Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (41 page)

But he still lived! As fresh air filled his lungs and he caught the cold wind on his face and saw the sun rising gloriously over the sierra, Gribardsun knew, once more, the ecstasy of living a life on the edge. He’d partaken of such joy countless times in thousands of years, and it still energized him.

The ecstatic peak fading, he evaluated his situation: the bag was still with him, its contents somewhat shaken, but the most precious parts of his equipment were intact. Those things were sturdy, made to last the centuries. He’d lost bow and arrows, but still had the knife.

He noticed that the rock he was sitting on was getting warmer. There was also some steam coming, under pressure, from the waterfall, as if the falling water itself was becoming hotter.

He looked down.

Gribardsun was perched high above Dom Antônio’s fortress, and could survey the whole area around it. The tactical situation was crystal clear: the castle was under siege by the Aymorés. There was a skirmish at the rearguard of the attacking Indians—he surmised that the surviving smugglers had tried to return to the white man’s refuge and found the path blocked by the native force.

He took a moment to sort out his equipment and materials, adjusting his camera in a nook close to the tip of the crescent and pointing it in the general direction of the source of the rushing water. Judiciously placing pebbles on and around the shutter button, he created a system that, he believed, would take a series of a dozen snapshots as soon as the ground moved in response to some big upheaval. He then decided to enter the fray on the side of the smugglers. The Aymorés, after all, were a threat to Cecilia, and if the warming rock and steaming water meant what he thought, any second there could be their last.

So, knife firmly grasped in his clenched teeth, he jumped.

* * *

The first Aymoré never knew what killed him. The knife went into his spine at the bottom of the skull and he fell instantly, dead silent. Gribardsun then used a trick he had learned back in his infancy, when he had wanted to mock the savages that had slain his ape-mother. For a whole month he had played the role of a trickster jungle spirit. After each attack, Gribardsun jumped back to the nearest tree, far from the sight of the Indians.

In this jump-kill-jump routine, it took him less than forty-five minutes to wipe out a sizeable part of the Aymoré troop. Enough to give the smugglers a fighting chance to get behind the walls, but only barely: the war party was huge. He might have kept the game going for a while more, but the tree cover was becoming scarce as they approached the walls, forcing him to do longer and longer jumps. And, in one of them, someone grabbed his left ankle and dashed him to the ground.

The impact caught Gribardsun in the shoulders, not on the head, which was partially luck and partially well-honed reflexes. Even so, the knife fell from his hand.

He was back on his feet in almost no time, quickly slipping back into his Peri persona, automatically assuming the typical crouch of the Indian wrestler. Facing him, equally crouched and with a maniacal light in his eyes, stood Aymberê, the giant of the Aymorés.

And, with a roar, the giant plunged to the attack.

The roar gave Peri an unwanted taste of Aymberê’s breath, enough for his awareness to register a peculiar scent, an acetous edge. The man had gorged himself on ant-poison liquor. He was drugged into a berserk rage.

And, of course, behind the red haze of fury that clouded his mind, he recalled the previous humiliating defeat at Gribardsun’s hands.

His plunge was not that of a wrestler: the crouch propelled him forward with balled fists, his thighs stretching like high-tension coils. His powerful blows caught Peri’s face and midsection, knocking the air out of him.

Aymberê was possessed and powerful, and Peri was tired, dazed by the sudden fall and still sore with the many wounds he had sustained in the caves. Aymberê’s mad punches were hurting him more than they should; and his counter-punches had no effect he could discern.

So, Peri went down, felled like an old oak.

The glee in his opponent’s eyes was fearful to see. Aymberê’s smile was a hideous rictus, and spittle drooled from his lower lip as he loomed over Peri’s body, the eyes closed, the head turned to the side.

He came closer, savoring the moment, the berserk rage fueling a sadistic, anticipatory pleasure, a monstrous gloating. He would do unmentionable things to this inert body before dismembering it. Power surged to his loins.

It was when Aymberê’s shadow fell on Peri’s face, blocking the red glare of the sun that filtered through his eyelids, that the time traveler, who had been pretending defeat, flashed into action, raising his bent knee with the speed, strength, and determination of a Norse god brandishing his magic hammer, smashing his enemy’s genitalia.

