Beneath Strange Stars: A Collection of Tales

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  When writing fantasy fiction based in antiquity, a writer who is far too obsessive (some even say “anal”) might spend an inordinate amount of time perusing old maps, reading annotated copies of ancient travelogues, and charting the paths of rivers or the changes in coastlines. He might also look for place names that inhabitants forgot long ago, or make connections with people and events which are celebrated under better known, but quite erroneous, names. But, as I mentioned elsewhere, I have great faith in the intelligence of my readers. Not that I would venture into obscurity. Well, not too far.

  The Spider’s Web

  A Tale of Tawa of the Sky Clan

  Three days from Tyre, Tawa of the Sky Clan reached Ptahset on the Salt Sea at dusk. Mystery clung to its ruined spires and domes. A horned moon silvered the inland sea. Wind-sculpted salt pillars rose by onyx quays where brimstone and pitch bubbled. The gods upon its beetling walls had died elderly when Jericho and Catal Hayak were yet young; the dolabriform script declaring the glory of Ptahset had passed from human memory long ages past.

  She plunged into cobalt shadows treading rubbled ways and empty plazas. Deep within the city stealthy noises circled her, made her pause. She unsheathed her Kelt-crafted bronze sword.

  “Go about your business and let me be about mine,” she said. “I came seeking more than a fight.”

  Small spindly creatures edged into moonlight, reminiscent of both jackals or rats in form. Obsidian eyes gleamed malevolently.

  They attacked. Four died by her sword. The others stayed out of sword-reach, harrying her, herding her into shadows. It was a small thing that betrayed her, a rock shifting underfoot, but it was enough. Tawa fell hard against a block of masonry.

  A sudden whine was followed by a solid thunk. A creature sprawled back against its fellows, an arrow’s shaft protruding from its chest. Three more fell to the archer. Tawa recovered and killed two near her. The others fled.

  She sheathed her sword but did not drop her hand from the hilt. “I owe you my life.”

  “Your life’s your own,” the archer said. “Leave! Ptahset isn’t for you.”

  “It is for you?”

  “A bloated corpse of a city, ravaged by evil and stinking of corruption—yes, I belong here.”

  A gray shadow rose atop a fallen column and shambled into the moonlight. The man was huge. A massive hump rose behind his left shoulder. His arms were oddly articulated as if broken and mended badly. His right hand had only two fingers. Scars covered the exposed portions of his body, a very deep one running jagged from his left temple to the right of his throat. His forehead sloped into a thick brow jutting over two pale, watery blue eyes.

  “Run and scream, girl, or laugh—no difference to me.”

  “My name is Tawa. What’s yours?”

  “Monster.”

  “That’s no proper name.”

  “Offender of the gods.”

  “There are no gods.”

  “I was named Hektor at birth, but such a birth it was to murder she who bore me and shape me to this form.” He touched his two right lingers to the deep scar across his face. "What the gods did not disfigure, war did.”

  Scurrying sounds came from the darkness. The wind carried bestial growls and the baying of hounds.

  “Come,” he said, gathering his arrows. “The iblixes will return to eat their dead and there are more dangerous things that hunt by night after they have gone away.”

  Tawa followed the misshapen giant. He loped with a strange, animalistic grace. He entered a tumble of stones, and she followed. A twisting passage opened into a high-domed chamber lit by an oil lamp’s pale flame. He blocked the way with a large stone.

  The chamber’s facings held monstrous visages. “Gods are ugly bastards, even the Olympians. I used to tell people Zeus was my father, but I guess hundreds of lads tell that story.” He looked at the slender girl with black hair and almond eyes. “No gods? Not even a One True God, like Aten’s Children?”

  Tawa shook her head. “As a child I believed many foolish things. The spirits came to our village at the seasons and danced in the plazas. One night I hid to watch the spirits fly back to the sacred mountains, but they removed their Masks and became men I had known all my life.”

  “Gods assume many guises, even that of mortals.” Hektor said. “Gods speak through their priests and oracles.”

  Tawa made no reply.

  “Why are you here girl?”

