The Coming of the Terrans

by Leigh Brackett

  CHAPTER THREE

  HE CAME to himself—the self that was Captain Burk Winters—in a room that was much like the one he last remembered, in Valkis, except that the walls were of a dark green rock and there was no prism.

  Winters could not remember anything of what had happened since that last room, except that he knew he had had a strong emotional shock. Jill’s name was uppermost in his mind. He began to tremble with a deep excitement.

  He got to his feet, and it was then that he realized he was shackled. Chains ran from cuffs on his wrists to similar cuffs on his ankles, passing through rings on a metal belt around his waist. These constituted his entire clothing. He saw also that there were freshly healed scars on his body.

  The heavy door was opened for him before he could begin to pound on it. Four tall barbarians, their harness magnificent with jewels and wrought metal, formed up a guard around him, and an officer led the way. They did not speak to Winters, and he knew the uselessness of trying to get anything out of them.

  He had not the faintest idea where he was, or how he had come there, beyond a vague memory of pain and flight that was like something he had dreamed.

  And somewhere, during that dream, he had seen Jill, spoken to her. He was as certain of that as he was of the weight of his chains.

  He stumbled, because his sight was blurred with tears. Up to then, he had not been sure. He had seen the twisted wreck of her flier, and while he did not believe it, there was always the chance that she might really be dead, and lost to him beyond all hope.

  Now he knew. She was alive, and if Winters had been alone he would have wept like a child.

  Instead, he studied the corridors and the great halls through which the guard took him. From the size and the splendor of them he knew that he was in a palace, and guessed that it might be the one he had seen on the cliffs above Valkis. This was confirmed when he caught a glimpse of the town through a window embrasure.

  The palace was older than anything he had seen on Mars, except for the buried ruins of Lhak in the northern deserts. But this was no ruin. It had grown old in somber beauty. The patterns of the mosaic floors were blurred, the precious stones worn, thin as porcelain. The tapestries, preserved by the wonderful Martian formula that had been lost for centuries, like everything else on Mars, had grown frail and brittle, their colors all softened to faint glows, infinitely sad and lovely.

  Here and there, on the walls or the soaring vault of a roof, were murals—magnificent pageants of lost glory, dim as an old man’s memory. The seas they pictured were deep and blue, and the ships were tall, and the mail of the warriors was set with gems, and the captive queens were beautiful as dusky pearls.

  Proud architecture, mating beauty with strength, and showing that strange blend of culture and barbarism that is so typically Martian. Winters reflected on how long ago these stones had been quarried, and went on to reflect that at that time civilization had already destroyed itself in a series of atomic wars, and the proud Kings of Valkis were only bandit chieftains in a world that was slipping downward toward the night.

  They came at length to doors of beaten gold that were more than twice Burk’s six-foot height. The Keshi guards who stood there pushed them wide, and Burk saw the throne room.

  Westering sunlight slanted in from the high embrasures, falling across the pillars and the tessellated floor. The pale light touched vagrant glints from the shields and the weapons of dead kings, warmed the old banners to brief life. Everywhere else in that vast place was a brooding darkness, full of whispers and small faint echoings.

  A shaft of cool gold fell directly upon the throne at the far end of the room.

  The high seat itself was cut from a single block of black basalt, and as Winters approached it, his swinging chains making a loud sound in the silence, he saw that the stone had been already half shaped by the sea. It was very worn and smooth with the patient sanding of the tides, and where hands had lain on the armpieces there were deep hollows, and on the basalt step below.

  An old woman sat upon the throne. She was wrapped in a black cloak, and her hair wound into a sort of white crown on her head, braided with jewels. She stared with half-blind eyes at the Earthman, and suddenly she spoke, in sonorous High Martian, a tongue as antique on Mars as Sanskrit is on Earth. Winters could not understand one word of it, but he knew from her tone and expression that she was quite mad.

  Someone sat in the heavy shadows by her feet, outside the shaft of sunlight, and veiled by it from Winters’ sight. He could catch only a vague pallor of ivory-tinted flesh, but for some reason his nerves tingled with premonition.

