this damage."
"Where are they?" OBie asked, grimacing as he got to his feet.
"They'd have no reason to blow a hole in this mound unless they knew we were inside and wanted to get us out," Anthony said. "They're probably looking for us or getting ready to cause more damage."
"Well," OBie said, "let's save our gracious host the queen any more grief and find them before these creatures do."
Ray helped OBie by letting him lean on one shoulder. They half climbed, half slid down the wall to the first level, then took a ramp to the base of the mound. A few communisaurs stood aside with sheep-like expressions of uncertainty as they passed. "The fight's been taken out of them," OBie commented.
"Maybe they have other things on their mind," Anthony said. "There has to be some reason—"
Another explosion shook the ground. A billow of dust and debris flew from the western side of the mound. They ran around the corner, OBie hopping beside Ray, just in time to see a corner of the mound collapse, a gaping hole opening in two levels.
"Halloa!" a voice shouted from the forest. Wetherford stepped into the clearing, and then another figure. Peter's jaw dropped in shock. Vince Shellabarger stood behind Wetherford, a bandage wrapped loosely around the crown of his head.
"We thought we could distract them while you escaped," said the Englishman, still waving. "If they hadn't turned you into infant formula, that is."
"My God, Vince!" OBie called out, and they met in the clearing, shaking hands and slapping shoulders to the strident skirling of hundreds of communisaurs. "I was sure you'd been killed."
Vince stared at them with little expression, touched the side of his head, and said, "Not yet."
"Dagger gave it his best shot," Wetherford said. "He was prying old Vincent from under the cage when el Colonel's soldiers brought him down with a bazooka flown in from Uruyen."
"Dagger's dead?" Peter asked.
Vince turned to Peter and regarded him as if he were the only sane one in the group. The trainer's steady gaze discomfited Peter. It seemed as if Vince had died, and his ghost now stared at him. "The Indians fought the Army to save him," Vince said. "They considered it sacrilege to kill the Challenger. A lot of people died."
Communisaur diggers
"My God," OBie said.
Wetherford's grin faded. "Yes, and Mr. Shellabarger's had a nasty time of it. He insisted he come with me, however. And he it was who suggested a few sticks of dynamite would come in handy."
Shellabarger shook his head, face creased with sorrow. "I swear I did not have it in for that animal. I did not want him to die."
"Unpleasant situation back there now," Wetherford said. "They've pushed out the Indians and insisted on closing the tepui completely. Wouldn't even consider a rescue expedition. El Colonel is beside himself. The radio's working again, but the government in Caracas doesn't dare face up to the Army in the middle of an Indian uprising. Mr. Shellabarger knows his vines, however . . . We found some mamure in the forest and used bars from the cages to hammer out a grappling hook. Threw the vines across—"
Shellabarger took Peter's shoulder and seemed to derive some strength from the contact. "If you had died, boy, I would have never forgiven myself. How in hell did you get this far north?"
"Yes, well," Wetherford said, "I was about to describe our remarkable feat with the vines—"
"Billie said El Grande swallows people," Peter said.
"That's true enough," OBie said. "The inside of that mound smelled like the very bowels."
Anthony had said little until now. He seemed agitated, even angry. "Peter and Ray saw a seaplan
e fly over."
"We've heard it, but we haven't seen it," Wetherford said. "The Army's chartered someone from Uruyen to inspect the area, with strict instructions not to land, but it isn't a seaplane."
"We saw that one, too," Peter said. "It buzzed the Stratoraptor."
As if summoned by name, a ringing skreee cut through the forest and echoed from the mound. The communisaurs investigating the fresh hole froze, then hurriedly retreated inside. A few reluctant fork-tails stayed in place, bouncing back and forth on their husky forelimbs.
"It was getting itself cleaned by golden ants in an open space, an ant field," Peter added.
"That's less than a half a mile from here," Shellabarger said.
"Cleaned—by ants?" Wetherford asked.
Anthony grabbed Peter's shoulder. "You didn't stick with us," he said, glaring at his son. "I was sure you were dead."
"Father—" Peter began, but there was no time.
The fresh hole was suddenly mobbed by burly fork-tails, heads swinging as they scrambled from within the mound. They seemed in a mood to attack anything—and several focused their attention on the humans. Shellabarger looked back into the forest. "Let's get the hell out of here." They ran from the open space around the mound, leaping onto the clean-cut edge of forest bed. Looking behind, Peter saw two of the biggest fork-tails following, tails erect, double-fanged beaked jaws gaping. He doubted they'd be taken back to the queen for examination this time.
That was what he had heard his father saying. Not "expectation," but "examination." This thought sprang into his head for no good reason just before Shellabarger came to an abrupt halt.