Hammer the Exalter, Page 2

  Chapter 2

  At first he thought he was blind, and then an overwhelming nausea swept over him until he was violently ill. He lay on a thick carpet of grass holding his head, feeling like he had a hang over, darts of pain stabbing his temples. Movement caused further discomfort and pins and needles tickled his arms and legs. He sat that way for several minutes until slowly his mind began to clear and Isaac could make out shapes through the fog. He found it difficult to focus and he felt as if he was in transit somewhere between two places, one he knew well and the other alien. His nausea lessened and the dullness around him brightened, his hearing improving and his muscles relaxing. Clear and familiar sounds of small waves breaking onto a shoreline and bubbling back into the sea stole his attention and as his vision cleared further and he could see the green of some nearby trees, and smokey boulders covered in light emerald moss, all shrouded in a wafer thin mist curling in from an ocean.

  He sat still, movement still causing him pain, as he tried to orientate himself. The landscape around him, while familiar in its component parts of trees, rocks and water, felt different from any he knew. Beautifully manicured lawns and slate edging, rather than sand, greeted the water’s edge as far as he could see up the coastline in either direction. It was as if

  someone snipped the shoreline away with giant scissors and hemmed it with a petticoat of homogenous and smooth rocks.

  He raised himself tentatively on quivering legs and immediately fell back to the ground, his head spinning. He decided to stay where he was and try to fathom what had just happened to him. He recalled with a shudder the creature in the room and remembered incredibly diving through the painting and feeling as if he free fell from a great height. The journey was dreamlike, a rush of cold and heat flooding through his body as he careered through a deep mist, his body battered and flung in all directions until a harsh landing bruised him to a stop.

  He told himself to disbelieve, strained his mind to consider logical explanations as he fingered the charred fringes of his pants and shirt. Could he be hallucinating or acting out a fantasy from a drug induced psychosis or some madness he could not understand the origin of? The longer he considered these options the less able he was to deny what he could see, feel and smell around him. No dream could be so real.

  He looked around hoping to find Darion or even the crazy old man but there was no sign or sound of them. He tried standing again this time with greater success and he staggered towards the water’s edge to try and splash himself awake. He climbed down a few feet of smooth rock and carefully cupped a handful of receding water its frigidness refreshing him and watched as the water lapped very softly against the crusty water’s edge. He ran hands and water through his hair and surveyed the shoreline stretching a few hundred yards inland before the ground began rising until it became a small hillock he could not see past. Avenues of tall trees lined a steep path rising to the hill, wide enough to accommodate at least a dozen men.

  Isaac turned back to the ocean and apart from the wave-lets, appeared quite calm, benign and vast with no sign of land or islands as far as the horizon. The morning sun glistened off the surface and on such a day one could expect to see flotillas of small boats and fishermen, swimmers and divers but today the sea was utterly vacant of any human life. He turned from the sea and followed the path leading away from the water hoping once he reached the distant peak of the hill he could find some landmark to judge exactly where he was.

  He began a series of stretches in an attempt to free his body of the aches of his sudden landing commencing with ankle rolls and working up to calf and hamstring extentions. He sat and crossed his legs yoga fashion and pushed on his knees until his groin groaned while pulling one arm at a time by the wrist back over his head. After a few minutes he felt much more ready to start a search of the area. He studied the hill and slowly a deep sense of foreboding settled on him. It was not the oppression he felt in the museum, rather an uneasiness he best described to himself as anticipation. His greatest worry came from his ignorance of exactly where he now was and getting back to where he came from seemed at best problematic.

  He dropped from the rocks to a beach covered in fine sand and walked a few hundred yards in either direction calling Darion’s name repeatedly. His voice sounded shrill in the open land and the soft wind blew his cries away. He could see no trace of Darion or find evidence anybody had been through this area recently and the beach showed only his own footprints quickly washed away by the bubbling waves. He lifted himself back to the shoreline and walked towards the path, the ocean noises receding behind him until all he could notice was the absolute silence of the land. Not a bird sang or a leaf rustled and the wind that only minutes before filled the coastal air had ceased completely. The whole land felt like it was holding its breath. It was the eeriest thing he had ever experienced.

  He trundled up and along the path and after a few minutes turned back to the coastline. He noticed a change in temperature as he climbed and could now see the thin veil of mist almost entirely gone, the horizon fully visible, blank and enormous.

