“We will follow! We will follow, and the gods will slay!”
As the rush of the Lahal carried him away, Heath heard the last echo of his cry.
“Alor!”
With all the strength he had left Heath quieted his outraged ship and let her fill away on the starboard tack. Broca and Alor got slowly to their feet. Broca said, “I thought you’d wrecked her.”
“They had the wind of me,” Heath said. “I couldn’t come about like a Christian.”
Alor walked to the stern and watched where the Lahal wallowed and staggered as she tried to stop her headlong rush. “Vakor!” she whispered, and spat into the sea.
Broca said, “They will follow us. Alor told me—they have a chart, the only one, that shows the way to the Moonfire.”
Heath shrugged. He was too weary now to care. He pointed off to the right.
“There’s a strong ocean current runs there, like a river in the sea. Most skippers are afraid of it but their ships aren’t like the Ethne. We’ll ride it. After that we’ll have to trust to luck.”
Alor swung around sharply. “Then you will go to the Moonfire.”
“I didn’t say that. Broca, get me the bottle out of my cabin locker.”
But it was the woman who fetched it to him and watched him drink, then said, “Are you all right?”
“I’m dying, and she asks me that,” said Heath.
She looked a moment steadily into his eyes and oddly enough there was no mockery in her voice when she spoke, only respect.
“You won’t die,” she said and went away.
In a few moments the current took the Ethne and swept her away northward. The Lahal vanished into the mists behind them. She was cranky in close handling and Heath knew that Johor would not dare the swirling current.
For nearly three hours he stayed at his post and took the ship through. When the ocean stream curved east he rode out of it into still water. Then he fell down on the deck and slept.
Once again the tall barbarian lifted him like a child and laid him in his bunk.
All through the rest of that day and the long Venusian night, while Broca steered, Heath lay in bitter sleep. Alor sat beside him, watching the nightmare shadows that crossed his face, listening as he moaned and talked, soothing his worst tremors.
He repeated the name of Ethne over and over again and a puzzled strangely wistful look came in the eyes of Alor.
When it was dawn again Heath awoke and went on deck. Broca said with barbarian bluntness, “Have you decided?”
Heath did not answer and Alor said, “Vakor will hunt you down. The word has gone out all over Venus, wherever there are men. There’ll be no refuge for you—except one.”
Heath smiled, a mirthless baring of the teeth. “And that’s the Moonfire. You make it all so simple.”
And yet he knew she spoke the truth. The Children of the Moon would never leave his track. He was a rat in a maze and every passage led to death.
But there were different deaths. If he had to die it would not be as Vakor willed but with Ethne—an Ethne more real than a shadow—in his arms again.
He realized now that deep in his mind he had always known, all these three seasons and more that he had clung to a life not worth the living. He had known that someday he must go back again.
“We’ll go to the Moonfire,” he said, “and perhaps we shall all be gods.”
Broca said, “You are weak, Earthman. You didn’t have the courage.”
Heath said one word.
“Wait.”
III
OVER THE BAR
THE DAYS and the nights went by, and the Ethne fled north across the Sea of Morning Opals, north toward the equator. They were far out of the trade lanes. All these vast upper reaches were wilderness. There were not even fishing villages along the coast. The great cliffs rose sheer from the water and nothing could find a foothold there. And beyond, past the Dragon’s Throat, lay only the barren death-trap of the Upper Seas. The Ethne ran as sweetly as though she joyed to be free again, free of the muddy harbor and the chains. And a change came over Heath. He was a man again. He stood shaved and clean and erect on his own deck and there was no decision to be made anymore, no doubt. The long dread, the long delay, were over and he too, in his own bitter way, was happy.
They had seen nothing more of the Lahal but Heath knew quite well that she was there somewhere, following. She was not as fleet as the Ethne but she was sound and Johor was a good sailor. Moreover, the priest Vakor was there and he would drive the Lahal over the Mountains of White Cloud if he had to—to catch them.
He said once to Alor, “Vakor seems to have a special hatred for you.”
Her face twisted with revulsion and remembered shame. “He is a beast,” she said. “He is a serpent, a lizard that walks like a king.” She added, “We’ve made it easy for him, the three of us together like this.”
From where he sat steering Heath looked at her with a remote curiosity. She stood, long legged, bold-mouthed, looking back with somber smoky eyes at the white wake unrolling behind them.
He said, “You must have loved Broca to break your vows for him. Considering what it means if they catch you.”
Alor looked at him, then laughed, a brief sound that had no humor in it.
“I’d have gone with any man strong enough to take me out of the temple,” she said. “And Broca is strong and he worships me.”
Heath was genuinely astonished. “You don’t love him?”
She shrugged. “He is good to look at. He is a chief of warriors and he is a man and not a priest. But love—”
She asked suddenly, “What is it like—to love as you loved your Ethne?”
Heath started. “What do you know about Ethne?” he asked harshly.
“You have talked of her in sleep. And Broca told me how you called her shadow in Kalruna’s place. You dared the Moonfire to gain her back.”
She glanced at the ivory figurehead on the high curving bow, the image of a woman, young and slim and smiling.
“I think you are a fool,” she said abruptly. “I think only a fool would love a shadow.”
She had left him and gone down into the cabin before he could gather words, before he could take her white neck between his hands and break it.
Ethne—Ethne!
He cursed the woman of the temple gardens.
He was still in a brooding fury when Broca came up out of the cabin to relieve him at the sweep.
“I’ll steer a while yet,” Heath told him curtly. “I think the weather’s going to break.”
