The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

July 7, 1976

  The Jewel of Bas

  1

  Mouse stirred the stew in the small iron pot. There wasn’t much of it. She sniffed and said: “You could have stolen a bigger joint. We’ll go hungry before the next town.”

  “Uh huh,” Ciaran grunted lazily.

  Anger began to curl in Mouse’s eyes.

  “I suppose it’s all right with you if we run out of food,” she said sullenly.

  Ciaran leaned back comfortably against a moss-grown boulder and watched her with lazy gray eyes. He liked watching Mouse. She was a head shorter than he, which made her very short indeed, and as thin as a young girl. Her hair was black and wild, as though only wind ever combed it. Her eyes were black, too, and very bright. There was a small red thief’s brand between them. She wore a ragged crimson tunic, and her bare arms and legs were as brown as his own.

  Ciaran grinned. His lip was scarred, and there was a tooth missing behind it. He said, “It’s just as well. I don’t want you getting fat and lazy.”

  Mouse, who was sensitive about her thinness, said something pungent and threw the wooden plate at him. Ciaran drew his shaggy head aside enough to let it by and then relaxed, stroking the harp on his bare brown knees. It began to purr softly.

  Ciaran felt good. The heat of the sunballs that floated always, lazy in a reddish sky, made him pleasantly sleepy. And after the clamor and crush of the market squares in the border towns, the huge high silence of the place was wonderful. He and Mouse were camped on a tongue of land that licked out from the Phrygian hills down into the coastal plains of Atlantea. A short cut, but only gypsies like themselves ever took it. To Ciaran’s left, far below, the sea spread sullen and burning, cloaked in a reddish fog.

  To his right, also far below, were the Forbidden Plains. Flat, desolate, and barren, reaching away and away to the up-curving rim of the world, where Ciaran’s sharp eyes could just make out a glint of gold; a mammoth peak reaching for the sky.

  Mouse said suddenly, “Is that it, Kiri? Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life?”

  Ciaran struck a shivering chord from the harp. “That’s it.”

  “Let’s eat,” said Mouse.

  “Scared?”

  “Maybe you want me to go back! Maybe you think a branded thief isn’t good enough for you! Well I can’t help where I was born or what my parents were—and you’d have a brand on your ugly face too, if you hadn’t just been lucky!”

  She threw the ladle.

  This time her aim was better and Ciaran didn’t duck quite in time. It clipped his ear. He sprang up, looking murderous, and started to heave it back at her. And then, suddenly, Mouse was crying, stamping up and down and blinking tears out of her eyes.

  “All right, I’m scared! I’ve never been out of a city before, and besides…” She looked out over the silent plain, to the distant glint of Ben Beatha. “Besides,” she whispered, “I keep thinking of the stories they used to tell—about Bas the Immortal, and his androids, and the gray beasts that served them. And about the Stone of Destiny.”

  Ciaran made a contemptuous mouth. “Legends. Old wives’ tales. Songs to give babies a pleasant shiver.” A small glint of avarice came into his gray eyes. “But the Stone of Destiny—it’s a nice story, that one. A jewel of such power that owning it gives a man rule over the whole world…”

  He squinted out across the barren plain. “Some day,” he said softly, “maybe I’ll see if that one’s true.”

  “Oh, Kiri.” Mouse came and caught his wrists in her small strong hands. “You wouldn’t. It’s forbidden—and no one that’s gone into the Forbidden Plains has ever come back.”

  “There’s always a first time.” He grinned. “But I’m not going now, Mousie. I’m too hungry.”

  She picked up the plate silently and ladled stew into it and set it down. Ciaran laid his harp down and stretched—a tough, wiry little man with legs slightly bandy and a good-natured hard face. He wore a yellow tunic even more ragged than Mouse’s.

  They sat down. Ciaran ate noisily with his fingers. Mouse fished out a hunk of meat and nibbled it moodily. A breeze came up, pushing the sunballs around a little and bringing tatters of red fog in off the sea. After a while Mouse said:

  “Did you hear any of the talk in the market squares, Kiri?”

