He settled himself to watch, and presently in spite of himself Stark slept, with Zareth curled at his feet like a little dog.
There was no time down there in the heart of the Red Sea. No daylight, no dawn, no space of darkness. No winds blew, no rain nor storm broke the endless silence. Only the lazy currents whispered by on their way to nowhere, and the red sparks danced, and the great hall waited, remembering the past.
Stark waited, too. How long he never knew, but he was used to waiting. He had learned his patience on the knees of the great mountains whose heads lift proudly into open space to look at the Sun, and he had absorbed their own contempt for time.
Little by little, life returned to his body. A mongrel guard came now and again to examine him, pricking Stark’s flesh with his knife to test the reaction, so that Stark should not malinger.
He reckoned without Stark’s control. The Earthman bore his prodding without so much as a twitch until his limbs were completely his own again. Then he sprang up and pitched the man half the length of the hall, turning over and over, yelling with startled anger.
At the next period of labor, Stark was driven with the rest out into the City of the Lost Ones.
7
Stark had been in places before that oppressed him with a sense of their strangeness or their wickedness—Sinharat, the lovely ruin of coral and gold lost in the Martian wastes; Jekkara, Valkis—the Low-Canal towns that smell of blood and wine; the cliff-caves of Arianrhod on the edge of Darkside, the buried tomb-cities of Callisto. But this—this was nightmare to haunt a man’s dreams.
He stared about him as he went in the long line of slaves, and felt such a cold shuddering contraction of his belly as he had never known before.
Wide avenues paved with polished blocks of stone, perfect as ebon mirrors. Buildings, tall and stately, pure and plain, with a calm strength that could outlast the ages. Black, all black, with no fripperies of paint or carving to soften them, only here and there a window like a drowned jewel glinting through the red.
Vines like drifts of snow cascading down the stones. Gardens with close-clipped turf and flowers lifting bright on their green stalks, their petals open to a daylight that was gone, their heads bending as though to some forgotten breeze. All neat, all tended, the branches pruned, the fresh soil turned this morning—by whose hand?
Stark remembered the great forest dreaming at the bottom of the gulf, and shivered. He did not like to think how long ago these flowers must have opened their young bloom to the last light they were ever going to see. For they were dead—dead as the forest, dead as the city. Forever bright—and dead.
Stark thought that it must always have been a silent city. It was impossible to imagine noisy throngs flocking to a market square down those immense avenues. The black walls were not made to echo song or laughter. Even the children must have moved quietly along the garden paths, small wise creatures born to an ancient dignity.
He was beginning to understand now the meaning of that weird forest. The Gulf of Shuruun had not always been a gulf. It had been a valley, rich, fertile, with this great city in its arms, and here and there on the upper slopes the retreat of some noble or philosopher—of which the castle of the Lhari was a survivor.
A wall or rock had held back the Red Sea from this valley. And then, somehow, the wall had cracked, and the sullen crimson tide had flowed slowly, slowly into the fertile bottoms, rising higher, lapping the towers and the treetops in swirling flame, drowning the land forever. Stark wondered if the people had known the disaster was coming, if they had gone forth to tend their gardens for the last time so that they might remain perfect in the embalming gases of the sea.
The columns of slaves, herded by overseers armed with small black weapons similar to the one Egil had used, came out into a broad square whose farther edges were veiled in the red murk. And Stark looked on ruin.
A great building had fallen in the center of the square. The gods only knew what force had burst its walls and tossed the giant blocks like pebbles into a heap. But there it was, the one untidy thing in the city, a mountain of debris.
Nothing else was damaged. It seemed that this had been the place of temples, and they stood unharmed, ranked around the sides of the square, the dim fires rippling through their open porticoes. Deep in their inner shadows Stark thought he could make out images, gigantic things brooding in the spark-shot gloom.
He had no chance to study them. The overseers cursed them on, and now he saw what use the slaves were put to. They were clearing away the wreckage of the fallen building.
Helvi whispered, “For sixteen years men have slaved and died down here, and the work is not half done. And why do the Lhari want it done at all? I’ll tell you why. Because they are mad, mad as swamp-dragons gone musth in the spring!”
It seemed madness indeed, to labor at this pile of rocks in a dead city at the bottom of the sea. It was madness. And yet the Lhari, though they might be insane, were not fools. There was a reason for it, and Stark was sure it was a good reason—good for the Lhari, at any rate.
An overseer came up to Stark, thrusting him roughly toward a sledge already partly loaded with broken rocks. Stark hesitated, his eyes turning ugly, and Helvi said, “Come on, you fool! Do you want to be down flat on your back again?”
Stark glanced at the little weapon, blunt and ready, and turned reluctantly to obey. And there began his servitude.
It was a weird sort of life he led. For a while he tried to reckon time by the periods of work and sleep, but he lost count, and it did not greatly matter anyway.
He labored with the others, hauling the huge blocks away, clearing out the cellars that were partly bared, shoring up weak walls underground. The slaves clung to their old habit of thought, calling the work-periods “days” and the sleep-periods “nights.”
