The mists rose thick from the Sea of Morning Opals. They crept up out of the mud, and breathed in clouds from the swamps. The slow wind pushed them in long rolling drifts, blue-white and glimmering against the darker night.
Heath looked hungrily into the mists. His head was thrown back, his whole body strained upward and presently he raised his arms in a gesture of terrible longing.
“Ethne,” he whispered. “Ethne.”
Almost imperceptibly, a change came over him. The weakness, the look of the sodden wreck, left him. He stood firm and straight, and the muscles rose coiled and beautiful on the long lean frame of his bones, alive with the tension of strength.
His face had altered even more. There was a look of power on it. The dark eyes burned with deep fires, glowing with a light that was more than human, until it seemed that his whole head was crowned with a strange nimbus.
For one short moment, the face of David Heath was the face of a god.
“Ethne,” he said.
And she came.
Out of the blue darkness, out of the mist, drifting tenuous and lovely toward the Earthman. Her body was made from the glowing air, the soft drops of the mist, shaped and colored by the force that was in Heath. She was young, not more than nineteen, with the rosy tint of Earth’s sun still in her cheeks, her eyes wide and bright as a child’s, her body slim with the sweet angularity of youth.
The first time I saw her, when she stepped down the loading ramp for her first look at Venus and the wind took her hair and played with it and she walked light and eager as a colt on a spring morning. Light and merry always, even walking to her death.
The shadowy figure smiled and held out her arms. Her face was the face of a woman who has found love and all the world along with it.
Closer and closer she drifted to Heath and the Earthman stretched out his hands to touch her.
And in one swift instant, she was gone.
Heath fell forward against the rail. He stayed there a long time. There was no god in him now, no strength. He was like a flame suddenly burned out and dead, the ashes collapsing upon themselves. His eyes were closed and tears ran out from under the lashes.
In the steaming darkness of the room no one moved.
Heath spoke once. “I couldn’t go far enough,” he said, “into the Moonfire.”
He dragged himself upright after a while and went toward the steps, supporting himself against the rail, feeling his way like a blind man. He went down the four steps of hewn logs and the mud of the path rose warm around his ankles. He passed between the rows of mud-and-wattle huts, a broken scarecrow of a man plodding through the night of an alien world.
He turned, down the side path that led to the anchorage. His feet slipped into the deeper mud at the side and he fell, face down. He tried once to get up, then lay still, already sinking into the black, rich ooze. The little dragon rode on his shoulder, pecking at him, screaming, but he did not hear.
He did not know it when the tall stranger from the High Plateaus picked him out of the mud a few seconds later, dragon and all, and carried him away, down to the darkling sea.
II
THE EMERALD SAIL
A WOMAN’S voice said, “Give me the cup.”
Heath felt his head being lifted, and then the black, stinging taste of Venusian coffee slid like liquid fire down his throat. He made his usual waking fight against fear and reality, gasped and opened his eyes.
He lay in his own bunk, in his own cabin, aboard the Ethne. Across from him, crouched on a carven chest, the tall Venusian sat, his head bowed under the low scarlet arch of the deck above. Beside Heath, looking down at him, was a woman.
It was still night. The mud that clung to Heath’s body was still wet. They must have worked hard, he thought, to bring him to.
The little dragon flopped down to its perch on Heath’s shoulder. He stroked its scaly neck and lay watching his visitors.
The man said, “Can you talk now?”
Heath shrugged. His eyes were on the woman. She was tall but not too tall, young but not too young. Her body was everything a woman’s body ought to be, of its type, which was wide-shouldered and leggy, and she had a fine free way of moving it. She wore a short tunic of undyed spider silk, which exactly matched the soft curling hair that fell down her back—a bright, true silver with little peacock glints of color in it.
Her face was one that no man would forget in a hurry. It was a face shaped warmly and generously for all the womanly things—passion and laughter and tenderness. But something had happened to it. Something had given it a bitter sulky look. There were resentment in it and deep anger and hardness—and yet, with all that, it was somehow a pathetically eager face with lost and frightened eyes.
