“I could give you two a couple of extra deer. You could run for the Housatonic River; once across it, you’d be safe. There’s a fort there. But Alba still might catch you.”
He twisted his face into a mask of intense concentration. Then he said, “Only one honorable thing to do. We can’t allow two God-believers to fall into the foul hands of Alba. Especially when one of them is my cousin!
“All right, men!” he shouted. “What do you say? Shall we give up the safe-conduct and fight for these two? Or be chickens before the hawk and hide in the forest?”
“We live like Caseys and we die like Caseys!” the team roared.
“Okay, we fight,” Mighty said. “But first we make a run for it. We’ll make them work for their blood.”
At that moment, they heard the baying of the hounds.
“On your mounts! Let’s go!”
Mary and Stagg untied the packs from the deer given them, climbed on the bare backs of the beasts, and gripped the reins.
“You women ride first,” Stagg said. “We’ll drop behind a little.”
Mary looked despairingly at Stagg. “If he stays behind, I stay behind with him.”
“No time to argue,” Mighty said. “We’ll ride together.”
They began galloping down the rough and winding trail. Behind them, the baying increased as the hounds caught the scent of many men and deer. The fugitives had scarcely left the meadow before the first of the hounds burst out of the woods. Stagg, looking back, saw a large dog built like a cross between a greyhound and a wolf. Its body was snow-white, and its wolflike ears were auburn. Behind it came a pack of twenty more like it.
Then he was too busy guiding his deer over the rough trail to risk many more backward glances. He did not have to urge the frightened beast to run at top speed.
Half a kilometer sped beneath the flying hoofs, and then Stagg took another quick look behind him. Now he saw about twenty deer and riders. At their head, riding a white stag with scarlet-painted antlers, was an old woman who wore only a tall black conical hat and a live snake around her neck. Her long white hair trailed out behind her, and her flat hanging breasts bounced with every motion of the beast under her.
She was enough to frighten any man. Alongside of the riders, running swiftly as the deer, was a herd of pigs. These were tall, long-legged, rangy swine, built for speed. They were black, their tusks long and painted with scarlet, and they squealed hideously as they ran.
Stagg had just turned his head when he heard a crash and then a deer screaming with pain in front of him.
He looked ahead. There were two deer on the ground, and beside them their riders. The worst had happened. The deer of the mascot had stepped into a hole and gone down.
Mary, just behind her, had not been able to pull to one side quickly enough.
Stagg reined in his deer and leaped down.
“Are you all right?” he cried.
“A little shaken up,” Mary said. “But I think Katie’s deer has broken its leg. And mine has bolted into the woods.”
“Get on the back of my deer,” he said. “One of the others can carry Katie.”
Mighty rose from Katie’s side and came to Stagg. He said, “She can’t move her legs. I think her back is broken.”
Katie must have known what he was saying. She called, “Somebody kill me! I won’t commit the sin of doing it myself! But if you kill me, I’m sure it would be forgiven. Even the Mother wouldn’t want me to fall into Alba’s hands!”
“Nobody’s going to kill you, Katie,” Mighty said. “Not while one of us is alive to defend you.”
He barked orders, and the rest of the Caseys dismounted.
“Form into two lines. The dogs will hit us first; use your swords on them. Then grab your spears because either the hogs or the cavalry will charge next.”
His men had just enough time to form in front of the two women when the hellhounds reached them. These dogs were no hangers-back but vicious beasts trained to kill. Snarling, they leaped into the air at the throats of the defenders.
There was confusion for a moment as the dogs bowled over many of the men. But in two minutes, despite all the snarling, shouting, yelping, screaming, it was over. Four dogs, badly wounded, limped to the woods to die. The rest were dead, their heads half severed or their legs cut off.
One Casey was on his back, eyes staring, throat ripped out. Five had been bitten deeply in several places but could still wield their swords.
“Here come the others!” Mighty shouted. “Reform ranks and stand ready to cast spears!”
