by Gardner Fox
“Luck is with us, Peganna. Hold on for just a little longer.” He turned and stared back and upward at the sky behind them. Before any searchers could sight them in their red blankets, he would see the dark dots of their fliers against that pallid sky. Then all he and Peganna need do would be to lie down and cover themselves with the blankets. The red wool would blend with the red sand, and since their prone figures would cast no shadow, they would be as good as invisible.
And in such intense heat as the Makkamar desert, any devices which might locate them by their body-warmth would be ineffective. Bran held Peganna tighter against him and stared northward toward low hills rimmed with stunted evergreens. In those cooler hills with their rocks and many trees, concealment would be easy.
After a little while, Peganna lifted her head from his chest and smiled wearily. “It seems I’ve been running all my life, Bran. First from the catastrophe that destroyed my home worlds, then across the voids between Lyanol and the Empire planets. From you. From Alvar Drexel when he succeeded to the high command. I’m tired.”
He kissed her moist forehead. “Only a few more hours and we’ll be safe. Once in those hills we have nothing to worry about.”
Her shoulders rounded in discouragement. She shook her head. “Sooner or later they’ll find us.”
His own voice was grim. “No man can find me if I don’t want to be found. Now, how about it? Can you walk?”
She stirred, stretching. Her smile was suddenly buoyant with hope, for the thought touched Peganna of the Lyanir that she really did not mind the ache in her slim white legs so long as Bran Magannon was here for her to lean on every once in a while. Not until she had found him again did she understand how bitterly empty her days had been without him.
She drew the red wool blanket closer about her shoulders, saying, “I’m ready any time you are.”
They began striding, side by side.
Since before dawn they had been walking all the way from the su’udar stews. The Wanderer had understood the significance of Empire soldiers stationed about the Lyanir starship. Fleet Commander Drexel had Peganna under surveillance; he had let her land on Makkador, allowed her to make contact with Bran Magannon. This last he did not know for sure, but he could make a shrewd guess. Someone in the High Counsel of the Lyanir had played the informer. From what Peganna had told him of her preparations for this visit to Makkador, there could be no other answer.
Though he himself suspected Gron Dhu, Bran made no outright accusation to Peganna. On Kuleen, when he had stated his belief that ambition ate too strongly in her younger brother, Peganna had stormed with fury that had expended itself in tears. He would not rouse her displeasure now; he would bide his time. Peganna needed strength for what lay ahead.
Curiosity was strong inside him, but this too, he smothered. Peganna had come out of hiding for a strong reason, yet nothing but the hope to win equality and living room for her people would induce her to place them in danger. Once Empire learned where the Lyanir were hiding, it might send its fleets to destroy them. Peganna must be aware of this; it had been no idle whim that had compelled her to put herself in range of capture and possible torture.
On the other hand, if Commander Drexel had been informed that Peganna was on her way to Makkador, he must also know where the Lyanir were hiding, since his informant would have told him. It was very puzzling.
His eyes slid sideways toward the girl. Somehow she had learned that Bran Magannon was coming to Makkador or was already on that planet. She had come to find him for a reason. What could the Wanderer do to help the Lyanir? Bran honestly did not know.
Nor would he ask until the time was better suited to discussion. He turned and assessed the sky behind him, toward Makkamar City. Long since had its stone towers faded from sight. There was only red desert sand and pale sky to be seen.
No! There to the west. Three dots.
“Get down,” he said to Peganna.
She caught the grimness of his voice and obeyed him instantly. She lay flat on her face, the blanket pulled over her so that nothing of her body showed. Bran lay beside her, drawing up his own blanket. He waited until his keen eyes verified his first suspicion; those dots were three Zad-10’s, fast interceptor-hunters. They came across the sky almost as swiftly as thought, leaving trails of vapor in their wakes. Their a-motors made no sound. They whispered as they streaked the sky and the sound of their going and that of their detection devices was as silent as the sunlight bathing their vee wings.
