Weird Tales volume 36 number 02

by McIlwraith, Dorothy

  KHAL KAN awoke with a vague sense of some duty oppressing his mind. There was something he must do, or say—

  He opened his eyes, to look with contentment upon the dawn-lit interior of his own black stone chamber in the great palace at Jotan. On the wall were his favorite weapons—the sword with which he'd killed a sea-dragon when he was fourteen years old, the battered shield with the great scar which he had borne in his first real battle.

  Golden Wings stirred sleepily against him, her perfumed black hair brushing his cheek. He patted her head with rough tenderness. Then he became aware of the tramp of many feet outside, of distant clank of arms and hard voices barking orders, and rattle of hurrying hoofs.

  His pulse leaped. "Today we go south to meet Egir and the Bunts!"

  Then he remembered what it was that dimly oppressed his mind. It was something from his dream—the queer nightly dream in which he was the timid little man Henry Stevens on that strange world called Earth.

  He remembered now that Henry Stev-

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  ens had promised a doctor that he would say aloud, "Thar isn't real—I, Khal Kan, am not real."

  Khal Kan laughed. The idea of saying such a thing, of asserting that Thar and Jo-tan and everything else was not real, seemed idiotic.

  "That timid little man I am in the dream each night—he thinks I would mouth such folly as that!" Khal Kan chuckled.

  Golden Wings had awakened. Her slumbrous black eyes regarded him ques-tioningly.

  "It's my own private joke, sweet," he told her. And he went on to tell her of the nightly dream he had had since childhood, of a queer world, called Earth in which he was another man. "It's the maddest world you can imagine, my pet—that dream-world. Men don't even wear swords, they don't know how to ride or fight like men, and they spend their lives plotting in stuffy rooms for a thing they call 'money'—bits of paper and metal.

  "And the cream of the joke," Khal Kan laughed, "is that in my dream, I even doubt whether Thar is real. The dream-me believes that maybe this is the dream, that Jotan and Brusul and Zoor and even you are but phantom visions of my sleeping brain."

  HE ROSE to his feet. "Enough of dreams and visions. Today "we ride to meet Egir and the Bunts. That is no dream!"

  Ten thousand strong massed the fighting-men of Jotan later that morning, outside the walls of the city. Under the red sun their bronzed faces were sternly confident and eager for battle.

  Kan Abul rode out through their ranks, with his captains behind him in full armor. Khal Kan was among them, and beside him rode Golden Wings. The desert princess had fiercely refused to be left behind.

  Their helmets flashed in die red sun-

  light, and the cheers of the troops were deafening as Kan Abul spoke to his captains.

  "Egir's main force is already ten leagues north of Galoon," he told them. "There's talk of some new weapon which the Bunts have, with which they claim to be invincible. So we're going to take them by surprise.

  ■"I'll lead our main force of eight thousand archers and spearmen south along the coast road," the king continued. "My son, you will take our two thousand horsemen and ride over the first ridge of the Dragals, ■=■ then ride south ten leagues. We'll join battle with the Bunts down on the coastal plain, and you can come down from the Dragals and strike their flank. And the gods will be against us if we don't roll them up and destroy them as our forefathers did, generations ago."

  Kan Abul led the troops down the coast -road, and as they marched along they roared out the old fighting-song of Jotan.

  "The Bunts came up to Jotan, Long ago!"

  Hours later, Khal Kan sat his horse amid a thin screen of brush high in the red easternmost ridge of the Dragals, leagues south of Jotan. Golden Wings sat her pony beside him, and their two thousand horsemen waited below the concealment of the ridge.

  Down there below them, the red slopes dropped into a narrow plain between the mountains and the blue Zambrian. Far southward, a pall of black smoke marked the site of sacked Galoon. And from there, something like a glittering snake was crawling north along the coast.

  "My Uncle Egir and his green devils," muttered Khal Kan. "Now where ate father and our footmen?"

  "See—they come!" Golden Wings cried, pointing northward eagerly.

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  IN THE north, a glittering serpent of almost equal size seemed crawling southward to meet the advancing Bunt columns. "Your desert eyes see well," declared Khal Kan. "Now we wait." ■ The two armies drew closer to each other. Horns were blaring now down in the Bunt columns, and the green bowmen were hastily forming up in double columns, a solid, blocky formation. More slowly, they advanced.

