Golden Blood

by Jack Williamson

  Next morning, when Price had breakfasted, he went for a stroll about the palace, escorted by four of his female retinue, who wore their golden jambiyahs. As he strode ahead of them through magnificent gardens and among gold and marble colonnades, his eye was alert for some opportunity to escape.

  He had resolved to leave Verl, if that could be done. Vekyra, certainly, would not willingly or knowingly aid him in Aysa’s rescue. He suspected that the golden woman had questionable designs upon himself. But escape seemed a hopeless thing, unarmed as he was, and ceaselessly watched by the snake-branded women.

  “Effendi Duran’!”

  The hail, in a familiar voice, startled him. Turning, he saw the sheikh Fouad el Akmet approaching along an avenue of palms. The old Bedouin was unarmed, and beside him, familiarly close, tripped one of Vekyra’s girls, crooked jambiyah at her waist.

  “Peace be upon you, O sheikh,” Price greeted him, and walked to meet him. “You are also the guest of Vekyra?”

  The old Arab drew Price apart from the warrior-girls, and whispered through his scraggy black beard:

  “Aywa, Sidi!” He looked cautiously at the waiting girls, with his shifty black eyes. “Three days ago the Howeja Jacob Garth sent me to scout toward the mountain, with my men. The evil golden woman-djinni, who rides the golden tiger, came upon us suddenly. Three of my men the tiger killed. And she brought me to this castle of Eblis.”

  The old sheikh glanced behind him again, lowered his voice further.

  “But yet I may escape. The woman with me, she knows a man.” He leered fatuously. “Nazira is her name. Last night she promised to aid me. I know my way with the women, eh?”

  Price grinned at the old man. Fouad whispered again:

  “Effendi, when the time comes, will you go with me? Bismillah! I like not to be alone in this land of ’ifrits!”

  “Yes,” Price assured him, though he was none too confident of the old Arab’s ability to seduce his jailer, and still less confident that, even with the woman’s aid, escape would be successful.

  The Bedouin turned away, leering familiarly at the waiting girl. Price, with his escort, moved on, amid the splendors of Verl.

  Presently Vekyra overtook him, upon the tiger. She made the golden beast crouch beside him, extended a slim yellow arm.

  Vekyra had exchanged her green garments for a close-fitting tunic of luminous violet, that shimmered metallically when her lithe body moved. Her ruddy hair, fastened back with a broad band of the same material, assumed a glowing brilliance against it.

  “Iru,” she said, “I wish you to ride with me this morn, upon the mirage.”

  “Upon the mirage?”

  “Yes. I am the mistress of the illusion. You have seen it. A secret of ancient Anz. The old wise men mastered the laws of illusion, contrived mirrors—and other forces—to rule the mirage.”

  “How—”

  “You shall see, in the hall of illusion.”

  She spoke to the tiger, and the gigantic cat, which wore neither bridle nor halter, swung rapidly away, along a magnificent colonnade of white marble and gold.

  The woman arranged the cushions in the howdah and drew Price down beside her. The swaying of the beast threw him against her, so that he felt the lithe, warm strength of her body, caught the heavy, intoxicating perfume of her hair.

  The tiger carried them into the central pile of the castle, and up a spiral ramp, that ascended, Price knew, into the great middle tower of shimmering gold. Through unglazed openings in the walls he glimpsed the white and gold wings of the building, and below, the grim, limitless sea of dark desert, blue in the haze of heat.

  At last they entered a strange hall, at the very summit of the tower. From the end of the sloping way the tiger stepped silently and cautiously out upon a vast mirror, an unbroken sheet of crystal that formed the floor.

  Price gazed about in amazement at the hall of illusion. Not only its floor was crystal. The walls were mirrors, oddly shaped, strangely curved. Reflecting one another, they gave deceptive impressions of limitless vistas of mirrored halls, made it impossible to tell the actual size of the room. Half the roof was open to the turquoise sky, half a brilliant plane of flawless crystal.

  A thousand times—ten thousand times—in mirror-walls and floor and ceiling, Price saw reflections of himself and Vekyra upon the tiger. Infinitely the image was repeated, sometimes looking gigantic, sometimes diminished almost to invisibility.

