by C. L. Moore
Alan thought he had never known what it was to kiss a girl before. This strong, lithe body was not afraid of the full pressure his arms could bring to bear. She was not, after all, so fragile as she looked. It was like embracing a figure of tempered steel that answered the pressure with a singing resilience, quivering and alive with more than human aliveness.
Evaya stepped back.
"Now you are awake!" she said breathlessly, with a little dazzled smile. "But we have no time to talk of anything but Flande now. I called you so long, day after day. But you were not yet healed. The fountain still kept you in its sleep."
Alan caught his breath, remembrance coming back with an overwhelming rush.
"That was all real? Not delirium?"
"Real enough. Your sleep was deep—and Flande still stays his hand. I think—I am afraid—perhaps he waits only until you awake ..."
-
Chapter III
The Way of the Gods
Flande! Flande and the tower of rain, and the battle on the waterfalling steps. It all came back to Alan in an avalanche of vivid memories. Questions crowded upon questions until his tongue tripped. He stammered over them for a moment, then said simply, "What happened?" and waited almost dizzily for the answer. Evaya smiled again.
But she sobered quickly.
"They took away your friends," she told him. "The Terasi, I mean. There was a great fight there on the steps. The evil young man fought terribly, but they took him at last. They struck the red girl on the head and carried her off senseless." Evaya looked a little pleased, in spite of herself. She had made no secret of her aversion toward Karen. "The old man went quite peacefully when he saw there was no hope. He seemed almost interested. I saw him trying to talk to the Terasi leader as they went down the steps."
Alan grinned. In the sudden strangeness of this alien city, it was good to hear one familiar thing about someone he knew. That would be Sir Colin—coolly examining the headsman's axe as it fell toward his own neck. He said quickly:
"Where did they go?"
Evaya shook her head, the silvery hair clouding out around her. "Nobody knows. The Terasi live somewhere outside Carcasilla, in the wilderness underground. Flande put a magic on them and brought them here. And afterward, when you were crushed by the barbarian's blow, he refused to let me bathe you in the fountain to heal your hurts."
Alan nodded, remembering dimly. "You—you changed his mind, didn't you?"
Evaya's face lighted. "I defied him. But—but shivering inside, for fear he might destroy me. I don't know how I found the courage to do it, unless—sometimes I have thought I was once the priestess who opened the doors of Carcasilla to the gods when the gods still lived. Long ago. But I am immortal, of course. Like you."
Alan looked at her silently. After a while he said, "I was wondering if I'd dreamed that."
She shook her head.
"No. It's quite true. All who bathe in the fountain live forever, so long as they renew the baths. You did not dream it. The gods made us so."
"The gods?"
She pointed. Far off through the city Alan could see a disc of blackness set against the cavern wall, tiny in the distance. Before it stood something so bright that its outlines blurred before his eyes.
"The statue of the Light-Wearer," Evaya said, reverence in her voice. "They made Carcasilla and us, for their pleasure. They lighted the fountain, that we might live eternally. Very long ago, I think I was their priestess, as I say—I opened the doors when they called. For there were good Light-Wearers and some—not good. Some who might have destroyed us. So the two doors into Carcasilla can be opened only from within, at the summons of the gods. But the gods, of course, are dead ..."
Evaya lifted a troubled gaze to his. "Has one of the gods come back?" she asked him.
Alan shook his head. "You tell me," he said.
Evaya said presently, "I felt the call from far away, very weak. And I remembered from many sleeps ago ... All memories are washed away in the fountain when we take the great sleep, but somehow, I knew the call. So I went up to the citadel where the gods once lived—and you were there, A-lahn. But I think—A-lahn, I think this god is not one of the good Light-Wearers. If it is a god. I am not sure ... I don't wish to be sure. I shut my brain to it, A-lahn, when I hear the far-away echo of that call."
"Have you heard it since I—came here?"
She shook her head.
