by C. L. Moore
For Franga the warlock was kneeling in his chapel, and to see Franga on his knees was like watching the devil recite a paternoster. But it was no holy altar before which the wizard bent. The black stone of it bulked huge in this tiny, bare room echoing still with the thunder of battle, and in the split second between the door’s fall and Jirel’s crashing entry through its ruins Franga had crouched in a last desperate effort at—at what?
His bony shoulders beneath their rich black robe heaved with frantic motion as he fingered the small jet bosses that girdled the altar’s block. A slab in the side of it fell open abruptly as the wizard, realizing that his enemy was almost within sword’s reach, whirled and crouched like a feral thing. Blazing light, cold and unearthly, streamed out from the gap in the altar.
“So that’s where you’ve hidden it!” said Jirel with a savage softness.
Over his shoulder Franga snarled at her, pale lips writhed back from discolored teeth. Physically he was terrified of her, and his terror paralyzed him. She saw him hesitate, evidently between his desire to snatch into safety what was hidden in the altar and his panic fear of her sword that dripped blood upon the stones.
Jirel settled his indecision.
“You black devil!” she blazed, and lunged like lightning, the dripping blade whistling as it sheared the air.
Franga screamed hoarsely, flinging himself sidewise beneath the sword. It struck the altar with a shivering shock that numbed Jirel’s arm, and as she gasped a sound that was half a sob of pain and fury, half a blistering curse, he scurried crabwise into a corner, his long robe giving him a curiously amorphous look. Recovering herself, Jirel stalked after him, rubbing her numbed arm but gripping that great wet sword fast, the highlights of murder still blazing in her yellow eyes.
The warlock flattened himself against the wall, skinny arms outstretched.
“Werhi-yu-io!” he screamed desperately. “Werhi! Werhi-yu!”
“What devil’s gibberish is that, you dog?” demanded Jirel angrily. “I’ll——”
Her voice silenced abruptly, the red lips parted. She stared at the wall behind the wizard, and something like awe was filming the blood-lust of her eyes.
For over that corner in which Franga crouched a shadow had been drawn as one draws a curtain.
“Werhi!” screamed the warlock again, in a cracked and strained voice, and—how could she not have seen before that door against whose panels he pressed, one hand behind him pushing it open upon darkness beyond? Here was black magic, devil’s work.
Doubtfully Jirel stared, her sword lowering. She did not know it, but her free hand rose to sign her breast with the church’s guard against evil. The door creaked a little, then swung wide. The blackness within was blinding as too much light is blinding—a dark from which she blinked and turned her eyes away. One last glimpse she had of the gaunt, pale face of Franga, grinning, contorted with hate. The door creaked shut.
The trance that had gripped Jirel broke with the sound. Fury flooded back in the wake of awe. Choking on hot soldier-curses she sprang for the door, swinging up her sword in both hands, spitting hatred and bracing herself for the crash of the heavy blade through those oaken panels so mysteriously veiled in the shadow that clung about that corner.
The blade clanged shiveringly against stone. For the second time, the agonizing shock of steel swung hard against solid rock shuddered up the blade and racked Jirel’s shoulders. The door had vanished utterly. She dropped the sword from nerveless hands and reeled back from the empty corner, sobbing with fury and pain.
“C-coward!” she flung at the unanswering stone. “H-hide in your hole, then, you fiend-begotten runaway, and watch me take the Starstone!”
And she whirled to the altar.
Her men had shrunk back in a huddle beyond the broken door, their magic-dazzled eyes following her in fascinated dread.
“You womanish knaves!” she flared at them over her shoulder as she knelt where the wizard had knelt. “Womanish, did I say? Ha! You don’t deserve the flattery! Must I go the whole way alone? Look then—here it is!”
SHE plunged her bare hand into the opening in the altar from which streamed that pale, unearthly light, gasped a little, involuntarily, and then drew out what looked like a block of living flame.
