'Do you know where we are?' Stark asked.
'Not exactly.' Berild's face was shadowed with weariness. It had changed, and somehow, to Stark, it had grown more beautiful, because there was no weakness in it.
She thought a minute, looking at the sun. 'The wind blew from the north,' she said. 'Therefore we have come south from the track. Sinharat lies that way, across the waste they call the Belly of Stones.' She pointed to the north and east.
'How far?'
'Seven, eight days, afoot.'
Stark measured their supply of water and shook his head. 'It'll be dry walking.'
He rose and took up the skin, and Berild came beside him without a word. Her red hair hung loose over her shoulders. The rags of her silken robe had been torn away by the wind, leaving her only the loose skirt of the desert women, and her belt and collar of jewels.
She walked erect with a steady, swinging stride, and it was almost impossible for Stark to remember her as she had been, riding like a lazy queen in her scarlet litter.
There was no way to shelter themselves from the midday sun. The sun of Mars at its worst, however, was only a pale candle beside the sun of Mercury, and it did not bother Stark. He made Berild lie in the shadow of his own body, and he watched her face, relaxed and unfamiliar in sleep.
For the first time, then, he was conscious of a strangeness in her. He had seen so little of her before, in Valkis, and almost nothing on the trail. Now, there was little of her mind or heart that she could conceal from him.
Or was there? There were moments, while she slept, when hr shadows of strange dreams crossed her face. Sometimes, in t he unguarded moment of waking, he would see in her eyes a Iook he could not read, and his primitive senses quivered with a vague ripple of warning.
Yet all through those blazing days and frosty nights, tortured with thirst and weary to exhaustion, Berild was magnificent. Her white skin was darkened by the sun and her hair became a wild red mane, but she smiled and set her feet resolutely by his, and Stark thought she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.
On the fourth day they climbed a scarp of limestone worn in ages past by the sea, and looked out over the place called the Belly of Stones.
The sea-bottom curved downward below them into a sort of gigantic basin, the farther rim of which was lost in shimmering waves of heat. Stark thought that never, even on Mercury, had he seen a place more cruel and utterly forsaken of gods or men.
It seemed as though some primal glacier must have met its death here in the dim dawn of Mars, hollowing out its own grave. The body of the glacier had melted away, but its bones were left.
Bones of basalt, of granite and marble and porphyry, of every conceivable colour and shape and size, picked up by the ice as it marched southward from the pole and dropped here as a cairn to mark its passing.
The Belly of Stones. Stark thought that its other name was Death.
For the first time, Berild faltered. She sat down and bent her head over her hands.
'I am tired,' she said. 'Also, I am afraid.'
Stark asked, 'Has it ever been crossed?'
'Once. But they were a war party, mounted and well supplied.'
Stark looked out across the stones. 'We will cross it,' he said.
Berild raised her head. 'Somehow I believe you.' She rose slowly and put her hands on his breast, over the strong beating of his heart.
'Give me your strength, wild man,' she whispered. 'I shall need it.'
He drew her to him and kissed her, and it was a strange and painful kiss, for their lips were cracked and bleeding from their terrible thirst. Then they went down together into the place called the Belly of Stones.
8
The desert had been a pleasant and kindly place. Stark looked back upon it with longing. And yet this inferno of blazing rock was so like the valleys of his boyhood that it did not occur to him to lie down and die.
They rested for a time in the sheltered crevice under a great leaning slab of blood-red stone, moistening their swollen tongues with a few drops of stinking water from the skin. At nightfall they drank the last of it, but Berild would not let him throw the skin away.
Darkness, and a lunar silence. The chill air sucked the day's heat out of the rocks and the iron frost came down, so that Stark and the red-haired woman must keep moving or freeze.
Stark's mind grew clouded. He spoke from time to time, in a croaking whisper, dropping back into the harsh mother-tongue of the Twilight Belt. It seemed to him that he was hunting, as he had so many times before, in the waterless places — for the blood of the great lizard would save him from thirst.
