For a moment, he could see nothing through the thick, black smoke that sought to smother him. Then the wind shifted yet again, blowing the scorching flames and choking smoke to the south, away from the prisoners’ enclosure.
He tore off the still-burning bear pelt and threw it on the ground. Then he bent over and began coughing uncontrollably. When he looked up between coughs, a frightened-looking Adythne was standing before him. She looked distraught at seeing the remains of the sacred she-bear pelt smoldering on the ground, but then she grinned.
“It is as the old she-bear spirit told me in my dream! He who wore her pelt into battle would be invincible! Even fire would not touch him!”
The painful reddish burns all over Kwasin’s body and the gruesome wound in his thigh argued against the priestess’s assertion, but he could say nothing to refute her. He was still too busy coughing.
While Kwasin was recovering, a large group of prisoners came up behind Adythne, their frightened faces straining to look hopeful as they regarded the newly arrived giant.
“Quickly,” Adythne said. She took Kwasin by the hand and began leading him back from the fiery wall, motioning her people to follow. “If the winds shift again,” she said to Kwasin, “we’ll all die beneath the flames and smoke. You, O Giant Bear Man, must use your gleaming ax and break through the stockade’s outer wall!”
Though his lungs felt like they had been raked repeatedly with a rusting iron file, Kwasin accompanied the priestess to the outlying wall and began chopping at it with his ax. After a wearisome effort, and not a few glances back at the burning enclosure to motivate him, Kwasin succeeded in hewing down three cedar poles near their bases, creating a wide enough space for him and the prisoners to pass through.
Kwasin and Adythne in the lead, the group ran across the clearing and assembled in the woods a short distance from the village. Here the priestess gathered the escapees about her. These amounted, all told, to about sixty men, women, and children, though Kwasin estimated that perhaps only twenty-five of them might make able warriors.
“Though we are all tired,” Adythne said to the group, “we must strike the enemy while they are routed! We cannot falter now when our victory over the sun worshipers is so near! We must reenter the village and get weapons from the armory.” To Kwasin, she said, “The weapons are stored in an outbuilding in the southeast corner of the village, untouched by flames.”
“What of the spirit guides?” a man asked, his worried face making it clear he had no desire to reenter the blazing village. “They have been angered and will eat us!”
Adythne scowled at the man. “It is the spirit guides who have freed us, Tethwa. They will not harm the faithful. And if Nakendar’s children do devour us, our flesh will only strengthen them as they rise up to slay the enemies of Kho.”
Tethwa grumbled something beneath his breath, but he shook his head in obeisance to his priestess.
Kwasin, for his part, did not relish the idea of returning to the hellhole that was Q”okwoqo any more than Tethwa. But he had come this far against staggering odds. Why not, one way or another, see it through to the end?
After a deep sigh and a silent prayer to Kho, Kwasin led the party back to the fiery main gate.
* * *
When dawn broke, few of the survivors of the previous night’s devastation were happy. Q”okwoqo lay in ruins. The longhouse of the Klakordeth, many huts and outbuildings, the stockade, and a long stretch of the defensive wall had all been reduced to little more than ash and smoldering cinders. Villagers and soldiers alike stood about looking tired and dejected, their feet and hands stained gray-black with soot.
During the night, Kwasin had succeeded in reentering the village and recovering the weapons from the armory, and with these he led a guerrilla force against the soldiers who had regrouped outside the walls. Many of these men fled into the forest upon being attacked, but Kwasin and his band of twenty men and four women slingers managed to hole up a number of soldiers in the village. These had huddled in an area not beset by fire, deciding to wait it out there until morning rather than risk being killed by the guerrillas in the dark.
Now, as Kwasin and Adythne entered through the main gate in the dawn light, the soldiers looked up as if their very souls sought to flee their bodies. When Adythne began hurling holy curses at them, they bolted for the main gate and fled into the woods. Kwasin, utterly exhausted and relieved that he did not have to fight them, only laughed at the men as they ran past and shouted a number of disparaging epithets about the manhood of Minruth’s soldiers.