  Turning back, he laboured in his climb for another half an hour as the path steepened, his breathing becoming more difficult. He found the hill deceptively steep and what appeared to be only a few hundred yards when viewed from the shoreline now became a journey. As he walked he examined the path more closely. It was well tendered and maintained and seemed to be made out of the same yellow/brown rocks he saw on the shoreline not unlike the colour of the sandstone blocks of the museum he just left. He bent and tried to pry a stone loose, but the precise engineering of the road wedged each stone firmly in its place. He scanned each side of the path for evidence of stones weathered loose or fallen from general road traffic but he found no trace. Even the rolling hills and grasslands away from the path showed no sign of any rocks at all which made him think the entire road base had been transported from somewhere else. The path like the shoreline looked ordered and precise and if both were clearly tooled then there were people somewhere who constructed them.

  He continued his walk, the gradient increasing further, his legs taxed and his strength waning, with the summit appearing no closer than when he set off. He stopped to get his breath and noticed not for the last time his incredible thirst. His tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth and white foam drying on his lips. The thought came to him in quite a calm manner. If he did not get some relief soon he would start to dangerously dehydrate and that could kill him. To make matters worse the sun had reached what he guessed to be about mid day and it bit into his flesh. He looked for some shelter off the road, but apart from a few scant the trees, nothing could be seen nearer than the mini mountain ahead. A creeping anxiety began its assault on his reason and he felt he needed to be off the road and away from curious eyes. He could see the hazy outline of a distant outcrop of large rocks and trees at the top of the distant mountain and he steeled himself for one last effort.

  ‘Bloody Darion would think this is the most beautiful scenery he had ever seen,’ he thought. ‘Gee I’m glad he is not here.’ He began to chuckle through dry lips as he forced his tired legs to move the final few hundred yards to the summit.

  The walk took much longer than he expected and his exhaustion overwhelmed him. He took a final few steps to the top of the hill and collapsed to his knees, head down ans sweat dripping from the point of his nose to the dry path. He raised his head and for an instant forgot his tiredness and thirst as he absorbed the scene in front of him. A vast plain opened far below him and reached out from the floor of the hill in radials looking like green sunshine. An ocean of grass washed like a giant wave against a wall of white tipped mountains in the distance, stretching north and south, disappearing into a grey haze.

  He looked back the way he had come, the shoreline now a line in the distance and the ocean filling the rest of the horizon.

  He turned back to the mountains and the brilliant green of the grasslands looked like a sala
d bowl of freshly rinsed lettuce. Further ahead, one shape in the distance held most of his attention. At the farthest edge of his sight he could see a city butted up against the mountains, stark white buildings contrasting with the ubiquitous green.

  He tried to judge the distance, remembering how he misread the journey up the hill, but was certain the mountains were at least a fifty miles away. Even at this distance though, the buildings could be clearly seen. Giant spires pointed to the sky almost as high as the mountains they cushioned against, the city looking like a white hedgehog.

  It appeared larger than anything he had seen before and the exotic design of spires was completely alien to him. He guessed the city to be at least twenty miles broad and considering its height, very compact, not the sprawling suburbs he was so used to, rather a concentrated urban district. As with the water’s edge, the city stopped abruptly allowing the grassy plain to continue its spread along the base of the mountain range.

  He shifted his attention back to the path and saw it wriggle along the plain below but could not immediately see how it travelled down the mountain. He took a few unsure steps and warily approached what he thought to be two house sized rocks to either side of the path. He touched their suprisingly smooth surface the coolness a relief and followed their line until he stood in front of them. He saw the rocks were the crowns of two enormous carved stone heads peering down and out from the edge of the mountain. The path drove straight between them and dropped steeply into steps with five foot risers, each a plateau in itself, drilled into the mountain’s side until they disappeared towards the plain below.

  Isaac moved to the first stone towering over him at twice his height and examined the face. Deep set eyes sitting under a circlet of stone leaves watched over the plain below a necklace of rock baubles choked a massive neck. Long tresses of braided stone dropped down the side of a face housing a wide, flat nose with a mouth bridged by a thick moustache that travelled down each side of a grim mouth.

  The face looked ancient, wise and regal, with the strength and power of youth. The heads were twins, and Isaac had no doubt they had a ceremonial purpose for the race who created them as defenders of the lands below, inanimate sentries posted to waylay trespassers.

