Cave Dogs (Pachacuta Book 1) Page 15

  The crashing continued from the entrance way and each time a part of the rock wall that was protecting us fell away. I don’t know what tool they were using, but it was a powerful one. Another crash and a chunk of the ceiling fell away, leaving a gap large enough for a Maeroero to climb through. None did though, they just kept chipping away at the rock wall.

  ‘Now what?’ Fizzer asked, calmly though, not a trace of tension or panic in his voice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, feeling that I had let them all down. I looked at Tupai, who had suggested the screaming charge, which had worked so effectively. He looked back without comment.

  ‘The dust-digger,’ Phil said, pointing to the big, plastirock wheel, ‘I think I can make a catapult out of that.’

  He didn’t wait for comment, but bounded over to the device. It had four large arms spreading out from a central hub. Each contained a rounded shovel. Although we had not seen it working, it was clear that its function was to dig into the pile of dust that was piled up before it, lift it up and over, tipping it onto the dust cart.

  Phil, the mechanical mind, was examining the mechanism. The power seemed to come from a set of foot pedals, connected to some kind of a drive shaft.

  ‘Give me five minutes,’ he said, ‘And somebody give me a hand.’

  Tupai bent to help him. The rest of us backed away and watched the hammering at the entranceway with increasing levels of adrenalin and bile in the pits of our stomachs.

  ‘Is there anything else we can do?’ I asked. ‘Any other weapons. Hell, we’ve got hundreds of years of history, of technology, building new ways to kill each other. We must know something the cave-dogs don’t.’

  ‘Sure,’ Fizzer said, ‘Give me a Uzi and we’ll see how the battle turns then.’

  It turned out later to be one of the strangely prophetic things that he says from time to time. Just then, however, it didn’t seem funny.

  ‘Where’s Tukuyrikuq?’ Jenny asked suddenly.

  I scanned the cave and saw him finally, climbing down from the mikhuy. The hiss of the boiler on the mikhuy, which had been running constantly since it crashed into the cave, had become a roar.

  I looked wordlessly at the old man, suddenly knowing what he had done.

  ‘The mikhuy must not pass to the cave-dogs,’ he said, staring me straight in the eye. ‘It is done.’

  ‘What has he done?’ Jenny shouted, but I think she knew. The steam release on the mikhuy was jammed, it was now only a matter of time before the whole thing blew. We were about to get sliced, diced and boiled.

  ‘We could have held them off!’ I cried in desolation.

  ‘No you couldn’t,’ the old man said. ‘Fifty kuimata could not hold off what is about to be unleashed in this cave.’

  There was a strange twanging sound and a boulder the size of a bowling ball suddenly bounced off the roof of the cave, hitting the far wall and coming to rest by the mikhuy.

  I raced over to look at Phil and Tupai’s handiwork. Somehow they had stripped off the drive shaft and lashed a heavy slab of rock to one of the arms, close to the hub. The arm on the opposite side formed the bucket of the catapult. Phil had rigged a reed-rope around one of the feet of the machine that hauled the bucket down to the floor. Another sturdy reed arrested the movement of the arm just as it reached the top of its swing. It was to all intents and purposes, a catapult such as might have been used against castles of old.

  ‘Find me as many boulders as you can,’ Phil said urgently, adjusting the length of the arresting rope. ‘The same size as this one, or close to it.’

  There were dozens of them amongst the rubble littering the floor of the construction site. Daniel and I between us were just able to lift one. Tupai carried one on his one.

  Tupai loaded his boulder into the shovel that was the bucket of the catapult.

  Phil let out a whoop and wrenched out a stick he had jammed into the base of the device, holding the reed-rope. The heavy weight of the rock slab dropped. The extended arm of the catapult shot into the air, stopping, just before ninety degrees, by the sudden jolt of the reed-rope.

  The boulder arced across the cave, striking the wall on the other side, just a metre above the entranceway.

  Phil nodded and made a small adjustment to the rope. He armed the machine and Tupai reloaded it. Daniel and I went scurrying off for more ammunition, but looked up at the twanging sound to see a boulder fly across the gap and drop neatly into the hole the Maeroero were enlarging for themselves in the side of the entrance.