  He shrugged. “They gabble. I don’t waste my time with it.”

  “All along the border countries they were saying the same thing. People who live or work along the edge of the Forbidden Plains have disappeared. Whole towns of them, sometimes.”

  “One man falls into a beast-pit,” said Ciaran impatiently, “and in two weeks of gossip the whole country has vanished. Forget it.”

  “But it’s happened before, Kiri. A long time ago…”

  “A long time ago some wild tribe living on the Plains came in and got tough, and that’s that!” Ciaran wiped his hands on the grass and said angrily, “If you’re going to nag all the time about being scared…”

  He caught the plate out of her hands just in time. She was breathing hard, glaring at him. She looked like her name, and cute as hell. Ciaran laughed.

  “Come here, you.”

  She came, sulkily. He pulled her down beside him and kissed her and took the harp on his knees. Mouse put her head on his shoulder. Ciaran was suddenly very happy.

  He began to draw music out of the harp. There was a lot of distance around him, and he tried to fill it up with music, a fine free spate of it out of the thrumming strings. Then he sang. He had a beautiful voice, clear and true as a new blade, but soft. It was a simple tune, about two people in love. Ciaran liked it.

  After a while Mouse reached up and drew his head around, stroking the scar on his lip so he had to stop singing. She wasn’t glaring any longer. Ciaran bent his head.

  His eyes were closed. But he felt her body stiffen against him, and her lips broke away from his with a little gasping cry.

  “Kiri—Kiri, look!”

  He jerked his head back, angry and startled. Then the anger faded.

  There was a different quality to the light. The warm, friendly, reddish sunlight that never dimmed or faded.

  There was a shadow spreading out in the sky over Ben Beatha. It grew and widened, and the sunballs went out, one by one, and darkness came toward them over the Forbidden Plains.

  They crouched, clinging together, not speaking, not breathing. An uneasy breeze sighed over them, moving out. Then, after a long time, the sunballs sparked and burned again, and the shadow was gone.

  Ciaran dragged down an unsteady breath. He was sweating, but where his hands and Mouse’s touched, locked together, they were cold as death.

  “What was it, Kiri?”

  “I don’t know.” He got up, slinging the harp across his back without thinking about it. He felt naked suddenly, up there on the high ridge. Stripped and unsafe. He pulled Mouse to her feet. Neither of them spoke again. Their eyes had a queer stunned look.

  This time it was Ciaran that stopped, with the stewpot in his hands, looking at something behind Mouse. He dropped it and jumped in front of her, pulling the wicked knife he carried from his girdle. The last thing he heard was her wild scream.

  But he had time enough to see. To see the creatures climbing up over the crest of the ridge beside them, fast and silent and grinning, to ring them in with wands tipped at the point with opals like tiny sunballs.

  They were no taller than Mouse, but thick and muscular, built like men. Gray animal fur grew on them like the body-hair of a hairy man, lengthening into a coarse mane over the skull. Where the skin showed it was gray and wrinkled and tough.

  Their faces were flat, with black animal nose-buttons. They had sharp teeth, gray with a bright, healthy grayness. Their eyes were blood-pink, without whites or visible pupils.

  The eyes were the worst.

  Ciaran yelled and slashed out with his knife. One of the gray brutes danced in on lithe, quick feet and touched him on the neck with its jeweled wand.

  Fire explode
d in Ciaran’s head, and then there was darkness, pierced by Mouse’s scream. As he slid down into it he thought:

  “They’re Kalds. The beasts of legend that served Bas the Immortal and his androids. Kalds, that guarded the Forbidden Plains from man!”

  Ciaran came to, on his feet and walking. From the way he felt, he’d been walking a long time, but his memory was vague and confused. He had been relieved of his knife, but his harp was still with him.

  Mouse walked beside him. Her black hair hung over her face and her eyes looked out from behind it, sullen and defiant.

  The gray beasts walked in a rough circle around them, holding their wands ready. From the way they grinned, Ciaran had an idea they hoped they’d have an excuse for using them.

  With a definitely uneasy shock, Ciaran realized that they were far out in the barren waste of the Forbidden Plains.