The Deecee had reined in. The white-haired hag rode out a little in front of them, shouting in a high thin voice.
“Men of Caseyland! We do not want you! Give us our Horned King, and all of you, even that girl who was our prisoner, may go back to your country in safety. If you don’t, I will release my death-hogs on you—and all will die!”
“Go screw yourself!” Mighty roared. “I’m sure you’re the only one you could find to do it, you withered stinking old she-goat!”
Alba shrieked with rage. She turned to her priests and priestesses and signaled with her hand.
They unsnapped the leashes on the big tuskers.
“Use your spears as if you were on a pig-sticking!” Mighty shouted. “You’ve hunted wild hogs since you were old enough to hold a spear! Don’t let them panic you!”
To Stagg he said, “Use your sword. I saw you fight the dogs. You’re quicker and stronger than we—quick enough to wield a sword even on a tusker... okay, men, steady! Here they come!”
Mighty rammed his spear into the neck of a huge boar. The boar slumped to the ground; an enormous sow just behind it charged for Mighty. Stagg leaped over the carcass of the dead boar and brought his broadsword down with such force it cut through the sow’s spinal cord just back of the neck.
Then he repeated the feat on another sow that had knocked a man down and was ripping his legs open with her teeth.
He heard a scream from Mary and saw that she was holding onto the end of her spear, the head of which was stuck in the side of a boar. The boar was not hurt badly, he was just angry and was trying to get at Mary. She clung to the end of the spear while she went around and around in a circle with the wheeling boar in its center.
Stagg shouted and leaped through the air. He landed with his feet on the back of the hog, and its legs crumpled under the impact. Stagg rolled off onto the ground. The boar regained its hoofs with lightning speed and swiveled toward Stagg. He thrust the point of his sword out; it drove into the open mouth of the tusker and down its throat.
He rose to his feet, assuring himself with a glance that Mary, though frightened, was not hurt. Then he saw that a hog had reached Katie. The Casey who had been protecting her was also on the ground, screaming because his legs had been ripped open and his ribs were sticking out of his flesh.
Stagg was too late to help Katie. By the time he had chopped off one of the hog’s hind legs and slashed its jugular vein, Katie was dead.
He took a quick survey of the situation.
It was bad. The sixteen Caseys left alive after the onslaught of the dogs had been reduced to ten by the swine. Of the ten, only five were still on their feet.
Stagg helped the Caseys dispatch three more hogs. The remainder of the original twenty beasts, four wounded ones, ran squealing for the woods.
Mighty panted, “Alba will charge now, and we’ll be done for. But I want to say, Stagg, that this is a fight they’ll sing of for a long time to come in the halls of Caseyland!”
“They’re not going to get Mary!” Stagg screamed. His eyes were wild, his face emptied of human expression. He was possessed—but it was blood he wanted, not women.
He turned toward Alba’s group. They were being marshaled into files of five, their long spears glittering in the sunlight.
“Alba!” he roared, and he ran toward her.
She did not see him at first, but when her retainers warned her, she wheeled the white stag to face him.
“I’ll kill you, you bloody old bitch!” he shouted. He swung his sword in great circles above his head. “I’ll kill you all!”
And then a strange thing happened.
The priests and priestesses had been conditioned from childhood to regard the Sunhero as a demigod. Now they were in an abnormal and upsetting situation. They were being led by the Death-Goddess, who was invincible. But they were also being asked to battle a man whom their religion told them was also invincible. Every myth about the Sunhero stressed his inevitable triumph over his enemies. One of the myths even told of his victory over Death.
Moreover, they had witnessed his killings of the hellhounds and the death-hogs, animals sacred to Alba, and seen his superhuman swiftness and terrible swordplay. So, when the incarnation of the Death-Goddess ordered them to level spears and charge the Horned King, they hesitated.
Their pause lasted only a few seconds, but that time was long enough for Stagg to be upon Alba.