Blood shot into Aymberê’s eyes, and his crazed wide-eyed rictus was turned into a desperate, thin-lipped scowl as he fell to the ground. Rolling to one side, Peri connected his elbow with the Indian’s jaw, and Aymberê was knocked unconscious, his face broken.

Peri then started hearing explosions. The smugglers couldn’t have had time to reload their muskets and pistols, but finally there was someone at the walls using the cannons.

There was an explosion quite close, and chips of broken rock and hot lead embedded themselves in Peri’s cheek.

Someone, it seemed, had found the time to reload.

“Die, pagan bastard!” cried Loredano, a brace of pistols in his arms. Two guns, two barrels per gun, one shot fired. Three to go then.

As his mind evaluated the tactical aspects of the situation, Peri kept rolling on the ground, hoping the smuggler would keep firing at a moving target, wasting shots. The smuggler then raised his right arm above his head, and started, slowly, to lower it, bringing the barrels in line with the blurring motion that was the half-naked savage in front of him.

“Die, and Cecilia will be mine!”

Not today,
thought Peri, changing direction and using his legs as pistons to jump over Loredano’s head, passing so close to him he could smell the stink of old layers of dry sweat. As he passed over the man’s oily hair, Peri grabbed the still raised weapon—barely taking notice of Loredano’s scream when his forefinger, caught in the trigger guard, was broken by the sudden lurch—and, on landing behind the enemy, crouched, turned, and used its heavy wooden handle as a club, cracking Loredano’s right knee.

“Nor ever.”

Turning Loredano with a shove of his left hand and grabbing him by the hair before he fell, Peri launched two punches from his right into Loredano’s nose and left eye, blinding him and cutting off his breathing. The man even tried to claw at Peri’s eyes with his muddy nails, but failed and started to choke.

Peri finally smashed Loredano’s face against the nearest tree, cutting the blabbing and gurgling off and leaving a red blot on the trunk.

He felt the earth trembling under his feet. He knew that if the sequence of collapses and landslides happening right now in the caves ended up creating a critical mass of uranium, the possible outcomes would be a “China syndrome”—the fissile material boring a hole into the earth and burying itself—or an explosion. Whichever would happen, might happen quickly.

Now his goal was to take Cecilia, and if possible her family, out of this doomed land.

The time traveler had a way paved with dead bodies in front of him. The Aymorés had been scattered by the cannon fire from the castle, and demoralized by the second defeat of Aymberê, but apparently not before slaughtering all of the remaining smugglers.

Which meant that Cecilia would be alone in the fortress, with only her father and the servants, and maybe one or two other bandits who perhaps had remained behind when Loredano’s party ventured outside to find the mine. But would anyone wish to be left behind? These men were cutthroats, and none would trust the others with the secret location of the silver, Peri surmised.

He ran.

* * *

There were no more defenses on the walls. The gates were closed, but the cannons were silent, and Gribardsun got there without being challenged or hailed. He climbed the stone barrier with the ease of one long adjusted to steep hills and even steeper trees, jumped inside, breaking his fall by grabbing a wooden shaft that projected at an angle from the structure, and landed, silently, on his two feet and left hand.

He thought of inspecting the inside of the walls, finding out what may have happened to the men who had manned the artillery, but his priority was to locate Cecilia and, if possible, Dom Antônio. The rest could wait.

As he ran into the castle, the great hall seemed empty. This first cursory impression almost cost Peri his life. He moved quickly toward the stairs, failing to notice the giant snake slowly uncoiling from the roof beams to the floor behind him, ready for the attack.

It was only Gribardsun’s almost unconscious, instinctive attention to every scrap of information around him that allowed him to detect the barely audible sound of the reptile slithering on the flagstones of the floor. He turned just in time to see the monster launching two coils of its scaly body around his torso and legs, and to use the heel of his left hand to stop its jaws from closing on his head.

