Enchantress of Venus Dispelled

by Lee Brackett

Slave to the Lhari, in the city of the Lost Ones.

  What the devil did they do with slaves, at the bottom of the sea?

  The heavy gases conducted sound remarkably well, except for an odd property of diffusion which made it seem that a voice came from everywhere at once. Now, all at once, Stark became aware of a dull clamor of voices drifting towards her.

  She tried to see, and Zareth turned her head carefully so that she might.

  The Lost Ones were returning from whatever work it was they did.

  Out of the dim red murk beyond the open door they swam, into the long, long vastness of the hall that was filled with the same red murk, moving slowly, their white bodies trailing wakes of sullen flame. The host of the damned drifting through a strange red-litten hell, weary and without hope.

  One by one they sank onto pallets laid in rows on the black stone floor, and lay there, utterly exhausted, their pale hair lifting and floating with the slow eddies of the sea. And each one wore a collar.

  One woman did not lie down. She came toward Stark, a tall barbarian who drew herself with great strokes of her arms so that she was wrapped in wheeling sparks. Stark knew her face.

  'Helvi,' she said, and smiled in welcome.

  'Brother!'

  Helvi crouched down—a great handsome girl she had been the last time Stark saw her, but she was a woman now, with all the laughter turned to grim deep lines around her mouth and the bones of her face standing out like granite ridges.

  'Brother,' she said again, looking at Stark through a glitter of unashamed tears. 'Fool.' And she cursed Stark savagely because she had come to Shuruun to look for an idiot who had gone the same way, and was already as good as dead.

  'Would you have followed me?' asked Stark.

  'But I am only an ignorant child of the swamps,' said Helvi. 'You come from space, you know the other worlds, you can read and write—you should have better sense!'

  Stark grinned. 'And I'm still an ignorant child of the rocks. So we're two fools together. Where is Tobal?'

  Tobal was Helvi's sister, who had broken taboo and looked for refuge in Shuruun. Apparently she had found peace at last, for Helvi shook her head.

  'A woman cannot live too long under the sea. It is not enough merely to breathe and eat. Tobal overran her time, and I am close to the end of mine.' She held up her hand and then swept it down sharply, watching the broken fires dance along her arms.

  'The mind breaks before the body,' said Helvi casually, as though it were a matter of no importance.

  Zareth spoke. 'Helvi has guarded you each period while the others slept.'

  'And not I alone,' said Helvi. 'The little one stood with me.'

  'Guarded me!' said Stark. 'Why?'

  For answer, Helvi gestured toward a pallet not far away. Malthora lay there, her eyes half open and full of malice, the fresh scar livid on her cheek.

  'She feels,' said Helvi, 'that you should not have fought upon her ship.'

  Stark felt an inward chill of horror. To lie here helpless, watching Malthora come toward her with open fingers reaching for her helpless throat…

  She made a passionate effort to move, and gave up, gasping. Helvi grinned.

  'Now is the time I should wrestle you, Stark, for I never could throw you before.' She gave Stark's head a shake, very gentle for all its apparent roughness. 'You'll be throwing me again. Sleep now, and don't worry.'

  She settled herself to watch, and presently in spite of herself Stark slept, with Zareth curled at her 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 she never knew, but she was used to waiting. She had learned her patience on the knees of the great mountains whose heads lift proudly into open space to look at the Sun, and she had absorbed their own contempt for time.

  Little by little, life returned to her body. A mongrel guard came now and again to examine her, pricking Stark's flesh with her knife to test the reaction, so that Stark should not malinger.

  She reckoned without Stark's control. The Earthwoman bore her prodding without so much as a twitch until her limbs were completely her own again. Then she sprang up and pitched the woman 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.

  VII

  Stark had been in places before that oppressed her with a sense of their strangeness or their wickedness—Sinharat, the lovely ruin of coral and gold lost in the Martin 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 nightstallion to haunt a woman's dreams.

  She stared about her as she went in the long line of slaves, and felt such a cold shuddering contraction of her belly as she 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. She 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.

  She 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 of rock had held back the Red Sea from her 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 tree tops 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 Egila 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 she could make out images, gigantic things brooding in the spark-shot gloom.

  She had no chance to study them. The overseers cursed them on, and now she saw what use the slaves were put to. They were clearing away the wreckage of the fallen building.

  Helvi w
hispered, 'For sixteen years women 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 her roughly toward a sledge already partly loaded with broken rocks. Stark hesitated, her 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 her servitude.

  It was a weird sort of life she led. For a while she tried to reckon time by the periods of work and sleep, but she lost count, and it did not greatly matter anyway.

  She 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' Egila, or her sister Conda, came to see what had been done, and went away black-browed and disappointed, ordering the work speeded up.

  Treona was there also much of the time. She would come slowly in her awkward crabwise way and perch like a pale