  We heard crunching sounds and screams as it bounced and bashed around inside the narrow tunnel. It must have been carnage in there.

  Phil whooped and high-fived Tupai. The hammering from the tunnel stopped, but restarted after a moment.

  ‘Reload!’ Phil called.

  Daniel and I concentrated on making a small pile of the bowling-ball sized boulders. Phil pushed some to one side as too big or too small, then Tupai loaded the waiting bucket with one that seemed OK.

  It flew well, but dropped short, smashing into the back of the mikhuy with an alarming crunch. The mikhuy was making alarming noises of its own. The roar of the boilers had been joined by long drawn out creaks, and the groan of distressed metal.

  ‘Try not to hit the Rock-Eater,’ I said, sensing that that would be a bad thing.

  ‘I’ll try,’ Phil grinned, the beggar was actually enjoying himself I realised, ‘but no promises.’

  I wondered if he realised the extent of the destruction when the mikhuy blew. I doubted it.

  Another boulder flew, and missed (too high), but the next smashed into the hole, taking a small part of the roof with it, and the hammering stopped again.

  They didn’t give up though, the Maeroero, and the hammering continued for a few minutes, then, just as Phil was about to fire, the hammering ceased.

  Jenny said, ‘They’ve worked out how long it takes you to reload.’

  ‘Fine with me,’ Phil said, and waited, his hand on the pin, for the hammering to resume.

  The moment it did he let it rip and the boulder smashed just above the opening, showering the mikhuy with rock chips, but causing no danger to the Maeroero.

  The hammering resumed with a frenzy and the gap grew gradually wider, stopping when they thought we were about to fire. Still Phil managed to land a couple of good shots inside the tunnel, amongst quite a lot of misses, and each time, I am sure, a few of the Maeroero were taken out of the battle.

  He managed to miss the mikhuy as well, the closest he came was a shot that smacked into the edge of the disc, shuddering the entire machine.

  All the time the creaking, groaning of the mikhuy grew.

  ‘Are you sure it can’t be stopped,’ I asked Tukuyurikuq at one point, quietly, so as not to panic the rest of the guys.

  ‘It is built that way,’ he replied. ‘If it could be un-jammed then the Maeroero could do it. Once it had been done, there is nothing you can do except run.’

  And we had nowhere to run.

  ‘Where the hell are the warriors?’ Fizzer wanted to know, but there was no time to answer as at that moment an entire shelf of rock gave way and the Maeroero poured through the gap.

  There was a blur as Flea raced towards them, his bo held in an attack grip.

  ‘Wait!’ shouted Phil, he had prepared one last shot. The bucket was full of smaller, fist sized boulders, grape-shot I supposed you could say. Phil let it go and the deadly rocks found targets amongst the swarm of cave-dogs, four or five collapsed, blood staining their long hair, under the impact of the missiles.

  Then Flea was back to the fray and Tupai was just behind him, hammers whirling like windmills. Jenny and I fought side by side, the spinning ends of our bos protecting each other.

  Phil stood at waited at the back, he held his bo at the ready, but could not join the fight with his injured leg.

  Tukuyrikuq I could not see, too old to fight, he had melted into the wall of the cave with his camouflage cape.

&n
bsp; The one thing we had to our advantage was surprise. The Maeroero had fought against the Runa for years, maybe centuries. They knew how to fight against Taiaqha. But they had never seen a bo used in anger and their reflexes were not prepared for it.

  You may wonder how a simple shaft of wood can become a deadly, even lethal weapon. But consider this. When the bo is spun at speed, the outermost tip of the pole is travelling at something close to the speed of sound. When that connects with a weapon arm it can snap it like a twig, even a burly Maeroero arm. When the tip connects with the jaw, or the ear, it renders an incapacitating blow. A solid blow to the temple is often fatal.

  Jenny and I were of an equal level of skill, and the whirling, twirling tips of our bos created a wall that the Maeroero could not penetrate. Those that tried staggered away clutching shattered forearms, or dropped to the ground in front of us.