In her bare hand as she knelt she held it, and for minutes no one moved. It was pale, this Starstone, cold with unearthly fire, many-faceted yet not glittering. Jirel thought of twilight above the ocean, when the land is darkening and the smooth water gathers into its surface all the glimmering light of sea and sky. So this great stone gleamed, gathering the chapel’s light into its pale surface so that the room seemed dark by contrast, reflecting it again transmuted into that cold, unwavering brilliance.
She peered into the translucent depths of it so near her face. She could see her own fingers cradling the gem distorted as if seen through water—and yet somehow there was a motion between her hand and the upper surface of the jewel. It was like looking down into water in whose depths a shadow stirred—a living shadow—a restlessly moving shape that beat against the prisoning walls and sent a flicker through the light’s cold blue-white gleaming. It was——
No, it was the Starstone, nothing more. But to have the Starstone! To hold it here in her hands at last, after weeks of siege, weeks of desperate battle! It was triumph itself she cradled in her palm. Her throat choked with sudden ecstatic laughter as she sprang to her feet, brandishing the great gem toward that empty corner through whose wall the wizard had vanished.
“Ha, behold it!” she screamed to the unanswering stone. “Son of a fiend, behold it! The luck of the Starstone is mine, now a better man has wrested it from you! Confess Joiry your master, you devil-deluder! Dare you show your face? Dare you?”
Over that empty corner the shadow swept again, awesomely from nowhere. Out of the sudden darkness creaked a door’s hinges, and the wizard’s voice called in a choke of fury,
“Bel’s curse on you, Joiry! Never think you’ve triumphed over me! I’ll have it back if I—if I——”
“If you—what? D’ye think I fear you, you hell-spawned warlock? If you—what?”
“Me you may not fear, Joiry,” the wizard’s voice quavered with fury, “but by Set and Bubastis, I’ll find one who’ll tame you if I must go to the ends of space to find him—to the ends of time itself! And then—beware!”
“Bring on your champion!” Jirel’s laughter was hot with scorn. “Search hell itself and bring out the chiefest devil! I’ll lift the head from his shoulders as I’d have lifted yours, with one sweep, had you not fled.”
But she got for answer only the creak of a closing door in the depths of that shadow. And now the shadow faded again, and once more empty stone walls stared at her enigmatically.
Clutching the Starstone that—so legend had it—carried luck and wealth beyond imagination for its possessor, she shrugged and swung round to her soldiers.
“Well, what are you gaping at?” she flared. “Before heaven, I’m the best man here! Out—out—pillage the castle—there’s rich loot of that devil’s servant, Franga! What are you waiting for?” and with the flat of her sword she drove them from the chapel.
“BY PHAROL, Smith, have you lost your taste for segir? I’d as soon have expected old Marnak here to sprout legs!”
Yarol’s cherubic face was puzzled as he nodded toward the waiter who was moving quickly about the little private drinking-booth of polished steel in the back of the Martian tavern, placing fresh drinks before the two men, regardless of his artificial limbs—lost, some said, during an illicit amorous visit to the forbidden dens of the spider women.
Northwest Smith frowned moodily, pushing the glass away. His scarred dark face, lighted with the pallor of steel-colored eyes, was morose. He drew deeply on the brown Martian cigarette that smoked between his fingers.
“I’m getting rusty, Yarol,” he said. “I’m sick of this whole business. Why can’t something really worth the effort turn up? Smugglin
g—gun-running—I’m sick of it, I tell you! Even segir doesn’t taste the same.”
“That’s old age creeping up,” Yarol advised him owlishly above the rim of his glass. “Tell you what you need, N. W., a snort of the green Mingo liqueur old Marnak keeps on his top shelf. It’s distilled from pant-berries, and one shot of it will have you prancing like a pup. Wait a minute, I’ll see what I can do.”
Smith hunched over his folded arms and stared at the shining steel wall behind Yard’s vacant chair as the little Venusian slid out of the booth. Hours like these were the penalty of the exiled and the outlaw. Even the toughest of them knew times when the home planet called almost intolerably across the long voids of the spaceways, and all other places seemed flat and dull. Homesickness he would not have admitted to anyone alive, but as he sat there alone, morosely facing his dim reflection in the steel wall, he found himself humming that old sweet song of all Earth’s exiled people, The Green Hills of Earth:
Across the seas of darkness
The good green Earth is bright—
Oh, star that was my homeland
Shine down on me tonight . . .
