The Days of Glory

by Brian Stableford

  It was the first time Blackstar had ever seen hatred in a man’s face. He wondered how a simple matter of friendship could do such a thing to a man. He had never understood how his brother’s love for Angeline could lead to his involvement in a war, but as he looked at Stormwind he saw the simple power of love.

  Stormwind did not trouble to try and understand. His mind was solidly set in the path which his vanity and his anger had forced upon it. There was no doubt and no hesitation.

  Blackstar willed life into his bruised body and flexed his stiff fingers again, wincing as he did so. In silence they waited.

  The Urside reappeared, carrying two pairs of gloves. They were made of some stiff black cloth. Each finger bore a long, curved claw of steel. The thumb bore a shorter, barbed claw. On the palm of each glove was a series of metal plates, grooved to accommodate the claws so that the fists could still be clenched. On the back and on the knuckles were rows of metal studs.

  Stormwind threw one pair to Blackstar and pulled the others on himself. He pulled them tight, making sure his fingers were comfortably bedded, and clenched his fists experimentally. Then he flashed his fingers out, suddenly exposing the glinting claws. With a satisfied expression, he looked at Blackstar.

  The Human was familiar with the talons only by reputation. He had never used them. Even with the Beasts they were not a popular weapon.

  Stormwind held up the gloves, palm open, waiting. Black-star took his time, wiping most of the blood off his hands first.

  “Ready?” asked Stormwind eventually.

  Blackstar shrugged.

  The Ursides stepped well back, forming a rough line some distance away. Then they sat down to watch.

  Blackstar backed away slowly as Stormwind came in—bent low with hands extended. Blackstar recognized the catlike crouch which Robert Hornwing had used while wrestling on Stonebow.

  Briefly, ideas for various forms of strategy slipped through his confused mind, but he adopted none of them. He merely waited for the time being, to see what would happen.

  Stormwind came forward quickly, ducking low to the left and then hurling his body into an acrobatic roll which took him away to the right, far out of the Human’s reach. As he curved away, his hand licked out and two claws ran lightly across Blackstar’s thigh.

  Blackstar retreated, and then ducked into a crouch rather like Stormwind’s, where he would be better able to retaliate to a similar attack.

  The Beast lord moved lightly, round and round the Human in a crablike sideways amble, while Blackstar was content to turn and make no overt move himself until Storm-wind cared to attack again.

  Metal crashed on metal as Stormwind came in, hands slashing upwards; Blackstar parried left with right But Stormwind’s right hand got inside Blackstar’s guard and ripped along the bigger man’s forearm with all claws splayed.

  Blackstar reacted with a savage kick which caught his opponent on the hip and catapulted his body sideways and away. The high lord followed up but did not try to use the talons. Instead he pivoted on one knee and lashed out his right foot like a battering ram. It caught Stormwind just above the knee and sent him over backwards, scrambling to regain his balance. The Beast rolled over and over as Blackstar bounded back to his feet and gained enough ground to flow smoothly up on to one knee and back into an upright position again.

  Blackstar moved forward slowly, knowing that his kicks must have inhibited Stormwind’s movement but not trusting his own muscles to react fast enough to take advantage of the fact. Now it was Stormwind’s turn to wait for a while. Remembering to maintain the low crouch, Blackstar licked out one talon to tempt Stormwind into a counter. Stormwind refused to be drawn and remained still, balancing on his feet and waiting for the Human to commit himself.

  Blackstar suddenly lunged with a speed of which Storm-wind had not thought him capable. One foot slipped along the floor as the Human seemed to go into a sliding fall, and Stormwind’s own feet were whipped away from beneath him. The Beast jerked his body back out of harm’s way, and Blackstar’s hands swooped down, reaching for a trailing ankle.

  The Beast lord whirled, supporting himself on the knuckles

  131 of one taloned hand and reaching out with the other as he snatched his feet out of reach.