  Isaac looked past the watchmen and over the first step and sat quickly as a wave of vertigo hit him. The path descended quickly and steeply to the plain below and continued in a meandering ribbon into the distance and inevitably to the city. He did not know what to make of his circumstances.

  He stood cautiously feeling the rush of dizziness pass and studied the plain below. His natural skepticism encouraged him to dismiss recent events as some kind of hypnosis, but physically he knew he was experiencing reality. He took stock of his circumstances, listing those things he believed critical to his survival and those he considered mere inconveniences. Firstly, he knew any search for Darion would be a long one and due to his complete unfamiliarity with the land and likely unsuccessful so he relegated this issue to the non critical. He was thirsty, tired and still somewhat nauseous and these he considered serious matters. A lack of water and the threat of further dehydration became his most immediate problem and one he could not find an answer for. With little knowledge of his surrounds he decided the city a sensible option and decided to stay on or near the road in the event he met another traveller. The trip looked daunting and the hot early afternoon sun further distressed him. He decided it was foolish to try and walk in the heat and risk more stress on his body. The plain below looked very fertile and green which to Isaac meant there was water somewhere. If he could at least reach the bottom he stood a chance.

  He decided to wait until the sun dipped lower in the sky, the breathless heat of mid afternoon was drawing too much water from his pores and he needed rest and relief from the sun before he attempted the journey down the mountain. The distant city looked a difficult journey especially on foot but he reasoned if he maintained a steady pace, he could make the distance in about three days. He was glad he wore his sneakers. He placed his back to the leeward side of the nearest tree and fell immediately to sleep.

  Isaac woke in a dark place. He supposed he had opened his eyes but could not immediately tell so black was the world around him. Suddenly he felt himself weightless and flying through the air. He crashed head first into something so hard an egg shaped lump immediately formed on his forehead. He no sooner rubbed the pain away when seconds later he was thrown again, collecting another lump on the other side of his head to partner the first. He began to make out vague shapes around him and realised he was no longer outside and sat inside what he guessed to be a timber crate and he was being transported on some type of conveyance moving quickly and unevenly.

  He was tossed again and this time broke his fall with an out stretched hand.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted as another bump sent him reeling. He realised he was being carried but by what means he could not tell, his transport silent, except for the creaking of the timber joints of the crate. He ran his hands across the solid walls and could not find any windows or doors but the regular sideways movement confirmed for him he was being carried on something without wheels. He pitched forward again and slammed into the wall letting out another yelp of annoyance and pain.

  ‘Hey you idiot how about slowing down a bit?’ he called angrily.

  The movement slowed and he felt himself being more gently handled until he stopped moving completely. He could feel the crate being lowered to the ground and seconds later the roof of the container began to give way and cracks of grey light appeared above him. The box was large enough for him to stand without crouching and he pressed his back against the wall in case the roof fell and crushed him however it came away in one piece and a soft evening light crept into the cage. He toyed with the idea of climbing out when he dropped to his knees, his mouth open in shock.

  ‘Be careful who you call an idiot. You sure have a big mouth for something so small.’

  Isaac could scarcely believe his eyes. The face in front of him mirrored the statues he saw earlier. A giant head filled the roof cavity and looked three times the size of a normal human being’s, the deep and resonating voice of the creature, rippled sound waves over his skin.

  With no point of reference he reckoned the figure to be in his early twenties but may have been older and his head was covered with curly brown shoulder length hair and a neatly trimmed beard covering a bright and intelligent looking face. The eyes probed Isaac for a few more seconds and hands as large as pizza trays began replacing the lid.

  ‘Wait! Who are you?’ Cried Isaac, but the giant ignored him and closed the lid. Isaac felt himself being lifted once again, this time more gently and the jolting journey recommenced in a less frenetic, although still uncomfortable, fashion.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ came the booming voice. ‘There are only a few hundred more steps left and I will cease taking them two at a time if it makes you happy.’

  ‘Thanks,’ squeaked Isaac, who heard his own voice as an insignificant mosquito buzz against the background of the tremor from the giant.

  The journey seemed to continue interminably and Isaac felt completely drained both physically and mentally. All his long held beliefs that demanded everything in the universe to be scientifically explained if you had enough data at your disposal, deserted him completely the moment the great head showed itself throughout the roof. He felt as if he had been penciled into a story, a child’s fairy tale where improbable things were the norm. A giant of a man at least twenty feet high existing in reality, indisputable flesh and blood right before him doomed his feeble logic to less than useless.