Words and tune were banal, but somehow about them had gathered such a halo of association that the voices which sang them went sweeter and softer as they lingered over the well-remembered phrases, the well-remembered scenes of home. Smith’s surprizingly good baritone took on undernotes of a homesick sweetness which he would have died rather than admit:
My heart turns home in longing
Across the voids between,
To know beyond the spaceways
The hills of Earth are green . . .
What wouldn’t he give just now, to be free to go home again? Home without a price on his head, freedom to rove the blue seas of Earth, the warm garden continents of the Sun’s loveliest planet? He hummed very softly to himself,
——and count the losses worth
To see across the darkness
The green hills of Earth . . .
and then let the words die on his lips unnoticed as he narrowed steel-colored eyes at the polished wall in which a moment before his dim reflection had faced him. It was darkening now, a shadow quivering across the bright surfaces, thickening, clouding his mirrored face. And the wall—was it metal, or—or stone? The shadow was too thick to tell, and unconsciously he rose to his feet, bending across the table, one hand hovering back toward the heat-gun on his thigh. A door creaked open in the dimness—a heavy door, half seen, opening upon darkness beyond too black to gaze on—darkness, and a face.
“Are your services for hire, stranger?” quavered a cracked voice speaking in a tongue that despite himself sent Smith’s pulses quickening in recognition. French, Earth’s French, archaic and scarcely intelligible, but unquestionably a voice from home.
“For a price,” he admitted, his fingers closing definitely on his gun. “Who are you and why do you ask? And how in the name of——”
“It will reward you to ask no questions,” said the cracked quaver. “I seek a fighting-man of a temper strong enough for my purpose, and I think you are he. Look, does this tempt you?”
A claw-like hand extended itself out of the shadow, dangling a double rope of such blue-white pearls as Smith had never dreamed of. “Worth a king’s ransom,” croaked the voice. “And all for the taking. Will you come with me?”
“Come where?”
“To the planet Earth—to the land of France—to the year of 1500.”
Smith gripped the table-edge with one frantic hand, wondering if the segir he had drunk could somehow have sent him into paroxysms of dream. By no stretch of imagination could he really be standing here, in this drinking-booth in a Martian tavern, while out of a door that opened upon darkness a cracked voice beckoned him into the past. He was dreaming, of course, and in a dream it could do no harm to push back his chair, skirt the table, step closer to that incredible door thick-hung with shadows, take the outstretched hand over whose wrist the luminous pearls hung gleaming . . .
The room staggered and whirled into darkness. From somewhere far away he heard Yarol’s voice shouting frantically, “N.W.! Wait! N.W., where’re you going——” And then night too black to gaze on blinded his dark-dazzled eyes and cold unthinkable flamed through his brain, and—and——
HE STOOD on a green hilltop whose gentle slope rolled downward to a meadow where a brook wound with a sound of rippling water. Beyond, on a high upthrust of craggy rock, a great gray castle loomed. The sky was blessedly blue, the air fresh in his nostrils with the sweetness of green growing things. And all about him rolled grassy uplands. He took a deep, deep breath. “The Green Hills of Earth!”
“N.W., what in—by Pharol, I—hell’s blazes, man, what’s happened?” Yarol’s spluttering amazement jolted him out of his delight.
Smith turned. The little Venusian stood on the soft grass beside him, two small glasses full of pale green liquid in his hands and a look of almost idiotic bewilderment on his good-looking, cherubic face. “I come back into the booth with the pant-juice,” he was muttering dazedly, “and there you are stepping through a door that—damn it!—that wasn’t there when I left! And when I try to pull you back I—I—well, what did happen?”
“You stumbled through the Gateway—uninvited,” said a cracked voice ominously behind them.
