Beneath Strange Stars: A Collection of Tales

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  Ujjain paused in his climb up the leeward side of the fortress-crowned mesa. The pain in his side flared again, threatening to consume him, but he fought it until it became a dull ache. The wind swirled around him, but he clung with fingers that were numb and bloody. The amusing thought passed through his mind that Mathura might not have to do anything at all to kill him, that he might die from his wounds here amid the bizarre outcroppings of the mesa, unknown and unmourned.

  Presently he came to a forgotten entrance into the Citadel, one he had discovered as a child playing with Mathura. It was a relic of earlier, unsettled times. He pried the protesting doorway open, squeezed through, closed it behind him and collapsed against the cool and dank floor. The passageway was dimly lit by phosphorescent fungi etching the walls. Ujjain lay there, gathering strength. He seemed to hear the voices of children at play.

  “Shiva the Destroyer will get you!”

  “Mathura?" Ujjain murmured weakly.

  “I bet the demons of darkness thrive down there!” the youngster exclaimed. “Are you afraid of demons, Ujjain?”

  “The demons are within,” Ujjain breathed.

  “Wait till I bring Ahmra down here!”

  Mathura rammed his youthful face close to Ujjain’s, but the features shimmered and flowed. The boy was replaced by a man.

  “When a man was reported climbing the mesa toward the old escape panel, I feared it was you,” Mathura said. “I hoped the poisoned cakra would kill you. How many times will you die, Cousin? Will you not stay dead once?”

  Mathura’s guards carried him through the dismal passages and deposited him in one of the Citadel’s many dungeons.

  “When we learned of your crime, the Praetor ordered your name be struck from all clan records,” Mathura said. “It was a mere formality, though, because you were already expelled from the clan, forbidden to return.”

  “I heard of your moves against me,” Ujjain said. Using the bars of the cell, he climbed to an upright position and held on. “Even in Touvalasis, among the Mourdant tribes who cared for me, I gathered scraps of news from merchants and mendicants.”

  “This was not my doing alone," Mathura protested. “I was supported by the entire membership of the Council.”

  “What of the oath you swore to me the night I left?” Ujjain demanded. “What of honor?”

  “Words,” Mathura smiled. “Lord Jarl was not pleased you still lived, was less pleased when he learned of your escape, but your recapture should make the lord once again smile upon Citadel Bhalwaphadasas.”

  “You were never one to work with Second Landers before," Ujjain said.

  “Since Lord Jarl’s return from Touvalasis, things have been…different,” Mathura explained. “We thought there might be war again, him trying to destroy us because you were not available. There were penalties, taxes, punishments. Now that he has you…”

  “Treason!” Ujjain shouted. “He was going to steal the Ship and search for wicked Earth.”

  “And leave Jambhudiva to us, you fool!” Mathura snapped. “If there is a traitor in this farce, it is you!”

  “But the Ship…”

  “The Ship be damned!”

  “Blasphemy!”

  “There is no talking to you,” Mathura said, turning away. “Never was.” He paused at the door. “I must tell Lord Jarl that his great enemy has fallen into my hands.” He smiled. “And I must tell my dear wife Ahmra that soon your ghost will haunt us no more.”

  Alone, Ujjain slid down the bars and collapsed on the filth-encrusted floor. He heard whisperings in the void, Jovah and Vishnu laughing as they played with their toys. As Ujjain hung between creation and apocalypse, a familiar voice pulled him back to consciousness.

  “You should have stayed in the land of the dead, my one-time friend,” the voice said. “Once again, you find ways to complicate the lives of others.”

  Ujjain lifted his head and opened his eyes. The world swam, then steadied. “Jarl?”

  “Life was less than unbearable when I could believe your bones rotted in that blasted valley,” Jarl spat.

  “I had to return,” Ujjain replied. He stood. “It was a matter of honor.”

  “Honor?” Jarl laughed bitterly. “What is honor to you? I counted you a friend when all said I was a fool for trusting a First Lander, and you betrayed me. You murdered my dream, and our secret prophecy. I have nothing. I shall never escape Jambhudiva and for that I shall kill you with my own hands.”