  We had never trained in pairs, and it might have been useful, but even without it we were a deadly team. My bo would sweep the legs from under a cave-dog as he clambered over the fallen body of a comrade, and even as it hit the ground, Jenny’s bo would crack down on its head.

  Slowly though we were driven backwards, back towards the rear wall of the cave, from there I knew, there would be no retreat.

  I had no time to watch the others, but every now and then I would get a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of Tupai, a savage grin on his face and the madness of battle in his eyes, the hammers tossing Maeroero aside like broken dolls. He was bleeding profusely from a deep wound on his forearm, but did not seem to notice.

  Flea was a blur. The most skilled of us all in the use of the bo, and with the speed of his ‘thing’ to aid him, he was everywhere. You could tell his progress only from the flying bodies of the Maeroero.

  Fizzer moved as if in a dream, as if on another plane of existence. He moved before the Maeroero did, moving out of the way of their blows even before they had begun the downward slashing movement that was their predominant attacking thrust. His bo was poetry, artistic in its flight, and he was the master of the feint.

  Fizzer’s bo would flick up at the underbelly of a cave-dog, but as the creature brought its hands down to protect itself it would find that the blow had only ever been an illusion, to disguise the backswing of the other end of the bo that slashed towards its head. And that would be the last thing it knew.

  Even Fizzer though was slowly, but surely, giving up ground, being forced towards the rear of the cave. There Phil waited, but even the addition of his bo was not going to turn the battle in our favour.

  Flea alone, could move where he wanted, fight where he wanted, but he fell back with us, knowing we were stronger as a group. He could help us more, protect us more, if he was with us.

  On the other side of the cave I saw Maeroero clambering over the shaking, screaming shape of the mikhuy.

  I slashed the end of my bo across the face of a Maeroero and his weapon dropped as he pawed at his shattered nose with both hands. My backswing caught him under the chin and his head snapped backwards, his body, unconscious or dead, I didn’t know, falling limply back across the frame of one of his own.

  Even as I swung the second blow though I realised I had made a mistake, left myself unprotected against a knife that was jabbing down from another Maeroero to my right. I braced myself for the impact, for the deep cut and slice of the weapon in my right side, just below my rib cage.

  The weapon never reached me. It went spinning off into the far reaches of the cave and there was the snap of a broken bone. Phil’s bo came around on the backswing and just about took the creature’s head off.

  I realised, with a mixture of gratitude, and desperation, that we had just about reached the rear wall of the cave.

  We fought desperately, knowing that without a metre or so behind us we could not swing the bos and we would be defenceless. Except for Tupai of course whose hammers needed little room indeed to bash the sense out of the vile creatures that faced us.

  Jenny shouted to me then. One of them had managed to grasp the end of her bo and was pulling it away from her. My bo crashed down on its fingers and it screamed, cut off as both Jenny’s and my bos took it on either temple. It must have been dead long before its body felt the need to start falling to the ground.

  A scream in the distance, the far distance, beyond the wall of cave-dogs that pressed us further and further back. A chorus of screams, the screams of the Runa Warriors.

  I looked up expecting to see the cavalry, but all I saw were more cave-dogs, streaming through the tunnel into the cave. The cave seem full of them, packed from wall to wall. And then, finally I saw the warriors.

  They too burst from the opening of the tunnel, the Maeroero falling back before the vicious blades of the fearsome taiaqha.

  At the front of the warriors was a tall man, unrecognisable behind his fierce battle-mask, and yet I knew instantly who it was.

  Turiz and his compatriots fought their way out from the entrance, fanning out in a semi-circle. I saw him glance at the mikhuy and I knew that he knew exactly what was happening. The mikhuy was rocking now, there were only seconds left, I felt before we were obliterated. Turiz knew this too. He probably knew it better than I, and he was standing only a few metres from the centre of destruction.

  Yet he never faltered. He lunged against the Maeroero with a vigour and determination that had them yielding before him even before they felt the weight of his club and the cut of his knife.

  The mikhuy was glowing now, and I knew that the end was near.

  ‘Turiz!’ I shouted to my friends, my soldiers in arms, ‘We’ve got to get to Turiz! Get out of here!’