  “Do you know a place called the House of the Spider?”

  Hektor’s eyes narrowed. “At the center a damned place in a damned city.”

  “That’s my goal,” Tawa said. “A magician in Tyre told me I’d find a homeward path there.”

  Hektor eyed her in the dim light. “Home’s a long way off?”

  Tawa nodded. “West, beyond the Pillars of the Sky, across the Outer Ocean.”

  “None but Phoenicians leave the Central Sea,” Hektor said. “Their forts and galleys kept all others bottled up.”

  “They also claim a void lies beyond the Pillars of the Sky.”

  Hektor grinned, a hideous sight. “Phoenicians lie to each other and even themselves to keep secret routes secret. When it comes to ports of trade, they want the only horse-headed boats there to be their own.”

  “So I sought other ways,” she said. “Magick-makers of all sorts from Tartessus to Karnak, but without result.”

  “The Spider’s House won’t take you home,” Hektor said. “It will kill you.”

  “Show me how to get there.”

  “Not now,” Hektor said after a moment “The dark hides too many dangers, but the Spider’s House even more.”

  Tawa shook her head. “I’ve come too far to stop now.”

  “Stay the night,” Hektor said. “It’s safe here.”

  “Just tell me what path to take” Tawa said. “Or don’t. I can find my own way.”

  Hektor sighed. “If I let you go, I’ll hear your screams in my ears and maybe in my dreams. We’ll go but stay close.”

  Hektor abandoned his bow for a massive bronze sword and a shield adorned with a grinning Gorgon’s head. He reached for a gleaming helm, oddly formed to fit his head, but let his hand drop.

  “In the long war I wore the armor of a soldier and shared the campfires of heroes,” he murmured. “Upon those windy plains, my comrades judged me by the strength of my arm and the range of my bow.” He sighed. “If I had died, I would have been one of the honored dead. The gods are cruel bastards.”

  Tawa stayed close as they penetrated the heart of Ptahset. Swift and silent, they clung to shadows. They were often forced to hide, and hardly dared breathe as terrors passed. Ropy, black shapes slithered through the ruins. Even the dire inhabitants of the dead city gave those questing tendrils a wide berth.

  “What are they?” Tawa breathed.

  “Dwellers below,” Hektor said. “They’re hunting. Those caught are dragged into great holes. The screams give way to silence and the dwellers below again hunt the night.”

  They entered a ruined court. Faded murals upon the walls, moonlit through rents in the crystal ceiling, showed men astride griffins and thunder-beasts fighting wars with powers of air and darkness. A skeleton robed in tatters sat upon the raised throne. They scaled a fallen wall, from block to block. As they neared the top, Hektor motioned for her to stay low and silent.

  Below. Tawa saw the place she sought. It could be nothing else—the main part of the building was squat and chambered to mimic a spider’s form, black arches flew outward like articulated legs and multifaceted crystals glimmered in the night. The place was not ruined, but more importantly it was not abandoned. Tall robed beings moved among the legs of the spider.

  “Even the dwellers below don’t hunt here” Hektor said in her ear. “The guardians of the Spider’s House will take your soul and then kill you.”

  “The magician told me a way home was within,” Tawa said.

  “He lied.”

  “Perhaps,” Tawa admit
ted “but I must know.” She started down the other side of the heaped wall.

  Hektor grabbed her wrist. “If you go there, you’ll die.”

  She slipped her wrist from his huge grasp. “If I do, I’ll at least discover if the gods live.”

  Halfway down the wall, she looked back. Hektor was gone. She felt no ill will. This was her quest, not his. Guiding her to this place, he had shown more kindness than she had had reason to expect.

  The temple guards were garbed in gray. At a distance they might have passed for men. Closer, though, the differences were manifold—crystalline blue eyes, gray leathery skin, facial tentacles and strange musculature moving beneath their robes. They held staffs tipped with crystals glowing ruddy in the dark, which Tawa took to be weapons.

  This was not just a temple to some god of the Central Sea. One could not approach and ask to visit the Web-shrine in the Hall of Journeys, or so the magician in Tyre, Abrim al’Toth had said. A steaming sheep’s liver had given an augury of peril, but Abrim al’Toth had also prophesied a homecoming.

