We were inside the gate. We were storming up the long steps toward the encastled tower. And I saw Panyr’s bearded face watching us from an out jut of the temple wall. I shouted at him and he lifted his horn high in recognition.
“Come up!” he called to us, barely audible above the uproar. “Come up to me here!”
My centaur heard. I felt his mighty body gather itself beneath me and we seemed to flow up the steps through suddenly riven ranks of the gold-mailed defenders, parted helplessly before the centaur’s dripping sword. From his back I dealt with those he missed.
Panyr waved an urgent arm toward the base of the outjut where he stood.
“There’s a door down there,” he shouted. “Guarded—but I’ll meet you inside if you can get through. Zeus, what a battle!” He grinned and vanished.
I did not need to urge my centaur forward. We plunged around the curve of the wall and the grille of a barred door stood before us, shining within with the armor of the defenders. My centaur laughed, a brutish whinny of sound, and rose on his hind feet. I clung to the sweating human waist, feeling the terrific jolt that racked us both as his front hoofs smashed against the grille.
The gateway buckled. The centaur danced backward, came down to all-fours, reared again. I heard the shrill scream of his inhuman laughter, felt a worse jolt than before, and the gateway burst open before us.
Before I was off his back four men lay dying on the floor and the centaur’s hoofs and sword dripped bloodily. He was laughing in a half-crazy voice, hysteria and savagery mingling terrifyingly.
Then Panyr’s hoofs clicked on the floor and he came around a bend of the corridor and hailed us. The centaur cried out in no human language, and Panyr replied, laughing with excitement, breathless, beckoning us on.
Thrice we met guards, and each time my sword and the centaur’s terrible arsenal of weapons triumphed. Panyr himself took no part in the conflict. He stood back, watching and waiting, until we made our kill. Then we went on again.
And so we came, at last, to the garden where the Python guarded Apollo’s Fleece.
CHAPTER XIII
Power Unleashed
NO TIME was left, now, for more than a glance through the shutter that closed the garden. For footsteps echoed down the corridor behind us, running hard, and the clatter of mail and weapons. From the distance came the roar of the battle around the temple walls, and above it the wailing of that infernal chant, and the darkness still seemed to be deepening over everything.
But I scarcely knew it. I had forgotten the battle and the oncoming danger behind us, and even the uncanny night-time of the Eclipse in which I must fight a battle with the gods. For the Garden of the Fleece lay before me—
And it had changed. I laid my hand on the shutter and pushed it wide. I set a knee on the sill and bent my head through the low window, and in a half-dream, scarcely knowing what I did, I stepped down into the magical garden.
That carpet of flowers that had blazed like molten stars no longer burned so blindingly. For this was the Hour of the Eclipse. They still burned, but with a curious, sickly flame that made me shrink at the thought of wading through them.
But wade I must. For there in the center of the garden swayed the tree that legend called Python, sluggish, half-asleep in the deepening darkness of the Eclipse. The great eyes of the serpent-branches turned slowly to watch me, the scaled bodies turned—slowly, slowly, like serpents in a nightmare.
Hanging among them burned the Fleece.
Then from the window behind me a sudden tumult burst. I heard Panyr shout, and I heard the wild, screaming laughter of the centaur, and the thud of his hoofs on flesh. A wave of gold-mailed men came pouring through the broad low window—and the fight was on again.
I would not have avoided it if I could. For I knew now the secret of the Python Tree. I knew the one thing that would cast enchantment on it, as Medea had done for the other Jason, long ago.
So I stumbled back among the palely burning flowers toward the tree, swinging up my dripping sword. Across the heads of the oncoming soldiers I saw the centaur flounder across the sill and come down clumsily among the flowers, both hands gripping his weapon and the savage joy of combat in his half-animal face.
Then he struck my attackers from behind in the same moment I rushed them from the front, and for a timeless while after that, I was aware of nothing but the clash of blades and mailed bodies around me, and the desperate need to keep those golden swords away from me and to kill as many as I could.