  He always believed creatures of this size were impossible. The heart would struggle to pump blood over such a great distance and the weight would mean the legs of any over large creature would need to be at a greater than merely increasing in proportional scale. Gravity and weight would demand a twenty foot high creature to have legs like a dinosaur, not a man. However a
s improbable as he thought it to be, with his own eyes he confirmed there indeed are giants.

  Now this fact was confirmed for him he faced his next issue. He was physically impotent. When logic failed him in the past he could always rely on brute strength to win the argument and quite often win intellectual debates with a literal twist of the arm. Here such an action could mean death. This creature could crush him in an instant and this made him very nervous. His only consolation was this giant, and he assumed there must be more, had not as yet done so. If the creature wished him harm, then he supposed he would have done so already.

  After what seemed like hours, Isaac felt the end of the descent with one violent and colossal step keeping him airborne and weightless for a moment before he slammed once again into the bottom of the crate.

  As the ground levelled out he noticed immediately their speed increase and now the giant was not hampered by stairs, the ride became smooth. The cage rocked slowly for hours and Isaac drifted into another restless sleep.

  He woke lying flat on his back out in the open air, white stars blinking at him from directly above. For a long moment he thought he had dreamed the whole episode and now had the sort of relief one gets when they awake from a nightmare and realise they are safe under the covers in their bed. He could not focus his eyes as he stared at a double vision of the moon. He rubbed them hard and looked again and sure enough, two gibbous moons, looked back at him like two small C’s, each in close proximity to the other. Isaac lay still accepting yet another bold fact quite calmly. He was most certainly not on Earth any more. Rather than panic, all he could think of was whether the two moons had an extraordinary gravitational effect on each other and how two moons would affect tidal patterns on the planet. Certainly the ocean looked calm enough but he thought there would be some extraordinary king tides depending on the rotational patterns of the satellites. All very interesting information he thought and completely useless.

  He shifted focus and looked across the rest of the sky. No Southern Cross, Orion with the bright red star Betelgeuse was not where it was supposed to be and he should also have a pretty good view of Scorpio this time of the year and it too was not there. Saturn should be about ten degrees from the eastern horizon however not knowing which way was east made his orienteering difficult. What if the whole planet had no magnetic north, or spun on an odd axis, or turned on its side like Uranus? He would be unable to complete the simplest of navigations. The stars above were alien and the constellations mere spillages of milk across the sky. He felt very, very alone.

  He sat up rubbing sandpapered eyes. His cage lay open behind him and the giant was no where to be seen. He felt something heavy around his ankle and saw his leg chained to the box with a heavy linkage making his leg difficult to move more than a fraction. The two moons gave him enough light to see vague shapes including what he decided could only be the same hill he had breached earlier, now a mere bump on the horizon. In the opposite direction he could see the unmistakable city, its vastness even more impressive now he was on ground level, the spires in particular disappearing into the night sky and while now closer, still appearing to be many miles away. The mountains behind the city looked bleak in the distance however every few seconds, brilliant lighting would flash across the peaks, jettisoning the dark and illuminating the whole world for a second before plunging it again into blackness.

  ‘Its been happening like that for weeks now,’ said a booming baritone voice behind Isaac making him jump. The giant had silently moved back to the encampment, his bulk making no sound even in the still night.

  ‘What has?’ asked Isaac.

  ‘The mountains have come alive, evil portents we have not seen the like of and now an Invader has crossed the Great Desert, Hammer the Exalter will know what to do.’ The giant did not address Isaac directly appearing to speak to himself. Isaac cast his mind back to a television show he once saw on kidnappers and knew if he could personalise himself to the giant he may stand a better chance of survival.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Isaac tentatively. The giant looked down on him for a long moment.

  ‘Don’t speak to me Invader,’ he finally said. ‘Although I imagine I should feel somewhat honoured an Invader would speak to me. Usually you kill first isn’t that right?’ The giant became suddenly aggressive and Isaac shrunk away from him.

  ‘I’ve never killed anything in my life,’ said Isaac. ‘Where I come from we don’t do that sort of thing.’

  ‘Perhaps and perhaps not, you are also expert liars little man, you see we don’t forget our history so easily here in Salnikovia, our scars are deep and we have never forgiven and this is especially so with The Hammer. I am afraid you will not like meeting him.’

