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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Serie: Tomorrow
- Sprache: Englisch
The Bright Flag of Tomorrow by Arthur Leo Zagat is a riveting exploration of hope and revolution set against a backdrop of societal upheaval. As a charismatic leader emerges with a bold vision for a brighter future, a wave of change sweeps through the city, challenging the status quo and igniting passions. Amidst the turmoil, individuals from all walks of life are drawn into a struggle that will test their ideals and courage. With powerful themes of ambition, loyalty, and the quest for a better world, this novel delves into the heart of human resilience and the transformative power of hope. Will the flag of tomorrow rise above the chaos, or will it be consumed by the flames of conflict? Dive into this gripping narrative and witness the fight for a new dawn.
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Seitenzahl: 113
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
The Bright Flag of Tomorrow
I. — THE MEANING OF FEAR
II. — THE SILENCE A-TREMBLE
III. — TIDINGS OF WRATH
IV. — THE STRENGTH OF A MAN
V. — WHERE DANGER CREEPS
VI. — THE BLACK PIT
VII. — WITHIN THE CAVE
VIII. — PERIL IS THE PLEDGE
IX. — DEATH IN THE FOREST
X. — FINGERS UNCROSSED
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
The Bright Flag of Tomorrow
I. — THE MEANING OF FEAR
THE sun, an hour risen, flooded the Mountain with brightness. The morning wind whispered softly through the forest that cloaked the mountain with a robe of living green. Within the cool underbrush-shadows of the forest scuttered the small woods creatures; the chipmunks, the rabbits, the field mice. The forest walled the clearing with the dark brown pillars of its boles, with the shining green of its foliage, and out of the clearing rose a unison of young voices.
"We pledge allegiance to our Flag…" the voices chanted in unison.
Before the Fire Stone at one end of the clearing, Dikar stood, straight and tall and proud. The sun dusted with gold his bronzed limbs, his muscle-banded torso. It made golden his silken beard, his shock of yellow hair. There was strength in his broadly sculptured face, solemnity and thoughtfulness in his high brow In his blue eyes was a light that did not come from the sun.
Braced against Dikar's taut belly was the lower end of a straight, white pole that a week ago had been a birch sapling in the woods. Dikar's great hands grasped the pole, holding it slanting only slightly forward, the muscles swelled under the smooth, brown skin of Dikar's arms. Above Dikar's shining head the flag hung from the pole. The folds of the flag lifted a little in the morning wind, settled down, and lifted again.
Red-striped the flag was, and white-striped, and in one corner of the flag was a white-starred square of blue deep as the cloudless sky at dusk. The sun's light lay on the flag, but the brightness and the glory of the flag seemed to come from the stuff itself of which the girls had sewn it.
"And to the country for which it stands…"
High and clear and youthful, the voices of the bunch chanted the words Johndawson had taught them. Row on row the boys and the girls of the Bunch stood in the grass of the clearing, facing Dikar and the flag, their right arms upraised.
To the right of the Bunch was the long, low, weather-grayed wall of the Boys' House, to their left that of the Girls' House. Behind them was the post-propped roof of the Eating Place and beyond that the mountain lifted high and green and shining into the shining blue of the morning sky.
The Girls made the forward rows, their slim forms robed in the lustrous mantles of their hair. Rounded shoulders, sun-browned flanks, peeped through those black and blond and russet robes. Waists were clasped by thigh-length skirts plaited from reeds, deepening breasts were hidden by circlets woven from leaves for the unmated, of gayly-hued flowers for the wed.
Behind the Girls were the Boys, a few full-bearded like Dikar, some hairless as yet, their faces rashed with pimples, the faces of most fuzzed with the sparse beginnings of beards. All the boys were naked save for small aprons of twigs split and deftly intertwined, all were clean-limbed, narrow-hipped, their hollow bellies and deep chests plated with flat, lithe muscles.
In the eyes of boys and girls alike, was the same brightness that glowed in the wind-lifted stuff of the flag.
"One nation, indivisible…."
ONE nation. On this shining morning it was a nation enslaved. From the circling base of the mountain, far and far to where the sky and ground met and unthinkably far beyond that meeting, yellow-faced men, black-faced men, were masters of the land for which the starry flag stood. Ravening, brutish hordes. They had come out of the East and out of the West and up from the South in a long-ago time of fear that Dikar recalled only dimly and most of the Bunch not at all. They had come with a rolling of thunder, and a death-hail that rained from sea and sky, and though the people that dwelt in the land had fought them, desperately, frantically, when their thunders rolled to silence and their death hail no longer shook the earth they had made themselves masters of the land, and of those of the people that still lived in the land.
"With liberty and justice for all."
No liberty was there in all the land, no justice. Only the whips and the guns of the green-clad men who were its masters, only their barbed-wire fenced prison camps and their hangman's nooses, their driving and their cruelty.
In all the vast land there was liberty and justice only here on the Mountain to which, in the time of fear, the Old Ones had brought the little children who now were grown to be the Boys and the Girls of the Bunch, and had hidden them here from the green-clad hordes.
High, twice and three times as high as the tallest tree in the woods, a drop circled the base of the Mountain.
The face of the drop was sheer rock that gave neither hand nor foothold to an unaided climber, and circling the base of the drop was a wide space of tumbled stones. While the death-thunder still rolled in the flaming sky, the Old Ones had brought the little children to the Mountain and had blasted away the one narrow, slanting hill atop which ran the road by which they had reached the Mountain.