Partly the presence of the tree helped me. My flesh crawled at the nearness of sluggish heads that stirred and lifted with hideous avidity whenever I stepped within their reach. The soldiers feared them too, and it was their fear that must have saved me from being cut down a dozen times over as we fought. For I was no hero of ancient Greece now, only Jay Seward fighting in the ghastly, pallid light of those drowsing flowers and praying that the goddess watched and could delay her hour until I was ready.
But I had no shield to protect me, and as we struggled to and fro among the burning blossoms, my blood mingled with that of the guards. And the centaur fought like a demon. There was silence except for the thud of blows and our heavy panting as we struck and stumbled and struck again—and the flowers of Apollo drank our blood.
Blood soaked the golden ground. The headless body of a guard collapsed, spouting a crimson stream. Avidly the flowers held out their cups. Avidly the petals stirred as they drank.
Among the roots of the tree the blood flowed and sank. And slowly, slowly the serpent heads sank too, grew lethargic, swayed and drooped as the fight raged on about those reptilian branches.
Three thousand years ago Jason tricked Medea into brewing a magic potion that would send the Python into a charmed slumber. I had seen with Jason’s eyes, and I knew what the potion was. Stripped of its mystic herbs and incantations, the potion was—blood.
Even so, it was only in the Hour of the Eclipse that any human could approach this near to the tree, through the incandescence of the garden. But the right moments of the right hour were with us now, and time itself seemed to fight today for Hecate.
The Python-Tree drank and drank. Slowly it seemed to fall into a drowsy ecstasy of vampirism as its half-reptilian roots sucked up the liquor we spilled from our living bodies.
I WATCHED and waited my time. And at last, in a moment, while by common consent my opponents and I paused to draw a panting breath, I sprang suddenly backward toward the tree. The guardsman lifted his sword and plunged forward—and then suddenly hesitated, eyeing the sluggish serpents. But I did not hesitate. I knew the time was running desperately low.
The lowest branches of the tree were scaly to my grasp. I swung up among them, got a knee over the thick golden limb, clambered upward, clutching the scaled branches that writhed slowly under my hands.
Slowly the serpent-heads curved around toward me, sluggish with the blood-feast. If I had had time to think, I must have been too congealed with horror to move. But my eyes were on that shining, incredible thing glittering with a thousand lights even now, in the full glow of the garden.
I reached out an unsteady hand. I touched the Golden Fleece.
Astride a writhing branch, I lifted it from its age-old limb. A shimmering ripple of glory flowed across the Fleece as it shook in my hands, vibrant, alive, incredible.
I swung it across my shoulders like a cloak. It clung there, needing no. fastening.
It was alive.
And until this moment I had been dead flesh!
Only dead guardsmen were left when I came down from the tree. All the living had fled. The centaur watched me warily, his eyes showing white like a frightened horse.
Even Panyr kept a safe distance. And the flowers at my feet withered and crisped to burned embers as I walked among them.
I never knew the principle of the Fleece.
Those ringlets of delicate golden wire might have been antennae, picking up energy from some unknown source, energy that po
ured into my body and mind and flooded me with miraculous power. Hephaestus, greatest craftsman of an inhumanly great race, had made the Fleece, and though it was a machine, it superseded a machine as the human brain supersedes the simple colloid which is its basic structure. What form of physio-psychic symbiosis made its operation possible I never understood.
I wondered if my body and mind could bear this overload long enough. For it was dangerous to wear the Fleece, but more dangerous not to, at this point. And that flooding ecstasy which the wearing of it poured through me made even the danger a delight. No man has lived at all, I thought, who has not worn the Fleece!
I went back through the window into the temple hall. Panyr stood back for me; the centaur floundered again across the sill and followed at a distance, warily, like a skittish horse. I had almost forgotten them.
The walls gave back the glowing of the Fleece and sang faintly with an echo of its power.
We came out of the corridor into an enormous hall, deafening with the tumult of battle. The centaur army had plunged this far in its invasion, and the hall was a battlefield.
