Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories

by Leigh Brackett

  'There will be no war,' he said. 'You have been betrayed.'

  In the moment that was left to him, he confessed the lie of the Rama crowns. And then Berild, who was behind him now, had moved like a red-haired fury to drive her dagger into his heart.

  In his own body, Stark might have escaped the blow. But the reflexes of Kynon were not as his. They were swift enough to postpone death — the blade bit deep, but not where Berild had wished it. He turned and caught her by the wrists, and said to Delgaun, 'She has betrayed you, too. Freka lies in a coral pit — and I am not Kynon.'

  Berild tore away from him. She spurred her beast toward the Valkisian. She would have broken past him, through the escort, and up the cliffs to safety in the tunnels under Sinharat. But Delgaun was too quick.

  One hand caught in the masses of her hair. She was dragged screaming from the saddle, and even then her screams were not of fear, but of fury. She clawed at Delgaun, and he fell with her to the ground.

  The tall chieftains of the escort came forward, but they were dazed, and confused by the anger that was rising in them.

  Delgaun's wiry body arched. He flung the woman over the ledge, and what happened to her after that Stark did not see, nor wish to see.

  He was shouting again to the barbarians, the tale of Delgaun's treachery.

  Behind him on the ledge there was turmoil where Delgaun ran on foot between the beasts, and the outlanders made their try for safety. Below him in the desert, where there had been silence, a great deep muttering was growing, like the first growling of a storm, and the ranks of spears rippled like wheat before the wind.

  And Stark felt the slow running out of Kynon's blood inside him, where Berild's dagger stood out from his back.

  They had headed Delgaun away from the path up the cliff. The two loose mounts had been caught and held. They had tried to catch Delgaun, but he was light and fast and slipped away from them. Now he broke back, toward Kynon's great beast.

  Knock the dying man from the saddle, charge through the milling chieftains, who were hampered by their own numbers in that narrow space ...

  He leaped. And the arms of Kynon, driven by the will of Eric John Stark, encircled him and held him and would not let him go.

  The two men crashed to the ledge. Stark let out one harsh cry of agony, and then was still, his hands locked around the Valkisian's throat, his eyes intent and strange.

  Men came up, and he gasped, 'He is mine,' and they let him be.

  Delgaun did not die easily. He managed to get his dagger out, and gashed the other's side until the naked ribs showed through. But once again Stark's mind was free in some dark immensity of its own. He was living again the dream he had in Valkis, and this was the end of the dream. N'Chaka had a grip at last on the demon with yellow eyes that hungered for his life, and he would not let go.

  The yellow eyes widened. They blazed, and then they slowly dimmed until the last flicker of life was gone. The strength went out of N'Chaka's hands. He fell forward, over his prey.

  Below, on the sand, Berild lay, and her outspread hair was as red as blood in the fiery dawn.

  The men of Kesh and the men of Shun flowed, in a resistless tide up over the coral cliffs. The chieftains and the pipers and the link-boys joined them, hunting the outlanders and the wolves of Valkis through the streets of Sinharat.

  Unnoticed, a dark-haired girl ran down the path to the ledge.

  She bent over the body of Kynon, pressing her hand to its heart. Tears ran down and mingled with the blood.

  A low, faint moan came from the man's lips. Weeping like a bulH, Fianna drew a tiny vial from her girdle and poured three drops of pale liquid on the unresponsive tongue.

  12

  He had come a long way. He had been down in the deep black valleys of the Place of Darkness, and the iron frost was in his bones. He had climbed the bitter mountains where no creature of the Twilight Belt might go and live.

  There was light, now. He had been lost and wandering, but he had won back to the light. His tribe, his people would be waiting for him. But he knew that he would never see them.

  He remembered, then, with the old terrible loneliness, that they were not truly his people. They had raised him, but they were not of his blood.

  And he remembered also that they were dead, slain by the miners who had needed all the water of the valley for themselves. Slain by the miners who had taken N'Chaka and put him in a cage.

  With a start of terror, he thought he was again in that cage, with the leering bearded faces peering in at him. But in the blinding dazzle of light he could see no bars.