Both men whirled, hands dropping to their guns. For a dazed moment Smith had forgotten the voice that had lured him into the past. Now for the first time he saw his host—a small man, wizened, dark, stooping under his robe of rich black velvet as if the evil reflected on his seamed face were too heavy to bear upright. Dark wisdom glinted in the eyes that stared malevolently at Yarol.
“What’s he saying, N. W.?” demanded the little Venusian.
“French—he’s speaking French,” muttered Smith distractedly, his gaze on the lined and evil face of their host. And then to the warlock, “Qui etes-vous, m’sieur? Pourquoi——”
“I am Franga,” interrupted the old man impatiently. “Franga, the warlock. And I am displeased with this blundering stranger who followed us through the door. His speech is as uncouth as his manners. Were it not for my magic I could not guess his meaning. Has he never learned a civilized tongue? Well, no matter—no matter.
“Listen, now. I have brought you here to avenge my defeat at the hands of the lady of Joiry whose castle you see on yonder hilltop. She stole my magical jewel, the Starstone, and I have vowed to find a man who could tame her if I had to search outside my own world and time to do it. I am too told myself, too feeble now. Once when I was as young and lusty as you I won the jewel from a rival as it must be won, bloodily in battle, or its magic is void to the possessor. Too, it may be given freely and maintain its power. But by neither method can I take it from Joiry, and so you must go up to the castle and in your own way win the stone.
“I can help you—a little. This much I can do—I can put you beyond the reach of the pikes and swords of Joiry’s men.” Smith lifted an eyebrow and laid his hand lightly on his heat-gun, a blast of whose deadly violence could have mowed down a charging army like wheat ripe for the scythe.
“I’m armed,” he said shortly.
Franga frowned. “Your arms would not avail you against a dagger in the back. No, you must do as I say. I have my reasons. You must go—beyond the Gateway.”
Cold, pale eyes met the wizard’s veiled stare for a moment. Then Smith nodded.
“It doesn’t matter—my gun burns as straight in any land. What’s your plan?”
“You must get the lady of Joiry through the Gateway—that same Gateway by which you came hither. But it will take you into another land, where—where”—he hesitated—“where there are—powers—favorable to me, and therefore to you. Make no mistake; it will not be easy to wrest the Starstone from Joiry. She has learned much of the dark lore.”
“How shall we open the Gateway?” Franga’s left hand rose in a swift, strangely archaic gesture. “By this sign—learn it well—thus, and thu
s.”
Smith’s gun-calloused brown hand imitated the queer motion. “Thus?”
“Yes—and the spell must be learned as well.” Franga mouthed something queer and garbled, Smith echoing him with twisted tongue, for the words were as strange as he had ever spoken.
“Good.” The warlock nodded, and again the strange syllables came incoherently from his thin lips, again his hand moved, giving the gestures an oddly cadenced rhythm. “When you voice the spell again the Gateway will open for you—as it opens now for me!”
Silently a shadow swept down upon them, dimming the sunlit hill. In its midst a blacker oblong darkened, the creak of a door sounded faintly as if from enormous distances.
“Bring Joiry through the Gateway,” the wizard whispered, vicious lights crawling in his cold eyes, “and follow. Then you may seize the Starstone, for the powers in this—this other land will fight with you. But not here, not in Joiry. You must follow me . . . As for this little man who blundered through my door of darkness——”
“He is my friend,” said Smith hastily. “He will help me.”
“Eh—well, let his life be hostage then to your success. Win me the stone, and I stay my wrath at his stupid interference. But remember—the sword of my magic hovers at your throat . . .”
A shadow quivered over the wizard’s black-robed form. His image quivered with it as a reflection in troubled water shakes, and abruptly shadow and man were gone.
“By great Pharol,” articulated Yarol in measured syllables, “will you tell me what this is all about? Drink this—you look as though you need it. As for me”—he thrust a small glass into Smith’s hand, and drained his own drink at a gulp—“if all this is a dream, I hope there’s liquor in it. Will you kindly explain——”