The taller of the two white men answered. He had a knife scar on his cheek, and one ear had been mutilated by a ray-blast. “You’re new here, fella,” he sneered. “There’s meat on your bones and blood in your guts. You’ll take new men’s rations till we and the boss say different. You’ll do what we say, when we say it, or we’ll pare you down a size in the collar and a couple more in the head.”
Moran’s grin was insulting. “Oh my, oh my,” he deplored. “Is there no sportsmanship left in the race of man? Four of you against one, and you with your sour-looking, friends to boot. Yah!” He spat contemptuously. “Come on, the four of you! I’ll take any one of you with my hands tied and bend you into knots! I’ll take all four of you—yes, and your friends besides—and show you who’ll make the laws in this place from now on! Show me this skulking boss of yours, and by the saints I’ll—”
“You will what?”
A man stood in the cave mouth, an old man, with white hair and beard, taller than Moran. He wore shorts and a jerkin of leather, and his arms were folded on the hilt of a mighty broadsword.
Moran turned to face him. Here was a man of another sort, a man he could treat as an equal.
“You’ll be the boss, I think,” he sneered. “And you a man past your best years. Faith, it must be no trick at all, to handle this gang of bezabors you have here.”
“Do you think so?” There was a queer light in the old man’s eyes. They were eagle eyes, peering under show-white brows into Moran’s face. The steely ring had gone out of his voice when he answered. “You have a name, I think. What, among friends, might it be?”
“Friends is it?” Moran snorted. “You talk softer than the boys here. It’s maybe different if you’ve a man to buck, in the place of a lot of starved bilge rats with no starch in their knees. There’s no secret to it, though—friend or foe it’s Moran.”
“Danny! My boy!” The great sword fell clanging on the rock. Tears were in the old man’s eyes and his hands were outstretched. “Danny Moran—have you forgot your father?”
Moran gripped the oldster’s two shoulders. The grin was back on his face and twice as broad.
“Paddy Moran is the way of it,” he said, “not Danny. Patrick Terence Aloysius Moran is the whole of it, and a name that’s known from here to Capella and maybe farther. Danny Moran was my father, God rest his soul, before the drink got him and he went off by his lone self after chib-bugs on Pluto. Is there a chance at all that you would be that teetotalin’, horse-stealin’, space-blisterin’ old reprobate of the world, my esteemed old spalpeen of a grandfather?”
He knew it before he asked. The Moran face was there, under the white beard, and the Moran eyes, and the muscles of the Morans rippled under his fingers in shoulders that were eighty years old and more besides. It was thirty years ago that Michael Moran had steered his ship into the black gulf that is between the stars, and vanished like dust into space. Thirty years ago Patrick Moran was but a likely glint in his father’s eyes as he surveyed the pretty girls of Dublin. There had been tales told of the tee-totaling giant with ready fists and a readier tongue who seemed always to have scrip in his wallet and a chip on each of his broad shoulders, but they ended where they began, in emptiness. Old Michael Moran was a legend among space hogs, and another Moran was fast becoming one in his own right.
~ * ~
A grin stood on the old man’s face. His gnarled fist smote Moran’s chest with a blow that would fell an ox. His arm went around the younger man’s shoulder as he turned to his watching men.
“Ye’ve a Moran to deal with here, ye blaggards!” he roared. “Blood of my blood, and by the feel of him bone of my bone. He’ll whip any five of you with his two hands tied and a quart of liquor in him, but by the Lord Harry if he touches a drop in my presence I’ll have the hide off his back for it! Zagar—Moses—come here, the pack of you. Wolves that ye are, you’ve a better wolf than any of you to fawn on and ye’ll feel his fangs too if need be, as ye’ve felt mine! He’s new, but he’s a Moran, and we’ll stew the fatted calf in his honor, and be damned to tomorrow!”
The Martian’s face was dark. “The ration’s too short now,” he hissed. “There’s ten days before we’ll get more. By what right do you break the law for a new man?”
Moran felt the old man stiffen beside him. One foot came down on the great sword, so that it clanged faintly on the rock.
“I made the law,” the calm voice said. “I’ll make new ones if need be. Would you, perhaps, care to make a trial of it?”
Zagar’s glance fell. “You have the sword,” he mumbled.
“I have indeed.” The old man picked it up and stood again with his hands clasped on its massive hilt. It was beaten out of a strange gray steel, tempered blue at the edges, and as broad as a man’s thigh. “With my own two hands I made it out of the star that fell, and as ye’ve cause to know I’ve used it. Are there, maybe, some of you that think it has grown too heavy for me to swing?”
“The law’s for you, not us.” It was Moses, the Negro. “You made it to suit yourself and you break it to make a feast for a man who has no need of food. You’ve kept us to a ration that a dog would starve on. You’ve kept us weak and sick, so you could lord it over us with your loud mouth and your big sword. We’re thirty men, hungry, and you’ll swill away our food!”
“And what will you do?” Moran felt the old man’s elbow against him, pushing him back.
“We’re bare-handed and you have the sword. All right. You asked if we thought you could still swing it. Well—can you?”