  There was only one face. The anxious, pitying face of a girl.

  Fianna.

  His brain began to clear. Memory returned bit by bit, the fragments fitting themselves gradually into place.

  Kynon. Delgaun. Berild. Sinharat, the Ever-Living.

  He remembered now with perfect clarity that he was dying, and it seemed a terrible thing to die in the body of another man. For the first time, fully, he felt the separation from his own flesh. It seemed a blasphemous thing, more terrible than death.

  Fianna was weeping. She stroked his hair, and whispered, 'I am so glad. I was afraid — afraid you would never wake.'

  He was touched, because he knew that she loved him and would be sad. He lifted his hand to touch her face, to comfort her.

  He saw the fingers of that hand, dark against her cheek. Dark... His own fingers. His own hand.

  He was not on the ledge. He was back in the coral crypt beneath the palace. The light that had dazzled his eyes was not the sun, but only the flare of torches.

  He sat up, his heart pounding wildly.

  Kynon of Shun lay beside him on the coral. He was quite dead, his head encircled by a crown of fire, his side open to the white bone where Delgaun's blade had struck.

  The wound that Kynon himself had never felt.

  The golden coffer was open. The second crown lay near Fianna, with the rod beside it.

  Stark looked at her, deep into her eyes. Very softly he said, 'I would not have dreamed it.'

  'You will understand, now — many things,' she said. 'And I was glad of my power today, because I could truly give you life!' She rose, and he saw that she was very tired. Her voicemwas dull, as though it counted over old things that no longer mattered.

  'You see why I was afraid. If they had ever suspected that I, too, was of the Twice-Born ... Berild or Delgaun, each alone, I might have destroyed, but I could not destroy both of them. And if I had, there was still Kynon. You did what I could not, Eric John Stark.'

  'Why were you against them, Fianna? How were you proof against the poison that made them what they were?'

  She answered angrily, 'Because I am weary of evil, of scheming for power and shedding the blood of men as though they were sheep! I am not better than Berild was. I, too, have lived a long time, line, and my hands are not clean. But perhaps, by what you helped me do, I have made up a little for my sins.'

  She paused, her thoughts turned darkly inward, and it was strange to see the shadow of age touching her sweet young face. Then she said, very slowly, like an old, old woman speaking, 'I am weary of living. No matter where I go, I am a stranger. You can understand that, though not so well as I. There is an end pleasure, and after that only loneliness is left.

  'I have remembered that I was human once. That is why I set myself against their plan of empire. After all these ages I have come round full circle to the starting point, and things seem to me now as they seemed then, before I was tempted by the Sending-on of Minds.

  'Ist is a wicked thing!' she cried suddenly. 'Against nature and the gods, and it has never brought anything but evil!' She caught up the rod and held it in her hands.

  'This is the last,' she said. 'Cities die, and nations perish, and material things, even such as these, are destroyed. One by one the Twice-Born have perished also, through accident or swift disease or murder, as Berild would have slain Delgaun. Now only this, and I, are
left.'

  Quite suddenly, she flung the rod against the coral, and it broke iemp a cloudy flame and a tinkling of crystal shards. Then, one by one, she broke the crowns.

  She stood still for a long moment. Then she whispered, 'Now only I am left.'

  Again there was silence, and Stark was shaken by the magnitude of the thing that she had done. Her slim girl's body somehow took on the stature of a goddess.

  After a while he went to her and said awkwardly, 'I have not thanked you, Fianna. You brought me here, you saved me ...' 'Kiss me once , then,' she answered, and raised her lips to his.

  'For I love you, Eric John Stark — and that is the pity of it. Because I am not for you, nor for any man.'

  He kissed her, very tenderly, and there was the bitter taste of tears on her soft lips.

  'Now come,' she whispered, and took his hand.

  She led him back through the labyrinth, into the palace, and then out again into the streets of Sinharat. Stark saw that it was sunset, and that the city was deserted. The tribes of Kesh and Shun had broken camp and gone.