  There was a small lull on our side of the cave as some of the Maeroero stopped to look at the new threat.

  Tupai roared at us above the din of battle, ‘Get behind me, we’ll try and cut through the centre.’

  Flea cut us an opening in the wall with his bo, a hurricane flurry of movement that sent one cave-dog after another crashing to the ground. Into the gap stormed Tupai White, tireless, deadly, flailing hammer blows like rain upon the enemy.

  ‘Tukuyrikuq!’ I shouted, but he was right there beside me, detaching himself from the wall as if part of the rock had come to life.

  Jenny ran before the old man, and I ran after him. Phil ran too, despite the agony of his leg, and his bo flashed as he ran. Fizzer Boyd ran at the rear as Tupai cut a channel across a cave full of Maeroero with his mighty hammers. The Maeroero closed around us, but the slashing bos kept us intact, and Fizzer whirled and spun at the rear, in harmony with the essence of the battle, keeping the cave-dogs from our tail.

  Ahead of us Turiz saw what we were doing and with a fierce cry to his troop he too cut into the wall of the enemy, slashing a path towards us with his taiaqha.

  The Maeroero parted like the red sea in face of the onslaught from two directions and then we were enveloped into a protective sheath of Kuimata warriors, for that is what they were, the elite, the guardians of kings, trained by the Kuimatero School of Combat. One by one we ducked into the black gap by the quivering mikhuy and, free from the battle we just ran.

  Phil pulled up once we had emerged into the Nan, but Tupai grabbed him around the waist and hoisted him under his shoulder.

  ‘Run!’ I heard Tukuyrikuq shout.

  Turiz was the last of the Kuimata to emerge from the cave and he took after us with three Maeroero at his heels. I half expected him to turn and fight, but then realised that he too knew what was coming.

  He was only ten metres from the entrance when the whole world blew apart. With a roar that shook the nan the mikhuy self-destructed inside the cave. Jagged pieces of rock like the blades of giant axes blew out of the entrance in a cloud of dust and steam, and several of the cave-dogs just disappeared.

  The Maeroero chasers at the heels of Turiz stopped, stunned by the ferocity of the explosion behind them. It was a fatal mistake. As Turiz sprinted forwards a scalding shockware rippled up the nan, invisible, but deadly,
burning the creatures even as it flung them against the walls of the nan. Ahead Turiz had gained another ten metres and dived to the ground. All of us, even further ahead did the same, and I felt the searing blast tug and tear at the back of my robes as it passed over my head.

  Turiz lay where he had dived to the ground and did not move.

  I got unsteadily to my feet and ran to him, but as quick as I was, Jenny was there first. His back was scalded and great flakes of skin were peeling from the red raw flesh underneath.

  ‘Cold water,’ Jenny cried. ‘We’ve got to get him to cold water.’

  ‘The lake,’ I said.

  ‘What about the monster!’

  Perversely, Tukuyrikuq began then to laugh. ‘Monster! Shi-Urlu is no monster. She is a pet.’

  Turiz looked up weakly, blankly, and Tukuyrikuq stopped laughing and began to bark orders in Runa Simi to the other Kuimata.

  They raised him gently and ran ahead of us, disappearing into the tunnel that led down to the inky lake.

  My legs gave out at that point and I found myself sitting on the dusty floor of the nan, my head between my legs, heaving for breath.

  Then Flea clapped a hand on my shoulder, and Jenny sat beside me. Fizzer put his arms around both of us and Phil and Tupai joined the group embrace.

  We held each other and no-one said anything, yet we shared deeply with each other. We all felt the bond of common danger, and the unexpected release from the certainty of death.

  We just held each other until a moa-cart arrived to take us back to the city.

  14. A Life Underground

  By Daniel Taylor

  The fight in the cave of the rock eater had affected us all, in different ways, and some of the effects were still to come. We were surrounded by warriors, whooping and shouting, and we had no idea what they were saying. Tukuyrikuq had been mildly concussed by the blast and was sitting groggily against the nan wall, his head in his hands. On all of our faces there had been a kind of elation, the after-adrenalin high that no-one can imagine who has not fought for their lives, and won.