  The Spider’s House was well kept, but was surrounded by rubble, fallen columns and statuary, and decayed walls. Wreathed in shadows, Tawa moved silent as a shade. An inhuman guard passed near but did not pause. He vanished beyond one of the spider’s legs. Tawa dashed into the nearest lighted portal.

  Suddenly dizzy, she sank to a polished marble floor, her vision blurred. By slow stages she regained her feet. She was alone. She let her bronze sword slip back into its sheath.

  She stood in a curving corridor. There was no sign of the portal through which she had entered. The temple was silent but for the tap-tapping of her sandals. There were no torches, but the corridor was infused with a somber light of enigmatic origin.

  After several hundred paces, Tawa came to a branching. All ways curved beyond sight and were ridged as inside a nautilus’ shell. She entered the one seeming to penetrate deepest into the mysterious structure.

  The way darkened with every step forward. Noises sounded ahead, a low chanting in no language she recognized and a whining flute piping without rhythm. She crept cautiously forward.

  The corridor opened into a chamber. Tawa crouched in the darkness behind one of two flared structures flanking what Tawa took to be an altar. Temple priests moved quietly on walkways arching through the murk like a spider’s webbing. The vault of the chamber seemed constructed of crystal or ice, and through it the stars were…

  The stars were strange. She could not group them into the constellations that had guided her in her journeys. Gone were the Hunter and Serpent, the Scorpion and the Seven Sisters.

  Portals glowed softly at myriad levels within the chamber, used by the priests on the arching walkways. The chanting and the fluting still seemed distant. She raised herself a bit to better see what happened to the priests who entered the portals.

  A hissing sounded close by. She turned. A priest, eyes aglow and tentacles writhing, towered over her. He swung his staff. Tawa dodged, unsheathing her sword even as she rolled clear. On her feet, sword at the ready. Tawa faced the priest.

  “I intend no disrespect to your gods,” Tawa said. “I seek a path homeward, was told I’d find it here.”

  The priest jabbed his crystal-tipped staff at her. Tawa parried with her sword. Metal clanged. A sphere of light erupted from the crystal, striking a nearby walkway, and bright lines of fire played over its surface.

  Other angry hisses sounded loudly. More priests scurried toward her. They were, Tawa saw, in no mood for discussion.

  She parried a thrust of the nearest priest and knocked away the staff of another. She did not want to hurt them, for it was yet possible they might be somehow appeased, their god honored and a solution found.

  But not at the moment, Tawa thought as she fought off two newcomers. She turned toward the portal, but saw only a featureless wall. A priest sent a bright pebble of fire from his staff. He missed Tawa as she leaped out of its path; it struck another priest, sending him flying against a wall where he slumped and did not move.

  The priests now attacked with their staffs’ hard metal ends. She blocked their thrusts, but held no illusion as to her fate. They would batter her down as persistent waves upon a shore grind even the hardest stone to sand.

  They fell suddenly away from her. Any sense of reprieve she felt was short-lived. The darkness within the chamber seemed to shimmer and gather, assuming a gigantic shape. Huge limbs reached for Tawa, and she was coolly regarded by clusters of fiery eyes high in the vaulted chamber. There was no real body, just the suggestion of something vast, something partly of this world but mostly of another.

  It was, Tawa realized with dread, the being which the Hittites called Istustaya, the weaver of fates. Tawa tried to raise her sword, but her arm would not obey.

  “There are no gods!” she yelled. “I do not believe!”

  The vast form of the spider-god seemed to fill the entire chamber, towering against strange stars. The reaching arms reeked of slaughter houses, of the coldness between the worlds in their crystal spheres.

  A roar erupted within the chamber. The Spider’s priests scattered before a misshapen giant of a man, his features twisted with rage.

  The black arms of the spider-god swung toward the warrior.

  “Hektor, no!” Tawa cried. “Run!”

  “The gods are ugly bastards!” he yelled as he hacked away at deity and worshipers alike.