  There was a beast ready for him, supplied with food and water. Fianna asked him where he wished to go, and pointed the way to Tarak.

  'And you?' he asked. 'Where will you go, little one?'

  'I have not thought.' She lifted her head, and the wind played with her dark hair. She did not smile, and yet suddenly Stark knew that she was happy.

  'I am free of a great burden,' she whispered. 'I shall stay here for a while, and think, and after that I shall know what to do. But whatever it is there will be no evil in it, and in the end I shall rest.'

  He mounted, and she looked up at him, with a look that wrung his heart although it was not sad.

  'Go now,' she said, 'and the gods go with you.'

  'And with you.' He bent and kissed her once again, and then rode away, down to the coral cliffs.

  Far out on the desert he turned and looked back, once, at the white towers of Sinharat rising against the larger moon.

  Enchantress of Venus

  I

  The ship moved slowly across the Red Sea, through the shrouding veils of mist, her sail barely filled by the languid thrust of the wind. Her hull, of a thin light metal, floated without sound, the surface of the strange ocean parting before her prow in silent rippling streamers of flame.

  Night deepened toward the ship, a river of indigo flowing out of the west. The man known as Stark stood alone by the after rail and watched its coming. He was full of impatience and a gathering sense of danger, so that it seemed to him that even the hot wind smelled of it.

  The steersman lay drowsily over his sweep. He was a big man, with skin and hair the color of milk. He did not speak, but Stark felt that now and again the man's eyes turned toward him, pale and calculating under half-closed lids, with a secret avarice.

  The captain and the two other members of the little coasting vessel's crew were forward, at their evening meal. Once or twice Stark heard a burst of laughter, half-whispered and furtive. It was as though all four shared in some private joke, from which he was rigidly excluded.

  The heat was oppressive. Sweat gathered on Stark's dark face. His shirt stuck to his back. The air was heavy with moisture, tainted with the muddy fecundity of the land that brooded westward behind the eternal fog.

  There was something ominous about the sea itself. Even on its own world, the Red Sea is hardly more than legend. It lies behind the Mountains of White Cloud, the great barrier wall that hides away half a planet. Few men have gone beyond that barrier, into the vast mystery of Inner Venus. Fewer still have come back.

  Stark was one of that handful. Three times before he had crossed the mountains, and once he had stayed for nearly a year. But he had never quite grown used to the Red Sea.

  It was not water. It was gaseous, dense enough to float the buoyant hulls of the metal ships, and it burned perpetually with its deep inner fires. The mists that clouded it were stained with the bloody glow. Beneath the surface Stark could see the drifts of flame where the lazy currents ran, and the little coiling bursts of sparks that came upward and spread and melted into other bursts, so that the face of the sea was like a cosmos of crimson stars.

  It was very beautiful, glowing against the blue, luminous darkness of the night. Beautiful, and strange.

  There was a padding of bare feet, and the captain, Malthor, came up to Stark, his outlines dim and ghostly in the gloom.

  "We will reach Shuruun," he said, "before the second glass is run."

  Stark nodded. "Good."

  The voyage had seemed endless, and the close confinement of the narrow deck had got badly on his nerves.

  "You will like Shuruun," said the captain jovially. "Our wine, our food, our women—all superb. We don't have many visitors. We keep to ourselves, as you will see. But those who do come—"

  He laughed, and clapped Stark on the shoulder. "Ah, yes. You will be happy in Shuruun!"

  It seemed to Stark that he caught an echo of laughter from the unseen crew, as though they listened and found a hidden jest in Malthor's words.

  Stark said, "That's fine."

  "Perhaps," said Malthor, "you would like to lodge with me. I could make you a good price."

  He had made a good price for Stark's passage from up the coast. An exorbitantly good one.

  Stark said, "No."

  "You don't have to be afraid," said the Venusian, in a confidential tone. "The strangers who come to Shuruun all have the same reason. It's a good place to hide. We're out of everybody's reach."