Alan sat down deliberately upon the cushioned, swaying floor. He beckoned, and Evaya sank beside him in a descending billow of her pale garments and silvery clouds of hair. He was trying to keep a tight grip upon the spinning in his brain. There was so much to be learned, and perhaps so little time to learn it, if Flande was watching—if the enigmatic thing Evaya knew as a god were calling from its unthinkable citadel ...
"You've got to tell me—well, everything," he said. "From the beginning. Who are these gods of yours? Where did they come from?"
Evaya laughed on an exquisite ripple of ascending notes. "Not even Flande himself could answer all that! The gods? How should we mortals know? We have dim legends that tell of their conquering earth so long ago that we have no way to measure the time between. Great ships, dropping down out of the skies, bellowing thunder and flame. It may be they came from another—world—no one knows that now. They were beings from—outside. They wore light like a garment, and to them humans were—vermin. They cleansed the earth of them. And in the end, the legends say, they ruled earth from those citadels they had built, like the one above, keeping only those humans they had bred themselves, like us. To ornament their beautiful cities. I think Carcasilla is the only one left now."
Alan looked out over the airy suburbs floating before him, not seeing anything. Things were beginning to fit themselves together in his mind—but what stunning things, what appalling catastrophes and immeasurable vistas of time for a man's mind to encompass!
Earth conquered, ravaged, ruined—while he slept his timeless slumbers in the ship. The ship? A ship from space, like those the invaders must have come in? It was the inevitable answer. The being of the golden globe, the bodiless presence in the citadel, the questing thing at their heels in the mist, must somehow be one creature only—a Light-Wearer!
But what had gone wrong? Why had not the—the first of the alien beings—awakened when the armada that followed him came raging down from the skies? Why had this inhuman Columbus slept through the heyday of his race's power and glory, and wakened with his human captives only in the desolation of a time-ruined world?
Perhaps the Alien, first of his kind in a world inconceivably new to him, had misjudged the depths of his ageless slumber. His awakening, in the twilight of a dying world, must have been very terrible. Alan, from the depths of his own nostalgia for all that had passed into dust, could almost feel pity for the Light-Wearer who had come to lead his race to conquest—and slept, forgotten, while the dark sands of time ran irrevocably away. How frantically he must have scoured the empty earth before realization dawned that he was the last of his kind upon this ruined world. The first—and the last.
"Tell me about Flande," he said presently, in a controlled voice. It was not, he thought, wise to think very deeply on the subject of the Alien, and of Earth's ruin.
-
EVAYA answered obediently, "Flande is very old and wise." (She was a toy, he remembered bitterly. A toy created of human flesh, to amuse the gods of earth. Obedience was bred into her from unthinkable aeons ago.) "Flande has never taken the sleep. None but he remembers all that has happened since Carcasilla's first days. He is afraid of forgetting, perhaps—something. He has many magics, and now he hates us both."
"Is he—human?"
"Flande is—" She paused, closing her eyes softly. And she sat perfectly still, the drifting hair settling about her shoulders. "You see—" she murmured, and lifted heavy lids with infinite slowness. "A-lahn!" she cried, with a curious, sleepy fright, looking at him under drowsy lashes. And she crumpled toward him, yawning with
a flowerlike delicacy.
He caught her in his arms, and again he was vividly aware of her blown-glass strength and fragility.
"What is it?" he asked frantically.
"Flande—" she told him in a slow, drugged voice. "Flande—must be—watching. Listening to—our talk. He will not let me—tell you—about him ... I'm afraid, A-lahn—A-lahn dearest—the Light-Wearer ..."
She relaxed in his arms with the utter limpness of death itself, though he could still feel breath stirring her ribs gently against his arm.
So—Flande had struck.
Well, it had been as good a way as any, he supposed, to summon him into Flande's presence. This—this strange little whisper far back in his mind was not really necessary. He would have gone anyhow.
But it was not Flande who called.
Another voice—an alien voice—was summoning in the deepest depths of his brain. And beside him, Evaya stirred. "Yes, lord, yes," he heard her murmuring softly, in a voice entirely without inflection. "Yes, lord—it shall be done."