  Jarl moved toward caged Ujjain, hands raised, and Ujjain could not bring himself to move from Jarl’s grasp. The lord’s words rang truer than he wanted to admit. Jarl’s fingers closed around Ujjain’s throat, stiffened, then relaxed. A surprised expression on his face, Jarl staggered back, turned and fell. The ivory hilt of a delicate dagger protruded from the center of his back. Lord Jarl sighed, then was as dead as his dreams.

  Ujjain lifted his gaze to the slim figure in the doorway of the dungeon. “Ahmra…”

  Clad in glittering jewels and shimmering fabrics, Ahmra took the dungeon key from its hook on the wall and opened the cell,. Ujjain tried to take her in his arms, but she pushed him away, moved out of reach.

  “I have returned for you,” Ujjain said. “We can live our lives together as was intended since we were children.”

  “Was it intended that I should be the bride of an outlaw and an apostate?” she challenged. “I do not want you. I am not sure I ever did. I am my husband’s wife.”

  “But you cannot love Mathura.”

  “He would not desert me for a Second Lander’s foolish quest,” she replied. “Nor would he bring doom upon his clan, as you have done.” She looked at dead Jarl. “You have destroyed enough lives. Leave me with mine.”

  She grabbed the knife, turned and ran, vanishing into the darkness. He did not follow. Had he been a fool all along? Many people seemed to think so. If he fled Citadel Bhalwaphadasas, the clan would be cleared of the murder of Lord Jarl. It would most certainly be blamed on him. And if his own dead body were discovered on the slope of the mesa, that would be the end of it.

  He left his battle-mask beside Jarl’s body and dipped his knife into the congealing blood. Then he went out the secret door and stumbled blindly down the mesa, consumed by pain.

  * * *

  “Maybe further south,” Ibrham said. “Humans are not quite so numerous in the southern continents. We might find Tholotant communities or Mourdants that have not turned from the old ways.”

  “I had hopes that…” She touched her bruised cheek, where one of the cast stones had struck.

  “Humans!” Ibrham spat contemptuously.

  The larger component of Jambhudiva’s binary star system had traveled beyond the horizon, leaving the land in a false twilight, and an arm of the spiral god rose ghostly above the fortress on the mesa far behind them. The Tholotants had been delayed in their departure from the vicinity of the village, not just by the savage and unprovoked attack by the residents of Hollaton Grove, but by checkpoints and several thorough searches of the wagon. More than once, Ibrham breathed silent prayers of thankfulness to One Eye for having sent the human on his way. The village lay far behind them now. They continued southward.

  “Wait, Father,” Bryll said, suddenly touching his arm.

  He reined the drays to a halt. “What is it?”

  “By the rocks,” she said. “It may be Ujjain.”

  “Daughter, no.”

  “I feel his suffering.”

  “And I felt the way you suffered because of him,” Ibrham said. “Can you forget the pain he caused? Can you forget what all the humans have done to us?”

  “No, I cannot forget, anymore than you can, Father,” she said. “But we can forgive. We are not human.”

  Ibrham helped Bryll load Ujjain into the back of the wagon. They hid him well in case there were further checkpoints before they finally escaped the reach of the powers of this region. Bryll pressed her cheek against his brow and helped him find his way out of th
e darkness.

  Under the watchfulness of One Eye, they proceeded southward.

  Early in life I became fascinated with the history and culture of ancient and medieval Japan (Nippon), particularly the Samurai. I read extensively about Japan and took language courses. When I started a literary magazine in the early 1990s, I titled it Sozoryoku, which is a Japanese word that can be translated as “the power of imagination.” I wrote several historical and fantasy tales during the 1980s & 90s set in Japan (mostly in the city of Edo) or with Japanese characters. When asked to create an alternate history background for an anthology for an acquaintance, I gave him Napoleonic warfare with atomic bombs, Crusader kingdoms in the Near East, a plain of glass in Russia, a Balkanized Europe, and a New World lightly colonized by the Old; when it came time to write my own tales, however, I put all that in the past, advanced the timeline to the 1960s, and took up the tale of young Mitsuko, a lady of Nippon seeking to evade the vengeance of Lord Zempachi, whose son she killed in self defense. Though her story was intended to be a novel, it became a series of short stories and novellas which saw publication in various venues.