  Vekyra reached out her hand and touched a little cluster of five tiny disks. Price had not seen them before; they seemed suspended in space beside the tiger. Actually, he realized, they projected through a sheet of crystal beside them, polished to the perfection of invisibility.

  Vekyra pressed a crimson stud. Beneath, Price heard the even throb of concealed machinery. The mirrors shifted, spun; reflections swam disturbingly within them.

  The thousand images of the tiger fled away astoundingly. A single level floor of blue, shimmering crystal reached out in all directions, to infinity. Away across that bright plain raced the reflections of the tiger, shrank to tiny dark points, vanished.

  Only the blue light of the sky was mirrored in the crystals; Price felt oddly as if the tiger were suspended in a blue and vacant void.

  Vekyra touched a green disk. The shrill whine of another hidden mechanism rose about them. The air was suddenly charged, tense. Price sniffed the pungence of ozone, knew that powerful electric forces must be discharging about them.

  “Watch!” cried Vekyra. “The bending of light, the birth of illusion!”

  Price saw black points come into the mirrors, where their reflection had vanished; saw the points expand into dark lines of far horizons; scraps of distant desert, swimming swiftly nearer, so that he saw first blue haze above, then undulating ranks of yellow-red dunes; queer patches of desert; snatches of sand and sapphire sky. All mingled fantastically in a crazy-quilt of illusion, swiftly expanding, rushing nearer.

  Abruptly, it all took form. The scraps of desert merged into a whole. Seemingly hundreds of feet below, a heavy slope of loose sand reared its barren yellow-red crest. Away to. hot, shimmering world-rims rolled crescent dunes.

  The illusion was incredibly real.

  Price could see his own body, the golden woman beside him in the cushioned howdah… and far below, the sand-desert. The mountain, the dark surrounding lava flows, had vanished.

  Vekyra smiled at him, as if in malicious delight at his amazement, and pressed a yellow disk. Then, though Price, of course, had no sensation of physical motion, the desert seemed to race beneath them. Vast, sun-glinting salt-pans flashed beneath, like snow-clad lakes. Yellow outcroppings of limestone. Barren plains of flint and clay. Black lava fields.

  Price reached out an exploring hand toward the clustered disks. Where his eyes saw only empty air, his fingers met polished crystal. A queer, tingling shock made his arm jerk back involuntarily.

  “Beware,” warned Vekyra. “All the tower is charged with the power that bends down the light. And you are not immortal—yet.”

  She touched a green stud. And Price, looking over the howdah’s edge again, saw that they seemed to hang motionless over the oasis of El Yerim.

  A broad streak, green with date-palms and fields of green, across dark lava plains. The tiny, green-rimmed lake. The square, clustered mud houses of the town. Across the lake, the camp of his recent allies.

  White tents, grouped along the shore. The gray bulk of the tank—Sam Sorrows had got back safely. Supplies stacked, tarpaulin-covered. The black tents of Fouad’s Bedouins, the herds of camels.

  And two surprising things. One was a set of glistening, parallel wires strung upon poles cut from palm trunks—an unmistakable radio antenna. The other was a smooth, cleared field on the gravel beyond the camp, with two airplanes squatting upon it. Trim, gray-winged military biplanes, machine-guns frowning grimly above their cockpits, light aerial bombs in their racks. Beside the fuselage of one of them he saw Jacob Garth, unmistakable in his f
aded khaki and white topi, staring up at them.

  For a moment Price was dumfounded. Then the explanation of it burst upon him. Garth had insisted, rather strangely, upon bringing no airplanes with them, his only excuse being the difficulty of landing in the sand-desert.

  But he must have secretly arranged for the planes, left them in the hands of unsuspected allies. He had smuggled a portable radio transmitter in with the supplies, unknown to the rest of the party. The landing-field prepared, he had sent directions to the planes by wireless.

  Now Price understood why Garth had been so ready to dynamite the schooner. With the planes, it was useless to him. Also, Price better understood Malikar’s desire for his own aid against the treasure-seekers.

