He lunged again and I ducked again, and it went on in the same nightmare fashion until the knife was gleaming at the tip of an attenuated arm that followed my movements like a zigzagging lightning bolt.
He transferred the knife eight times, his laughter an insane echo as he weaved about. Desperately I dove for him and tried to knock the weapon away, but each time he was too quick for me.
His eyes burned with defiance and derision. But I suddenly saw that his mouth was beginning to sag, the lower lip trembling with unmistakable weakness.
I don’t quite know how I got the knife away from him. But get it I did. I closed in suddenly, struck him a body blow that sent him reeling, followed him as he went backwards and wrested the weapon from him before he could recover his balance. I hit him again, and he went down, and I stood wrathfully over him.
He looked at me, his eyes filled with bewilderment and horror.
“Trag Unil Deguna,” I said. “I’ve beaten you man to man in honest combat.”
Suddenly his eyes widened, and all of the insane rage was gone from his face. “It is true,” he whispered. “The Mountain must have given you his strength. How else could you have conquered the son of a Chief?”
“In no other way,” I assured him.
“Does the Mountain now speak with your voice?”
“The Mountain is closer to me than it is to its false Servants,” I told him.
I bent and gripped him by the shoulders. “You are young and strong,” I said. “The son of a Chief. Only such a one can truly lead his people. If when the Mountain speaks and the sky becomes red you leap straightway into battle at your father’s side against the false Servants I will spare your life.”
He sat up and rubbed his chin. His eyes were still awestruck, and I was confident that if the mountain itself had entered the hut, and spoken to him he would scarcely have been more eager to obey.
“I will do as the Mountain desires,” he promised.
“You will not have long to wait,” I assured him. “Soon the wrath of the Mountain will be terrible against its false Servants. Sit here quietly and be patient. You will see.”
It was almost dawn when I returned to the central hut. I walked in boldly like a man coming home a little later than usual with some tremendous bright surprise for his wife that would take the curse off his lateness.
Kallatah was asleep with her weather jacket rolled up under her head, a look of almost childlike innocence on her face. She looked so beautiful that I was afraid if I knelt and kissed her she’d shatter and fly apart like one of those ancient statues that have lain for centuries in the buried past of the Earth.
There was no need for me to wake her. The rumbling did it. It started far off, and came slowly nearer, sweeping down upon the hut like the drums of primitive warfare beating at first in ominous undertones and then ever more loudly as they converged upon their mark.
The drums were nature’s own, and they were beating deep within the ground. With the beating came a heaving and a quaking, and right where I was standing a jagged rent appeared suddenly in the dried red clay which had been baked by Geipgos himself to line the floor of his hut.
I had timed the eruption with the sure instinct of a trained scientist who knows just how to fill in the gaps left by the hair-trigger measurements of precision instruments with an intuitive sixth-sense. It could have occurred an hour sooner or an hour later, but I wasn’t surprised that it occurred when it did.
Only Kallatah was surprised. She awoke with the first quake and looked up at me. Her eyes grew wide and startled, and suddenly she was on her feet, clinging to my arm and screaming.
I shook her until she grew quiet, then drew her to the hut’s swaying entrance and pointed out into the flame-streaked shadows. Flashes of light were converging on the village from all directions, cascading over the thatched roofs with their central supporting poles, sending women and children scrambling frenziedly into the open.
“The volcano’s in full eruption!” I whispered.
“How can you stand there so calmly?” Her face was white. “If a quake opens a fissure at our feet—”
“We’ll never know a moment’s pain,” I said. “It’s the one great danger. The lava flow won’t reach the village.”
“How do you know?”
“I used some very sensitive instruments to measure the banked up lava flow and the intensity of the central fires with a minimal margin of error,” I said. “I knew almost precisely to the hour when the eruption would occur. It’s a fairly severe eruption, but not a major one.”
“You knew—”
“It’s been building up for days. It should be over in an hour.”
She started to reply, then swayed toward me in blind panic.
It wasn’t a stampede exactly. The lizards didn’t emerge from the shadows in a single onrushing column, but in threes and fours. Maddened with terror they darted to and fro between the cowering, screaming women and children, their distended eyes and metallic body sheen mirroring the fiery sky glow.
They lunged and parried, striking out with their claws as they circled about as any savage animal will when it feels itself to be hopelessly trapped. There was a blind purposelessness in their movements, a frantic swaying and thumping that churned up the ground beneath them and sent clumps of uprooted vegetation spinning in all directions.
The sky glow became more fiery, spilling over in crimson splotches, turning the village thatch poles into redly glowing fingers pointing mountainward as if in remorseless accusation. The rumblings grew louder, the quakes more frequent.
A woman ran into the open with a child in her arms. She set the child down with a look of calm, tender solicitude on