  He got a little closer to Mouse. “Hello.”

  She looked at him. “You and your short cuts! So all that talk in the border towns was just gabble, huh?”

  “So it’s my fault! If that isn’t just like a woman…” Ciaran made an impatient gesture. “All right, all right! That doesn’t matter now. What does matter is where are we going and why?”

  “How should I—Wait a minute. We’re stopping.”

  The Kalds warned them with their wands to stand. One of the gray brutes seemed to be listening to something that Ciaran couldn’t hear. Presently it gestured and the party started off again in a slightly different direction.

  After a minute or two a gully appeared out of nowhere at their feet. From up on the ridge the Forbidden Plains had looked perfectly flat, but the gully was fairly wide and cut in clean like a sword gash, hidden by a slight roll of the land. They scrambled down the steep bank and went along the bottom.

  Again with an uneasy qualm, Ciaran realized they were headed in the general direction of Ben Beatha.

  The old legends had been gradually lost in the stream of time, except to people who cared for such things, or made a living from singing about them, like Ciaran. But in spite of that Ben Beatha was taboo.

  The chief reason was physical. The Plains, still called Forbidden, ringed the mountain like a protective wall, and it was an indisputable fact whether you liked it or not that people who went out onto them didn’t come back. Hunger, thirst, wild beasts, or devils—they didn’t come back. That discouraged a lot of traveling.

  Besides, the only reason for attempting to reach Ben Beatha was the legend of the Stone of Destiny, and people had long ago lost faith in that. Nobody had seen it. Nobody had seen Bas the Immortal who was its god and guardian, nor the androids that were his servants, nor the Kalds that were slaves to both of them.

  Long, long ago people were supposed to have seen them. In the beginning, according to the legends, Bas the Immortal had lived in a distant place—a green world where there was only one huge sunball that rose and set regularly, where the sky was sometimes blue and sometimes black and silver, and where the horizon curved down. The manifest idiocy of all that still tickled people so they liked to hear songs about it.

  Somewhere on that green world, somehow, Bas had acquired the flaming stone that gave him the power of life and death and destiny. There were a lot of conflicting and confused stories about trouble between Bas and the inhabitants of the funny world with the sky that changed like a woman’s fancy. Eventually he was supposed to have gathered up a lot of these inhabitants through the power of the Stone and transported them somehow across a great distance to the world where they now lived.

  Ciaran had found that children loved these yarns particularly. Their imaginations were still elastic enough not to see the ridiculous side. He always gave the Distance Cycle a lot of schmaltz.

  So after Bas the Immortal and his Stone of Destiny had got all these people settled in a new world, Bas created his androids, Khafre and Steud, and brought the Kalds from somewhere out in that vague Distance; another world, perhaps. And there were wars and revolts and raiding parties, and bitter struggles between Bas and the androids and the humans for power, with Bas always winning because of the Stone. There was a bottomless well of material there for ballads. Ciaran used it frequently.

  But the one legend that had always maintained its original shape under the battering of generations was the one about Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life, being the dwelling place of Bas the Immortal and his androids and the Kalds. And somewhere under Ben Beatha was the Stone, whose possession could give a man life eternal and the powers of whatever god you chose to believe in.

  Ciaran had toyed with that one in spite of his skepticism. Now it looked as though he was going to see for himself.

  He looked at the Kalds, the creatures who didn’t exist, and found his skepticism shaken. Shaken so hard he felt sick with it, like a man waking up to find a nightmare beside him in the flesh, booting his guts in.

  If the Kalds were real, the androids were real. From the androids you went to Bas, and from Bas to the Stone of Destiny.

  Ciaran began to sweat with sheer excitement.

  Mouse jerked her head up suddenly. “Kiri—listen!”

  From somewhere up ahead and to the right there began to come a rhythmic, swinging clank of metal. Underneath it Ciaran made out the shuffle of bare or sandaled feet.

  The Kalds urged them on faster with the jewel-tipped wands. The hot opalescence of the tips struck Ciaran all at once. A jewel-fire that could shock a man to unconsciousness like the blow of a fist, just by touching.