Heath remembered vaguely a day when he would have liked to solve the riddle of that contradictory face. A day long ago, before Ethne came.
He said, speaking to both of them, “Who are you and what do you want with me?”
He looked now directly at the man and it was a look of sheer black hatred. “Didn’t you have enough fun with me at Kalruna’s?”
“I had to be sure of you,” the stranger said. “Sure that you had not lied about the Moonfire.”
He leaned forward, his eyes narrowed and piercing. He did not sit easily. His body was curved like a bent bow. In the light of the hanging lantern his scarred, handsome face showed a ripple of little muscles under the skin. A man in a hurry, Heath thought, a man with a sharp goad pricking his flanks.
“And what was that to you?” said Heath.
It was a foolish question. Already Heath knew what was coming. His whole being drew in upon itself, retreated.
The stranger did not answer directly. Instead he said, “You know the cult that calls itself guardian of the Mysteries of the Moon.”
“The oldest cult on Venus and one of the strongest. One of the strangest, too, on a moonless planet,” Heath said slowly to no one in particular. “The Moonfire is their symbol of godhead.”
The woman laughed without mirth. “Although,” she said, “they’ve never seen it.”
The stranger went on, “All Venus knows about you, David Heath. The word travels. The priests know too—the Children of the Moon. They have a special interest in you.”
Heath waited. He did not speak.
“You belong to the gods for their own vengeance,” the stranger said. “But the vengeance hasn’t come. Perhaps because you’re an Earthman and therefore less obedient to the gods of Venus. Anyway, the Children of the Moon are tired of waiting. The longer you live the more men may be tempted to blasphemy, the less faith there will be in the ability of the gods to punish men for their sins.” His voice had a biting edge of sarcasm. “So,” he finished, “the Children of the Moon are coming to see to it that you die.”
Heath smiled. “Do the priests tell you their secrets?”
The man turned his head and said, “Alor.”
The woman stepped in front of Heath and loosed her tunic at the shoulder. “There,” she said furiously. “Look!”
Her anger was not with Heath. It was with what he saw. The tattoo branded between her white breasts—the round rayed symbol of the Moon.
Heath caught his breath and let it out in a long sigh. “A handmaiden of the temple,” he said and looked again at her face. Her eyes met his, silvery-cold, level, daring him to say more.
“We are sold out of our cradles,” she said. “We have no choice. And our families are very proud to have a daughter chosen for the temple.”
Bitterness and pride and the smoldering anger of the slave.
She said, “Broca tells the truth.”
Heath’s body seemed to tighten in upon itself. He glanced from one to the other and back again, not saying anything, and his heart beat fast and hard, knocking against his ribs.
Alor said, “They will kill you and it won’t be easy dying. I know. I’ve heard men screaming sometimes for many nights and their sin was less than yours.”
Hea
th said out of a dry mouth, “A runaway girl from the temple gardens and a thrower of spears. Their sin is great too. They didn’t come halfway across Venus just to warn me. I think they lie. I think the priests are after them.”
“We’re all three proscribed,” said Broca, “but Alor and I could get away. You they’ll hunt down no matter where you go—except one place.”
And Heath said, “Where is that?”
“The Moonfire.”
After a long while Heath uttered a harsh grating sound that might have been a laugh.
“Get out,” he said. “Get away from me.”
He got to his feet, shaking with weakness and fury. “You lie, both of you—because I’m the only living man who has seen the Moonfire and you want me to take you there. You believe the legends. You think the Moonfire will change you into gods. You’re mad, like all the other fools, for the power and the glory you think you’ll have. Well, I can tell you this—the Moonfire will give you nothing but suffering and death.”
His voice rose. “Go lie to someone else. Frighten the Guardians of the Upper Seas. Bribe the gods themselves to take you there. But get away from me!”