  As he neared the high seat, the old woman rose and stretched out her arm toward him, a wrinkled Cassandra crying doom upon his head. The wild echoes of her voice rolled from the vaulted roof, and her eyes were full of a blazing hate.

  The guards set the butts of their spears into his back so that he was thrown face down before the basalt step. A low, sweet, mocking laugh came out of the shadows, and he felt the pressure of a little sandaled foot on his neck.

  He knew the voice that said, “Greetings, Captain Winters! The throne of Valkis welcomes you.”

  The foot was withdrawn from his neck. He rose. The old woman had fallen back onto the throne. She was intoning what sounded like a church litany, and her upturned face had an exalted look.

  The remembered voice said out of the dimness, “My mother is repeating the coronation rites. Presently she will demand the year’s tribute from the Outer Islands and the coastal tribes. Time and reality do not bother her, and it pleases her to play at being queen. Therefore, as you see, I, Fand, rule Valkis from the shadow of the throne.”

  “Sometimes,” Winters said, “you must come into the light.”

  “Yes.”

  A soft, quick rustle and she was standing there in the shaft of sunlight. Her hair was the color of night after moonset, intricately coiled. She was dressed in the old, arrogant fashion of the bandit kingdoms—the long full skirt slit to the waist at the sides, so that her thighs showed when she moved, the wide jeweled girdle, collar of golden plaques. Her small, high breasts were bare and lovely, her body slender, with a catlike grace.

  Her face was as he remembered it. Proud and fine, golden-eyed, a mouth like a red fruit that mingled honey and poison, a lazy, slumbrous power behind the beauty, the fascination of all things that are at once beautiful and deadly.

  She looked at Winters and smiled. “So at last you have reached the end of your search.”

  He looked down at his chains and his nakedness. “A strange way to reach it. I paid Kor Hal well for this privilege.” He gave her a searching glance. “Do you rule Shanga, as well as Valkis? If so you’re not very courteous to your guests.”

  “On the contrary, I treat them very well—as you shall see.” Her golden eyes taunted him. “But you didn’t come here to practice Shanga, Captain Winters.”

  “Why else would I have come?”

  “To find Jill Leland.”

  He was not really surprised. Subconsciously he had known that she knew. But he managed a look of blank amazement.

  “Jill Leland is dead.”

  “Was she, when you saw her in the garden, and spoke to her?” Fand laughed. “Do you think we’re such fools? Everyone who comes to the Hall of Shanga in the Trade Cities is carefully checked and examined. We were particularly careful with you, Captain Winters, because psychologically you were the wrong type to be drawn to Shanga. Men like you are too strong to need escape.

  “You knew, of course, that your fiancée had taken up the practice. You didn’t like it, and tried to make her stop. Kor Hal said that she was terribly upset about it on several occasions. But Jill had gone too far to stop. She begged to be allowed the full power, the real Shanga. She helped us plan her supposed death in the sea bottom. We would have done that anyway, for our own protection, since the girl has influential connections and we can’t afford to have people hunting for our clients. But she wanted you to believ
e that she was dead, so that you would forget her. She felt she had no right to marry you, that she would ruin your life. Doesn’t that touch you, Captain Winters? Doesn’t that bring tears to your eyes?”

  It brought more than that to Winters. It brought an overpowering urge to take this lovely she-devil between his hands and break her and then stamp the pieces into the earth.

  His chains made one harsh jangling sound, and then the spears came up and touched his flesh with sharp red kisses. He stood still and said, “Why have you done this? Is it for money, or for hate?”

  “For both, Earthman! And for something more important than either of them.” Her lips curved in brief amusement. “Besides, I’ve done nothing to your people. I built the Halls of Shanga, yes. But the men and women of Earth degrade themselves of their own free will. Come here.”