After the soldiers and a handful of traitorous villagers had been chased into the woods, Kwasin accompanied the priestess as she poked about in the ashes searching for the remains of the sacred she-bear pelt. Finally, looking defeated, Adythne sat down on a half-burned post.
“It is no use,” she said. “The sacred pelt has returned to the spirit world.” Then Adythne’s smoke-reddened, dark-circled eyes brightened. “But not all is lost. By a divine miracle of the Bear God himself, the spirit guides have all escaped the flames and now wander the woods. You, O Kwasin, will help me round them up, and then, with your ax, you can help my people cut down enough lumber to rebuild the totem hall. And when you have finished constructing it, you will lead a glorious dance in the new hall, after which I shall take you into my hut and show you my gratitude.”
Kwasin sighed heavily. The priestess was certainly beautiful and the thought of the reward waiting for him in her hut was, without question, enticing. But he knew staying here and rebuilding the village was not in his future.
He did, however, have one last chore he felt obligated to perform before he left the valley of Q”okwoqo.
* * *
The evening before Kwasin took his leave of the priestess and her village, Kho and Resu pealed the heavens with great blinding flashes of lightning and fearsome claps of thunder as they waged war against one another. Who won the battle, Kwasin could not say, but the heavenly tumult only strengthened his resolve for the task that lay ahead.
The next morning Kwasin ascended the steep, rain-sodden slope overlooking the local hot spring. The climb was a treacherous one. The ground, powdery and brittle from the recent dry spell, had given way in many places to small mudslides. Twice, Kwasin lost his hold and slid painfully down the face of the rocky escarpment. But he was determined. He had a debt to repay.
At last, he pulled himself up over the ledge that jutted out from the slope before Old Father Nakendar’s cave. Kwasin stood up and examined the boulder that blocked the entrance. The size of the great stone was daunting. He could not begin to guess its weight, but it was certainly more than even his prodigious strength might hope to move.
But he had an idea. If he could not move the boulder by himself, perhaps Great Kho, goddess of the Earth, could give him a little help.
He unslung his ax and began assailing the dirt at the base of the boulder with the weapon’s massive iron head. Soon, the earth began to give way.
Too late, Kwasin realized the flaw in his plan. After several swings of his ax, the ledge as a whole—already weakened from the recent downpour on dry soil—began to crumble beneath his feet.
He fell to his knees as the ground on which he stood yielded, the ax falling out of his grip and tumbling end over end down the escarpment. The great boulder groaned as it teetered forward, the soil beneath it sieving down the slope in great rivers of earth. Then, the boulder gave.
Kwasin kicked off just before the ledge completely collapsed, barreling his chest into the sharp rocks that rimmed the lower edge of the newly opened cave entrance. There he hung, his dust-covered, muscular arms thrust out over the edge, clinging with the barest of holds to the face of the escarpment. For a few moments, he could still hear the roar of the boulder as it wreaked havoc on the slope.
Now the lower edge of the cave’s base began to crumble beneath his weight. He slipped down another foot before desperately flailing out and finding another hold.
; He looked down. The landslide resulting from the great boulder’s tumble had sloughed off a huge portion of the slope directly below him, a deep and narrow gouge that dropped fifty feet to the rocky base of the escarpment.
Again, dirt crumbled and he felt his hold giving way.
He breathed a prayer to Kho. Soon he would see Sisisken’s terrible face and be led down to her shadowy underworld. He only hoped the people of Q”okwoqo would from time to time sacrifice a bull or a goat to his spirit so that he would not hunger. If they did not, who would?
Something warm gripped his wrist. An overpowering, rank bear smell saturated the dusty air. Suddenly, he felt himself being pulled upward as the earth crumbled beneath him. Then, he was sitting on the firm ground inside the cave, peering through a cloud of sunlit dust and out over the rocky scape. In the distance lay the clear and steaming turquoise waters of the sacred spring.
Although it took all his will to do so, Kwasin turned and looked up at the towering dark form beside him. When he did, he gasped, his heart pounding.