He slashed at her spear and cut through the wood of the shaft so that the steel head fell on the ground. At the same time, the deer on which Alba sat reared up.
She fell off backwards.
Alba landed on her feet like a cat. For a moment she had a chance to run among her retainers, since her deer was between her and Stagg.
He slashed at it, and the beast fled.
For a second, he stared into her pale blue eyes. He saw a tall, bent-backed old woman, old, old. She looked as if she were two hundred, so lined and seamed and wrinkled was her face. Long thin white hairs sprouted from her chin, and hairs formed a white film like milk on her upper lip. Her eyes seemed to have seen generations of men come and pass, and their stoniness said that she would see more. She was Death Herself!
Stagg felt cold, as if he were facing the inevitable Destroyer.
The rattlesnake, writhing and hissing around her neck, added the extra note of fatality.
Then he shook himself, reminding himself that she was, after all, only human. He charged.
He never reached her.
Her face contorted with pain, she clutched at her chest, and she fell, stricken dead with a heart attack.
There was panic among her followers, a panic of which Stagg took advantage. Running into their midst, he struck left and right. He was berserk, unmindful of the gashes from their spear heads or sabers.
He slashed riders and mounts alike. The deer reared up and threw men and women onto the ground, and Stagg cut them down before they could get to their feet.
For a while, it looked as if he would defeat the whole band. He had killed and wounded at least six on deerback and upset four more and struck them down. Then a rider who had kept cool urged her beast forward. She rode directly toward Stagg. He looked up just in time to see her bearing down on him.
He saw the lovely face of Virginia, the one-time chief virgin of Washington, the woman with the long honey-colored hair and nose like a delicate hawk’s and lips as red as blood and breasts that tilted upwards. Her bosom was covered now, for she was full in the belly with his child. She had only four months to go before delivering the baby—and yet she was riding deerback.
Stagg had raised his sword to cut at her.
Then, recognizing her—and realizing that she carried his child, he froze.
That was enough time for her. Her beautiful face cold and expressionless, she slashed out with her weapon, a keen-edged light saber. The edge whistled through the air, thwacked into his antler. And that was the end for Peter Stagg.
17
The plan called for months of careful preparation.
First, spies, disguised as Deecee of various classes, drifted into Washington. They investigated any sources that might be able to inform them about the equipment left on the Terra. They also used their many means to find out what had happened to the Sunhero. During their inquiries, they discovered that Doctor Calthorp was back in Washington.
It was not long before he was contacted, and, a few days later, he slipped out by boat down the Potomac to Chesapeake Bay and on out into the ocean. Here a Karelian ketch picked him up and took him to the port of Aino.
He had a happy reunion with Churchill and the others, marred only by news of the deaths of Sarvant and Gbwe-hun and the doubts about Stagg’s whereabouts.
Churchill explained the deal he had made with the Karelians. Calthorp chuckled and said that it might work. If it didn’t, they would at least have tried. He himself was the most profitable source of information on the conditions of the Terra. He knew exactly what they would find in it and what they needed to get elsewhere.
Finally, they were ready.
They left Aino with Captain Kirsti Ainundila and three Karelians to each one of the crew of the Terra. The Karelians carried knives which they would use at the first suspicious action of the starmen.
They sailed in a swift brigantine that preceded the vast fleets to follow. This fleet was composed of vessels manned by Karelians from the colonies south of Deecee and the colonies of what had once been called Nova Scotia and Labrador.
The brigantine sailed boldly into Chesapeake Bay and let the small party of invaders out on a sailboat at the mouth of the Potomac. Disguised as a fishing vessel of Deecee, the sailboat tied up at night on a dock near Washington.
At midnight, the party rushed the building where the arms from the Terra were stored.
The few guards went down silently, their throats cut. The armory was broken into, and the starmen took the rapid-fire rifles and passed out the rest to the Karelians. These had never handled such weapons before, but they had worked in Aino with mock-ups made by Churchill.
Churchill also armed the starmen with self-propelled grenades.