Quick as was the Negro’s swing, the boss was quicker. The great blade fell in an arc of blue light. Split to the breastbone, Moses dropped at his feet. Then before he could free the sword the Martian was upon him.
The glint of battle shone in the old man’s eyes. He caught the squat form in his two hands and swung it above his head, then hurled it, twisting and sprawling, into the mob. At his side Moran was slugging knee to knee with the bigger of Zagar’s two companions. He felt the man’s ribs come under his fist, saw bright red blood spurt from his lips, and stepped over him to meet the charge of the half-mad pack.
Months of starvation had told on them. In bloody glee Moran smashed at their bony faces, kicked at their crowding bodies, before the tide closed over him. He dug his thumbs into the throat of a snarling Blueskin uglier than old Wallagash. He ducked past the six flailing arms of a Centaurian and pushed back his scaly, three-eyed skull until his bull neck cracked. Then a tentacle as thick as his arm twined round his throat and began to tighten. As he raised his hands to tear it away, a second twisting tendril fastened on his wrists. A bloody haze thickened before his eyes. A pulse of spent air throbbed and hacked at his throat. Then with the clang of steel on iron-hard scales the tentacles loosened and he fell to his knees. He heard a great voice roaring somewhere near him. The mist cleared and he saw the old man, his sword red to the hilt, standing spread-legged over the cloven body of the lizard-man and shouting his defiance at the mob.
“Come on!” he cried. “Show me the stuff in you! There’s but the two of us here, and me a grandfather to boot.. Can I swing the sword yet, did you ask? Can I prove the law, who made it? Rats is what you are—crawling, squeaking rats! Is it food you’re wanting? There’s carrion for you! Fill your bellies so you can crawl into your holes like the rats ye are and dream of the day when you’ll pull down Michael Moran. Or will you go to her and get your fill of what she’ll give you?”
They quailed before him. Six of them were dead and Zagar lay writhing with a broken back. They retreated as the old man strode to where the crippled Martian lay.
“You know the law,” he said quietly. “There’s only death for you, the way you are, and you’ve got the choice. Which is it, the sword—or her?”
Moran saw black venom in Zagar’s eyes. The flat brown face twisted in a leer of hate. “I claim the law!” the Martian hissed. “Take me to her!”
Dead silence followed his reply. Leaning on his swo
rd, the old man stared into the hate-filled eyes. He shook himself like a great, shaggy dog.
“Pick him up, Paddy Moran,” he commanded. “You’ll be with us a long time, and you may as well know the whole of it now as later. Follow behind me now, and remember—kin of mine or not, I’m boss!”
Shouldering his bloody sword like a rifle, the old man strode down the broken slope in front of the caves. Picking up Zagar, Moran followed. An impulse came over him to crush the life out of that hate-filled dwarfish body and fling it away among the rocks, but the Martian’s whisper stopped him:
“I Claim the law!”
~ * ~
Following paths which old Michael seemed to know well, they wound their way through the labyrinth of wind-worn, gaudy stone, forcing their way against the howling gusts of wind that buffeted them from every side. They came to a little stream, a mere trickle of icy water running in a groove in the soft rock, and stopped to wash the blood from their faces and bodies and to clean the great sword. At last, through an avenue in the rock, Moran saw the amethyst dyke rising before them, its top a good fifty feet above the rock of the valley floor. Blocks of broken crystal made a steep way to its top, and up that broken way they climbed until they stood side by side on its bare summit, that ran like a great smoky purple road to the east.
Here in the open they were exposed to the full force of the wind. The dyke was glassy-smooth, and Moran had all he could do to keep his footing as he followed the old man along its top toward the abyss. He tried to speak, but the wind snatched the words from his mouth. He bowed his shoulders over the now unconscious Martian and struggled on.
Straight as a drawn line the purple causeway ran, splitting the valley in two halves. As they struggled on, the giant clear crystal at its end loomed ever higher before them and the dazzling radiance from the abyss beat ever brighter upon them, until they were forced to shield their eyes. A sudden gust spun Moran around and flung him to his knees, and as he rose he saw that the others were close behind them.
The old man walked cradling the sword in his arms like a child, his white head bowed. Moran could feel the fierce light on his skin, burning deep into it. Then it was welling up through the rock under his feet, beating in on all sides, so that it seemed that he walked on a ribbon of purple ice, flung out in a great projecting frost-tongue over the abyss.
The old man stopped. The dyke was narrow here, barely eight feet across, and the mutter of the wind had died until Moran could hear his voice.
“Lay him there at her feet,”
Moran strode forward, one pace, two and three, and laid tbe body of the Martian at the base of the crystal shaft. He stepped back and looked up.
He saw her floating there.
She was a woman, taller than most, and slim. Her hair streamed in a red glory over her bare white shoulders, covering her body with a veil of silken flame. Her hands were pressed flat against her body, each pink fingernail showing as though lit from within. Her head was bent a little to look down, her red lips parted breathlessly. Her eyes were closed and the long dark lashes lay gently on her cheeks that were soft as white velvet.