  He paused, but Stark did not rise to his bait. Presently he chuckled and went on, "In fact, it's such a safe place that most of the strangers decide to stay on. Now, at my house, I could give you—"

  Stark said again, flatly, "No."

  The captain shrugged. "Very well. Think it over, anyway." He peered ahead into the red, coiling mists. "Ah! See there?" He pointed, and Stark made out the shadowy loom of cliffs. "We are coming into the strait now."

  Malthor turned and took the steering sweep himself, the helmsman going forward to join the others. The ship began to pick up speed. Stark saw that she had come into the grip of a current that swept toward the cliffs, a river of fire racing ever more swiftly in the depths of the sea.

  The dark wall seemed to plunge toward them. At first Stark could see no passage. Then, suddenly, a narrow crimson streak appeared, widened, and became a gut of boiling flame, rushing silently around broken rocks. Red fog rose like smoke. The ship quivered, sprang ahead, and tore like a mad thing into the heart of the inferno.

  In spite of himself, Stark's hands tightened on the rail. Tattered veils of mist swirled past them. The sea, the air, the ship itself, seemed drenched in blood. There was no sound, in all that wild sweep of current through the strait Only the sullen fires burst and flowed.

  The reflected glare showed Stark that the Straits of Shuruun were defended. Squat fortresses brooded on the cliffs. There were ballistas, and great windlasses for the drawing of nets across the narrow throat. The men of Shuruun could enforce their law that barred all foreign shipping from their gulf.

  They had reason for such a law, and such a defense. The legitimate trade of Shuruun, such as it was, was in wine and the delicate laces woven from spider-silk. Actually, however, the city lived and throve on piracy, the arts of wrecking, and a contraband trade in the distilled juice of the vela poppy.

  Looking at the rocks and the fortresses, Stark could understand how it was that Shuruun had been able for more centuries than anyone could tell to victimize the shipping of the Red Sea, and offer a refuge to the outlaw, the wolf's-head, the breaker of taboo.

  With startling abruptness, they were through the gut and drifting on the still surface of this all but landlocked arm of the Red Sea.

  Because of the shrouding fog, Stark could see nothing of the land. But the smell of it was stronger, warm damp soil and the heavy, faintly rotten perfume of vegetation half jungle, half swamp. Once, through a rift in th
e wreathing vapor, he thought he glimpsed the shadowy bulk of an island, but it was gone at once.

  After the terrifying rush of the strait, it seemed to Stark that the ship barely moved. His impatience and the subtle sense of danger deepened. He began to pace the deck, with the nervous, velvet motion of a prowling cat. The moist, steamy air seemed all but unbreathable after the clean dryness of Mars, from whence he had come so recently. It was oppressively still.

  Suddenly he stopped, his head thrown back, listening.

  The sound was borne faintly on the slow wind. It came from everywhere and nowhere, a vague dim thing without source or direction. It almost seemed that the night itself had spoken—the hot blue night of Venus, crying out of the mists with a tongue of infinite woe.

  It faded and died away, only half heard, leaving behind it a sense of aching sadness, as though all the misery and longing of a world had found voice in that desolate wail.

  Stark shivered. For a time there was silence, and then he heard the sound again, now on a deeper note. Still faint and far away, it was sustained longer by the vagaries of the heavy air, and it became a chant, rising and falling. There were no words. It was not the sort of thing that would have need of words. Then it was gone again.

  Stark turned to Malthor. "What was that?"

  The man looked at him curiously. He seemed not to have heard.

  "That wailing sound," said Stark impatiently.

  "Oh, that." The Venusian shrugged. "A trick of the wind. It sighs in the hollow rocks around the strait."

  He yawned, giving place again to the steersman, and came to stand beside Stark. The Earthman ignored him. For some reason, that sound half heard through the mists had brought his uneasiness to a sharp pitch.

  Civilization had brushed over Stark with a light hand. Raised from infancy by half-human aboriginals, his perceptions were still those of a savage. His ear was good.

  Malthor lied. That cry of pain was not made by any wind.

  "I have known several Earthmen," said Malthor, changing the subject, but not too swiftly. "None of them were like you."