They walked without hindrance to the great baseball stadium, now a shrine sacred to the Sunhero. Inside it, the Terra still reared her needle nose toward the stars she had left.
The group was challenged by the sentries; a fight took place—slaughter, rather. Thirty archers were killed by the automatic rifles, and forty more badly wounded. The invaders, unscratched, blasted open the gate to the stadium.
The starship was designed so that one man could operate it. Churchill sat in the pilot’s seat, Kirsti and two Karelians standing beside him, knives in their hands.
“You will see what this ship can do,” Churchill said. “It can destroy Washington simply by letting its bulk down on the buildings. Your fleet will have no trouble sacking the city. And we can fly to Camden and Baltimore and New York and do the same there. If we had not been taken in by the Deecee at first, we’d never have been captured. But we let them sweet-talk us into coming out of the ship after they made Stagg their king.”
He tested the controls, checked the indicators, found everything working. He closed the main port and then looked at the clock on the instrument board.
“It’s time to go into action,” he said, loudly.
Every starman held his breath, at this prearranged code.
Churchill punched a button. Sixty seconds later, the Karelians keeled over. Churchill pressed another button, and air from outside swept out the gas.
It was a trick they had used to get away from the avianthropes of the planet Vixa when they had been in a similar situation.
“Do we put them in deep-freeze?” Steinborg said.
“For the time being,” Churchill replied. “Later, we’ll put them on the ground. If we took them to Vega II, they might murder us.”
He took hold of the wheel, pulled back on a lever, and the Terra rose from the ground, her antigravs lifting the fifty-thousand ton bulk easily.
“Due to atmospheric resistance,” Churchill said, “it’ll take us fifteen minutes to get to Aino. We’ll pick up your wives there and mine—and then it’s Poughkeepsie ho!”
The wives he was referring to were the Karelian women Yastzhembski and Al-Masyuni had married during their stay in Aino.
“They’re not expecting this. What’ll they do once we get them aboard?”
“Gi
ve them the gas and put them in deep-freeze,” Churchill said. “It’s a dirty trick, but we can’t waste time arguing with them.”
“I hate to think of what they’ll say when they thaw out on Vega.”
“Not much they can do about it,” Churchill said. But he frowned, thinking of Robin’s sharp tongue.
However, for now at least, there was no trouble. Robin and the two women came aboard, and the starship took off. The Karelians still on the ground discovered the abduction too late and hurled harmless invectives at them which they did not hear. Again, the gas was released. The women were put in the tanks.
On the way to Poughkeepsie, Churchill said to Calthorp, “According to what the spies said, Stagg was seen in a little village on the east bank of the Hudson a few days ago. That means he escaped from the Pants-Elf. Where he now is, I don’t know.”
“He must be trying for Caseyland,” Calthorp said. “But he’ll just be jumping from fire to pan. What I don’t understand is how he’s had will power enough to keep from going back on the Great Route. That man is possessed by something to which no man can say no.”
“We’ll land outside Poughkeepsie,” Churchill said. “Near Vassar. There’s a large clearinghouse for orphans, operated by the priestesses. The orphans are kept there until families are found who’ll adopt them. We’ll pick the infants up and deep-freeze them. And we’ll kidnap a priestess and use a hypnotic on her to make her reveal what she knows about Stagg’s whereabouts.”
That night, they hovered above the clearinghouse. There was a slight wind, so the starship moved upwind a little and then released the anesthetic.
It took an hour to install sixty sleeping infants in the deep-freeze. Then they revived the head of the clearinghouse, a priestess of about fifty years of age.
They did not bother trying to get her to talk voluntarily. They injected the drug. Within a few minutes, they learned that Alba and her hunting party had left Poughkeepsie the night before on Stagg’s trail.
They carried her back into the house and put her in bed.
“When morning comes,” Churchill said, “we’ll cruise over the vicinity where they should be. We could use black light, but our chances of finding somebody who’ll be hiding under cover of trees are very remote.”