A wind sighed over the Forbidden Plains, rolling the sunballs in the red sky. And then, from the crest of Ben Beatha, the darkness came.
This time Ciaran didn't stop to be afraid. There was nothing left inside him to be afraid with. He remembered the hermit's words: Judgment. Great things moving. Doom and destruction, a shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying. Something of the same feeling came to him, but he wasn't human any longer. He was beyond fear. Fate moved, and he was part of it.
Stones and shale tricked his feet in the darkness. All across the Forbidden Plains there was night and a wailing wind and a sharp chill of cold. Far, far away there was a faint red glow on the sky where the sea burned with its own fire.
Ciaran went on.
Overhead, then, the sunballs began to flicker. Little striving ripples of light went out across them, lighting the barrens with an eerie witch-glow. The flickering was worse than the darkness. It was like the last struggling pulse of a dying man's heart. Ciaran was aware of a coldness in him beyond the chill of the wind.
A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying . . .
He began to climb Ben Beatha.
5
The stone was rough and fairly broken, and Ciaran had climbed mountains before. He crawled upward, through the sick light and the cold wind that screamed and fought him harder the higher he got. He retained no very clear memory of the climb. Only after a long, long time he fell inward over the wall of a balcony and lay still.
He was bleeding from rock-tears and his heart kicked him like the heel of a vicious horse. But he didn't care. The balcony was man-made, the passage back of it led somewhere—and the light had come back in the sky.
It wasn't quite the same, though. It was weaker, and less warm.
When he could stand up he went in along the passage, square-hewn in the living rock of Ben Beatha, the Mountain of Life.
It led straight in, lighted by a soft opaline glow from hidden light-sources. Presently it turned at right angles and became a spiral ramp, leading down.
Corridors led back from it at various levels, but Ciaran didn't bother about them. They were dark, and the dust of ages lay unmarked on their floors.
Down and down, a long, long way. Silence. The deep uncaring silence of death and the eternal rock—dark titans who watched the small furious ant-scurryings of man and never, never, for one moment, gave a damn.
And then the ramp flattened into a broad high passage cut deep in the belly of the mountain. And the passage led to a door of gold, twelve feet high and intricately graved and pierced, set with symbols that Ciaran had heard of only in legend: the Hun-Lahun-Mehen, the Snake, the Circle, and the Cross, blazing in hot jewel-fires.
But above them, crushing and dominant on both valves of the great door, was the crux ansata, the symbol of eternal life, cut from some lusterless stone so black it was like a pattern of blindness on the eyeball.
Ciaran shivered and drew a deep, unsteady breath. One brief moment of human terror came to him. Then he set his two hands on the door and pushed it open.
He came into a small room hung with tapestries and lighted dimly by the same opaline glow as the hallway. The half-seen pictures showed men and beasts and battles against a background at once tantalizingly familiar and frighteningly alien.
There was a rug on the floor. It was made from the head and hide of a creature Ciaran had never even dreamed of before—a thing like a huge tawny cat with a dark mane and great, shining fangs.
Ciaran padded softly across it and pushed aside the heavy curtains at the other end.
At first there was only darkness. It seemed to fill a large space; Ciaran had an instinctive feeling of size. He went out into it, very cautiously, and then his eyes found a pale glow ahead in the blackness, as though someone had crushed a pearl with his thumb and smeared it across the dark.
He was a thief and a gypsy. He made no more sound than a wisp of cloud, drifting toward it. His feet touched a broad, shallow step, and then another. He climbed, and the pearly glow grew stronger and became a curving wall of radiance.
He stopped just short of touching it, on a level platform high above the floor. He squinted against its curdled, milky thickness, trying to see through.
Wrapped in the light, cradled and protected by it like a bird in the heart of a shining cloud, a boy slept on a couch made soft with furs and colored silks. He was quite naked, his limbs flung out carelessly with the slim angular grace of his youth. His skin was white as milk, catching a pale warmth from the light.