  Blackstar’s glove met his own, and for a moment they were poised, stalemated, each using one hand to support himself, and with the other gripped in an unyielding clasp. Blackstar pushed, trying to use his superior strength to roll Stormwind on to his back and expose his belly. Storm-wind resisted the push, and squeezed hard. The claws of his talons could gain no purchase against the armored glove, but the strength of his fingers caused Blackstar’s cut hand to send waves of pain into his brain. The pain caused the hand to give way, just a little, and his fingers relaxed under the force of Stormwind’s grip. Then his opponent suddenly pulled. Blackstar came right off balance. Stormwind also lost his balance but was on his back for a mere instant before curling himself right up and launching himself away from the eagerly reaching Black-star.

  As Blackstar suddenly found himself nothing to reach for, he also found himself with nothing to reach -with. His talon was no longer on his, hand. When his fingers had relaxed, and Stormwind had pulled, the talon had been ripped away. Stormwind had it.

  The Human looked frantically around for a way to save the situation, but Stormwind was already coming in, having suddenly discovered unexpected advantage. Black-star braced himself for a kick, still lying on his back in the sand, but Stormwind abruptly snapped his talons in to grab for the foot. Blackstar halted the movement and scrambled backwards instead, somehow managing to bring himself to his feet.

  As he got up again and Stormwind came forward, Black-star’s naked right hand, swinging back behind him, found a knob of metal. He grabbed and heaved. His hand came up and round with a fragment of metal from the hull of the crippled spaceship. The momentum of the pull brought it round in a low arc and Blackstar crashed it into the charging Stormwind, losing his grip as he did so.

  Stormwind went backwards and fell heavily, his lower ribs feeling as though they had been caved in. But the lump of metal had done relatively little damage; it had been heavy, but Blackstar had failed to get any real force into the blow.

  Blackstar looked wildly around for another makeshift weapon, and found a strip of metal sheared from the girdle supports which held the space-drive motors. He lifted it high above his head like a club and jumped forward to tower over the stricken Stormwind.

  The Beast rolled over into Blackstar’s legs, and the Human lost his balance. But Stormwind was unable to prevent the metal club driving down hard on to his uplifted right arm. He felt a tearing sensation and a sudden nausea as the arm broke below the elbow. The hand and wrist and much of the forearm swung away at an odd angle as the edge of the metal carved its way through the flesh, almost severing the end of the limb. Blood fountained out of the ragged slash on to both combatants.

  But Stormwind’s roll had carried him on top of Black-star as the Human went down, unable to recover his balance because of the momentum of his weapon. Stormwind’s left hand pawed away the hand still clutching the club, and stormwind jabbed his knee into Blackstar’s midriff. As Blackstar tried to bring his taloned hand into action, Stormwind brought up his smashed arm and deliberately sprayed blood into the Human’s eyes.

  The stretching claws on Blackstar’s hand clenched convulsively as the wrist was pinned to the ground under Stormwind’s foot. The Human’s open right hand engaged Stormwind’s clawed left. Stormwind squeezed hard, and got the barbed claw of his thumb under Blackstar’s thumb and dug it deep into the palm. The other daws bit into the back of Blackstar’s hand. Blood welled out from between Stormwind’s gripping fingers. Stormwind twisted and wrenched, and Blackstar fought frantically to disengage his trapped wrist from beneath Stormwind’s boot

  But it was no use. Stormwind let go the crushed hand and turned his attention to more vital parts. The Beast lord plunged the barbed thumb-c
law into Blackstar’s blind, blood-filled eyes, one at a time, and Blackstar’s blood coursed from the ripped eyelids to join Stormwind’s on the Human’s face. Blackstar half screamed, half coughed.

  Then Stormwind disengaged the second talon from Blackstar’s trapped wrist, and stepped backwards.

  Blackstar came slowly to his knees, searching his face with his one good hand. He could feel the ruins of his eyes flowing down his face like viscous tears.