But nothing lived in the Belly of Stones. Nothing, but the two who crept and staggered across it under the low moons.
Berild fell, and could not rise again. Stark crouched beside her. Her face stared up at him, while in the moonlight, her eyes burning and strange.
I will not die!' she whispered, not to him, but to the gods. 'I will not die!'
And she clawed the sand and the bitter rocks, dragging herself onward It was uncanny, the madness that she had for life.
Stark raised her up and carried her. His breath came in deep sobbing gasps. After a while he, too, fell. He went on like a beast on all fours, dragging the woman.
I He knew dimly that he was climbing. There was a glimmering of dawn in the sky. His hands slipped on a lip of sand and he went rolling down a smooth slope. At length he stopped and lay in his back like a dead thing.
The sun was high when consciousness returned to him. He saw Berild lying near him and crawled to her, shaking her until her eyes opened. Her hands moved feebly and her lips formed the same four words. I will not die.
Stark strained his eyes to the horizon, praying for a glimpse of Sinharat, but there was nothing, only emptiness and sand. With great difficulty he got the woman to her feet, supporting her.
He tried to tell her that they must go on, but he could no longer form the words. He could only gesture and urge her forward, in the direction of the city.
But she refused to go. 'Too far ... die ... without water ...' He knew that she was right, but still he was not ready to give up.
She began to move away from him, toward the south, and he thought that she had gone mad and was wandering. Then he saw that she was peering with awful intensity at the line of the scarp that formed this wall of the Belly of Stones. It rose into a great ridge, serrated like the backbone of a whale, and some three miles away a long dorsal fin of reddish rock curved out into the desert.
Berild made a little sobbing noise in her throat. She began to plod toward the distant promontory.
Stark caught up with her. He tried to stop her, but she would not be stopped, turning a feral glare upon him.
She croaked, 'Water!' and pointed.
He was sure now that she was mad. He told her so, forcing the painful words out of his throat, reminding her of Sinharat and that she was going away from any possible help.
She said again, quite sanely, 'Too far. Two — three days without water,' She pointed. 'Monastery — old well — a chance ...'
Stark decided that he had little to lose by trusting her. He nodded and went with her toward the curve of rock.
The three miles might have been three hundred. At last they came up under the ragged cliffs — and there was nothing there but sand.
Stark looked at the woman. A great rage and a deep sense of futility came over him. They were indeed lost.
But Berild had gone a few steps farther. With a hoarse cry, she bent over what had seemed merely a slab of stone fallen from the cliff, and Stark saw that it was a carven pillar, half buried. Now he was able to make out the mounded shape of a ruin, of which only the foundations and a few broken columns were left.
For a long while Berild stood by the pillar, her eyes closed. Stark got the uncanny feeling that she was visualising the place as it had been, though the wall must have been dust a thousand years ago. Presently she moved. He followed her, and it was stra
nge to see her, on the naked sand, treading the arbitrary patterns of vanished corridors.
She came to a halt, in a broad flat space that might once have been a central courtyard. There she fell on her knees and began to dig.
Stark got down beside her. They scrabbled like a pair of dogs in the yielding sand. Stark's nails slipped across something hard, and there was a yellow glint through the dusty ochre. Within a few minutes they had bared a golden cover six feet across, very massive and wonderfully carved with the symbols of some lost god of the sea.
Stark struggled to lift the thing away. He could not move it. Then Berild pressed a hidden spring and the cover slid back of itself. Beneath it, sweet and cold, protected through all these ages, water stirred gently against mossy stones.
An hour later, Stark and Berild lay sleeping soaked to the skin, their very hair dripping with the blessed dampness.
That night, when the low moons roved over the desert, by the well, drowsy with an animal sense of rest and repletion. And Stark looked at the woman and said,
'I know you now.'
'What do you know, wild man?'
Stark said quietly, 'You are a Rama.'