  “Those are devices of war?” asked Vekyra, pointing to the planes.

  “Yes. Men fly in them—to battle.”

  “You think they will again attack this mountain?”

  “I’m sure they will. Jacob Garth isn’t the sort to give up.”

  “Jacob Garth? He was your leader?”

  “Not mine. But now he commands.”

  “Do you see him?”

  “The large man, by that machine.” Price pointed.

  Vekyra studied him intently, nodded. “That is what I wished to know.”

  Her slim yellow arm reached from the howdah, touched the center disk.

  The vibrant whine of hidden mechanisms, which Price had forgotten in his interest at what he saw, abruptly died. The scene below was shattered into a thousand fragments; into torn reflections in a thousand mirrors.

  The shattered shards of images fled away. A moment the mirrors were blank, shimmering with the ultramarine brilliance of the sky. Then a thousand black dots were in them. Specks that swelled, rushed nearer, expanded into pictures of the tiger and its riders.

  Softly the tiger padded across the floor of crystal, out of the hall of illusion.

  25. THE CROWN OF ANZ

  NEXT MORNING Price rose at dawn, to find three of his six female servants—or guards—waiting in his great, splendid room. They brought him breakfast; and, when he had eaten, and strolled out of the apartment, they followed him discreetly, keeping ten yards behind.

  Again he roved the vast building in the hope of some discovery that would lead to a means of escape. Now that Jacob Garth had the airplanes, he would surely attack the mountain again, and with some chance of success. Price longed poignantly for freedom to rejoin him and attempt Aysa’s succor once more.

  Two hours he roamed about the castle. The three girls, with their yellow jambiyahs, kept close behind him. And the wall of gigantic basalt blocks that skirted the flat mountain-top was forty feet high, guarded by other armed women in its studding towers. It appeared heart-breakingly impossible to leave Verl without Vekyra’s permission.

  Again, on the way back to his room, he met the sheikh Fouad el Akmet, walking intimately beside the yellow-branded girl.

  Fouad nodded at her, and winked elaborately at Price. Brushing close as he passed, he whispered:

  “Be at the east side of the central court, Effendi, at midnight.”

  The girl was beside him as he spoke; he ogled her, nudged her familiarly in the side. She smiled slyly back at him.

  “You will be there, Sidi?”

  Price nodded, and the old Bedouin grimaced craftily through his beard.

  The girl, he more than suspected, was about to make a fool of the old Arab. And even if she were sincere, Price could not see how an escape was to be contrived. Surely not through the passages in the mountain, guarded by Malikar and his snake-men. And Price had seen no way to negotiate the half-mile precipices outside the walls. But he resolved to meet the old man—if he could get free of his own guards. No reason why he should not. And there was a chance…

  Vekyra came to his room that evening, a female slave behind her carrying the garments that Malikar had taken from him, and the oval golden buckler, the chain-mail, and the great ax that had been Ira’s.

  “These I made Malikar give me,” she explained. “Do you wish to keep the ax?”

  “Why, yes,” Price said, puzzled, astonished, and delighted at this unexpected return of his possessions.

  “Then promise me not to use it in Verl.”

  “I promise.”

  “The word of Iru is strong as the walls of Anz,” she said. Then, smiling at him provocatively: “Iru, I would have you dine with me at sunset. The slaves will bring your garments.”

  And soon, declining the proffered aid of the armed girls, Price was donning a barbarically splendid outfit. Kamis of pure white silk, diaphanously thin. Abba of stiff, woven silver, lined with crimson silk, bordered with brilliant red. Something extraordinary, he thought, must be imminent.

  When he was ready, the girls led him out of the room, and down a long arcade whose twisted columns were alternately marble and gold, and into a long hall he had not seen before.

  The high walls of burnished gold were inset with broad panels of snowy alabaster, embellished with weird designs in black and crimson. On the walls flared silvery cressets, green and violet.

  Day was already fading and the colored lights were dim; mysterious shadows lurked in the long hall. The air was surprisingly and deliciously cool; it bore a pungent hint of unfamiliar fragrance, as if incense were burning in the cressets.