  Stormwind stood still, staring into the face with its vacant eye sockets, for a second or two. Blackstar was moving slowly and jerkily, like an insect which moves by reflex after having been killed. But Blackstar was not dead. He was losing blood slowly, but none of the cuts was deep enough to cause quick death. Stormwind had lost more blood than he. Blackstar had not even lost consciousness. His mind was still screaming, although his voice was not.

  Stormwind stumbled away unsteadily. He snatched the rifle from the Urside who ran to help him and pressed the muzzle into the gash in his arm, which had already spilled a great deal of arterial blood and was still leaking. He held the gun by the barrel and directed the other man to fire it.

  The Beast pressed the trigger without question. The gun was well into the wound, but even so the beam sheared clean through Stormwind’s arm. The shattered stump of wrist and taloned hand fell off, leaving a blackened stub which had ceased to bleed.

  Stormwind gasped out a strangled cry and swayed as though about to faint. The rifleman steadied him, but he brushed away the helping hand. He turned to the still-moving Blackstar.

  The Human had somehow got to his feet and was standing, legs apart, with his face tilted to the sun, as though feeling the radiation he could no longer see.

  Stormwind took the gun away from the stump of his arm, to which he still held it pressed, and wrenched it away from the Urside. He tossed it in the air and caught it with his grip now on the stock of the weapon. He got his finger clumsily inside the trigger guard—still with the awkward talon on his hand—and aimed the rifle.

  Blackstar suddenly changed from his sightless contemplation of the sun to direct his empty eyes at Richard Stormwind. He smiled a wide, skull-like smile even before the beam of energy wiped his lips away from his teeth.

  It took a long time for the face to fade away completely because the gunner had set the rifle on minimum discharge before cauterizing Stormwind’s wound. The Human’s curly brown hair became a yellow torch which did not die for an incredibly long time. It was nearly half a minute before the swelling brain burst the turbinal filter and ran blackening blood from the nose in a fast stream.

  Blackstar never even recoiled from the beam. When he finally fell, it was forwards.

  DREAMS

  Dawnstar, alone in her bed, lay dreaming.

  As always, her dreams lacked clarity; they were composed of fleeting images lost in a soup of confusion and tangled threads, jumbled fragments of time all out of order and out of context. But over the years they built up a picture. They all fitted into the same framework, like pieces of a jigsaw. The picture they made was a sort of memory that extended forwards instead of backwards and disappeared into nowhere.

  It frightened her when she dreamed. Her reversed memory was often terrifying in what it told, but it was terrifying simply by being what it was. A memory, in the real sense, relates to things accomplished and established. The consummation of the memory is the present, which confirms and reinforces the memory by its form and its progress. It makes the memory tangible and meaningful.

  But there is no such support to precognitive vision. It is alone without root or consequences. Although it has its origins in past and present, it does not relate to them in any comprehensible way. It is unreal with nothing to anchor it to the visible and tangible. It is a ghost—something to be feared.

  And so Dawnstar sweated in fear as she watched a man she had never seen, but whom she knew to be Mark Chaos of Aquila, striding in triumph through the halls of the palace which were below and around her. From a point high on the long, curling staircase she watched the Beasts within the palace, herding people and killed them. She saw flashes of rifle fire burning the curtains and scoring the carpets. She saw blood splashing the floors and the walls.

  She saw another face a thinner, darker face with a beard, that she knew to be the face of Ralph Eagleheart of Chrysocyon. That face was lighted with ecstasy. The two faces— the dark, evil one and the triumphant, round-faced one with piglike eyes—merged and blurred.

  She saw more blood, and another expression of ecstasy, but the scene was different; it was another face, and another time. This time the blood belonged to Eagleheart and the face was that of Gloriana of Chrysocyon. There was going to be more blood. The images were slow and long in fading and changing. The viscous flow of the dream showed her Eagleheart’s body, Gloriana’s face, a knife, her own hands, her own frightened face in a mirror, Gloriana’s face again. Her eyes became confused with her body. She was no longer remote. She dived into the pool of images, and felt and heard. She was living in that absurd, changing world. She was cast free of present and was floating in time, hurled from wave to wave in defiance of duration.