  Upon the Plain of Glass, By the Sea of Memories

  A Tale of Mitsuko of Nippon

  The samurais halted upon a gentle riverbank. The horses champed at the soft grass, and, after testing the water and determining it free of radiation, the men filled their canteens.

  Kyozokura, leader of the band, and Komurasaki, his second, strode atop a knoll up a bit from the river, pulled binoculars from wicker cases and surveyed the outspread unknown land. They swept their vision along a sinuous metal roadway that led to the horizon, a city of minarets and domes.

  “A city of the living, or another necropolis?” Komurasaki asked.

  “It is Samarkand,” Kyozokura said.

  “The city of Timur Khan!”

  Kyozokura laughed gruffly at his companion. “We serve Lord Zempachi two years, side by side, and only now do you betray a knowledge of history?”

  “The quest for vengeance burns away everything, including our lives.” Komurasaki murmured softly, lowering his binoculars.

  Kyozokura sighed. “Timur ruled Samarkand five centuries ago, but the city was founded twenty-five centuries earlier.” He paused. ”I believe Mitsuko and Ikeda Yoshaki have fled there.”

  “Yes, this direction, certainly, but perhaps they avoided the city, where their presence would surely be noted and remembered,” Komurasaki suggested. “Or perhaps they traveled north or south, thinking we would be lured to the city.”

  Kyozokura shook his grey head. “Southward, the land and ports are gripped by the Agharta King, who suffers in his realm no person whose skin is not black. His borders are marked by the hides of men stretched upon poles, pale hides like ours, friend.”

  “And to the north is…” Komurasaki started to say.

  “Death,” Kyozokura finished. For a long moment, he gazed across the boreal leagues, as if by dint of vision he could see those scorched and glassy plains, the abiding legacy of the war fought more than one hundred-fifty years earlier between Napoleon, Emperor of Greater Gaul, and Nicolas I, Czar of all the Tribes of Rus. “We’ll seek the girl and her companion in Samarkand, or for news of them.”

  “As you command,” Komurasaki acknowledged.

  The warriors remounted and thundered toward Samarkand, their route parallel to the ruined metal roadway. It was, Kyozokura knew, a relic of the Alexandrine Empire. Despite that Alexander never trod upon Nippon’s soil, or perhaps because of it, the Great Hellenic Emperor’s name was still spoken with a measure of reverence in the Home Islands.

  The samurais kept off the roadway, not from awe or respect, or even superstitious fear. Their avoidance derived from disdain, for road making was not a proper use of metal. In mineral-poor Nippon, the most noble use of metal was sword making, for only in the Katanakaji’s forge could metal achieve sentience and the sword be imbued with a soul.

  They reached Samarkand at dusk, as watchfires leaped from city walls. Barely civil guards carefully scrutinized the warrior band and dispatched a runner, to their commander, but they did not hinder their passage. They stabled their horses for a few coppers, then set out in search of their quarry.

  Samarkand was as large as Edo, but Kyozokura found it more primitive. A portion was gas lit, but pitch torches still accounted for a majority of the illumination. The thronging population was more poly-ethnic and polyglotic than would be tolerated by the Shogun. A few steamer carriages and palanquins careened through the streets, but there were no electrics, which became pandemic in Edo after the Chumash War.

  Kyozokura and Komurasaki questioned a few people they met, but, mostly, they kept their gazes peeled for signs. They found their first indication in a beggar’s chipped alms bowl.

  The beggar was dirty, rag-wreathed and one-eyed, the other patched. A wooden crutch leaned against the wall behind the man. His eye widened as the warriors squatted before him, one grabbing his arm while the other reached into his begging bowl with a serpent-swift strike.

  “Do not be frightened, unfortunate one,” Kyozokura said in an easy tone, eyeing the copper coin caught between his thumb and forefinger.

  “We seek information only,” Komurasaki added, releasing the beggar’s arm.

  “This coin comes from my homeland, very far away,” Kyozokura said. “Do you know who gave you this offering, and when?”

  The beggar’s gaze darted from man to man, still fearful. “An old man, sirs. He wore a blue robe. He was thin. He had long white hair. He was of your race. This morning. After daybreak.”