The Old Ones themselves had been crushed under the falling stones of the narrow hill, but they had left with the children Musts and Must-nots that the children obeyed, and because they faithfully obeyed the Musts and Must-nots of the Old Ones, and because the woods screened them from the far land below, and from the planes in the sky above, the children had grown tall and strong on the mountain.
They who were masters of the land knew nothing of the children on the mountain. And the children had known nothing of the far land below and nothing of Those who were masters of the far land until Dikar had ventured down the drop and into the far land, and had learned the terror that stalked it, and had brought back from the far land two, Marthadawson and Johndawson, who had taught him more.
And because of what he had learned, and because of a dream he had dreamed all the time he had lived on the mountain, a dream that was not a dream but a memory of the long-ago time of fear, Dikar had added to the pledge Johndawson had taught the Bunch, another pledge, that the Bunch now were chanting.
"We pledge ourselves, our strength, our lives," the clear, young voices of the Bunch proclaimed, "to drive the invader from the land and make our country free again."
The chorus ended, but for a moment longer the brown arms remained outstretched to the flag, and there was a lump in Dikar's throat, in his eyes a stinging of unaccustomed tears.
THE arms fell. Dikar dropped the butt of the pole to the ground, catching on his arm the folds of the flag that they might not trail the ground, and as he did so, Marilee, Dikar's brown-haired, gray-eyed mate, came lithe and silent from the front row of girls.
Dikar rolled the flag smoothly about its staff and slanted the staff down so that Marilee might draw over it the long bag of black cloth she had sewed for that purpose, and tie its mouth about the peeled, white wood of the staff.
The Bunch broke up into chattering groups that moved off to the jobs Dikar, Boss of the Bunch and of the Boys, and Bessalton, black-haired Boss of the Girls, had given out at breakfast. But Dikar went into the woods beyond the great oak whose spreading, leafy top canopied the fire from the eyes in the sky, and Marilee went with him.
It was cool and shadowy in the woods as Dikar and Marilee went towards a new little house that the Bunch had built there, away from the clearing.
"Dikar," Marilee said, "do you think we ever will?" Her eyes were grave in her elfin face, her tanned body was slim and supple within its ankle-length mantle of lustrous brown hair, though in that body Marilee carried her child, and Dikar's.
"Do I think we ever will what?" Dikar asked, smiling tenderly.
"Ever free America from the Asafrics?" That was the name by which Johndawson called the masters of America, explaining to Dikar and Marilee that it was a shortening of the long words, Asiatic-African Confederation, that was the real name of the green-clad hordes. "We are so few, Dikar, and they are so many," Marilee worried. "What can we do against them?"
Dikar's eyes were shadowed. "I don't know, Marilee." The brush rustled about their bare legs, and the forest seemed to darken with a kind of dread. "I don't know," Dikar repeated, after they had gone a space in silence. "But we can try. We've got to try." His white teeth flashed in a wide grin and his voice was young again, boyishly confident. "We'll make a good try, too. You just wait and see."
"I know you'll try, Dikar." They were coming to the little log house in the woods. "And I want you to try."
The house was like those in which the mated pairs lived, in the woods behind the Eating Place, but it was larger than the rest and up from its roof rose a strange network of wires that glinted red-yellow where the forest foliage had been cut away to give them space.
"But I'm afraid," Marilee whispered. Dikar stopped to lift down the flag from his shoulder, so that it might go through the doorway of the house.
"Not for me am I afraid, but for you. I've been afraid for you ever since I saw them, down in the far land, ever since I saw their long guns and shining knives, and their cruel eyes."
Dikar held still, his face troubled. "But, Marilee—"
"Marilee," a new voice said from inside the little house. "You've been afraid for your man two weeks." Marthadawson came into the doorway. "I've been afraid for mine for so many years that I have forgotten what it is not to be afraid."
II. — THE SILENCE A-TREMBLE
HER skin was tightly drawn over the bones of her face, strangely pale by contrast to Marilee's. Her unbound hair was brown as Marilee's, but without luster, and it neither fell unbound nor was braided as the girls braid theirs while working, but was piled, straggly and thin, on top of her head. Her scrawny frame was clothed in a gray and shapeless dress, her feet in broken, shabby shoes.
"Long ago, Marilee," Marthadawson said and put a hand on Marilee's shoulder, "my John went off to fight the Asafrics, and that was when I began to be afraid for him." Her voice was a tired shadow of a voice. "All the time the fighting kept on I was afraid that he would be killed. And then the fighting ended, and news came through of what they were doing to our men who had not been killed, and I was afraid that John had not been killed."
Marthadawson stopped talking for a moment, the woods were very still, and Marthadawson's eyes remembered agony.
"One night," she began again, telling what her eyes remembered, "there was a scratching at my door. I opened it and a thing fell in that I thought was the scarecrow from the cornfield. Then I saw that it was John.
"Before I dared do anything for him," Marthadawson's low, tired voice went on, "I had to carry him up two flights of stairs to the attic to hide him. He had been a big man when he went away to fight, and I am not strong, but what there was left of him I could carry easily.
"When I had brought him back to life, I wanted him to flee with me to the woods, as many had done, to live there like hunted animals or to die, but to live and die free. But he told me he had been chosen as an agent of the Secret Net that works always, blind and in the dark, against the invaders, and we did not flee.
"That was five years ago, Marilee. For five years I hid John in the attic, and for every minute of those five years, every second, I was afraid, afraid as you cannot be who do not know what they do to the agents of the Secret Net whom they catch. For five years, my dear, I lived with fear, but never once did I reproach John for the work he had chosen, or ask him to give it up.