She floated in a hollow in the quartz, an oval casket filled with violet radiance that surrounded her like a halo. The light from the abyss seemed somehow collected, curdled, compressed into the intangible medium in which she swam, her little feet pressed close together, her ten pink toes treading on emptiness. She was woman as men have dreamed of her since time began, and in him Moran felt the hot desire flooding up through his veins and bringing all the savage fury of love out of him in a mighty shout.
His grandfather’s hand was on his shoulder and he shook it off. He stepped forward, stiff-legged, like a robot walking. He heard the Martian’s cackle of mad glee.
He saw her green eyes open and look down at him.
Out of the world went everything but the love and the glory of her. Out of the world went everything but the red, red welcome of her parted lips, and the warm pleasure of her burning hair. Into his soul swam the glory of her sea-green eyes, calling him, drawing his life out to mingle with her life in a Nirvana never known to man.
In a world where the grass was springing emerald flame, where the trees drooped with clustered pearls for fruit and the streams were molten sapphire he wandered at her side under seething purple skies, and drank from the silver cup she held for him, feeling a flame of radiant fire surging through his veins as he sank with her into the clinging purple mists from which she drew her immortality—and his.
~ * ~
In a world where soft, perfumed breezes blew over spindrift of apple-jade and slow waves curled along coral sands, he lay dreaming under a moon of argent and shadowy purple, under a sky studded with diamond stars. In shadowed darkness, arched over with the filmy fronds of giant ferns, bedded on tufted mosses, he lay and played at love with maidens who ran from him through the pulsing darkness and danced among the silver moonbeams, mockingly, whose ringing voices called him, lured him, over hill and dale until in the cold gray light of dawn he came upon them bowered among orchids and saw them melt and merge into a shining, yielding One.
Flesh of her flesh he hung in the void above the Universe and saw it spread in a shining cloud beneath his spurning feet, saw it receding to a pin point of misty light as he rushed on and up and out into the utter blackness of space, held in her slim, warm arms, bathed in her fiery hair, drinking the sweetness of her crimson lips—until in all Eternity were only they two, and the hungry, feasting love that made them one, man and woman, until the end of time.
Soul of her soul he swam in a place of fires that burned without warmth, of tiny glowing motes that drifted up out of nowhere and swirled about his head like perfumed smoke. He caught one between finger and thumb and held it up for his mind to probe it and know it for a universe of universes, infinitely small, infinitely remote, where the lifetime of a world was but the ticking of a pulse. Yet in that microcosm he lived as he lived in the place of flame, and she with him, holding her to him with the green promise of her half-closed eyes, weaving a web with the copper glory of her hair, drawing him down, down, down into unfathomable blackness where there was only the green, cold light of her two eyes, staring, staring out of nothingness.
And then her soft hand was in his, drawing him away into a place where there was only herself and the beauty of her, like a thing alive and breathing, where he was but a hungering, longing atom of her being, merging in her, looking out through her eyes upon a world of mad, warped shapes that filled him with fear and loathing, and with a hate that came into him out of her and filled him with blinding rage—rage that eclipsed all save the smile on her soft, warm lips and the half-closed eyes that regarded him under drooping lashes—hate that split him in two parts, a part that fought and slew and a part that watched.
He saw one who wore his shape wrest the great sword from the old man’s hand and buffet him to the ground. He saw that one charge berserker upon the huddled crowd of men, hewing at them like a woodsman at a tree, beating at them as with a flail of steel, driving them before him like milling sheep. A silver thread ran from him to that one whom he saw, and over it came surging a great, cold glee, and the slippery stickiness of fresh blood warm on his hands, and the salt taste of blood on his lips, that were her lips, licked by her pointed tongue. He felt the evil joy welling up in her at the odor of death that was in the air, and the sight of death in her eyes, and it seemed that it drove out the self that was in her, and made it one with he who stood and slew.
He was that, one, there on the purple path, with the great sword in his bloody hands and the blood of slaughtered men wet on his face. And behind him, where the witch-woman swam in her crystal sepulcher, he heard the rasping, vengeful cackle of Zagar, the Martian.
~ * ~
All the lusts of his man’s body had been sucked up by the witch’s gaze—the lust of man for woman, and the lust of man for gold, and the bloody lust of man for war and death. Those lusts were gone from him, and he stood, now
, cold and empty, staring at the old man, his grandfather, where he lay senseless at the abyss’ edge. He saw the Martian, twisted with pain at the crystal’s base. And he saw again the woman floating in her mist, with the dark evil standing naked in her green eyes.
The red sword swung in an arc of steel and smote at the crystal’s face. Again—again—and the whole world rang with the clamor of steel on quartz. But the walls of the bubble that held her were thin, and with the third mighty blow they shivered and rained about him like needles of clear ice. Again he raised his dripping sword—and met her clear green eyes.
Slowly his arms fell limp at his sides and the sword fell at his feet unheeded. Her small bare feet stepped daintily down among the broken shards. Her red hair flowed back over her round white shoulders, revealing all the loveliness of her witch’s body, and her two slim hands were held out to him in invitation.
Travelers of Space - [Adventures in Science Fiction 03] Page 30