  Kyozokura smiled. “Your remaining eye serves you well.”

  “The Warriors of Nehru took my eye and legs. Condemned to sit and watch, I see more than I did whole,” the beggar explained.

  “The old man,” Komurasaki said. “Was he in the company of a young woman?”

  “A girl.” Kyozokura corrected.

  The beggar nodded. “Why do you seek them?”

  Komurasaki scowled. “That is none…”

  Kyozokura gestured his aide to silenced. “The old man is a traitor, the girl a murderer.”

  “Our orders are to return them to Nippon,” Komurasaki said. “Or bring back their heads.”

  The beggar sighed and slowly shook his head. “And such a pretty head too.”

  “Do you know if they are still in the city?” Kyozokura asked.

  “Toward the Grand Bazaar,” the beggar replied. “I have not seen them since.”

  Kyozokura dropped a silver coin into the beggar’s bowl, then he and Komurasaki hurried off in the direction of the Grand Bazaar.

  “May Ahura-Mazda bless you!” the beggar called after them.

  The beggar watched until the two samurai warriors had vanished. He grabbed the begging bowl, stood and hobbled into a nearby alley. They would eventually discover that all caravans leaving Samarkand did so by way of the northern gate, location of the so-called Petite Bazaar.

  He doubted detouring the samurais would result in the creation of any quantum tension vectors traceable to him. But he could no more stop the samurais than he could he spirit away Mitsuko, as she was known here, to the nearest portal in his flyer. The resulting quantum fissures would be instantly detected by the scanners at the Institute Max Planck.

  The dynamics were all wrong for opening any kind of a portal in Samarkand. The nearest possibility was in the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, but she had to reach that city on her own. Once he had her through the portal, there was no turning back—the resulting fissures would most likely collapse this timeline, but that was not his concern. She could not after that be sent back, so even if he ended his days in a sidestream prison, he would do so with the knowledge he had saved her.

  Divesting himself of a beggar’s garments, he exited Samarkand as a merchant and made his way to the ravine where his flyer lay hidden. Without a backward glance at what was, for him, a city of shadows and phantoms, he piloted his black craft westward. />
  “The girl Mitsuko is not here,” Kyozokura said with a measure of disgust. “Nor Yoshaki either.”

  “The beggar said it was early this morning,” Komurasaki pointed out. “They could have come and gone.”

  “I do not believe they were ever came to this so-called Grand Bazaar,” Kyozokura asserted.

  “But the beggar said…”

  “The beggar never saw them,” Kyozokura said. “We were purposely sent astray.”

  Komurasaki looked about the Grand Bazaar, as if seeking some unnoticed clue, then looked back to where they had entered the vast marketplace.

  “He will not be there,” Kyozokura said. “The man was not a beggar, but a diversion.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “The beggar’s bowl held many coins, but the coin from Nippon was on top,” Kyozokura explained. “As coins were added, he continually moved it to the top. We were intended to see the coin, to ask the beggar who gave it to him, to waste time in this labyrinthine bazaar.”

  “Who was the beggar then?” Komurasaki asked. “How could they have confederates in this land?”

  “I don’t know,” Kyozokura replied testily.

  Suddenly, the two warriors were surrounded by subtle sounds, just at the threshold of audibility, like strange music heard dimly from another room. It came from everywhere, yet nowhere, and they seemed to be the only ones who could hear it. By degrees, the noise subsided into the babble of the crowd.

  “Spirit voices?” Komurasaki said, but sounded doubtful.

  A streak of red leaped from the northern quarter of Samarkand, blossoming in the night sky like a fiery chrysanthemum. The crowd was terrified and awed by this strange manifestation, everyone asking what it could mean. Kyozokura and Komurasaki ran toward the fading glare, pushing people aside.

  The rocket had been sent up from a sector called the Petite Bazaar, a ramshackle gathering of stalls and stables just inside Samarkand’s northern gate. The place smelled of manure and grease and animals and food and the unwashed. It was a place of base necessities, not luxuries; sweat, not perfumery; hammered bronze and iron, not worked silver and gold; thick-hewed muscle, not the allure of fair skin and coiffed hair.