He slept deeply. He might almost have been dead, except for the slight rise and fall of his breathing. His head was rolled over so that he faced Ciaran, his cheek pillowed on his up flung arm.
His hair, thick, curly, and black almost to blueness, had grown out long across his forearm, across the white fur beneath it, and down onto his wide slim shoulders. The nails of his lax hand, palm up above his head, stood up through the hair. They were inches long.
His face was just a boy's face. A good face, even rather handsome, with strong bone just beginning to show under the roundness. His cheek was still soft as a girl's, the lashes of his closed lids dark and heavy.
He looked peaceful, even happy. His mouth was curved in a vague smile, as though his dreams were pleasant. And yet there was something there . . .
A shadow. Something unseen and untouchable, something as fragile as the note of a shepherd's pipe brought from far off on a vagrant breeze. Something as indescribable as death—and as broodingly powerful. Ciaran sensed it, and his nerves throbbed suddenly like the strings of his own harp.
He saw then that the couch the boy slept on was a huge crux ansata, cut from the dead-black stone, with the arms stretching from under his shoulders and the loop like a monstrous halo above his head.
The legends whispered through Ciaran's head. The songs, the tales, the folklore. The symbolism, and the image-patterns.
Bas the Immortal was always described as a giant, like the mountain he lived in, and old, because Immortal suggests age. Awe, fear, and unbelief spoke through those legends, and the child-desire to build tall. But there was an older legend . . .
Ciaran, because he was a gypsy and a thief and had music in him like a drunkard has wine, had heard it, deep in the black forests of Hyperborea where even gypsies seldom go. The oldest legend of all—the tale of the Shining Youth from Beyond, who walked in beauty and power, who never grew old, and who carried in his heart a bitter darkness that no man could understand.
The Shining Youth from Beyond. A boy sleeping with a smile on his face, walled in living light.
Ciaran stood still, staring. His face was loose and quite blank. His heartbeats shook him slightly, and his breath had a rusty sound in his open mouth.
After a long time he started forward, into the light.
It struck him, hurled him back numbed and dazed. Thinking of Mouse, he tried it twice more before he was convinced. Then he tried yelling. His voice crashed back at him from the unseen walls, but the sleeping boy never stirred, never altered even the rhythm of his breathing.
After that Ciaran crouched in the awful laxness of impotency, and thought about Mouse, and cried.
Then, quite suddenly, without any warning at all, the wall of light vanished.
He didn't believe it. But he put his hand out again, and nothing stopped it, so he rushed forward in the pitch blackness until he hit the stone arm of the cross. And behind him, and all around him, the light began to glow again.
Only now it was different. It flickered and dimmed and struggled, like something fighting not to die. Like something else . . .
Like the sunballs. Like the light in the sky that meant life to a world. Flickering and feeble like an old man's heart, the last frightened wing-beats of a dying bird . . .
A terror took Ciaran by the throat and stopped the breath in it, and turned his body colder than a corpse. He watched . . .
The light glowed and pulsed, and grew stronger. Presently he was walled in by it, but
it seemed fainter than before.
A terrible feeling of urgency came over Ciaran, a need for haste. The words of the androids came back to him: Failing, as we judged. If we finish in time. If we don't, none of it matters.
A shadow across the world, a darkness and a dying. Mouse slaving with empty eyes to build a shining monster that would harness the world to the wills of nonhuman brains.
It didn't make sense, but it meant something. Something deadly important. And the key to the whole mad jumble was here—a dark-haired boy dreaming on a stone cross.
Ciaran moved closer. He saw then that the boy had stirred, very slightly, and that his face was troubled. It was as though the dimming of the light had disturbed him. Then he sighed and smiled again, nestling his head deeper into the bend of his arm.
"Bas," said Ciaran. "Lord Bas!"
His voice sounded hoarse and queer. The boy didn't hear him. He called again, louder. Then he put his hand on one slim white shoulder and shook it hesitantly at first, and then hard, and harder.
The boy Bas didn't even flicker his eyelids.