  Momentarily ignored by the monstrous master of the temple, Tawa rushed toward Hektor.

  A bright pebble of fire erupted from a crystal-tipped staff. Hektor instinctively blocked with his bronze shield. What happened next, Tawa was not certain.

  A brightness blinded her. Thin ribbons of light seemed to erupt from Hektor’s shield. She heard angry hisses and above that, a keening scream filled with bestial fury. Something grabbed Tawa. She struggled till she realized Hektor held her.

  “By Hades!” he exclaimed. “The way I came in is gone!”

  “The glowing portals,” she gasped.

  “They just hang in the air.”

  “We must go through one.”

  “We’ll fall and die.”

  “No.” Tawa protested “There are doorways.”

  Tawa’s vision returned by slow degrees. She swung her sword at a black, spidery limb. The bronze blade sliced sluggishly through, as if she were cutting congealed fog. Frigid air blasted her, and the spider-god screamed.

  Glowing portals loomed as they rushed up a nearby walkway. Through them, Tawa glimpsed strange vistas, but the priests were too close to allow them pause.

  The suspended portals, Tawa realized, were somehow part of the spider-god’s dark form. She wondered who was master and who was slave. A shining portal shimmered before them. They drew near, but it started to dim.

  As Tawa raced past a branching walkway, she glanced into another gateway. What she saw seared her mind.

  Even as she and Hektor leaped through the dimming portal, she realized what she had seen—the spirits her people called kachinas dancing upon the slopes of the sacred mountain of the west and, in the distance, the dark mesa where her people had settled after entering Tuwaqachi, the World of the Fourth Sun.

  The image lingered in bitter memory as oblivion claimed her.

  Tawa opened her eyes to purple dusk and sat up. She was on a grassy slope. The air was mild. Hektor stood near her, his face grim. He still held his bronze sword and great shield, though the grinning Gorgon’s head was nearly scorched away. He stared beyond her. She turned.

  At first she could not breathe, then only in gasps.

  Across leagues of grassy fields, beyond an indigo forest rose a range of mountains, the upper reaches capped with frost and mist. Upon one of the mountains stood a fortress-like edifice, domes and spires beyond beetling walls, and rising from its midst, a slender, five-sided ebony pyramid capped with electrum.

  Rising on either side of the fortress were two azure moons, like a dragon’s eyes. Two ruddy sun
s touched a far horizon, casting double shadows.

  “Where are we?” Tawa breathed.

  “In a very strange land, far from home,” Hektor replied. “We’d better find shelter for the night and food.”

  “I saw it through another portal just before we leaped” Tawa said “My home. I saw the mesas and the villages upon the ridges, the Great House along the straight roads.” She paused. “The gods danced in the mountains, and they wore no masks.”

  “The gods are ugly bastards,” Hektor murmured. “Right down to their wicked black souls.”

  After a moment Tawa nodded,.

  They started for the indigo forest.

  Most of history is lost to us, the accounts destroyed by war, ignorance or the ravages of nature, but mostly because things were never written down at all. Then, as now, chroniclers and historians followed the lives of politicians, celebrities, religious leaders and other inconsequential people. History is not created on the battlefield or in courts, but in the hearts of people historians take no notice of. The battle is not won by the general, but by the nameless soldier who fires one critical, well-aimed shot. Cultural change is not created by race-baiters, activists or pundits, but by the man who helps to his feet another man who has fallen. Fiction is the antithesis of the historical account, for by its very nature it must focus on the obscure actions of the individual, and in that focus we find truth, whether or not the event actually occurred.

  Distant Suns

  A Tale of Unknown History

  Mikhial firstly perceived no connection between the fiery lance in the eastern sky and the singular being who appeared from out the forest's depths the next dawning.

  The lance was a manifestation of the Almighty, a display of God's power to effect change in what the Church declared an immutable universe of crystalline spheres and the fixed stars in their courses. The lance was an indicator of man's smallness. The deafening roar that accompanied the lance's passage was the voice of a wrathful God, loud enough to force a heathen to his knees, much less a pious man, and Mikhial was pious, more or less.