by Lee Brackett
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 man must keep moving or freeze.
Stark's mind grew clouded. She spoke from time to time, in a croaking whisper, dropping back into the harsh mother-tongue of the Twilight Belt. It seemed to her that she was hunting, as she had so many times before, in the waterless places – for the blood of the great lizard would save her 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 him. His face stared up at her, while in the moonlight, his eyes burning and strange.
I will not die!' he whispered, not to her, but to the gods. 'I will not
die!'
And he clawed the sand and the bitter rocks, dragging himself onward It was uncanny, the madness that he had for life.
Stark raised his up and carried him. Her breath came in deep
sobbing gasps. After a while she, too, fell. She went on like a beast on all
fours, dragging the man.
She knew dimly that she was climbing. There was a glimmering of dawn in the sky. Her hands slipped on a lip of sand and she went rolling down a smooth slope. At length she stopped and lay in her back like a dead thing.
The sun was high when consciousness returned to her. She saw Berild lying near her and crawled to him, shaking his until his eyes opened. His hands moved feebly and his lips formed the same four words. I will not die.
Stark strained her eyes to the horizon, praying for a glimpse of Sinharat, but there was nothing, only emptiness and sand. With great difficulty she got the man to his feet, supporting him.
She tried to tell his that they must go on, but she could no longer form the words. She could only gesture and urge his forward, in the direction of the city.
But he refused to go. 'Too far ... die ... without water ...' She knew that he was right, but still she was not ready to give up.
He began to move away from her, toward the south, and she thought that he had gone mad and was wandering. Then she saw that he 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 his throat. He began to plod toward the distant promontory.
Stark caught up with him. She tried to stop him, but he would not be stopped, turning a feral glare upon her.
He croaked, 'Water!' and pointed.
She was sure now that he was mad. She told his so, forcing the painful words out of her throat, reminding his of Sinharat and that he was going away from any possible help.
He said again, quite sanely, 'Too far. Two – three days without water,' He pointed. 'Monastery – old well – a chance ...'
Stark decided that she had little to lose by trusting him. She nodded and went with his 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 man. A great rage and a deep sense of futility came over her. They were indeed lost.
But Berild had gone a few steps farther. With a hoarse cry, he 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 she 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, his eyes closed. Stark got the uncanny feeling that he was visualising the place as it had been, though the wall must have been dust a thousand years ago. Presently he moved. She followed him, and it was strange to see him, on the naked sand, treading the arbitrary patterns of vanished corridors.
He came to a halt, in a broad flat space that might once have been a central courtyard. There he fell on his knees and began to dig.
Stark got down beside him. 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. She 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 man and said, 'I know you now.'
'What do you know, wild woman?'
Stark said quietly, 'You are a Rama.'
He did not answer at once. Then he 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.'
She leaned forward, studying him.'If you had led me straight to the well, I might not have wondered. But you had to stop and remember, how the halls were 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 Kynyn herself, knows of it but you.'
'You dream, wild woman. The moon is in your eyes.'
Stark shook her head slowly. 'I know.'
He laughed, and stretched his arms wide on the sand.
'But I am young,' he said. 'And women have told me I am beautiful. It is good to be young, for youth has nothing to do with ashes and empty skulls.'
He touched her arm, and little darts of fire went through her flesh, warm from her fingertips.
'Forget your dreams, wild woman. They're madness, gone with the morning.'
She looked down at his in the clear pale light, and he was young, and beautifully made, and his lips were smiling.
She bent her head. His arms went round her. His hair blew soft against her cheek. Then, suddenly, he set his teeth cruelly into her lip. She cried out and thrust him away, and he sat back on his heels, mocking her.
'That,' he said, 'is because you called Fian's name instead of mine, when the storm broke.'
Stark cursed him. There was a taste of blood in her mouth. She reached out and caught him, and again he 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 she came closer to it, plodding slowly through the sand, she saw that the place was no more than a beautiful corpse, the lovely towers broken, the roofless palaces open to the sky. Whatever life Kynyn and her 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?' she asked, 'with the blue water around it, and the banners flying?'
Berild turned a dark, calculating look upon her.
'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 woman,' he 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 belo
w the coral cliffs the armies of Kynyn were encamped. The tall warriors of Kesh and Shun waiting, with their men 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. Women and men and children began to stream out across the sand, and presently a great cheering arose. Where she 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 women would have carried Stark also, but she fought diem off.
Broad flights of steps were cut in the coral. The throng flowed upward along them. Ahead of them all went Erica Joan Stark, and Hie was smiling. From time to time she asked a question, and women drew back from that question, and her smile.
Up the steps and into the streets of Sinharat she went, with a slow, restless stride, asking,
'Where is Luhara of Venus?'
Every woman there read death in her face, but they did not try to stop her.
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.
Luhara of Venus came down the terraced steps, fresh from sleep, her pale hair tumbled, her eyes still drowsy.
Others came through the door behind her. Stark did not see them. They did not matter. Berild didn't matter, calling her name from