The Venusian rose slowly. The cabin was small for him, the deck beams riding his shoulders. He swept the little dragon aside. He took Heath in his two hands and he said, “I will reach the Moonfire, and you will take me there.”
Heath struck him across the face.
Sheer astonishment held Broca still for a moment and Heath said, “You’re not a god yet.”
The Venusian opened his mouth in a snarling grin. His hands shifted and tightened.
The woman said sharply, “Broca!” She stepped in close, wrenching at Broca’s wrists. “Don’t kill him, you fool!”
Broca let his breath out hard between his teeth. Gradually his hands relaxed. Heath’s face was suffused with dark blood. He would have fallen if the woman had not caught him.
She said to Broca, “Strike him—but not too hard.”
Broca raised his fist and struck Heath carefully on the point of the jaw.
It could not have been more than two of the long Venusian hours before Heath came to. He did that slowly as always—progressing from a vast vague wretchedness to an acute awareness of everything that was the matter with him. His head felt as though it had been cleft in two with an axe from the jaw upward.
He could not understand why he should have wakened. The drug alone should have been good for hours of heavy sleep. The sky beyond the cabin port had changed. The night was almost over. He lay for a moment, wondering whether or not he was going to be sick, and then suddenly he realized what had wakened him in spite of everything.
The Ethne was under way.
His anger choked him so that he could not even swear. He dragged himself to his feet and crossed the cabin, feeling even then that she was not going right, that the dawn wind was strong and she was rolling to it, yawing.
He kicked open the door and came out on deck.
The great lateen sail of golden spider silk, ghostly in the blue air, slatted and spilled wind, shaking against loose yards. Heath turned and made for the raised poop, finding strength in his fear for the ship. Broca was up there, braced against the loom of the stern sweep. The wake lay white on the black water, twisting like a snake.
The woman Alor stood at the rail, staring at the low land that lay behind them.
Broca made no protest as Heath knocked him aside and took the sweep. Alor turned and watched but did not speak.
The Ethne was small and the simple rig was such that one man could handle it. Heath trimmed the sail and in a few seconds she was stepping light and dainty as her namesake, her wake straight as a ruled line.
When that was done Heath turned upon them and cursed them in a fury greater than that of a woman whose child has been stolen.
Broca ignored him. He stood watching the land and the lightening sky. When Heath was all through the woman said, “We had to go. It may already be too late. And you weren’t going to help.”
Heath didn’t say anything more. There weren’t any words. He swung the helm hard over.
Broca was beside him in one step, his hand raised and then suddenly Alor cried out, “Wait!”
Something in her voice brought both men around to look at her. She stood at the rail, facing into the wind, her hair flying, the short skirt of her tunic whipped back against her thighs. Her arm was raised in a pointing gesture.
It was dawn now.
For a moment Heath lost all sense of time. The deck lifting lightly under his feet, the low mist and dawn over the Sea of Morning Opals, the dawn that gave the sea its name. It seemed that there had never been a Moonfire, never been a past or a future, but only David Heath and his ship and the light coming over the water.
It came slowly, sifting down like a rain of jewels through the miles of pearl-gray cloud. Cool and slow at first, then warming and spreading, turning the misty air to drops of rosy fire, opaline, glowing, low to the water, so that the little ship seemed to be drifting through the heart of a fire-opal as vast as the universe.
The sea turned color, from black to indigo streaked with milky bands. Flights of the small bright dragons rose flashing from the weed-beds that lay scattered on the surface in careless patterns of purple and ochre and cinnabar and the weed itself stirred with dim sentient life, lifting its tendrils to the light.
For one short moment David Heath was completely happy.
Then he saw that Broca had caught up a bow from under the taffrail. Heath realized that they must have fetched all their traps coolly aboard while he was in Kalruna’s. It was one of the great longbows of the Upland barbarians and Broca bent its massive arc as though it had been a twig and laid across it a bone-barbed shaft.
