by Lin Carter
Somber, unspeaking, we rode down in the twilight to the walls of Ilionis.
And the long quest was ended. We thought.
We could not guess that an even stranger quest had now begun!
11. Gateway to the Gods
The gate pylons of Ilionis still stood, unshivered by time. Two by two we rode between them into what once had been a broad and splendid boulevard. But the centuries, like vandals, had been here before us, and paving stones were split and cracked and tilted, some half-drowned in remorseless yellow dust-fine sand. Beside me Ilsa shuddered, and her face was sad and wan.
“How terribly sad,” she whispered. “All that majesty and greatness … gone.”
I nodded. “Time has a way with cities,” I said. “It does not really approve of anything less permanent than mountains, I suppose. Or stars. Do you know your Frost at all?”
“Who?”
“American poet, last century. He sensed all this somehow, this enmity the Eternal holds for the trumpery monuments of man. And summed up half a chapter of philosophy or something into one line …”
Her face was lovely in the cold fight.
“I know; I recall it now. ‘Something there is that does not love a wall.’ “
I nodded. “It’s as if he had seen Ilionis .. .”
We rode carefully down the ruined street. Darkness was gathering swiftly, chawing its black cloak across the sky. The unnatural mood of apprehension, through which we had ridden for so long, had ended when we passed beyond the last pair of stone giants. But the awesome wreckage about us, dim with hoary antiquity, lonely beneath the glitter of cold stars, was somber and grim. The desolation���the utter silence���was somehow dreadful.
We camped for the night within the shelter of crumbling walls. Once, long ago this broken shell had been a superb palace or a temple. Now it was a tomb, enshrining the dead dreams of the forgotten hands that had raised these walls to some unknown purpose ages ago.
There was disappointment written in Keresny’s face. He peered about, shining his Bronston lamp on mounded rubble, worn and fallen columns, heavily carved doorways leading nowhere.
“Even the inscriptions are too worn to be legible,” he said. “Somehow, I had expected more than this. I don’t know just what. Not an inhabited city, like Farad, but… something.”
I understood his mood, I think, and the disappointment that lurked behind his inarticulate words. For Ilionis was not only dead: the very mood and spirit of the ruin was extinct. Not even ghosts would linger amid this awful desolation. It was like the wreckage of man’s hopes���the ruins of a forgotten dream.
At least we slept soundly that night, and no shadowy terrors haunted our slumber. The slidars too rested easy, recovering their normal placidity.
The next day we organized things with Prince Kraa’s aid. The ruin was quartered off, and a party of Moon Dragon warriors were assigned to search each sector of the Lost City under the guidance of an Earthman.
We were alert to note significant structures, major monuments, or undamaged inscriptions of importance. Most of that day was spent combing the rubble, exploring half-ruined buildings, strolling through empty streets. In late afternoon we gathered again in our temporary camp to compare notes. Little enough of any value had we found; Ilsa’s party had located some inscriptions which remained legible after aeons; my group had found a major shrine which still stood; and Bolgov had scouted a tremendous edifice toward the heart of the dead metropolis that bore the semblance of a main temple.
But the disappointment was written deep in the Doctor’s weary face as he studied the depth pictures he had taken.
“The inscriptions are either in one of the Lost Tongues or are merely commemorative,” he sighed, setting them aside.
“What of my shrine?” I asked. He shrugged dispiritedly.
“The sepulchers are marked with the royal cartouches,” he replied. “And the wall inscriptions are nothing more than antique forms of the familiar huakan, tablets raised to the memory of the ancestors of the buried kings. Oh, doubtless of great historical importance, of course. But somehow I had expected more …”
It was Bolgov, in his blunt way, who touched on the central question.
“Where is the treasure supposed to be, damnit!”
“That’s just it, Konstantin,” the Doctor said sadly. “We don’t know just where it is; here, somewhere, but … where?”
“But Grandfather, what about the thought record? Didn’t it describe a definite site?”