Each “day” Egil, or his brother Cond, came to see what had been done, and went away black-browed and disappointed, ordering the work speeded up.
Treon was there also much of the time. He would come slowly in his awkward crabwise way and perch like a pale gargoyle on the stones, never speaking, watching with his sad beautiful eyes. He woke a vague foreboding in Stark. There was something awesome in Treon’s silent patience, as though he waited the coming of some black doom, long delayed but inevitable. Stark would remember the prophecy, and shiver.
It was obvious to Stark after a while that the Lhari were clearing the building to get at the cellars underneath. The great dark caverns already bared had yielded nothing, but the brothers still hoped. Over and over Cond and Egil sounded the walls and the floors, prying here and there, and chafing at the delay in opening up the underground labyrinth. What they hoped to find, no one knew.
Varra came, too. Alone, and often, she would drift down through the dim mist-fires and watch, smiling a secret smile, her hair like blown silver where the currents played with it. She had nothing but curt words for Egil, but she kept her eyes on the great dark Earth-man, and there was a look in them that stirred his blood. Egil was not blind, and it stirred his too, but in a different way.
Zareth saw that look. She kept as close to Stark as possible, asking no favors, but following him around with a sort of quiet devotion, seeming contented only when she was near him. One “night” in the slave barracks she crouched beside his pallet, her hand on his bare knee. She did not speak, and her face was hidden by the floating masses of her hair.
Stark turned her head so that he could see her, pushing the pale cloud gently away.
“What troubles you, little sister?”
Her eyes were wide and shadowed with some vague fear. But she only said, “It’s not my place to speak.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” Her mouth trembled, and then suddenly she said, “Oh, it’s foolish, I know. But the woman of the Lhari…”
“What about her?”
“She watches you. Always she watches you! And the Lord Egil is angry. There is something in her mind, and it will bring you
only evil. I know it!”
“It seems to me,” said Stark wryly, “that the Lhari have already done as much evil as possible to all of us.”
“No,” answered Zareth, with an odd wisdom. “Our hearts are still clean.”
Stark smiled. He leaned over and kissed her. “I’ll be careful, little sister.”
Quite suddenly she flung her arms around his neck and clung to him tightly, and Stark’s face sobered. He patted her, rather awkwardly, and then she had gone, to curl up on her own pallet with her head buried in her arms.
Stark lay down. His heart was sad, and there was a stinging moisture in his eyes.
The red eternities dragged on. Stark learned what Helvi had meant when he said that the mind broke before the body. The sea bottom was no place for creatures of the upper air. He learned also the meaning of the metal collars, and the manner of Tobal’s death.
Helvi explained.
“There are boundaries laid down. Within them we may range, if we have the strength and the desire after work. Beyond them we may not go. And there is no chance of escape by breaking through the barrier. How this is done I do not understand, but it is so, and the collars are the key to it.
“When a slave approaches the barrier the collar brightens as though with fire, and the slave falls. I have tried this myself, and I know. Half paralyzed, you may still crawl back to safety. But if you are mad, as Tobal was, and charge the barrier strongly…”
He made a cutting motion with his hands.
Stark nodded. He did not attempt to explain electricity or electronic vibrations to Helvi, but it seemed plain enough that the force with which the Lhari kept their slaves in check was something of the sort. The collars acted as conductors, perhaps for the same type of beam that was generated in the hand-weapons. When the metal broke the invisible boundary line it triggered off a force-beam from the central power station, in the manner of the obedient electric eye that opens doors and rings alarm bells. First a warning—then death.
The boundaries were wide enough, extending around the city and enclosing a good bit of forest beyond it. There was no possibility of a slave hiding among the trees, because the collar could be traced by the same type of beam, turned to low power, and the punishment meted out to a retaken man was such that few were foolish enough to try that game.
The surface, of course, was utterly forbidden. The one unguarded spot was the island where the central power station was, and here the slaves were allowed to come sometimes at night. The Lhari had discovered that they lived longer and worked better if they had an occasional breath of air and a look at the sky.
Many times Stark made that pilgrimage with the others. Up from the red depths they would come, through the reeling bands of fire where the currents ran, through the clouds of crimson sparks and the sullen patches of stillness that were like pools of blood, a company of white ghosts shrouded in flame, rising from their tomb for a little taste of the world they had lost.
It didn’t matter that they were so weary they had barely the strength to get back to the barracks and sleep. They found the strength. To walk again on the open ground, to be rid of the eternal crimson dusk and the oppressive weight on the chest—to look up into the hot blue night of Venus and smell the fragrance of the liha-trees borne on the land wind…They found the strength.
They sang here, sitting on the island rocks and staring through the mists toward the shore they would never see again. It was their chanting that Stark had heard when he came down the gulf with Malthor, that wordless cry of grief and loss. Now he was here himself, holding Zareth close to comfort her and joining his own deep voice into that primitive reproach to the gods.
While he sat, howling like the savage he was, he studied the power plant, a squat blockhouse of a place. On the nights the slaves came guards were stationed outside to warn them away. The blockhouse was doubly guarded with the shock-beam. To attempt to take it by force would only mean death for all concerned.