She did not answer at once. Then she said, 'I was bred in these these deserts. Is it so strange that I should know of this well?'
'Strange that you didn't mention it before. You were afraid, weren't you, that if you led me here your secret would come out? But it was that, or die.'
He leaned forward, studying her.'If you had led me straight to the well, I might not have wondered. But you had to stop and remember, how the halls wcre built and where the doorways were that led to the inner court. You lived in this place when it was whole. And no one, not even Kynon himself, knows of it but you.'
'You dream, wild man. The moon is in your eyes.'
Stark shook his head slowly. 'I know.'
She laughed, and stretched her arms wide on the sand.
'But I am young,' she said. 'And men have told me I am beautiful. It is good to be young, for youth has nothing to do with ashes and empty skulls.'
She touched his arm, and little darts of fire went through his flesh, warm from his fingertips.
'Forget your dreams, wild man. They're madness, gone with the morning.'
He looked down at her in the clear pale light, and she was young, and beautifully made, and her lips were smiling.
He bent his head. Her arms went round him. Her hair blew soft against his cheek. Then, suddenly, she set her teeth cruelly into his lip. He cried out and thrust her away, and she sat back on her heels, mocking him.
'That,' she said, 'is because you called Fianna's name instead of mine, when the storm broke.'
Stark cursed her. There was a taste of blood in his mouth. He reached out and caught her, and again she laughed, a peculiarly sweet, wicked sound.
The wind blew over them, sighing, and the desert was very still.
For two days they remained among the ruins. At evening of the second day Stark filled the water skin, and Berild replaced the golden cover on the well. They began the last long march toward Sinharat.
9
Stark saw it rising against the morning sky — a city of gold and marble, high on an island of rose-red coral laid bare by the vanished sea. Sinharat, the Ever Living.
Yet it had died. As he came closer to it, plodding slowly through the sand, he saw that the place was no more than a beautiful corpse, the lovely towers broken, the roofless palaces open to the sky. Whatever life Kynon and his armies might have foisted upon Sinharat was no more than the fleeting passage of ants across the perfect bones of the dead.
'What was it like before?' he asked, 'with the blue water around it, and the banners flying?'
Berild turned a dark, calculating look upon him.
'I told you before to forget that madness. If you talk it, no one will believe you.'
'No one?'
'You had best not anger me, wild man,' she said quietly. 'I may be your only hope of life, before this is over.'
They did not speak again, going with slow weary steps toward the city.
In the desert below the coral cliffs the armies of Kynon were encamped. The tall warriors of Kesh and Shun waiting, with their women and their beasts and their shining spears, for the pipers to cry them over the Border. The skin tents and the long picket lines were too many to count. In the distance, a convertible Kallman spacer that Stark recognised as Knighton's made an ugly, jarring incongruity.
Lookouts sighted the two toiling figures in the distance. Men and women and children began to stream out across the sand, and presently a great cheering arose. Where he had looked on emptiness for days, Stark was smothered now by the press of thousands. Berild was picked up and carried on the shoulders of two chiefs, and men would have carried Stark also, but he fought diem off.
Broad flights of steps were cut in the coral. The throng flowed upward along them. Ahead of them all went Eric John Stark, and Hie was smiling. From time to time he asked a question, and men drew back from that question, and his smile.
Up the steps and into the streets of Sinharat he went, with a slow, restless stride, asking,
'Where is Luhar of Venus?'
Every man there read death in his face, but they did not try to stop him.
People came out of the graceful ruins, drawn by the clamour, and the tide rolled down the broad ways, the rose-red streets of coral, until it spread out in the square before a great palace of gold and ivory and white marble blinding in the sun.
Luhar of Venus came down the terraced steps, fresh from sleep, his pale hair tumbled, his eyes still drowsy.
Others came through the door behind him. Stark did not see them. They did not matter. Berild didn't matter, calling his name from where she sat on the shoulders of the chiefs. Nothing, no one mattered, but himself and Luhar.