  Trumpets roared in the north, where the footmen of Jotan marched steadily on. Faintly to the two on the ridge came the distant chorus.

  "The Bunts fled back on the homeward l rack When blood did flow!"

  "There is my uncle, damn him!" exclaimed Khal Kan, pointing.

  He felt the old, bitter rage as he saw the stalwart, bright-helmed figure that rode with a group of Bunts at the head of the green men's army.

  "He leads them to the battle," he muttered. "He never was a coward, whatever else he is. But today I will wipe out his menace to Jotan."

  "They are fighting!" Golden Wings cried, with flaring eagerness.

  Clouds of" arrows were whizzing between the two nearing armies, as Jotan archers and Bunt bowmen came within range.

  Men began to drop in both armies— but in the Jotan army four fell for every stricken Bunt.

  "Something's wrong!" Khal Kan cried. "Every man of ours who is even touched by an arrow is falling. I can't—"

  "Poison!" hissed Golden Wings. "They are using poisoned arrows. It's a trick I've heard of the Nameless Men of the far north."

  Khal Kan stared unbelievingly. "Even

  the Bunts wouldn't use such hideous means! Yet my uncle is ruthless—"

  Red rage misted his brain, and his voice was an unhuman roar as he turned and shouted to his tensely waiting horsemen.

  "Our men are being slain by foul magic!" he yelled. "Down upon them— we strike for Jotan!"

  It was as though he and Golden Wings were riding the forefront of a human avalanche as they charged down the steep slope to the battle.

  They smashed home into the flank of the Bunts. The green men gave way in surprise and momentary terror. Kahl Kan's sword whipped like a lash of light among ugly green heads and thrusting spears. As always, in a fight, he moved by pure instinct rather than by conscious design.

  Yet he kept Golden Wings a little behind him. The girl was fiercely wielding her light sword against those on the ground who sought to hamstring Khal Kan's horse with spear or sword. His riders were yelling shrilly.

  HHHE crazy confusion of the battle took -*- on definite pattern. The Bunts had recoiled from the unexpected attack, but Egk was reforming them.

  Khal Kan shouted and spurred to get at Egir. He could see his uncle's giant form, his cynical, powerful face under his helmet, and could hear his bull voice directing the reforming of the Bunt columns.

  But he could not smash through the mad melee toward Egir. And now poisoned Bunt arrows were falling, dropping men from their saddles.

  Brusul had reached him, was shouting to him. "Prince, your father is slain—one of those hellish arrows."

  Khal Kan's heart went cold for a moment. He hardly heard Brusul's hoarse voice, shouting on.

  "We can't face those poisoned shafts here in the open! Unless we fall back,

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  they'M cut us down from a distance like grain in harvest-time!"

  Khal Kan groaned. He saw the dilemma. They could not hope to smash the Bunt lines that Egir had reformed—and in a long battle the new poisoned arrows of the green men would take heavier and heavier toll of them.

  The safety of Jotan was now a crushing weight on his shoulders. He was king now, and the dire responsibility of the positi
on in this mad moment left him no time even for sorrow for his father. A battle lost here now meant that Jotan was defenseless before Egir's horde.

  With a groan, he ordered a trumpeter to sound retreat

  "Fall back toward Jotan!" he ordered. "March the footmen back on the double, Brusul—-we'll cover your withdrawal with the horsemen."

  Through the long, hot hours of that afternoon, the bitter righting retreat surged back northward to Jotan. The Bunt columns followed closely, the green men howling with triumph.

  Ever and again, Khal Kan and his riders charged back against the pursuing Bunts and smashed their front lines, making them recoil. Each time, empty saddles showed the toll of the poisoned shafts.

  Sunset was flaring bloodily over the Dragals when the}' came back by that bitter way to the black towers of Jotan. Footsore, reeling with fatigue, Brusul's spearmen marched through the gate into the city.

  One last charge back at the Bunts made Khal Kan with the horsemen. He rode back then with Golden Wings, who was swaying in her saddle. They two were the last of the riders to enter the city.