Stark gave that idea up for the time being. There was never a second when escape was not in his thoughts, but he was too old in the game to break his neck against a stone wall. Like Malthor, he would wait.
Zareth and Helvi both changed after Stark’s coming. Though they never talked of breaking free, both of them lost their air of hopelessness. Stark made neither plans nor promises. But Helvi knew him from of old, and the girl had her own subtle understanding, and they held up their heads again.
Then, one “day” as the work was ending, Varra came smiling out of the red murk and beckoned to him, and Stark’s heart gave a great leap. Without a backward look he left Helvi and Zareth, and went with her, down the wide still avenue that led outward to the forest.
8
They left the stately buildings and the wide spaces behind them, and went in among the trees. Stark hated the forest. The city was bad enough, but it was dead, honestly dead, except for those neat nightmare gardens. There was something terrifying about these great trees, full-leafed and green, rioting with flowering vines and all the rich undergrowth of the jungle, standing like massed corpses made lovely by mortuary art. They swayed and rustled as the coiling fires swept them, branches bending to that silent horrible parody of wind. Stark always felt trapped there, and stifled by the stiff leaves and the vines.
But he went, and Varra slipped like a silver bird between the great trunks, apparently happy.
“I have come here often, ever since I was old enough. It’s wonderful. Here I can stoop and fly like one of my own hawks.” She laughed and plucked a golden flower to set in her hair, and then darted away again, her white legs flashing.
Stark followed. He could see what she meant. Here in this strange sea one’s motion was as much flying as swimming, since the pressure equalized the weight of the body. There was a queer sort of thrill in plunging headlong from the treetops, to arrow down through a tangle of vines and branches and then sweep upward again.
She was playing with him, and he knew it. The challenge got his blood up. He could have caught her easily but he did not, only now and again he circled her to show his strength. They sped on and on, trailing wakes of flame, a black hawk chasing a silver dove through the forests of a dream.
But the dove had been fledged in an eagle’s nest. Stark wearied of the game at last. He caught her and they clung together, drifting still among the trees with the momentum of that wonderful weightless flight.
Her kiss at first was lazy, teasing and curious. Then it changed. All Stark’s smoldering anger leaped into a different kind of flame. His handling of her was rough and cruel, and she laughed, a little fierce voiceless laugh, and gave it back to him, and remembered how he had thought her mouth was like a bitter fruit that would give a man pain when he kissed it.
She broke away at last and came to rest on a broad branch, leaning back against the trunk and laughing, her eyes brilliant and cruel as Stark’s own. And Stark sat down at her feet.
“What do you want?” he demanded. “What do you want with me?”
She smiled. There was nothing sidelong or shy about her. She was bold as a new blade.
“I’ll tell you, wild man.”
He started. “Where did you pick up that name?”
“I have been asking the Earthman Larrabee about you. It suits you well.” She leaned forward. “This is what I want of you. Slay me Egil and his brother Cond. Also Bor, who will grow up worse than either—although that I can do myself, if you’re averse to killing children, though Bor is more monster than child. Grandmother can’t live forever, and with my cousins out of the way she’s no threat. Treon doesn’t count.”
“And if I do—what then?”
“Freedom. And me. You’ll rule Shuruun at my side.”
Stark’s eyes were mocking. “For how long, Varra?”
“Who knows? And what does it matter? The years take care of themselves.” She shrugged. “The Lhari blood has run out, and it’s time there was a fresh strain. Our children will rule after us, and they’ll be men.”
Stark laughed. He roared with it.
“It’s not enough that I’m a slave to the Lhari. Now I must be executioner and herd bull as well!” He looked at her keenly. “Why me, Varra? Why pick on me?”
“Because, as I have said, you are the first man I have seen since my father died. Also, there is something about you…”
She pushed herself upward to hover lazily, her lips just brushing his.
“Do you think it would be so bad a thing to live with me, wild man?”
She was lovely and maddening, a silver witch shining among the dim fires of the sea, full of wickedness and laughter. Stark reached out and drew her to him.
“Not bad,” he murmured. “Dangerous.”
He kissed her, and she whispered, “I think you’re not afraid of danger.”
“On the contrary, I’m a cautious man.” He held her off, where he could look straight into her eyes. “I owe Egil something on my own, but I will not murder. The fight must be fair, and Cond will have to take care of himself.”
“Fair! Was Egil fair with you—or me?”
He shrugged. “My way, or not at all.”
She thought it over a while, then nodded. “All right. As for Cond, you will give him a blood debt, and pride will make him fight. The Lhari are all proud,” she added bitterly. “That’s our curse. But it’s bred in the bone, as you’ll find out.”
“One more thing. Zareth and Helvi are to go free, and there must be an end to this slavery.”
She stared at him. “You drive a hard bargain, wild man!”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes and no. Zareth and Helvi you may have, if you insist, though the gods know what you see in that pallid child. As to the other…” She smiled very mockingly. “I’m no fool, Stark. You’re evading me, and two can play that game.”
He laughed. “Fair enough. And now tell me this, witch with the silver curls—how am I to get at Egil that I may kill him?”
The Best of Leigh Brackett Page 23