And she sat up stiffly. Her eyes were enormous, staring straight ahead, their pupils blackening the violet iris. Alan said sharply, "Evaya! Evaya!" and tried to shake her out of that mirror-eyed stare. She was as rigid as ivory under his hands. Even her face was ivory, not flesh, its delicacy frozen as if by some inward congealing of the mind. And she rose to her feet.
She went forward with deliberate steps. And Alan, bemused by Flande's power, could do nothing but follow, knowing with a dreadful certainty what was happening because of the stir deep in his own brain ...
So long as she remained awake and mistress of herself, Evaya had kept her mind closed to that distant call. But when Flande put his sleep upon her to stop her revealing words, he had opened the gateway of her priestess mind ...
Alan was scarcely aware of their passage through Carcasilla. That stirring in the roots of his brain blinded and deafened him to everything but the slim, cloudy figure moving stiffly on ahead, over the fantastic bridges, the spiraled streets, toward a distant spot which they both knew well ... too well.
Before the great black circle where the light-veiled statue stood, Evaya paused. Alan paused behind her, a dozen paces away. The calling in his mind was very powerful now. A ravenous call, bellowing soundlessly from somewhere dangerously near.
Evaya touched something at the feet of the blinding statue, and quite suddenly a great flare of brilliance shot out all around the figure. It was like the blare of a struck gong, shivering out in a great wave over Carcasilla. If there could be such a thing as sound made visible, this was it.
Behind him, he heard the rising murmur of many soft voices, drawing near. All Carcasilla whispering its surprise, whispering perhaps with the awakening of memories buried deep behind the forgetfulness of many sleeps. Alan turned slowly and with infinite effort, for some inhibitory power was drugging his nerve-centers now and spreading through his body from that summoning in the brain.
The people of Carcasilla were answering the call. By tens, by scores, by hundreds, they came. Alan had not guessed before how many dwellers the city had. And when the last gossamer-robed citizen joined the crowd, and the wondering murmurs rose in a susurus all around them—exactly then, without turning, Evaya lifted her arms. Perhaps she touched some switch. Alan could not tell what.
She was facing the great circle of darkness upon the wall. Her arms were lifted, and her face. Her voice, clear and toneless as a bell, rang out over the assembly.
"Enter to your people, Light-Wearer and Lord."
A shiver seemed to run over the surface of the black disc on the wall. It was less disc than opening now. The opening to a long, dark tunnel ... Far down it something moved—brightly shimmering ...
Alan knew that it was infinitely far away. But it was rushing nearer with breathtaking speed. Each stride of its long legs—if these were legs—carried it shockingly nearer, as if it covered leagues with every step. The light-robes swirled around its devouring strides ...
It was near—it was almost upon them. It hovered, monstrous and glowing in the mouth of the tunnel, filling the high black circle of its disc ...
And then, with one great swoop, it burst into the violet daylight of Carcasilla.
-
ALAN'S confused impressions of the thing were too contradictory to have meaning. Was it monstrously tall? He could not tell, even as it stood there against the black mouth of the disc. Had it been blazingly robed in light against that blackness? He couldn't be sure. For, here in the light of the city, it was dark—a billowing darkness that swooped down upon its worshippers with a terrible avidity . It enveloped Evaya, who was foremost, in a cloud of nothingness, as if great unseen arms had seized her up in a devouring embrace.
Alan could not stir. His mind had congealed inside his congealed body, and he could only stand and stare, drowning in helpless wonder as he watched. For here at last, tangibly before him, was the nameless thing that had haunted all the hours of his awakening and the fathomless hours of his sleep. The questing creature that had run upon his tracks in the mist, the enigmatic watcher from the Citadel, the being whose dreams he had shared altogether too closely, in the long night-time of the ship.
He stared in frozen dismay as Evaya vanished into the cloudy grip of the Alien. Surely the Carcasillians had come to worship, expecting benediction—not this! This avid clutching grasp, as if the creature had been starving for countless centuries ...