Ciaran beat his fists against the empty air and cursed without any voice. Then, almost instinctively, he crouched on the stone platform and took his harp in his hands.
It wasn't because he expected to do anything with it. It was simply that harping was as natural to him as breathing, and what was inside him had to come out some way. He wasn't thinking about music.
He was thinking about Mouse, and it just added up to the same thing.
Random chords at first, rippling up against the wall of milky light. Then the agony in him began to run out through his fingertips onto the strings, and he sent it thrumming strong across the still air. It sang wild and savage, but underneath it there was the sound of his own heart breaking, and the fall of tears.
There was no time. There wasn't even any Ciaran. There was only the harp crying a dirge for a black-haired Mouse and the world she lived in. Nothing mattered but that. Nothing would ever matter.
Then finally there wasn't anything left for the harp to cry about. The last quiver of the strings went throbbing off into a dull emptiness, and there was only an ugly little man in yellow rags crouched silent by a stone cross, hiding his face in his hands.
Then, faint and distant, like the echo of words spoken in another world, another time:
Don't draw the veil. Marsali—don't . . .
Ciaran looked up, stiffening. The boy's lips moved. His face, the eyes still closed, was twisted in an agony of pleading. His hands were raised, reaching, trying to hold something that slipped through his fingers like mist.
Dark mist. The mist of dreams. It was still in his eyes when he opened them. Gray eyes, clouded and veiled, and then with the dream-mist thickening into tears . . .
He cried out, "Marsali!" as though his heart was ripped out of him with the breath that said it.
Then he lay still on the couch, his eyes staring unfocused at the milky light, with the tears running out of them.
Ciaran said softly, "Lord Bas . . ."
"Awake," whispered the boy. "I'm awake again. Music—a harp crying out . . . I didn't want to wake!
Oh, God, I didn't want to!"
He sat up suddenly. The rage, the sheer blind fury in his young face rocked Ciaran like the blow of a fist.
"Who waked me? Who dared to wake me?"
There was no place to run. The light held him. And there was Mouse. Ciaran said:
"I did, Lord Bas. There was need to."
The boy's gray eyes came slowly to focus on his face. Ciaran's heart kicked once and stopped beating. A great cold stillness breathed from somewhere beyond the world and walled him in, closer and tighter than the milky light. Close and tight, like the packed earth of a grave.
A boy's face, round and smooth and soft. No shadow even of down on the cheeks, the lips still pink and girlish. Long dark lashes, and under them . . .
Gray eyes. Old with suffering, old with pain, old with an age beyond human understanding. Eyes that had seen birth and life and death in an endless stream, flowing by just out of reach, just beyond hearing. Eyes looking out between the bars of a private hell that was never built for any man before.
One strong young hand reached down among the furs and silks and felt for something, and Ciaran knew the thing was death.
Ciaran, suddenly, was furious himself.
He struck a harsh, snarling chord on the harpstrings, thinking of Mouse. He poured his fury out in bitter, pungent words, the gypsy argot of the Quarters, and all the time Bas fumbled to get the hidden weapon in his hands.
It was the long nails that saved Ciaran's life. They kept Bas from closing his fingers, and in the meantime some of Ciaran's vibrant rage had penetrated. Bas whispered:
"You love a woman."
"Yeah," said Ciaran. "Yeah."
"So do I. A woman I created, and made to live in my dreams. Do you know what you did when you waked me?"
"Maybe I saved the world. If the legends are right, you built it. You haven't any right to let it die so you can sleep."
"I built another world, little man. Marsali's world. I don't want to leave it." He bent forward, toward Ciaran. "I was happy in that world. I built it to suit me. I belong in it. Do you know why? Because it's made from my own dreams, as I want it. Even the people. Even Marsali. Even myself."
"They drove me away from one world. I built another, but it was no different. I'm not human. I don't belong with humans, nor in any world they live in. So I learned to sleep, and dream."
He lay back on the couch. He looked pitifully young, with the long lashes hiding his eyes.
"Go away. Let your little world crumble. It's doomed anyway. What difference do a few life-spans make in eternity? Let me sleep."