He crossed the square, not hurrying, a dark ravaged giant in rags. He saw Luhar pause on the bottom step. He saw the sleep and the vagueness go out of the Venusian's eyes as they rested first on the red-haired woman, then on himself. He saw the fear come into them, and the undying hate.
Someone got between him and Luhar. Stark lifted the man and flung him aside without breaking his stride, and went on. Luhar half turned. He would have run away, back into the palace, but there were too many now between him and the door. He crouched and drew his gun.
Stark sprang.
He came like a great black panther leaping, and he struck low. Luhar's shot went over his back. After that there was no more shooting. There was a moment, terribly short and silent, in which the two men lay entangled, straining against each other in a sort of stasis. Then Luhar screamed.
Stark knew dimly that there were hands, many of them, trying to drag him away. He clung growling to the Venusian until he was torn loose by main force. He struggled against his captors, and through a red haze he saw Kynon's face, close to his and very angry. Luhar was not yet dead.
'I warned you, Stark!' said Kynon furiously. 'I warned you.'
Men were bending over Luhar. Knighton, Walsh, Themis, Arrod. Stark saw that Delgaun was among them. He did not question at the time how word had gone back to Valkis and sent Delgaun racing across the dead sea bottom with his hired bravos to search for the red-haired woman. It was right that Delgaun should be there.
In short ragged sentences, Stark told how Luhar and Freka had tried to kill him, and how Berild had been lost with him.
Kynon turned to the Venusian. Death was already glazing the cloud-grey eyes, but it had not quenched the hatred and venom.
'He lies,' whispered Luhar. 'I saw him — he tried to run away and take the woman with him.'
Luhar of Venus, taking vengeance with his last breath.
Freka pushed forward, transparently eager to pick up his cue. 'It is so,' he said. 'I was with Luhar. I saw it also.'
Delgaun laughed. Cruel, silent laughter. He stood up, and looked at Berild.
Berild's eyes were blazing. She ignored Delgaun and spoke to K
ynon.
'You fool. Can't you see that they hate him? What Stark says is true. And I would have died in the desert because of them, if Stark hadn't been a better man than all of you.'
'Strange words,' said Delgaun, 'coming from a man's own mate. Perhaps Luhar did lie, after all. Perhaps it was not Stark who tried to run away, but you.'
She cursed him, with an ancient curse, and Kynon looked at her, sullenly. He said to the men who held Stark, 'Chain him below, in the dungeons.' Then he took Berild's arm and went with her into the palace.
Stark fought until someone behind him knocked him on the head with the butt of a spear. The last thing he saw was the face of Fianna, standing out from the crowd, wide-eyed with pity and love.
He came to in a place of cold, dry stone. There was an iron collar around his neck, and a five-foot chain ran from it to a ring in the wall. The cell was small. A gate of iron bars closed the entrance. Beyond was an open well, with other cell doors around it, and above were thick stone gratings open to the sky. He guessed that the place was built beneath some inner court of he palace.
There were no other prisoners. But there was a guard, a thick-shouldered barbarian who sat on the execution block in the centre of the well, with a sword and a jug of wine. A guard who watched the captive Stark, and smiled.
Freka.
When he saw that Stark was awake, Freka lifted up the jug and laughed. 'Here's to Death,' he said. For no one else comes here!'
He drank, and after that he did not speak, only sat and smiled.
Stark said nothing either. He waited, with the same unhuman patience he had shown when he waited for his captors under the tor.
The dim daylight faded from the gratings. Darkness came, and the pale glimmer of the moons. Freka became a silvered statue of a man, sitting on the block. Stark's eyes glowed.
The empty jug dropped and broke. Freka rose. He took the naked sword in his hand and crossed the open space to the cell. He lifted the outer bar away. It fell with a great echoing clang, and Freka entered.
'Stand up, Outlander,' he said. 'Stand up and face the steel. After that you'll sleep in a coral pit, and not even the worms will find you.'
Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories Page 43