  The great gates hastily ground shut, as sweating men labored in the dusk at the winches. Through the loopholes of the guard-towers, Khal Kan looked out and saw the Bunt hordes outside spreading to encircle the whole land side of Jotan.

  "The}' have now four fighting-men to every one of ours," he muttered through his teeth. "We are in a trap called a city."

  He was staggering, his face grimed and smeared with sweat and dust and blood. Golden Wings pressed his arm in complete faith.

  "It was only the foul trick of the poisoned arrows that defeated tis!" she exclaimed. "But for that, we'd have rolled them into the sea."

  "We have Egir to thank for that," rasped Khal Kan. "While that man lives, doom hangs like a thundercloud over Jotan."

  He stepped to the window and sent his voice rolling out into the gathering darkness."

  "Egir, will you settle this man to man, sword to sword? Speak!"

  Back came a sardonic voice from the camp of the Bunts.

  "I am not so simple, my dear nephew! Your city's a nut whose shell we'll soon crack and pick, so rest you."

  Khal Kan set guards at every rod of the wall. Jotan's streets were dark under the two moons, for no torches had been lit this night. The sound of women's voices wailing a requiem for his dead father brought his numbed mind a sick sense of , loss.

  No one else in Jotan spoke or broke the stillness. Awful and imminent peril crushed the city's folk. But from the darkness outside the walls came the sound of distant hammering as the Bunt hordes began making scaling-ladders for the morrow.

  IjiROM a window of the palace, before he -*- collapsed in drugged sleep of exhaustion, Khal Kan saw the Bunt fires hemming in the whole landward side of the city in their crescent of flame. . . .

  Henry Steven's wife had been worried about him all day. He had been

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  acting queerly, she thought anxiously, ever since he had awakened that morning.

  He had been pale and stricken and haggard since he had awakened. He had not gone to the office at all, a tiling unprecedented. And he had spent most of the day pacing to and fro in the little house, his haunted eyes not seeming to see her, his whole bearing one of intense excitement.

  Henry was afraid—afraid of the dread climax to which things were rushing in the other world of Thar. He knew the awful peril in which Jotan now stood. Once those hordes of Bunts got over the wall, the city was doomed.

  "I've got to qutt driving myself crazy about it," he told himself desperately that afternoon. "It's just a dream—Thar and Khal Kan must be only a dream."

  But his feverish apprehension was not lessened by that thought. No- matter if Thar was only a dream, it was real to him!

  TTE KNEW Jotan and its people, from -"•-^- the nightly dreams of his earliest

  childhood. Every street of the black city he had known and loved, as Khal Kan. Even if it were only a dream, he couldn't let the old, lovely city and its people be overwhelmed by Egir and his green barbarians.

  If Thar was the dream, and the city Jotan was taken and Khal Kan was slain— there would be an end to his precious dream-life, forever. Only the monotonous existence of Henry Stevens would stretch before him.

  And if Thar happened to be the reality, then it was doubly vital that Khal Kan's people be saved from that menace.

  "Yet what can I do?" Henry groaned inwardly. "What can Khal Kan do? The Bunts will surely break into the city—"

  The poisoned arrows, new to the Jotani-ans, gave Egir's green warriors a terrific advantage. That, and their outnumbering hordes, would enable them to scale the

  walls of Jotan and then the end would be at hand.

  "Damn Egir for his deviltry in using those arrows!" Henry muttered. "I wish I could take a dozen machine-guns across. I'd show the cursed traitor."

  It was a vain and idle wish, he knew. Nothing material could traverse the gulf between dream-world and real world, whichever was which. His own body, even —Henry Stevens' body—never crossed that gulf. AH he took into Thar each night were his memories of Henry Stevens' life on Earth during the day, and that seemed only a dream.

  He could take memory across, though. And that thought gave pause to Henry. A faint gleam of hope appeared on his horizon. As Khal Kan, he would remember everything that he did or learned now, as Henry Stevens. Suppose that he—

  "By Heaven!" Henry exclaimed excitedly. "There's a chance I could do it! A trick to overmatch Egir's poisoned arrows!"