Bran waited until they were out of sight before climbing to his feet. Headquarters would be charting the progress of those Zads. Maps would be covered with colored lights to show where they had hunted. They had five hours at least before a re-check brought the fliers back over this northern corner of the desert.
In five hours they would be in the Hills of Dor.
An hour after sunset they were inside a cave that had looked out over this corner of Makkamar desert for uncounted eons. Bran dared not light a fire. A flame could be seen for an incredible distance in the blackness of a Makkadoran night and the Zads were soundless, giving no warning of their coming or their going. For a little while they must endure the cold and the dampness. Warmth would come when Mizar lifted its glowing bulk over the horizon.
Questions burned his tongue, but the Wanderer swallowed them. Peganna was exhausted. The seemingly endless walk over the desert had drained her of energy. Her feet were bleeding; he had been forced to carry her the last few miles. Sleep was what she needed. His curiosity could remain unsatisfied until daylight.
He put his arms about her, held her so the closeness of their bodies would keep them warm, and drew both blankets over them. Peganna rested her silvery head on his chest; Bran was used to a hard rock for a pillow.
“Sleep,” he whispered. “Here, you are safe.”
He woke twice during the night to gather her even tighter against him. In one sense, Bran cared nothing for the reason that had brought Peganna back into his life; that she was here in his arms was enough for him. If it were not for the danger she was in, he would have been completely happy.
Morning was a redness on his closed eyelids. Bran stirred and felt the weight of Peganna still across his chest. Soft laughter touched his ears and a moist mouth kissed his own. His arms tightened, holding her as she whispered.
“I came hunting you in the hope that we might pick up where we left off, eight years ago. Now I know it can never be.”
“Oh? Now what could have changed your mind?” he asked.
She sat up, rubbing her arms against the damp cold of the cave. Thick silvery hair that had come loose of its coif of net pearls in the night, hung down her back to the hard rock. She had never looked so regal, Bran thought, his admiration frank in his eyes for her to see. She flushed and leaning out, put a palm over his stare.
“Not—like this. I’m so rumpled.”
“Then be more rumpled,” he grinned and would have pulled her down on his chest again except that her face betrayed the despair eating in her. He sat up quickly and caught her hand in his. “Tell me, Peganna. What happened last night to spoil your happiness?”
Her green eyes were feverish with brightness. “The Empire soldiers—oh, Kronn! How I hate the sight of those white uniforms!” Her fingers twisted like snakes within the cup of Bran’s hand. She drew a sobbing breath. “I’d planned on contacting you—for a very special reason—when I learned who Bran the Wanderer really was. I sent a thousand spies into the Rim worlds to hunt you down, to bring you to me. The latest rumor said you were somewhere in the Mizar system. To find you, I came to Makkador.”
“And very obligingly, I strolled into Makkamar City.”
She glanced sideways at him, an elfin smile curving the corners of her mouth. “Makkador was the fifth planet I vaned down on, Bran. You had to be on one of the Mizar planets if that rumor was correct. And it was.”
“All right. You’ve found me. Why?”
“I ought to be insulted by that,
Bran Magannon,” she stated, pretending indignation. “If you really loved me you’d never say such a thing.”
“It wasn’t merely love that made you seek me out,” he commented wryly, then at her pout he laughed and caught her in his arms. Bran held her until she begged him to ease the pressure of his arms so she might breathe.
“Men said the Wanderer had seen many strange things in his travels,” she murmured when she could. “Marvelous things, sights no other man has ever beheld.”
He nodded soberly. “A thousand miracles hidden in far space, on planets so distant man will take a hundred centuries to reach them.”
Her eyes flickered. “Yet you found them.”
His white teeth glistened in a grin. “I found them,” he said flatly, “only because I know a way to travel without a spaceship.”
Ah, that shook her! She thrust back from him and put a hand to her silver hair, pushing it away from her glittering green eyes. Bran feasted his eyes on her pale white features. By Kronn, she was a beautiful woman! The years had only ripened her, giving her willowy younger body the sweet curves of maturity.