  The armed girls stopped at the curtained entrance. Price walked alone across the soft rugs to where Vekyra waited. For a moment he was self-conscious in the unfamiliar garments; the silver cloak felt stiff and heavy.

  Two couches had been set in the farther end of the hall, broad and low, of some dark, antique wood, crimson-lacquered. Upon one Vekyra was reclining upon luxurious deep cushions. With feline grace she rose and came to meet Price and took his hands.

  The sheath of scarlet about her pale-gold body made it almost white. A wide band of black about her head emphasized the ruddy splendor of her rebellious hair. She wore no jewels; her dress was richly simple. Perilous lights flamed in her Oriental eyes.

  Silently she led him to one of the couches, and tried to pull him down beside her upon it. He drew quickly away, and seated himself opposite.

  Angrily, she tossed her head.

  “Listen, Vekyra,” Price began abruptly. “I don’t want to quarrel with you. But I want you to understand that I’m not trying to finish any old love story that started two thousand years ago. What I want—”

  Imperiously she gestured with a slim, bare arm that was almost white against her crimson tunic, demanding, “Am I not beautiful?”

  He looked at her. Slenderly curved and graceful, cased in scarlet silk, she was beautiful. But her beauty was bright and cruel and terrible. “You are,” he admitted.

  “What do you want, Iru,” she whispered, “that I can not give you?”

  “See here, Vekyra, you don’t understand—”

  She cut him off with a petulant nod.

  “What is it,” she demanded in a voice that was soft, yet fierce, “that all men want the most? Love? Youth? Wealth? Power? Fame? Wisdom? Iru, I offer you not one, but all!”

  “Oh, but don’t you see—”

  She shrugged impatient shoulders.

  “You say I am beautiful. I give you a love that has lived through a hundred generations. A love that has brought you back from death, by its sheer living strength!”

  Price started to speak, but saw that anything he said would only anger her. He listened in silence.

  “Youth?” her silvery voice pealed the question. “When you and I are of the golden blood, you shall be young for ever. A few days in the yellow vapor—and your youth is immortal!”

  Her slanted eyes burned as she pleaded with strange eloquence.

  “Wealth? Look around you. My castle is yours for the taking, and all the gold in the lair of the snake. Is that nothing?

  “Fame? It is yours for the seeking, when you become the strongest of men, the wealthiest, and immortal.

  “Wisdom? Care, you nothing for the a
ncient secrets of Anz? I have the books of the wise men. The hall of illusion. The mirrors of gold. Many others. You spurn wisdom?”

  “See here—” Price spoke again, and again she would not listen.

  “And yet I offer you more. The thing men prize above all else. The thing they gladly trade all else for. What is that?

  “Power! I give you the weapons of the ancient land. The command of the tiger, and the snake. Power to conquer all the world!”

  She angrily clapped her small hands, and a slave-girl came into the room, carrying a red silken cushion upon which rested a crown of white metal, crusted with seed pearls, and set with large, primitively cut, red and yellow gems.

  “The crown of Anz!” cried Vekyra. “It is yours, Iru. Once you wore it. I give it back to you.”

  She took the crown in her hands; the girl vanished silently.

  Price gestured gravely. “I’m sorry, Vekyra, but you’ll have to listen to reason. I don’t say you aren’t beautiful, for you are. And I understand you are offering me quite a lot. Probably some men would be glad enough to take you up.”

  She drew angrily erect, the coronet in her hands. Price waved her back to the couch.

  “You might as well know the truth, even if it hurts. I love Aysa—no matter if you do say she is the reincarnation of a murderess. And I’m going to take her away from Malikar if it takes the rest of my life.

  “If she is still human, well and good. And if she is already changed to gold, then will be time enough for me to think about going to sleep in that mist, myself.

  “Sorry if it hurts. But it’s better for you to know.”

  Vekyra had listened silently, breast heaving, tawny eyes flashing. She started to her feet again, and then sat back down. Anger vanished from her face, like a discarded mask. She smiled obliquely at Price, with disarming, perilous sweetness.