“No, my dear, it did not. I had thought the treasure vault would be very conspicuous, very clearly marked. Some building so huge as to dominate the rest of the structures in the city, calling attention to itself. But it would seem that I have been mistaken,” he said with something very like despair in his voice.
Bolgov began to redden.
“You mean we come all this way for nothing?” he demanded. “Jus’ some lousy inscriptions and these damn ruins?”
“It is still too soon to tell for certain, Konstantin,” the Doctor argued faintly. “Perhaps the treasure is better hidden than I had conjectured…”
“What about those kings’ tombs?” he asked greedily. “Maybe they got gold and gems buried with ‘em; ‘s worth a try!”
“I doubt if our host would permit the royal sepulchers to be opened,” I warned. “We are here on sufferance and had best not appear to be treasure hunters.”
Konstantin started to blurt out some angry response, but Keresny silenced him. “The burial customs of the Ancients axe well known,” he said. “The old kings were cremated, and nothing was ever buried with them except for a ceremonial copy of the Book of Kings.”
“There’s still that major temple,” I pointed out. “The one Bolgov’s party scouted out. He said it was just too big to explore thoroughly.”
“Yes, there is that,” Keresny mused, rubbing his brows thoughtfully. “Tomorrow we’ll have a look at it…”
The following day we ventured deep into the center of the Lost City to examine the central structure. It certainly dominated the surrounding ruins, built upon a height as it was; and it was the largest edifice still standing.
Once it had been a cruciform temple, crowned with the traditional five domes, the arms of the ground floor oriented to the cardinal points of the compass. Time had brought its heaviest siege artillery to bear against it, however, and two of the wings were collapsed into stone heaps. But the central nave, the holy of holies, and the west and north wings still held up under the battery of the centuries.
Like most of the other ancient temples on Mars, the gates were guarded by stone sphinxes depicting those weird, insectlike, imaginary beasts. We entered the hall between them, up a flight of shallow steps worn by the tread of countless generations of worshipers. The gloomy vastnesses of the remaining temple stretched off in all directions, loud with echoes and dim with drifted dust.
There were endless vestibules and antechambers to explore, but nothing of any particular significance was found in any of them. More inscriptions, both in the unknown tongue and in the more familiar glyphs we could read. Bits of broken pottery, chipped and worthless votive figures, a few pieces of worn but good statuary, a few scraps of withered parchment���all that the remorseless passage of the years had left of ancient books and old tapestries. That was about it.
The day was exhausted in a systematic exploration of the two wings that time had left still standing. Here the resident priests had been housed, but nothing of worth was found in the endless succession of identical cells and cubicles. Keresny, armed with the Bronston lamps, led an exploring party into the lower levels, but most of the passageways had collapsed and were hopelessly blocked with wreckage. And those few portions which could be penetrated disclosed nothing of any particular interest.
That left only the central nave itself. This consisted of the high altar and the holy of holies behind it, which was a huge stone-walled chamber. Aeons ago, when Ilionis had been a living
city and this great temple had been odorous with the drifting clouds of incense, bright with votive lamps, and loud with the chanting chorus of priests and worshipers, the yawning portal of the innermost sanctum sanctorum had probably been hidden from impious, prying eyes by a huge curtain. If so, the centuries had left nothing of it, and the vast door yawned blackly vacant.
The Doctor had left the sanctum for last, because he knew there was little likelihood of our finding anything there. In this particular way the ancient Martian religion was like that of the Jewish kingdom of Earth’s own antiquity: the holy of holies was considered the residence of the Divinity. And it was always left empty, save for a copy of the scriptures, which lay on a low pedestal.
We broke for an early meal. While the warriors���who had camped beyond the portals of the temple, reluctant to intrude into the holy place���tended to the slidars, the rest of our party sat about on fallen ceiling blocks or rived columns and dined in silence.
