grew lushly, vine and gregarian, paline and many another luxurious plant of Kregen. So the last eruption must have occurred more than, say, a hundred years ago. These people might not know what to do — or what to try to do.
Down in the town the panic was atrocious. Men and women ran from their houses with bundles wobbling on their heads. Calsanys were being prodded along with sticks. Babies were crying. Girls were carrying out cloths with bits of household furniture sticking out, candlesticks, frying pans, grinders, samphron-oil lamps, anything they had thought to snatch up in their panic. Sulfur and brimstone choked in the air. The congested rumblings and explosions of the volcano battered at reason.
I grabbed a young man whose face showed stark fear. He was babbling incoherently, so I kicked him away and grabbed another man who swung at me, uglily, a stux thrusting forward. He bore a vosk-hide satchel over his shoulder and nothing else, and I suspected he had seized his chance to loot a neighbor’s house.
“Listen, dom, and I will not kill you,” I told him.
He reacted stupidly. He tried to stick me with the spear.
I took it away from him and poked the point into his sweating belly.
“Who is the chief man of the town, dom? Tell me his name and where I may hope to find him, or your tripes will spill into the road.”
He yelled, but he gabbled out what I wanted to know.
“Lart Lykon, the Elten! But he has fled-”
I shook him.
“Toward the jetties — a boat — for the sake of Kuerden the Merciless!”
I threw him from me. Useless to work on these people one at a time. Whatever the Star Lords were up to here, I scarcely thought it had been the saving of that first girl upon the higher slopes where the lava ran and would have engulfed her if she had not burned to death first. Everything was happening with enormous speed. I burst through a packed rabble wailing and clamoring at the jetty. A few boats lay there, small open double-ended craft, and a number had already pushed off. It was perfectly clear that the boats could not carry all the people of the town. It was equally and horribly clear that the lava pouring down so swiftly toward them would fill the narrow valley in which the town huddled, fill the green slot and cover the houses, rise up the terraced hills, pouring all the time through and over the town and into the lake. To jump into the water and swim would help only if one could outrace the lava. This is what many were doing; but soon the water grew too hot for them, so that they boiled. I found Lart Lykon, the Elten. He was a large, raw-boned man with a hectoring voice, hooded eyes, a massive beard, and golden rings about his fingers and bracelets upon his arms. He wore only a gray shirt and a pair of blue trousers. I took him by the shoulder as he pushed a woman aside and went to step into a boat. He had guards, tough men with stuxes who shouted at me to let the Elten alone, and who thrust at me. I took the first stux and hit the fellow over the head with it. Ash was now falling, raining down in white-hot droplets that stung as they hit flesh. People were screaming everywhere. Yet we were penned into this tiny space of the jetties between the lake-wall and the town.
“Elten,” I said, shouting into his ear. “By all you hold holy, you will not run away. There is a way to defeat Muruaa!”
“It cannot be done,” he gasped, his eyes rolling. “Muruaa will eat us all, burn us alive!”
Another guard, panicking, tried to thrust his stux into my back, so that I was forced to turn, my left hand grasping the Elten by the shoulder, and take the stux away from the guard. He looked a mean, low-browed fellow — well, maybe I do him an injustice — but I thrust back hard intending to frighten him away. But the press of people forced him on to the stux. He writhed like a fish on a harpoon, and lurched away.
I turned my face on the other guards.
They were relatively primitive people, at least in their relationship with authority. They understood what my face told them long before they heard what I bellowed out.
I lifted my voice and I shouted.
“Listen to me! It is useless to run away. You must do what I say, at once, for if you do not, then you will all be killed, and I along with you.”
I dragged up the Elten of the town, and hung him up in the air so that his heels dangled.
“Your Elten will confirm what I say! You must go up past the flanks of the lava flow, behind the houses, along the terraces, back above the town, below the village. You must carry cloths, wetted, over your heads. You must take picks and shovels, and you will do as I bid you. If you do not you will all surely be killed!”
There followed a wild argument; but I held the stux against the side of Lart Lykon, the Elten, and I pressed the cruel and broad head into the swell of his belly. “Tell them to obey, Lykon, or your tripes spill into the dirt!”
He squeaked and then managed a shout as I set him back on his feet.
“Do as this wild leem says! There is a chance! I know, for in my grandfather’s time Muruaa showed his anger and the people placated him by sacrifice-”
“You great nurdling onker!” I roared. I shook him so that he rattled internally.
“You will dig a gap in the side of the flow, where it has cooled a little. It will be hard. But if you do it the fire will flow a new way — the way you must know — over the cliff and into the lake beyond the village.”
Uproar, chaos, confusion, but out of them I hammered away at the people. I shook Lart Lykon and brandished the stux at some of his guards who attempted to launch a boat and sail away. When they would not stop I hurled the stux and wounded their Deldar; that brought the others directly back up onto the jetty. I seized another stux from the guard’s stuxcal and I waved it.
“Forward! Up the slope! Muruaa is merely a pit of fire! And are we not men and women? Dig!
Trap Muruaa’s vile vomit in the lake!”
The conceit caught them. Anyway, they knew they could not escape. Volcanoes have this nasty habit of forming basins, such as the one in which the town had been slotted, by the collapse of part of the surrounding land in ancient, prehistoric eruptions, and then of filling the basin in the subsequent eruptions. The lake had flowed in to fill any hope of escape: the water boiled near the shore as the stream of lava poured over the town and plunged into the water.
So we snatched up cloths and hides and I organized a water-carrying chain. We went back up the slope, around the fiery lava flow, and we ventured near the outer cooler edges. We dug. We sweated. We were burned. We died, some of us, who were not nimble enough, or who could not stand the heat. But we chopped a gap in the edge of the flow and, not suddenly, but quickly enough to make us skip out of the way, a fresh tentacle of flaming lava broke through, and swung toward the lake on its new course. The flow would not stop in its destructive travel over the town, but enough would now be channeled away so that the slot would not fill. We could find a safe if hot refuge on the higher terraces. The big man with the tawny mane of hair and the whip-marks on his back who had shouted, first, that he would come with me up the mountain of fire, bellowed now that he would go up higher and break a fresh gap.
“If you desire, Avec,” I said. “But the heat up there is worse even than here.”
“I care nothing for these cramphs of Orlush. I wish only to spite that yetch Elten Lart.”
Out of spite, then, he went up the mountain. I went up with him because I was not absolutely sure I had done all I could do to save the people of this town of Orlush. I had no idea where we were on Kregen. The Star Lords had given me the task of saving someone — perhaps the whole damned town — and until I was satisfied that I had done that, I could not rest.
We were followed by an intrepid band of young men — and some not so young — and we went at the lava flow again. This time the work was immensely more difficult; but we persevered. When even I was satisfied, and I had struck blow for blow with Avec, driving great swathing layers of flaming lava away to open a new breach and we were all burned and blistered, I shouted halt. Avec dragged a blackened arm across his sweat-grimed forehead, and he smiled at me.
“I do not know who you are, dom; but you are a man!”
“A man like yourself, Avec. I am Dray Prescot.”
“And I am Avec Brand, Notor of nothing, Elten of emptiness, Strom of onkers.”
“Aye, Avec!” shouted a sinewy young man whose strength as he slewed burning lava had surprised me.
“Aye, by Havil the Green! You are Kov of hulus, also!”
“And you, Ilter Monicep, are the Vad of boasters!”