  She motioned him to follow her to the window. As she crossed the vast room, she said, “You have seen part of the palace. Earth credits have rebuilt and restored the house of my fathers. The credits of apelings who wish to return to their normal state because the civilization they have forced upon themselves is too much for them. Look out there. Earth money has done that, too.”

  Winters looked out upon a sight that had almost vanished from the face of Mars. A garden, the varied and jewel-bright garden that would have belonged with a palace like this. Broad lawns of bronze green turf, formal plantings, statuary…

  For some reason he could not quite remember, that garden gave Burk Winters a cold shuddering chill.

  But the garden itself was only a part of what he saw. A small part. Beneath the window the ground sloped away into a vast bowl-shaped depression, perhaps a quarter-mile away, and Winters looked down into an amphitheater. Ruined as it was, it was still magnificent, with tiers of seats rising like steps of hewn stone from the inner wall. He thought of how it must have looked when the games were held in the old days, with all of those thousands of places filled.

  Now, in the arena, there was another garden. A wild and tangled garden, closed in by the high protective walls that had kept the beasts from the spectators. There were trees in it, and open spaces, and he could make out moving forms among the shadows, strange forms. He could not see them clearly for the distance and the slanting light, but a chill pang struck through him, a cold breath of foreboding.

  In the center of the arena was a lake. Not a large one, and probably not deep, but there were creatures splashing in it, and he caught the faint echo of a reptilian scream. An echo he had heard before…

  Fand was looking outward to the amphitheater, with an odd, slow smile. Winters saw that there were people already in the lower tiers of the seats, and more of them gathering.

  “What is this thing,” he asked her, “that is more important than money or your hatred for the men of Earth?”

  All the ancient pride of her race and house flashed out in her eyes as she answered him. He forgot his loathing of her for a moment, in his respect for her deep sincerity.

  She said only one word. “Mars.”

  The old woman, heard her and cried out from the throne. Then she flung the corner of her black mantel over her head and was silent.

  “Mars,” said Fand quietly. “The world that could not even die in decency and honor, because the carrion birds came flying to pick its bones, and the greedy rats suck away the last of its blood and pride.”

  Winters said, “I don’t understand. What has Shanga to do with Mars?”

  “You’ll see.” She turned on him suddenly. “You challenged Shanga, Earthman, just as your people have challenged Mars. We’ll find out which is the stronger!”

  She motioned to the officer of the guard, who went away. Then she said to Winters, “You wanted your girl back. You were willing to go through the fire of Shanga for her, though you abhorred it. You were willing to risk your identity through the changes of the ray—which after a while, Earthman, never go away. And all for Jill Leland. Do you still want her back?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well.” Fand glanced over his shoulder and nodded. “There she is.”

  For a long moment, Burk Winters did not turn around.

  Fand moved away a little, watching with a cruel, amused interest. Winters’ back stiffened. He turned.

  She was there, standing in the sunlight, bewildered, frightened, a wild and shining creature out of the dawn of the world, with a rope around her neck. The guards were laughing.

  Winters thought desperately, She has not changed too much. Back to the primitive, but not yet to the ape. There is a soul still in her eyes, and the light of reason.

  Jill, Jill! How could you have done this thing?

  But he understood now how she could have done it. He remembered how bitterly he had quarreled with her over Shanga. He had thought it a stupid and childish thing, far beneath her intelligence and as degrading as any other drug. But he had not understood.

  He did now. And he was filled with a deadly fear, because he understood so well.

  Because he himself was now numbered among the beasts of Shanga. And beneath his horror as he looked at the creature that was Jill and yet not Jill, he was aware that in some unholy way he found her more beautiful and more alluring than he ever had before. Stripped of all the shams and the studied unconventions of society, freed of all complexity, her body strong and fleet as a doe’s quivering with sensitive life…

  It would take two of a kind. Dawn-woman, dawn-man. Strong sinew, strong passion, the guts that cities stole away…

  Fand said, “She can still be saved, if you can find a way to do it.” Then she added shrewdly, “Unless you now need someone to save you, Captain Winters!”