Stars glittered with watchful eyes through open places in the domed roof far overhead. The sharp glare of the Bronston lamps painted huge velvet shadows over the walls���shadows that hunched and loomed monstrously as we moved about.
As a gesture of bravado, Prince Kraa and Kuruk and the boy Chaka ate with us, although I knew the Prince, at least, would have preferred to eat out in the open under the gem-strewn skies, rather than in the precincts of the great temple. The dwarfed priest Dhu sat huddled, refusing to profane the altar nave by eating, and mumbled prayers to avert the vengeance of his gods.
In a low voice, so as not to disturb the others, Keresny and I conversed.
“By all rights, the treasure ought to have been in the catacombs beneath the nave,” he muttered. “Ilionis was a holy city, you know, and the center of yearly world-wide pilgrimages. Votive offerings of jewels and artworks and precious metals must have poured into the hands of the priesthood, for this was the greatest and most sacred of all temples of ancient Mars known to us. The kings of the distant cities would have sent rich gifts in return for the prophecies of the resident oracles; the ill would have journeyed here to be cured by the arghatha, the ‘healing-priests,’ and once their miraculous cures had been effected, would have left as tributes replicas of their various afflicted or injured organs or whatever, worked in gold and silver and Martium. But where is it all?”
“We don’t know just when���or why, for that matter��� Ilionis became deserted. It’s just a speculation, but suppose it was looted in war? The treasure would have been carried off by the victors.”
He shook his head. “No, it was not war, my boy. War leaves signs. None of the buildings we have thus far seen bore exterior damage; the walls and gates of the city are fallen, but 1 saw no signs of siege engines having caused their fall. None of the shrines or frescoes or inscriptions or votive figures have been desecrated or defaced. I believe that Ilionis just died, dwindled away over the ages, as its empire fell into decay. The race has been dying out over millions of years, you know … The birthrate has steadily fallen for as long as we have records.”
I chewed on the problem for a while in silence.
“You know, it’s odd,” he said after a time. “We have found votive figures and offerings in the outer chambers, but they were humble things���ceramic, worked stone. Perhaps this temple was considered so very holy that to pay offerings or tribute in precious gems or noble metals was construed as blatant bribery and, for that reason, prohibited …”
“Well, I suppose that could be so,” I said, a trifle dubiously. “But in that case, what the hell did your thought record mean when it said that the greatest treasure of the Ancients was preserved here?”
“I cannot say,” he confessed. “What other kinds of treasure are there but���treasure?”
“A trove of ancient documents, maybe? A lost library of ancient literature or histoiical records?”
“Yes, you could call that treasure, I suppose. But even so, where is it all? We found a few moldering scraps of old books, but a cursory examination showed them to be fragments of the usual liturgical and prophetic literature, nothing we did not already possess. No, we have yet to find the place of the treasure.”
“A secret chamber then,” I suggested.
“Something like that, I suppose. Tomorrow, when the light is better, we shall have to start taking measurements and drawing up a map of the temple ruins. It’s just possible that, by comparing the thickness of the walls, we might detect the existence of a hidden room of some kind. We shall have to���”
He started and broke off suddenly as someone yelled.
We jumped to our feet and looked around.
Bolgov appeared suddenly in the entrance of the holy of holies, his face a mask of wild amazement in the harsh glare of the lamps. I had not realized he had finished eating and had strolled off to do a bit of exploring on his own. Now he gestured excitedly, beckoning us to him.
“What is it, Konstantin?” Keresny called. “What have you discovered?”
“Not the treasure, curse th’ luck!” the burly Russian growled. “But the damndest thing you ever saw, just the same. C’mere, all of you!”
We took up the Bronston lamps and ascended the steps to the altar and went around the huge, empty stone table where the offerings had been laid before the Timeless Ones, and joined him at the mouth of the great stone room.
I flashed my light around and saw what we had all known we would find, just emptiness and blank walls of stone, devoid even of frescoes or inscriptions.