The thing that met Kwasin’s eyes smiled down at him. Or it might have been a grimace. It was hard to tell with those terrible teeth and the unnerving, red-rimmed, all-brown eyes. Its jaws protruded, more than a man’s but less than an ape’s. Still, the face was unmistakably bearlike, and when the creature spoke a single word, Kwasin gasped again, though he did not at first understand it.
Then the hairy form stepped to the rim of the cave and lowered itself gracefully over the edge. Kwasin watched, stupefied, as the creature climbed slowly but nimbly down the rock-tumbled slope to the western side of the great abyss, finding holds where Kwasin could discern none. When it reached the bottom of the escarpment, it headed southwest, toward the deep mountains. Finally, it disappeared in the dark trees.
Kwasin’s heart went on beating heavily as he sat for a great while at the mouth of the cave looking out over the spring. Eventually, a wide smile stretched across his face. Though the word spoken by the Old Father had been strangely pronounced, Kwasin believed he understood it at last.
His mother had once told him, after all, that divine blood ran in his veins, though she had not elaborated on the matter.
Yes, there could be no mistaking it.
The Bear God had called him “Brother.”
* * *
4 “Cave bear” in Khokarsan, or literally, “great devourer of honey.”
5 Given the reputation of the Q”okwoqo as bear worshipers, it may be no coincidence that the name of their tribe and village is strikingly reminiscent of “Ngoloko,” another name for the legendary East African cryptid known as the Nandi Bear (note that the Khokarsan character transcribed as the letter “q” is pronounced roughly as the “ng” in the English “sing”).
WOLD NEWTON
PREHISTORY
JOHN GRIBARDSUN & TIME’S LAST GIFT
INTO TIME’S ABYSS
BY JOHN ALLEN SMALL
Philip José Farmer was known for writing many different series, even once stating that he had twelve going at the same time. However, the standalone novel Time’s Last Gift (Titan Books, 2012) has proven to be one of his most popular works. Perhaps “standalone” is not a completely accurate description; the novel also serves as an unstated prelude to the Khokarsa series: Hadon of Ancient Opar (Titan Books, 2013), Flight to Opar, and The Song of Kwasin. And who is to say that Farmer might not have revisited the characters in Time’s Last Gift? He certainly left an opening, as one can see in the excerpt on the following page, an opening John Allen Small deftly uses to relaunch the time travelers on a quite different adventure.
When the H. G. Wells I voyaged into time (again), he felt sorry for John II, Rachel, Drummond, and Robert. This trip would not take them to the France of 12,000 B.C. Somewhere along the transit, the vessel and its passengers would disappear. He did not know how or to where... He liked to think that Rachel and the others had not just disintegrated. Perhaps they were shunted off into a parallel world...
—Philip José Farmer, Time’s Last Gift
The explosion should have been as loud as a seventy-five-millimeter cannon’s.
The fact that it was not was the second bit of evidence that something might have gone awry.
The first had occurred en route. All available data and preliminary testing had indicated that the timeship’s transition from A.D. 2070, spring, to circa 12,000 B.C., spring, should have been instantaneous. The expected explosion, caused by displacement of air upon the vehicle’s arrival, should have been the only physical sensation proving that the transition had taken place at all.
Instead there was a sickening feeling of momentary nonentity—as if the H. G. Wells I and all four members of her crew had briefly phased out of existence altogether—followed not by a deafening boom, but by a sound vaguely reminiscent of an electrical short circuit. Or, perhaps, of bacon frying.
“That... didn’t seem right, somehow,” Rachel Silverstein managed to stammer. She brought up her hands, placed the palms against her chest, her shoulders, the sides of her face, as if making certain she was real. Her pretty face was twisted into a slight grimace. “Or am I just imagining things?”
Drummond Silverstein, her husband, slowly exhaled as he opened his eyes. Releasing his grip on the arms of his chair, he drew in a new breath as the color slowly returned to his ashen features. “If you are, you aren’t the only one,” he said in response to Rachel’s question.