  A strong shock of revulsion rocked him, but his eyes still held a strange light.

  The silver she was coming toward him. Her gaze was fixed upon him. He saw that she was drawn to him, and struggling to understand why. She did not speak, and somehow Winters’ throat closed on an aching lump, so that he too was dumb.

  The guard who held her rope let her move as she would. She came close to Winters, hesitantly, as an animal does. Then she stopped and looked up into his face. Tears gathered in her wide dark eyes. Presently she whimpered, very softly, and went down on her knees at his feet.

  The old woman let out a shrill cackling. Fand’s eyes were like cups of molten gold.

  Winters bent over and caught Jill in his arms. He lifted her to her feet and stood holding her to him, in a fury of protective possessive love. He said very softly to Fand, “You’ve seen it all now. Can we go?”

  She nodded. “Take them to the garden of Shanga,” she said, and added, “It is almost time.”

  The guards took them, Burk Winters and the woman he had lost and found again, out through the great echoing halls of the palace and down the long slope of lawn to the amphitheater.

  A barred gate of heavy metal covered the mouth of a tunnel. The guards unlocked it and took off Winters’ chains and thrust him inside with Jill. The gate was locked again behind them.

  Holding Jill tightly by the hand, Winters went down the tunnel and came presently into the arena—into the garden of Shanga.

  He stopped, blinking in the sudden light. Jill’s hand tightened on his. She quivered with a tense expectancy, and her head was tilted in an attitude of listening.

  He had only a moment before the gong sounded, the mellow sonorous notes that might have been calling some evil priesthood to its dark prayers. Only a moment to glimpse the trees and the shambling anthropoid forms that moved among them, to catch the rank beast taint in the air, to hear the splashing and the hissing screams from the hidden pool.

  Only a moment to be filled with horror and a sick fear, to deny to himself the reality of this nightmare garden, to wish that he were blind and deaf, or better than that, dead.

  In the seats above the protecting wall, rows of Martian faces looked down. They were the faces of men and women who watch the antics o
f creatures in a zoo—destructive creatures for which they have a personal hatred.

  Then the gong called out, and Jill leaped away, pulling him by the hand. All over the garden there was a moment of intense silence, and then there rose a devil’s chorus of roaring and screaming in voices that were horribly human and even more horribly not, and close to him Jill’s voice chimed in, saying over and over, “Shanga! Shanga!”

  It came to Winters in a flash, then, what Fand had meant about Mars. As Jill pulled him headlong between the trees and across the open grassy spaces, he realized that this garden of Shanga was in fact a zoo, an exhibit, where the people of Mars might come to see what manner of beast their economic conquerors were. A hot and dire shame rose in him. Apeling, running naked through the trees, a slave to the fire of Shanga!

  He yelled at Jill to stop!

  She only plunged on the harder, so that he had to fight her, setting his heels in the earth. And she turned on him snarling, saying, “Shanga!”

  A great anthropoid male came rushing toward them. He had slipped back beyond speech, but ecstatic noises came out of his throat. Behind him were others, males, females, and young on the same evolutionary level. Winters and the silver she that was Jill were caught up and carried on in their tribal rush. Winters fought to get away, but it was hopeless. The wild hairy bodies walled him in.

  As they approached the center of the garden they were joined by more and more, all apparently summoned by the sound of the gong. Looking at them, Winters’ stomach turned over. This was Walpurgis Night, a festival of blasphemies. And he was trapped in it, inextricably joined to destruction.

  The ones like Jill, who had only gone a little way as yet, were not so bad. They were human. Winters knew that he himself had been like that, and he felt no particular horror of them. But there were others. Back through all the stages of the primitive, beyond the Neanderthal, beyond Pithecanthropus Erectus, beyond the missing link, back to the common ancestor.

  Shapeless, shambling, hairy brutes, deformed skulls and little red cunning eyes, bared teeth grinning yellow. Things that even the anthropologists had never seen or dreamed of. Things that were not human, or ape, nor any form of life that had ever been classified.