But a field that parted before me and fell silent as I strode forward wrapped in the Golden Fleece. A cry of terror swept the crowd when they saw me, but I scarcely heard it. All I could hear was the faint, thin singing of the Fleece’s ringlets, pouring power through my brain and body.
I followed Panyr on and on, through great rooms filled with carnage and which fell silent, as we came. I think we left peace, behind us everywhere, for when these struggling masses saw the Fleece, they knew the time for human conflict had ended. The power had passed from them and it was the gods now who must meet in the final battle for supremacy.
We came at last to the threshold of that chamber I had seen through Hecate’s eyes.
It was dim now—very dim, and full of the voices and the ceaseless swaying motion of the praying throng. Against the black walls the golden robes of the priests glowed dully.
I saw the masks they wore—round sun-discs, featureless, hiding every face behind the enigmatic symbol of Apollo. And the discs glowed too, casting a strange, dim light over the crowd.
Apollo’s sun-circle on the wall was no longer as I had seen it in my vision, a half-eclipsed disc. Now it was a flickering ring, like the corona in the dark sky above Helios. The Eclipse was complete.
“Turn thy dark face from us, O Apollo,” the swaying throng wailed endlessly. “Look not upon Helios in the dark of the Eclipse.”
ON THE altar beneath the sun-corona a golden cloth lay moulded to the curves of the body it shrouded. Cyane, I thought, waiting the sacrifice. And the hour of the sacrifice must be very near—must be almost upon us.
The priests were moving and bending in ritual gestures. I knew Phrontis by his height, though the sun-disc masked his face. The chant went on, but it was rising to a climax now as the moment when blood should flow to Apollo drew near.
I stepped across the threshold.
Little rippling flashes of light flared out from the Fleece and eddied through the dark air of the temple like ripples through water. And for a heartbeat the chanting ceased and there was deathly silence in the sanctum of the sun-god. Every face turned. Even the faceless discs of the priests lifted.
Then a hushed murmuring swept the worshipers. The priests froze in their places. All but Phrontis. There was no need to see his face beneath the mask he wore. I knew how it must have convulsed with rage and terror as he sprang for the altar with one long bound, his hand going out for the sacrificial knife.
I thought the moment was not quite ripe for that sacrifice, but Phrontis could not wait any longer. He would disrupt the ceremony if need be, but he knew Cyane must die—quickly, before Hecate came for her priestess. He seized the knife. He braced himself with one hand upon the altar, swung the blade high.
Briefly it shone like a bright star in the light-ripples from the Fleece, a star that trembled and shook. From all that packed chamber there came no sound at all.
Not until, that moment did I know how much the Fleece could do. Involuntarily I had started forward, throwing out one hand to stop the fall of the blade, futilely, as if my arm could reach Phrontis’ wrist and halt it—
And the wrist did halt. Between my hand and his, a lance of power seemed to stretch.
I felt the strong golden energy of the Fleece pour through me and I knew that among all human creatures I was a god myself now—godlike in power, godlike in the destroying violence of the Fleece.
Among gods? Well, there was time enough to test that.
Phrontis’ face was hidden, but I could almost feel the panic-stricken stare behind it as he found he could not move his lifted hand. I saw the quiver of muscles beneath his robe as he strove in vain to break the frozen rigidity which the Fleece had locked upon him at the command of my miraculously augmented will.
I moved forward warily, not sure how long the spell would hold him. The throng drew back on each side, leaving me a broad aisle. I came to the altar.
Phrontis and I faced each other, for an instant motionless, across Cyane’s gold-shrouded body. I wished I could see his face.
I put out my hand and tossed the golden altar cloth aside.
Cyane’s eyes were open, but drowned in a drugged sleep. I think she did not see me. Golden fetters locked her to the block, wrist and ankle, as she had lain once before waiting the knife.
I wound the chains about my hand and snapped them like straws. And above the metallic sound of their breaking, I heard the low thunder of hoof beats approaching down the hall outside.