“Without a spaceship?”
“By tele-doors. Teleportation. Oh, Empire scientists have been working on it a long time, and they’ve succeeded to a minor extent, but the doors through which I walk were built by a master race, a race of beings so far ahead of us in scientific concept that—”
As he shook his head, he felt the green nails of her hand bit into his arm. “The Crenn Lir—or so at least we call them,” she breathed.
Bran blinked. “You know about the Crenn Lir?”
Excitement made her rise to her feet and move up and down the cave in that feline walk that was a mark of all her people. Her cheeks were flushed, her breasts trembling with the emotion powering her faster heartbeats. She went to the door of the cave and stood staring out at the blazing sky and scarlet desert stretching everywhere.
“Once the Lyanir inhabited the planets of a star system many thousand of light years from Earth, as you know. Avan, you named our star-sun. Long ago there was a disaster of almost incomprehensible magnitude on the edge of another galaxy. Had not a billion light years separated that catastrophe from our worlds, we’d have been wiped out of existence within the wink of an eye.”
Bran nodded. “Radio telescopes on Earth picked up evidence of that explosion back in the twentieth century. Men said then that a force was released instantaneously, equivalent to all the energy generated by a billion Sols from their birth to their end as star-suns. It must have been a fearsome thing, whatever it was that happened.”
She nodded, framed in the cavern entrance. “So fearsome that even on Lyanol it meant death to everyone unless we could go away.”
“You built a thousand great spaceships.”
“Yes. In them we put what we could of our culture and all the people who could go. It was a scientific selection. Only the youngest and the ablest were chosen. My great-great-grandfather was rayanor then, as I am reyanal now. They set out across space, traveling inward through our galaxy.”
“A long trip,” Bran said quietly.
“You cannot know how long. The journey lasted several centuries. At the beginning our ships were not equipped to travel in hyperspace. It took a century even with everyone in the ships working on the project to develop such a means of movement. After that we made better time.”
She turned and smiled back at him. The sunlight in her long hair made it gleam like molten gold. “We paused from time to time to live a little while on such worlds as had an atmosphere. Usually they were barren planets, burned out as though by some terrible force.”
“And on every one of them you found evidence of an ancient civilization, that of the Crenn Lir.”
Her eyes opened very wide. “You’ve been on them—on some of them at least!” she cried.
“I told you I had. I’ve wandered far from the usual haunts of men, Peganna. I tell myself I’ve learned a wisdom of sorts, seeing those other worlds where no feet but mine have raised the dust in perhaps a million years or more.”
“On any of them—did you find the well of Molween?”
He came off his rump and went to stand before her, putting his hands at her elbows, staring down fixedly into her eyes. “Last night at the tavern a man mentioned the well. To the men of the Empire, Molween’s well is only a myth, a fairytale of space.”
“Like all myths, at some time it had a reality of sorts.”
“How did you learn of the well?”
Her lips twisted bitterly. “As I’ve said, we Lyanir have had time to do many things with nothing else distracting our minds. To learn the mechanisms of the hyperspace drive, for one thing. To develop a weapon to protect us against attack, the oradirays which you solved, for another. And—to break the language barrier of the Crenn Lir.”
It was Bran’s turn to start. “You did that?” he asked softly and in his voice was the excitement of a man seeing a dream come to life before his eyes. He said swiftly, “Peganna, these people you call Crenn Lir built the tele-doors. I’m almost positive of it. Long and long ago they came and went by way of the doors to this planet and that. It may be that your race and mine are descended from them, that Lyanol and Earth, and some of the other inhabited planets which men found when they could travel to the stars, are remnants of Crenn Lir colonies.”
He paused reflectively. “We have a racial memory of a time when there was no need to toil, when the beasts and man could converse with one another. By telepathy? Religious books have called it Eden.”
Peganna smiled wanly. “Our forefathers named it Aesann.”