At his station on the other side of the craft, Robert von Billman shifted in his seat and nervously cleared his throat. “Indeed,” he concurred, his unease making his slight German accent seem a bit stronger than usual. He glanced around the ship and added, “Is it safe to get up and move about?”
John Gribardsun turned in his seat and took a moment to look at each of his crewmates. “Physically we all appear to be unharmed,” he said at last. “As for the ship...” He swiveled back around and began twisting dials on the instrument panel before him. As his fingers played upon the controls he felt a momentary flash of—what, exactly? Not so much a sense of déjà vu as of a vague, unsettling sensation that the situation should somehow be more familiar than it actually was.
The feeling passed quickly, and did not distract from the task at hand. Gribardsun’s hands danced expertly across the panel, pushing buttons and flipping switches as he watched the readouts and studied the controls’ responses. “Everything seems to be functioning normally,” he finally reported. “Let’s take a look outside..”
With that Gribardsun twisted the dial that activated the ship’s viewscreen and exterior cameras. His crewmates gathered around his chair as the picture shimmered into view.
That view was spectacular—a pristine, virgin woodland which reminded Rachel of the way she’d pictured the Garden of Eden when she was a child. Even the seemingly unflappable Gribardsun appeared visibly moved by the sight, but he and his crewmates barely had time to enjoy it. Rachel was the first to notice the tiny figure dash out of a clearing about halfway up the right side of the screen. “Look there,” she said, pointing. “Is that a man?”
Gribardsun looked where Rachel had pointed, then pressed a button to increase the camera’s magnification. Sure enough, it seemed to be a Magdalenian—followed by three more, all running in more or less the same direction. The primitives ran at an angle away from the general direction of the timeship. One turned and looked behind him, a look of fear etched into his features as he stumbled and almost fell. He managed to right himself, though the effort nearly caused him to careen into one of the other runners.
These men were running for their very lives.
“What are they afraid of?” Drummond asked. “Us?”
Gribardsun shook his head. “No,” he answered. “I don’t believe they are even aware of our presence. Something is chasing them. But what?”
As if in answer, there was a rippling in the air behind the runners, as if some sort of invisible projectile had been fired in their direction. An explosion like the b
ursting of a small artillery shell rocked the ground at the heels of the runner who had nearly stumbled before, sending him sprawling face-first into the ground as his companions continued to flee. The one who had fallen managed to roll over and sit upright, but that was as far as he got; his eyes grew wide, his face frozen in an expression of utter horror that none besides Gribardsun had ever seen before.
There was another rippling of the air, and this time whatever projectile had been fired struck the poor fellow full in the center of the chest. It hit with such force that the time travelers thought it should have ripped a hole in his midsection; instead the victim’s body began to spasm violently, as if gripped by an epileptic seizure. The seizure lasted roughly three seconds; on the fourth second the seizure ceased, and the man’s body suddenly turned white and slightly crystalline in appearance. As Gribardsun watched he was reminded of the old story about Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt...
That thought had scarcely entered Gribardsun’s head when the fallen man’s body suddenly popped out of existence. Not an explosion, but more like the bursting of a soap bubble—with only a small trace of a white, powder-like substance drifting to the ground to mark that the man had ever existed.
“My God!” von Billman exclaimed. Rachel gasped and buried her face in Gribardsun’s shoulder, who had jumped up out of his seat like a jungle cat ready to spring into action. Unconsciously, perhaps, he slipped a protective arm around Rachel; Drummond saw this and grimaced, but said nothing.
The four of them watched as the remaining runners suddenly stopped short, then turned in an effort to go back. They stopped again, their heads moving back and forth in either direction as the three of them seemed to press into one another for protection. Von Billman was just about to ask again what they might be running from when the viewscreen provided the answer: a pair of huge four-legged creatures, one emerging from either side of the clearing. The behemoths looked like some kind of cross between a wolf and a bear; both were saddled like a horse and ridden by humanoids wearing what appeared to be battle armor. The riders were quite a bit larger than the average man—Gribardsun guessed them to be somewhere between eight and nine feet tall, though it was difficult to be certain—and each carried a hand-held firearm, the likes of which none of the crew had ever seen before.