  Isaac felt the conversation deteriorating to an argument but at least he was learning something about the place he had arrived in.

  ‘So, what’s your name?’ persisted Isaac with a sheepish grin. ‘Come on it won’t hurt you to tell me your name, I’m hardly going to use it as a weapon if you give it to me.’

  ‘So bold,’ said the giant. ‘You want my name and we have hardly met. You want the most personal and precious thing I own, my entire being, the thing I fought twenty years to obtain and you want it in an instant. You are a strange creature Invader.’

  ‘I’ll tell you mine, it’s Isaac.’

  The giant shook his head looking distressed.

  ‘I don’t want it. Why did you give it to me, I did not ask for it.’ The giant seemed genuinely upset and paced the camp sight in a flurry until he calmed and walked back to Isaac.

  ‘I see why you gave it,’ he said. ‘Yours is so simple a name, ‘Isaac’ it means nothing, it has no history and no demands upon it, it does not seem a particularly honourable name although I may be wrong, it accords you no status and requires little maintenance and I suspect you did very little to earn it.’

  ‘I didn’t earn it, it was given to me at birth by my parents,’ said Isaac pleased the conversation was lessening the tension.

  ‘Given? How could it be given at birth? How do your parents know what you will become, are they all soothsayers and diviners of the future. Given at birth. How ridiculous.’ The giant laughed derisively. ‘I will tell you my name little man because it will mean nothing to you, and you can do no harm with it because you have no idea how I achieved it. You are an odd race.’

  The giant bowed low, until his head with its bush of brown curls bounced off his knees.

  ‘My name is Arad the Generous, of the King Makers of the city of Salnikovia, on the island of Salnikov in the Great Aesirian Empire.’

  He raised himself to his full height and looked tall and proud, his hands on his hips and a broad smile on his face. Isaac was impressed, not so much with the name itself, which he felt was a trifle ostentatious, but with the pride the giant showed. He wore the name like a badge of honour. He hoped the name was well earned and this Arad would be generous with him

  ‘So do I call you Arad or just The Generous? It seems a mouthful that’s all?’

  The giant laughed with genuine humour, the noise filling the night.

  ‘Arad is my name little Isaac, the rest is honorific and used by my peers, those who know how I earned it, but suffice to say it is proper for you to call me Arad.’

  ‘So do all your race have all those extra bits attached to the end?’ asked Isaac and again the giant laughed heartily.

  ‘Why of course, what a question, are you a jester where you come from or are you so frivolous as to ignore honorifics?’

  Isaac thought Arad was genuinely interested although he felt he looked inglorious and barbaric in the giant’s eyes.

  ‘We have earned title also Arad but mostly from those in the military who have done some great deed in battle.’

  The giant became suddenly thoughtful and wary as he stared daggers at Isaac.

  ‘Yes that would make sense. When you cast my grandfathers from their homes and slaughtered their chil
dren, and burnt their fields and exiled what was left of our tiny numbers to the wilderness, I suppose great medals and names were distributed on that day Invader.’

  Arad slammed his fist into his hands, the slap like a thunderclap exploding overhead. He stomped around the camp site, kicking the ground his eyes dancing with red anger.

  ‘It could not happen now Invader, we are strong again, terrible and strong. We have an army where we had none before and the greatest navy in history sitting in our harbours and the time will come when Hammer the Exalter will become Hammer the Restorer and we march to the lands of our fathers and reclaim what was ours.’

  At that moment Isaac thought his life was about to end. Arad stamped his feet in anger and pulled his hair. He tore massive boulders half buried in the ground and tossed them high into the air and watched them crash into the plain in a shower of rubble. All trace of the affable giant vanished and his face became hard and cruel as he bent down low to a cowering Isaac.

  ‘I won’t hurt you Invader,’ he said. ‘The Hammer will need to see you and his wisdom will decide your fate, although I think it is almost sealed.’

  The giant took the ankle chain off Isaac’s foot and returned him ungently to the cage. The giant quickly broke camp, gathering a light backpack and blanket and hoisted the cage to his back, setting off for the city with renewed vigour. Issac could feel the giant’s urgency, air whistling through cracks in the timber cage as the giant swallowed the distance between he and his destiny with disturbing rapidity.

  “A great One is coming to the Gathering

  and will contend with evil. He will be

  victorious but only if he follows the Law”

  Jharnell 23/868-70