  His wife watched him puzzledly as he pored excitedly over certain volumes of their encyclopedia. She saw him hastily jot down notes, and then for a long time that evening he sat, moving his lips, apparently memorizing.

  Henry was vibrant with excitement and hope. He, Henry Stevens of Earth, might be able to save Khal Kan's city for him!

  "If Khal Kan will only do it!" he thought prayerfully. "If he won't just ignore it as dream—"

  Waiting tensely for sleep that night, Henry repeated over and over to himself the simple formula he had gleaned from the encyclopedia.

  "Khal Kan must try it!" he told himself desperately.

  Sleep came slowly to him. And as he fell asleep, he knew that in his dream he would wake to what might be the last day of Jotan's existence. . . .

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  Khal Kan awoke with that thought from his dream vibrating in his mind like an ominous tolling.

  "The last day of Jotan!" he whispered. "By all the gods— no!"

  Fiercely, the tall young prince rose and buckled on his sword. It was just dawn, and sea-mists shrouded all the city outside in gray fog.

  Golden Wings still lay sleeping, Khal Kan heard a persistent hammering from out in the fog, as he went down to the lower level of the palace. Brusul, in full armor, came stalking up to him.

  "All's quiet," reported the brawny captain. "The Bunts are still working away at their cursed scaling-ladders. When they are ready, they'll dear the walls of our men with their damned poisoned arrows, and then come over."

  Khal Kan went out with him and inspected their defenses. As he supervised the placing of their fighting-men around the wall, and gave the white-faced people rough encouragement, something oppressed Khal Kan's mind. Something he should be doing for the defense of the city—

  When he got back to the palace with Brusul, Golden Wings' slim, leather-clad figure came flying into his arms.

  "I dreamed the Bunts were already in the city!" she cried. "And then I awoke and found you gone—"

  Khal Kan, soothing her, suddenly stiffened. Her words had recalled that vague, forgotten something that had oppressed him.

  "My dream!" he exclaimed. "I remember now—in the dream, on that other world, I learned how to make a weapon against the Bunts."

  It had all come back to him now—the dream in which Henry Stevens had feverishly memorized a formula out of the science of that dream-world of Earth, to help him in his struggle agains
t the Bunts.

  For a moment, Khal Kan clutched at new hope. Then his eagerness faded. After all, that was only a dream. Henry Stevens and Earth and its science were only an insubstantial vision of his sleeping mind, and nothing that he learned in that could be of any value.

  "I could wish you'd dreamed away the Bunts entirely," Brusul was saying dryly. "Unfortunately, they're still outside and it won't be many hours before they attack."

  Khal Kan was not listening. His mind was revolving the simple formula that Henry Stevens had desperately memorized, in the dream.

  "It wouldn't work," he thought. "It couldn't work, when there's no reality to all that—"

  Yet he kept remembering Henry Stevens' desperate effort to help him. That timid, thin little man he was in his dream each night—that little man had prayed that Khal Kan would not ignore his help, would try the formula.

  Khal Kan reached decision. "I'm going to try it—the thing I learned in the dream!" he told the others.

  Brusul stared. "Are you wit-struck? Dreams won't help us now! How could a dream-weapon be of any use?"

  "I'm not so sure now it was a dream," Khal Kan muttered. "Maybe this is the dream, after all. Oh, hell take all speculations—dream or reality, I'm going to try this thing."

  He shot orders. "Bring all the charcoal you can find, all the sulphur from the street of the apothecaries, and all of the white crystals we use for drying fruits. Those crystals were called 'saltpeter' in the dream."

  SCARED, wondering men brought the materials to the palace. There, Brusul and Zoor and Golden Wings watched mystifiedly as Khal Kan supervised their preparation.

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  He remembered clearly the formula that Henry Stevens had memorized in the dream. He had the men pound and pulverize and mix, until a big mass of granular black powder was the result.

  "Now bring small metal vases—enough to hold all this—and lampwicks and day," he ordered.

  A captain came running, breathless. "The Bunts have finished their ladders and I think they're soon going to make their attack, sire!" he cried.

  "And our leader lingers here, muddling in minerals!" cried Brusul gustily. "Khal Kan, forget this crazy dream and make ready for battle!"