Before the crowd about him could catch its breath, the tall, blinding robed figure—it was dark or light?—had tossed Evaya aside with a gesture almost of impatience, and was striding down upon the next nearest. It swooped and seized and enveloped with motion so incredibly swift that the Carcasillians could not have turned or fled even if they wished. And the great, striding god went through them like a reaper through grain, snatching up, enveloping, hurling aside figure after figure, and flashing on to the next.
Far back in Alan's brain, behind the helpless horror, the terrible revulsion, the more terrible taint of kinship with this being whose dreams he had known—lay one small corner of detached awareness. In that corner of his mind he watched and reasoned with a coolness that almost matched Sir Colin' s scientific detachment. "It can't get at them," he told himself. "Somehow, they're protected. Somehow, the good Light-Wearers gave them armor to wear—like a spiked collar for their pets. Whatever it wants it isn't getting it here. Not yet ..."
The stooping and rising and inevitable nearing of that figure almost shook even the cool corner of his brain as it came closer and closer, reaping among the standing rows of Carcasillians. Alan strained vainly at his frozen limbs. Now it was two rows ahead of him. Now it was one—Tall, formless, all but invisible in its robes that were both lightness and dark ...
The towering, inhuman thing stooped above his head with an avid swoop, its robes fell about him like blindness to shut out the violet day. He felt a vortex of hungry violence sweeping him up. Vertigo—gravity falling away beneath him—
And then a strange, indescribable, long-drawn "Ah-h-h!" of inhuman satisfaction breathing voiceless through his brain. And a probing—eager, ravenous, ruthless—as if intangible fingers were thrusting down all through his mind, his body, among his nerves, into his very soul. They were bruising fingers that in a moment would rip him inside out, bodily and mentally, as a fish might be gutted.
Instinct made him stiffen against them, with a stiffening of more than muscles. His mind went rigid in anger and rebellion, along with his body. And the thing that clutched him hesitated. He could feel its surprise and uncertainty, and he struck out into the blindness with futile fists, gasping choked curses that were less words than anger made audible. He was awake now, vividly, painfully awake as he had not been since his first bath in the fountain. And he fought with all the fury that was in him against this devouring thing that was—he knew it now—starving with an inhuman hunger for the life-force he was fighting to protect.
This much he knew, in that inviolabl
e corner of the brain where reason still dwelt. This creature was evil made incarnate, and its hunger was diabolic now. It could not touch the Carcasillians; he was its last hope. Its struggles to overpower him were as desperate in their way as his were to be free.
For one timeless instant Alan shared its hunger. And he shared its dismay and sorrow. He knew what it was to wake upon a dying world and find only the ruined relics of kinsmen that once had ruled the planet. Ruin and starvation and unthinkable loneliness.
He felt those gutting fingers thrust down along the track of the understanding thoughts, deep into his awareness, ripping and tearing.
He closed his mind like a steel trap against the treacherous sympathy of those thoughts, closed it as if he closed his eyes to shut out a terrible sight. With a brain tight-shut against everything but the danger he must fight, he stiffened against that probing, ravenous need raging all about him.
And he was holding his own. He sensed that. By fighting with every ounce of strength in him, he could hold his own. And when that strength began to fail ...
The blindness around him rifted now and again in his timeless, furious, voiceless fight. He could catch glimpses of violet light and the awed faces of the Carcasillians, and then dark again. Dark, and the starving desperation of the Alien tearing at him in a vortex of inhuman, demanding need.
And then, suddenly and bewilderingly—the bellow of gunfire.
That half-tangible grip upon him jolted—staggered—slipped away. Alan reeled back upon the slope of the white ramp, too dizzy to see anything clearly, knowing only in this moment that he was free and still alive. And then he heard—or was it a dream again?—a familiar, rasping voice, burred with strong emotion.
"Alan, laddie—gie us yer han'! Alan, here I am, laddie! It's Colin—here!"
Hard fingers dug into his arm, and a ruddy, bearded face, grinning with strain, thrust close to his. "Come awa', laddie—hurry! Can ye no see they're angry? Come awa'!"