I turned to look. The centaurs were coming. And the foremost held the Mask of Circe in his two outstretched hands. The eyes were closed and I think it slept. But from lids and closed lips faint lines of green fire gleamed. Circe waited to be freed.
In a deathly silence the centaurs wound their way down the aisle that had just opened to let me by. Their hoofs fell muffled upon the floor of Apollo’s sanctum. They were terrible, blood-splashed figures, still panting from the heat of combat, red drops falling with soft splashes to the floor as they paced slowly forward to restore the Mask of Circe from the dead priestess to the living one.
I saw Phrontis quiver with a long, convulsive shudder. He was still frozen as the power of the Fleece had caught him, knife poised above Cyane. But I knew he watched through the sun-disc across his face, and I knew the frantic emotions that must fill him as he saw all but the last of the old prophecies come true—the Fleece in Helios, the Mask and the Circe here at the sun-god’s altar. There remained now only the fulfillment of the last prophecy.
The centaur circled me, still holding the Mask upon his outstretched hands. He paced to the head of the altar, where Cyane lay.
CHAPTER XIV
End of a God
STERNLY I was watching Phrontis. Now I let my hand fall, that had stricken him motionless from the full width of the temple away. And his hand fell with it, the knife clattering to the floor, very loud in that breathless silence. He lifted a trembling arm and pulled down the sun-disc so that it hung across his chest. Above it his eyes met mine.
I saw incredulous horror there, pure terror convulsing that clever face. He had not shared the superstitions of his fellows. Cold logic had solved his problems—until now. But logic and science had failed him alike in this moment and I thought I could see the shattering apart of the whole fabric that had been Phrontis’ mind.
From the crowd a gasping cry went up.
I turned. Cyane was rising from the altar.
Cyane?
The inhuman beauty of Circe’s Mask watched us, nimbused with green flame, alive, enigmatic.
And then above us all, from that corona of dim fire above the altar, the blinded sun-symbol of Apollo, a gush of sudden, intolerable heat burst forth. And with it a sound—a sound like Olympian laughter.
Phrontis swayed. I saw the look of terror change upon his face, leap into a veritable madness of new fear.
“No!” he gasped. “Apo
llo—no!” And almost automatically he broke into the chanting I had interrupted. “Look not upon us, O Apollo, in the Hour of the Eclipse.”
The people took it up, and there was urgency in their voices now. This was no ritual prayer, but a vital cry of importuning: “Turn thy face away, Apollo! Look not upon, us in thy dark hour!”
And Apollo heard—and laughed!
I remembered what Panyr had told me of another Eclipse in which the god had looked upon his people, and none lived to say what the aspect of his dark face might be. These people were doomed to know arid never to tell the tale.
Laughter rang from the darkened disc, louder and more dreadfully. And heat poured forth from it, black heat like black, invisible water, filling up the temple with an intolerable flood. Heat without light, and in it, strangely, a core of pure cold that touched only the mind.
Behind me the centaurs wheeled. I heard the low thunder of their hoofs beating out a rising tumult as they clattered from the room through the terrified crowd. Echo upon echo rolled from the ceiling and through the halls outside as they fled.
The herd was racing from doomed Helios. The priests were scattering. The people were scrambling and fighting to be free. Now even Panyr turned away, with one last long glance of the yellow goat-eyes into mine in farewell.
Only Circe and I remained—and Phrontis facing us across the altar. He had been so sure of himself. He had scorned to kneel before a god he knew was no god. But he did not know enough. Apollo was still not divine, but his powers were so far above human powers that to Phrontis now he must seem truly the god men called him.
Still that terrible heat poured out of the darkened sun-circle. And now a Face began to take shape within it. I could not look. I knew that Face in the glory of its sun-brightness, and even then it was too dreadful in its beauty for me to look upon. But Apollo’s dark face—No, not even when I was armored in the Fleece would I gaze upon that sight!
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