“Not up there,” Bolgov growled impatiently, a suppressed excitement trembling in his voice. “Look at the floor of the room.”
We directed our lights downward. From where we stood, clustered on the threshold, the floor fell away, forming a vast pit of blackness. The pit stretched from wall to wall, and we could see clearly that this room was no room at all, but the roofed-over top of a tremendous shaft that fell away to unguessable depths beneath the plateau.
Dr. Keresny gasped an exclamation, the light trembling in his shaking hands as he moved the lamp about, exploring the black abyss that yawned before us. And I knew what thought was in his mind: this was the anomaly he had expected; for no other temple across the planet contained such an enigma as this mighty pit. And the purpose for which the Ancients had constructed it remained a mystery.
But down there somewhere must be the treasure for which we had come so far and endured so many hazards and discomforts!
To Keresny, I knew, the abyss represented a major archaeological riddle and one he was eager to solve. But my mind was on other matters. For as an engineering feat, the pit represented an astounding accomplishment. I flashed my lamp from side to side of the shaft, marveling. The sheer size of the shaft was what made it so fantastic: from wall to wall, it must have measured half a kilometer, perhaps a bit more. And it fell to a depth so great that the light of our Bronston lamps could not discover the bottom.
This central portion of the cruciform temple was built on the solid bedrock of the plateau. The amount of solid stone the tunnel displaced must have been in the millions of tons. Which made the labor of constructing so great a pit one of the greatest engineering feats of all recorded history: you could have constructed a hundred pyramids the size of the Great Pyramid of Cheops just from the stone dug out to hollow the shaft! As a work of human labor, it represented the toil of thousands for many generations, perhaps many centuries. The mind was stunned at the enormity of the project. But one question towered above all���-
Why!
Why this vast pit, cut from solid rock, descending many kilometers into the core of the planet! That was the real mystery: not how it had been done but���why?
“Look���the far wall!”
I followed the path of the light trembling in Keresny’s hands; and there, sloping down the far side of the shaft was a stone stair, cut from the rock itself, a great stair that led down���down���down���
To�
���what?
A hand clamped my arm. Kuruk stood beside me, his heavy face a mask of wondering awe.
“Lord … Lord!” he whispered, hoarsely. “The old legends���do you not remember? And the name of the city itself!”
I looked at him dumbly: Ilionis was the name of the Lost City in the Tongue; but the Tongue was merely the form to which the language of the Ancients had evolved by the present age. And in the original Old Tongue the name was���
“Ilionis … ylon-ath,” Keresny whispered wonderingly. “Ylon-ath means ‘Gateway to the Gods’…”
“What of it?” I asked, shaken by premonitions of the great wonder yet to come. “It’s a common enough name, why, back on Earth, Babylon means ‘Gateway to the Gods’ too … And like Babylon, Ilionis was a sacred city, the center of a great religion. It’s just a coincidence!”
“But the legends, Lord,” Kuruk cried. “Of the Timeless Ones who rule over the dead in their dim Underworld of … of Yhoom!”
We stared down at the mighty pit that sank, perhaps, to the very bottom of the world itself; and that was lined with the broad stone stair that led down and down … to whatever hidden realm of unguessable mystery lay at the secret core of the very planet.
Staring down and then at one another, our faces lit with dawning amazement, our eyes filled with wide surmise … we knew. Knew the truth of it all at last.
It was Prince Kraa who gave voice to the thing that lay in the minds of each of us in that moment. “This… this … is the road to Yhoom.”
12. Into the Abyss
There was never any question but that we should descend into the great pit. Let the dwarf Dhu howl of blasphemy as he would, or Kraa murmur of the curse of the gods, or even stout Kuruk, his face a mask of superstitious fear, mumble half-forgotten verses from the ancient epics���we had to see what was down there.
The man would not have been fully human who could have turned away from that world-deep pit without striving to learn what world-old mystery lay hidden in its depths.