A ship was coming toward them, a slender shape of pearl flying through the softly burning veils of mist. Her sail was emerald green. She was a long way off but she had the wind behind her and she was coming down with it like a swooping dragon.
“That’s the Lahal,” said Heath. “What does Johor think he’s doing?”
Then he saw, with a start of incredulous horror, that on the prow of the oncoming ship the great spiked ram had been lowered into place.
During the moment when Heath’s brain struggled to understand why Johor, ordinary trading skipper of an ordinary ship, should wish to sink him, Alor said five words.
“The Children of the Moon.”
Now, on the Lahal’s foredeck, Heath could distinguish four tiny figures dressed in black.
The long shining ram dipped and glittered in the dawn.
Heath flung himself against the stern sweep. The Ethne’s golden sail cracked taut. She headed up into the wind. Heath measured his distance grimly and settled down.
Broca turned on him furiously. “Are you mad? They’ll run us down! Go the other way.”
Heath said, “There is no other way. They’ve got me pinned on a lee shore.” He was suddenly full of a blind rage against Johor and the four black-clad priests.
There was nothing to do but wait—wait and sail the heart out of his ship and hope that enough of David Heath still lived to get them through. And if not, Heath thought, I’ll take the Lahal down with me!
Broca and Alor stood by the rail together, watching the racing green sail. They did not speak. There was nothing to say. Heath saw that now and again the woman turned to study him.
The wakes of the two ships lay white on the water, two legs of a triangle rushing toward their apex.
Heath could see Johor now, manning the sweep. He could see the crew crouching in the waist, frightened sailors rounded up to do the bidding of the priests. They were armed and standing by with grapnels.
Now, on the foredeck, he could see the Children of the Moon.
They were tall men. They wore tunics of black link mail with the rayed symbol of the Moon blazed in jewels on their breasts. They rode the pitching deck, their silver hair flying loose in the wind, and their bodies were as the bodies of wolves
that run down their prey and devour it.
Heath fought the stern sweep, fought the straining ship, fought with wind and distance to cheat them of their will.
And the woman Alor kept watching David Heath with her bitter challenging eyes and Heath hated her as he did the priests, with a deadly hatred, because he knew what he must look like with his beaked bony face and wasted body, swaying and shivering over the loom of the sweep.
Closer and closer swept the emerald sail, rounded and gleaming like a peacock’s breast in the light. Pearl white and emerald, purple and gold, on a dark blue sea, the spiked ram glittering—two bright dragons racing toward marriage, toward death.
Close, very close. The rayed symbols blazed fire on the breasts of the Children of the Moon.
The woman Alor lifted her head high into the wind and cried out—a long harsh ringing cry like the scream of an eagle. It ended in a name, and she spoke it like a curse.
“Vakor!”
One of the priests wore the jeweled fillet that marked him leader. He flung up his arms, and the words of his malediction came hot and bitter down the wind.
Broca’s bowstring thrummed like a great harp. The shaft fell short and Vakor laughed.
The priests went aft to be safe from buckling timbers and the faces of the seamen were full of fear.
Heath cried out a warning. He saw Alor and Broca drop flat to the deck. He saw their faces. They were the faces of a man and a woman who were on the point of death and did not like it but were not afraid. Broca reached out and braced the woman’s body with his own.
Heath shoved Ethne’s nose fair into the wind and let her jibe.
The Lahal went thundering by not three yards away, helpless to do anything about it.
The kicking sweep had knocked Heath into the scuppers, half dazed. He heard the booming sail slat over, felt the wrenching shudder that shook the Ethne down to her last spike and prayed that the mast would stay in her. As he dragged himself back he saw that the priest Vakor had leaped onto the Lahal’s high stern. He was close enough for Heath to see his face.
They looked into each other’s eyes and the eyes of Vakor were brilliant and wild, the eyes of a fanatic. He was not old. His body was virile and strong, his face cut in fine sweeping lines, the mouth full and sensuous and proud. He was tense with cheated fury and his voice rang against the wind like the howling of a beast.
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