Ciaran struck the harp again. "No! Listen . . ."
He told Bas about the slave gangs, the androids, the shining monster in the pit—and the darkness that swept over the world. It was the last that caught the boy's attention.
He sat up slowly. "Darkness? You! How did you get to me, past the light?"
Ciaran told him.
"The Stone of Destiny," whispered the Immortal. Suddenly he laughed. He laughed to fill the whole dark space beyond the light; terrible laughter, full of hate and a queer perverted triumph.
He stopped, as suddenly as he had begun, and spread his hands flat on the colored silks, the long nails gleaming like knives. His eyes widened, gray windows into a deep hell, and his voice was no more than a breath.
"Could that mean that I will die, too?"
Ciaran's scarred mouth twitched. "The Stone of Destiny . . ."
The boy leaped up from his couch. His hand swept over some hidden control in the arm of the stone cross, and the milky light died out. At the same time, an opaline glow suffused the darkness beyond.
Bas the Immortal ran down the steps—a dark-haired, graceful boy running naked in the heart of an opal.
Ciaran followed.
They came to the hollow core of Ben Beatha—a vast pyramidal space cut in the yellow rock. Bas stopped, and Ciaran stopped behind him.
The whole space was laced and twined and webbed with crystal. Rods of it, screens of it, meshes of it. A shining helix ran straight up overhead, into a shaft that seemed to go clear through to open air.
In the crystal, pulsing along it like the life-blood in a man's veins, there was light.
It was like no light Ciaran had ever seen before. It was no color, and every color. It seared the eye with heat, and yet it was cold and pure like still water. It throbbed and beat. It was alive.
Ciaran followed the crystal maze down and down, to the base of it. There, in the very heart of it, lying at the hub of a shining web, lay something.
Like a black hand slammed across the eyeballs, darkness fell.
For a moment he was blind, and through the blindness came a soft whisper of movement. Then there was light again; a vague smeared spot of it on the pitch black.
It glowed and faded a
nd glowed again. The rusty gleam slid across the half-crouched body of Bas the Immortal, pressed close against the crystal web. It caught in his eyes, turning them hot and lambent like beast-eyes in the dark of a cave-mouth.
Little sparks of hell-fire in a boy's face, staring at the Stone of Destiny.
A stone no bigger than a man's heart, with power in it. Even dying, it had power. Power to build a world, or smash it. Power never born of Ciaran's planet, or any planet, but something naked and perfect—an egg from the womb of space itself.
It fought to live, lying in its crystal web. It was like watching somebody's heart stripped clean and struggling to beat. The fire in it flickered and flared, sending pale witch-lights dancing up along the crystal maze.
Outside, Ciaran knew, all across the world, the sunballs were pulsing and flickering to the dying beat of the Stone.
Bas whispered, "It's over. Over and done."
Without knowing it, Ciaran touched the harpstrings and made them shudder. "The legends were right, then. The Stone of Destiny kept the world alive."
"Alive. It gave light and warmth, and before that it powered the ship that brought me here across space, from the third planet of our sun to the tenth. It sealed the gaps in the planet's crust and drove the machinery that filled the hollow core inside with air. It was my strength. It built my world; my world, where I would be loved and respected—all right, and worshipped!"
He laughed, a small bitter sob.
"A child I was. After all those centuries, still a child playing with a toy."
His voice rang out louder across the flickering dimness. A boy's voice, clear and sweet. He wasn't talking to Ciaran. He wasn't even talking to himself. He was talking to Fate, and cursing it.
"I took a walk one morning. That was all I did. I was just a fisherman's son walking on the green hills of Atlantis above the sea. That was all I wanted to be—a fisherman's son, someday to be a fisherman myself, with sons of my own. And then from nowhere, out of the sky, the meteorite fell.
There was thunder, and a great light, and then darkness. And when I woke again I was a god.
"I took the Stone of Destiny out of its broken shell. The light from it burned in me, and I was a god. And I was happy. I didn't know.
Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories Page 8