Blade strode between the colossal legs. In one foot, near the big toe, was a black rectangle. A door. Blade slung his bow over his shoulder and, with his knife and spear ready, stepped into semidarkness. He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and sniffed about. After a moment he relaxed. Nothing but the musty, dusty smell of slow decay. There was nothing here. Nothing but the rotten detritus of the years.
The inside of the foot was a chamber of brick — the stonework was only facing — from which the mortar had fallen in great chunks. In the heel was another door leading to a flight of twisting stone steps that climbed steeply upward. Blade started to climb.
On the first landing he found the first skeleton. Bones so rotted by time that when he touched a thighbone it crumbled to dust at his touch. Blade contemplated the thing. His association with Lord Leighton had been long enough — and Blade was a good student when he chose — to inform him that these bones had once been a human being as he knew them. The skull was that of modern man.
«What happened?»
Blade asked the question as he edged around the bones and began to climb again. There were four more such landings before he reached the top, and on each was a skeleton. Just bones. No weapons, no jewelry or adornments, only bones.
He reached the top landing. A door led into the inner skull of the idol. It had been of wood, so rotted now that when he approached, the slight vibration caused the wood to turn to powder and fall away. He gazed into the chamber beyond, at the stone altar.
Atop the altar were two skeletons, bones now linked in their long death. He did not need to be an expert to know that the slighter set of bones had belonged to a woman and the larger bones over her were those of a man. In what weird, perhaps sexual, ceremony had they died so? He shrugged and went about his exploring.
Scattered about the chamber were three more altars, smaller and in the form of lecterns. On each one was a massive book of yellowed parchment or vellum bound in hide. He touched a page and it vanished in powder. He bent to scan the strange cuneiform scribble, so faded that only by looking at it slantwise and using the light refraction could he discern traces of ink. At last he turned away. This mystery he would never solve.
Once again the crying of the gulls startled him. Blade went to one of the hollow eyes and peered out. Nothing. He went to the other eye and saw it: a lake. A greenish-blue soupbowl of a lake, not more than two miles away. The birds were circling over it, crying, and now and again diving for fish. Blade paid no attention to the birds. There were huts in the lake. Thatched and wattled huts on stilts, each with a landing platform built around it. Gray smoke curled from several of the huts. Women, bare-breasted and wearing skins to cover their genitals, worked at various chores. One was pounding a clublike stick into a large bowl. Pestle and mortar. Grain. Flour. Blade nodded. These lake people were certainly a cut above Ogar's tribe, though far down the scale from the men who had built the idol from which he now spied. And they were dangerous.
Blade spent the remainder of the afternoon, while the light lasted, studying the lake village. He did not like what he saw.
The lake people, from what he could see at his far vantage, were not true men. Lord L would have labeled them apemen. Pithecanthropus. Yet they walked like men, had weapons of stone and wood, used fire and had built the stilted huts in the lake. They built round, cuplike boats of withes and mud and used them to scuttle between the huts and the shore. And they were cultivators! Around the edges of the lake was a narrow littoral of cultivated fields extending to the edge of the forest. Perhaps half a mile.
The lake people used slaves in the fields. And scarecrows to keep the gulls away from the crops. Blade did not at first grasp the nature of the scarecrows, nor feel any particular pity for the slaves. When he did understand it he decided, then and there, to stay well away from the lake. These were a cruel and brutish people. More intelligent than Ogar, hence more to be feared.
More than once that day he wished for a pair of powerful binoculars. His own vision was superhuman — as near to 10–10 as is possible — but he fretted at details he sensed he was missing. Yet by concentrating on the strip of plowed land closest to him he managed well enough. And redoubled his determination not to go near the lake.
Half the slaves working in that near field were women. Some old, some young, all naked and all being whipped incessantly by apemen overseers. The male slaves were whipped only infrequently or not at all. This in itself puzzled Blade, but still more puzzling was the fact that the slaves were definitely of a higher species. They were devoid of body hair, smooth-skinned and well formed — true men — and yet they were in slavery to the shambling apeman. Lord L, when he emptied Blade's memory file at the end of this journey, would be surprised. The higher species, then, did not always triumph.
The scarecrows were the dead bodies of slaves. The watching Blade saw one of the grisly things come into being. A female slave faltered at her work, stumbled and fell, and an apeman immediately began to beat her. She could not get up. Another apeman joined the first and began to use his knout, the heavy whip the apemen carried. Blade made a wry face. He expected such horrors in Dimension X, yet it was not a pretty thing to watch. What followed was worse.
The apemen stopped beating the slave. One bent over her and made signs to indicate she was dead. The other apeman dropped his whip and fell on her still-warm flesh, attacking her sexually. When he had finished, the other apeman did the same. Blade cursed them, then chided himself. He had not yet adapted fully enough if his emotions could be so involved. He must do better, adapt more and faster. Home Dimension rules did not apply out here.
The body of the female slave was dragged to a post set in the ground and tied to it with withes. This task completed, the apemen went back to beating their female charges. Only now and then did a male slave receive a blow.
About this time Blade noticed one of the female slaves, young and, insofar as he could make out at the distance, quite pretty, quietly edging away from the other slaves. Step by step, yard by yard, she sidled toward the bordering forest. Blade, and he had to grin at himself for it, found he was holding his breath and wishing her luck.
Had the apemen overseers not been so engrossed in their maltreatment of the dead woman, the girl would never have had a chance. As it was she was discovered while she was still a hundred yards from the forest. One of the apemen saw her, let out a guttural scream of rage and bounded toward her. The young female slave screamed in turn and began to run.
The apeman was faster. He covered the ground in ludicrous fashion, awkward and with a leaping and lunging gait, but he covered it. The girl ran with her mouth open, screaming in terror, her slim legs and arms pumping, knowing what awaited her if caught.
Blade found Blade excitedly talking to Blade: «Come on — come on, girl! Run, damn it. Run!»
She was doing her best, but the ground was rough, recently gouged with sharp plowsticks, and she fell. The apeman screamed in angry triumph and struck at her with his knout. She rolled to her feet, eluded the blows and took off again for the forest. Blade felt his heart beat as fast as her own.