  She felt a hand on her arm, guiding. She felt tears on her face. She felt sick, and she felt her mind trying to retreat, to disappear down a tunnel. She felt silken sheets around her and a pleasant euphoria that cut itself off like a sudden shock of pain as she was being forced to kneel by Eagleheart’s body. And then she was running, but not far. Her legs were heavy and her vision shot back and forth from the knife and the face, and her own blurring tears. The disorder of nightmare lost the vivid impression of reality, but only for a few moments, as the sequence slowed again.

  She was swaying, and she saw Gloriana’s lips moving, forming the word “pretty” and other words which she could not read and did not want to hear or understand. She felt graceful fingers stroking her body underneath her clothing. The fingers felt as large as fists and her skin writhed and changed shape to get away, leaving a long trail of burning sensation as the fingers slid across her.

  It was much more terrible, that hand running over her eyelids, round her neck, down her back and inside her thighs, and round and round and up and down, than the knife which crawled into her navel like a spider hiding in a crack.

  Dawnstar hardly felt the blade inside her. She felt the hard shape of the pommel as her hands clutched at it convulsively, but the blade was hardly real. She held the blade tight but made no attempt to withdraw it. Gloriana was gone, for there were no more crawling fingers and staring eyes and ecstatic faces. Slower and slower went her life, ebbing up through the handle she held tightly between her two hands. Peace had drenched her fear, but there was horror in the eternity which every second took to drain away through her fingers. She struggled to escape, but the knife held her pinned fast; she could not move without tearing herself in two.

  Images blurred again and she flowed out of the wound along with the blood, to be nowhere else and not there either. There was another image echoing from her mind, superimposed upon the whirling darkness inside her closed eyelids. It was the moon-shaped face of Mark Chaos, disfigured and warped, emaciated and bloated, aflame with fright and a weird repulsion.

  Her dream began to dissolve but she was not near waking. She left her identity in the corpse wrapped neatly around Gloriana’s dagger. She became Mark Chaos for a few seconds that took a whole hour, but he was only a bridge to reach someone else. She got bigger then, and could feel stars inside her eyes. She began to see, and she disappeared down the tunnel and she had tried to reach earlier, and she saw a million things at once.

  She saw Blackstar dead and Stormwind dying in the darkness. She saw Stormwind after his death, in the eyes and hearts of the Beasts. She saw Stormwind the martyr become Stormwind the false god, in whose name the ritual murder of the House of Stars was committed, in the shadow of whose honor the Beasts were driven to murder madness.

  She saw the first human sacrifice in ten thousand year
s as her sister died, and suddenly she was back at her own death for a few fleeting moments, witnessing the slow and beautiful transformation, apart from the courage and the horror and the fear, trying to fit it in to the larger vision. But it dissolved in the blood of her father and the blood of her brothers.

  She saw Starbird denied help by a girl who loved him, somewhere out in the lonely deserts of Home.

  She saw a galaxy in chaos, buried in the shame of its own mad actions. She saw ghosts walking abroad amid the stars, ghosts of dead men and ghosts of living men, competing for the right to exist. She watched the ghosts attack a planet called Despair, where there was a land of fire. And from that land of fire she watched a new people come—a people who were neither Beast nor Human, a people who struggled for mastery of the galaxy with silver shapes that looked like men but moved like cats. She saw Heljanita the toymaker lose what he had tried to gain.

  She watched the stars move in the sky, and a crooked wheel spinning vanity and love into a net to catch the stars. She saw the pale shadows of Mark Chaos, and two others whose names she could not find—one a Beast and one a Human.

  She saw darkness, and through the darkness she saw…

  The sheets were sticking to her legs and her back, because of the sweat. Tears had forced themselves from the comers of her eyes and stood balanced on her cheeks.

  She cried a little.

  Her fever died but she dared not sleep again. She lay still in the silence waiting for her dreams to come true, as she knew that they would.

  All of them.