“How did you break the language?” he asked.
“We made everyone work on it, even the little children. On our journey inward across space to your Rim worlds, we stopped at several of what once had been Crenn Lir planets. We found old ruins crumbling to nothingness in the wind. We made three-dimensional pictures of them and built scale models. Naturally, every fragment of language or pictograph we found we photographed.
“At first only our philologists worked on the problem. We had no common denominator—as you’ve told me Earth once had with the Rosetta Stone that enabled your philologists to learn the language of the ancient Egyptians.”
“And later, the Aradnae stele which helped the early solar system explorers to understand High Martian.”
Peganna nodded. The warming breeze off the desert blew her silken jersey and kilt against her body and stirred the long silver hair. It was hard to think of her as a queen of the Lyanir. To him she was only the woman he loved come back to him.
She went on, “After you defeated us and went to Earth to draw up the treaty which would allow us to live in peace with the Empire, and I foolishly believed the lying message that said you wanted me to take the Lyanir to Yvriss—we fled back to those ancient Crenn Lir worlds.
“We suspected that theirs was a scientific culture many levels above our own. We decided in counsel that if we could break their language we might come up with some sort of wedge with which to pry living room from the Empire. We made a national field study of the Crenn Lir language, with our philologists trying to make linguistic experts of us all.”
“You had a little more than seven years in which to do it,” Bran said slowly, “while I was wandering between the stars.”
“And we did it, Bran. We learned the meaning of those little squiggly characters that made up the Crenn Lir language.”
Bran grinned. “For that gift alone, Empire ought to accept you into its hegemony.”
Swiftly she shook her head. “No, it isn’t enough. Not nearly enough. The Lyanir must learn how to compel the Empire to give it what it wants. Peacefully, if we can. If not peacefully, then by superior methods of waging war.”
“Peacefully,” Bran said soberly. “I’ve seen enough warfare.”
She nodded, touching his jawline with quivering fingers. “Yes, by peaceful means, Bran. If it can be done that way. But it must be done, in an
y event. Our children grow thin and weak for lack of proper foods. Manufactured proteins and carbohydrates can do only so much. They need warm sunlight instead of the weakness of dying stars, the fresh breezes of honest atmospheres instead of air that has been tainted with a hundred forgotten nuclear wars.”
Her people had suffered much, displaced as they were from their home worlds, forced to struggle against the uninhabitability of dying planets and the indifference of the Empire to their needs. Sympathy was warm and alive in Bran Magannon. He was an Empire man, trained for most of his years under the aegis of the Star Cluster, but the human part of him went out to the Lyanir. They were human, too. Brothers of a kind, if the Crenn Lir were their common ancestors.
“I know your needs,” he reminded her gently. “I fought for them in Counsel. And I’d have won my point, if you hadn’t come off Kuleen and moved on Yvriss.”
“Who sent that message telling me to go to Yvriss, Bran? Who wanted the Lyanir to be homeless and without friends?”
“I don’t know.” His big hand doubled into a fist. “I’ve wished I did—so many times I’ve lost count of the number.”
“Perhaps it’s just delayed it,” she exclaimed hopefully. “As I say, we learned the language of the Crenn Lir. Slowly, but steadily. We found a metal tablet listing the names of the star worlds which were a part of the Crenn Lir monarchy. Erased by time, we made them live again by special rays that penetrated the old metal. One name was recognized as an old, old term in the Lyanir language. It meant ‘home’ to us. It was a beginning.
“Here and there we made other strides. We began to dig on the dead planets where we vaned down. Sometimes we uncovered bits of pottery, of metal, of stone with symbols inscribed on them. Our archeologists matched them up with microfilm records of the stars where the Lyanir had lived.
“One word became seven, then fifty, then a hundred and eighty. Now we made very rapid progress. Soon we could read the Crenn Lir language almost as well as our own. And from a room that we believe was once a part of the Crenn Lir military setup, we learned about the well of Molween.”