The thing had the thickness of an old tree, and a body as hard as mahogany. The general appearance was that of a gigantic boa constrictor, but the head was triangular—an almost sure signature of the venomous snake. The eyes had the eerie blue glint of the radiation-immune animals, and with both hands employed in keeping the thing’s mouth open, he was able to feel the swelling poison bags behind the needle-like teeth.

The poison started to flow onto his hands and down his wrists as he pressed the jaws open and back. The liquid was dark-golden, like honey, and burned at the touch. At the same time, the muscular coils were closing around him: his breath became short and, suddenly, his ribs seemed quite brittle. He’d taken his knife back after the fights with Aymberê and Loredano, and even had a charged two-shot pistol in his sash, but both were useless now.

The whole thing would be decided by a contest of brute force and resistance: what would break first—his ribcage or the creature’s mandible? The pain in his chest at least distracted him from the smoldering burn of the acidic poison on his arms, but the lack of oxygen, combined with the extenuating effort, was starting to exact a price. His vision was tunneling; he would black out in no time.

Suddenly, there was a violent crack, and the coils around him went limp. Gribardsun fell to the ground—the only thing that had kept him erect for the last few minutes being the muscular strength of the snake—and gasped. The skin of his forearms was fiery red.

The beast was dead, its mouth open in an unnatural angle of much larger than 180 degrees.

He went into the kitchen, looking for something that might mitigate the chemical burns, and found some ashes and coarse soap—as well as dead bodies and a gaping hole in the floor.

There was a track of bluish mud coming from the hole, and Peri did not need special deductive powers to conclude that the snake had come from there. The corpses were crushed, or blackened by poison, or both. It seemed obvious that the creature hadn’t killed them out of hunger, but out of fear and anger. Its world had been destroyed, and someone—even perfectly innocent servants—had to pay.

Satisfied that his hands and arms were in good working condition and the pain had subsided enough, he decided to follow the tracks, fearful of what other bodies he might find along the way.

The remains of Dom Antônio were in the library. He still had a sword in his hands, but his legs were crushed beyond description and his belly was swollen and black, split open. The snake had injected an astounding amount of venom there.

Gribardsun took the time to close the old nobleman’s glazed eyes before proceeding. The snake’s trail, however, only led back to the main hall. So, hopeful that Cecilia might still be safe upstairs, he bolted up the steps.

But the rooms were all empty.

Might she be in one of the huts in the back yard? Perhaps even in the torture cell?

Gribardsun was preparing to run down and find out when a great blast, followed by a shock that shook the castle to its foundations, launched him against the corridor wall. He banged his head, and lost consciousness.

* * *

Mud and water! Everywhere!

The time traveler awoke with the fresh spray that came from a crack in the corridor lightly striking his eyelids. There was a torrent coming down on the castle from on high, filling the space between the building, the defensive wall, and the mountainside.

It was already filling up the lower levels of the structure: the main hall, kitchen, and library already had water close to the ceiling.

Gribardsun’s lips twisted in a sad smile. He believed he knew what had happened: his fear of a “China syndrome” against a full-blown nuclear explosion had been a false one. There was a third option, a so-called fizzle—a small blast, caused by a critical mass that takes form too quickly for a “syndrome” scenario, but too slowly to free the whole power of the nuclear fuel.

The relatively small blast hadn’t been enough to pulverize the mountain, but it had destroyed part of the stone wall that kept the river on course, and now the Paquequer was falling, with all its might, directly over Dom Antônio’s home.

As it dawned on Gribardsun that anyone who’d been in the huts behind the castle had certainly drowned by now, he felt a weight in his chest for Cecilia. She’d been not only young and beautiful and delightful, but there was also a fire in her, in her eyes, in her heart, that he could relate to and, even admire. But now...

Her scream pierced his thoughts.

There was already water bubbling up from the stairwell. Peri ran into one of the bedrooms in the corridor, found a window, and jumped out. His body hit the water after a fall of less than a meter and he swam in the direction of the screams.

They came from the external wall. Looking, he saw that Cecilia was there, on the top of a pillar somewhat higher than the surrounding structure. She was crouching over it, surrounded by water on one side, and by a sheer drop on the other. She had both hands behind her head, fingers intertwined. She screamed in utter despair.