  The power of the Stone, perhaps. The Stone of Destiny, sleeping under Ben Beatha.

  The shuffle and clank got louder. Quite suddenly they came to a place where the gully met another one almost at right angles, and stopped. The ears of the Kalds twitched nervously.

  Mouse shrank in closer against Ciaran. She was looking off down the new cut. Ciaran looked, too.

  There were Kalds coming toward them. About forty of them, with wands. Walking between their watchful lines were some ninety or a hundred humans, men and women, shackled together by chains run through loops in iron collars. They were so close together they had to lock-step, and any attempt at attacking their guards would have meant the whole column falling flat.

  Mouse said, with vicious clarity, “One man falls into a beast-pit, and in three weeks of gossip a whole town is gone. Hah!”

  Ciaran’s scarred mouth got ugly. “Keep going, Mousie. Just keep it up.” He scowled at the slave gang and added, “But what the hell is it all about? What do they want us for?”

  “You’ll find out,” said Mouse. “You and your short cuts.”

  Ciaran raised his hand. Mouse ducked and started to swing on him. A couple of Kalds moved in and touched them apart, very delicately, with the wands. They didn’t want knockouts this time. Just local numbness.

  Ciaran was feeling murderous enough to start something anyway, but a second flick of the wand on the back of his neck took the starch out of him. By that time the slave party had come up and stopped.

  Ciaran stumbled over into line and let the Kalds lock the collar around his neck. The man in front of him was huge, with a mane of red hair and cords of muscle on his back the size of Ciaran’s arm. He hadn’t a stitch on but a leather G-string. His freckled, red-haired skin was slippery with sweat. Ciaran, pressed up against him, shut his mouth tight and began to breathe very hard with his face turned as far away as he could get it.

  They shackled Mouse right in back of him. She put her arms around his waist, tighter than she really had to. Ciaran squeezed her hands.

  2

  The kalds started the line moving again, using the wands like ox-goads. They shuffled off down the gully, going deeper and deeper into the Forbidden Plains.

  Very softly, so that nobody but Ciaran could hear her, Mouse whispered, “These locks are nothing. I can pick them any time.”

  Ciaran squeezed her hand again. It occurred to him that Mouse was a handy girl to have around.

  After a while she said, “Kiri—
that shadow. We did see it?”

  “We did.” He shivered in spite of himself.

  “What was it?”

  “How should I know? And you better save your breath. Looks like a long walk ahead of us.”

  It was. They threaded their way through a growing maze of cracks in the plain, cracks that got deeper and deeper, so you had to look straight up to see the red sky and the little floating suns. Ciaran found himself watching furtively to make sure they were still shining. He wished Mousie hadn’t reminded him of the shadow. He’d never been closer to cold, clawing panic than in those moments on the ridge.

  The rest of the slave gang had obviously come a long way already. They were tired. But the Kalds goaded them on, and it wasn’t until about a third of the line was being held up bodily by those in front or behind that a halt was called.

  They came to a fairly wide place where three of the gullies came together. The Kalds formed the line into a circle, squeezed in on itself so they were practically sitting in each other’s laps, and then stood by watchfully, lolling pink tongues over their bright gray teeth and letting the wands flash in the dimmed light.

  Ciaran let his head and shoulders roll over onto Mousie. For some time he had felt her hands working around her own collar, covered by her hair and the harp slung across his back. She wore a rather remarkable metal pin that had other functions than holding her tunic on, and she knew how to use it.

  Her collar was still in place, but he knew she could slide out of it now any time she wanted. She bent forward over him as though she was exhausted. Her black hair fell over his face and neck. Under it her small quick hands got busy.

  The lock snapped quietly, and the huge red-haired man collapsed slowly on top of Ciaran. His voice whispered, but there was nothing weak about it.

  He said, “Now me.”

  Ciaran squirmed and cursed. The vast weight crushed him to silence.

  “I’m a hunter. I can hear a rabbit breathing in its warren. I heard the woman speak. Free me or I’ll make trouble.”

  Ciaran sighed resignedly, and Mouse went to work.