Clouds were boiling up in the south as the night closed down. The sea was running in long easy swells as it had done for all these days but there was a difference, a pulse and a stir that quivered all through the ship’s keel.
Broca, stretching huge shoulders, looked away to the south and then down at Heath.
“I think you talk too much to my woman,” he said.
Before Heath could answer the other laid his hand lightly on the Earthman’s shoulder. A light grip but with strength enough behind it to crack Heath’s bones.
He said, “Do not talk so much to Alor.”
“I haven’t sought her out,” Heath snapped savagely. “She’s your woman—you worry about her.”
“I am not worried about her,” Broca answered calmly. “Not about her and you.”
He was looking down at Heath as he spoke and Heath knew the contrast they made—his own lean body and gaunt face against the big barbarian’s magnificent strength.
“But she is always with you on the deck, listening to your stories of the sea,” said Broca. “Do not talk to her so much,” he repeated and this time there was an edge to his voice.
“For heaven’s sake!” said Heath jeeringly. “If I’m a fool what are you? A man mad enough to look for power in the Moonfire and faithfulness in a temple wench! And now you’re jealous.”
He hated both Broca and Alor bitterly in this moment and out of his hate he spoke.
>
“Wait until the Moonfire touches you. It will break your strength and your pride. After that you won’t care who your woman talks to or where.”
Broca gave him a stare of unmoved contempt. Then he turned his back and settled down to look out across the darkening sea.
After a while, the amusing side of the whole thing struck Heath, and he began to laugh.
They were, all three of them, going to die. Somewhere out there to the south, Vakor came like a black shepherd, driving them toward death. Dreams of empire, dreams of glory and a voyage that tempted the vengeance of the gods—and at such a time the barbarian chief could be jealous.
With sudden shock he realized just how much time Alor had spent with him. Out of habit and custom as old as the sea he had helped to while away the long hard hours with a sailor’s yarns. Looking back he could see Alor’s face, strangely young and eager as she listened, could remember how she asked questions and wanted to learn the ways and the working of the ship.
He could remember now how beautiful she looked with the wind in her hair, her firm strong body holding the Ethne steady in a quartering sea.
The storm brewed over the hours and at last it broke.
Heath had known that the Sea of Morning Opals would not let him go without a struggle. It had tried him with shallows, with shifting reefs, with dead calms and booming solar tides and all the devices of current, fog and drifting weed. He had beaten all of them. Now he was almost within sight of the Dragon’s Throat, the gateway to the Upper Seas and it was a murderous moment for a storm out of the south.
The night had turned black. The sea burned with white phosphorescence, a boiling cauldron of witch-fire. The wind was frightening. The Ethne plunged and staggered, driving under a bare pole, and for once Heath was glad of Broca’s strength as they fought the sweep together.
He became aware that someone was beside him and knew that it was Alor.
“Go below!” he yelled and caught only the echo of her answer. She did not go but threw her weight too against the sweep.
Lightning bolts as broad as comet’s tails came streaking down with a rush and a fury as though they had started their run from another star and gathered speed across half the galaxy. They lit the Sea of Morning Opals with a purple glare until the thunder brought the darkness crashing down again. Then the rain fell like a river rolling down the belts of cloud.
Heath groaned inwardly. The wind and the following sea had taken the little ship between them and were hurling her forward. At the speed she was making now she would hit the Dragon’s Throat at dawn. She would hit it full tilt and helpless as a drifting chip.
The lightning showed him the barbarian’s great straining body, gleaming wet, his long hair torn loose from its knots and chains, streaming with wind and water. It showed him Alor too. Their hands and their shoulders touched, straining together.
It seemed that they struggled on that way for centuries and then, abruptly, the rain stopped, the wind slackened, and there was a period of eerie silence. Alor’s voice sounded loud in Heath’s ears, crying, “Is it over?”
“No,” he answered. “Listen!”
They heard a deep and steady booming, distant in the north—the boom of surf.
The storm began again.
Dawn came, hardly lighter than the night. Through the flying wrack Heath could see cliffs on either side where the mountain ranges narrowed in, funneling the Sea of Morning Opals into the strait of the Dragon’s Throat. The driven sea ran high between them, bursting white against the black rock.
The Ethne was carried headlong, a leaf in a millrace.
The cliffs drew in and in until there was a gap of no more than a mile between them. Black brooding titans and the space below a fury of white water, torn and shredded by fang-like rocks.
The Dragon’s Throat.
When he had made the passage before Heath had had fair weather and men for the oars. Even then it had not been easy. Now he tried to remember where the channel lay, tried to force the ship toward what seemed to be an open lane among the rocks.
The Ethne gathered speed and shot forward into the Dragon’s Throat.
She fled through a blind insanity of spray and wind and sound. Time and again Heath saw the loom of a towering rock before him and wrenched the ship aside or fought to keep away from death that was hidden just under the boiling surface. Twice, three times, the Ethne gave a grating shudder and he thought she was gone.
Once, toward the last, when it seemed that there was no hope, he felt Alor’s hand close over his.
The high water saved them, catching them in its own rush down the channel, carrying them over the rocks and finally over the bar at the end of the gut. The Ethne came staggering out into the relative quiet of the Upper Seas, where the pounding waves seemed gentle and it was all done so quickly, over so soon. For a long time the three of them stood sagging over the sweep, not able to realize that it was over and they still lived.
The storm spent itself. The wind settled to a steady blow. Heath got a rag of sail up. Then he sat down by the tiller and bowed his head over his knees and thought about how Alor had caught his hand when she believed she was going to die.
IV
“I WILL WAIT!”
EVEN THIS early it was hot. The Upper Seas sprawled along the equator, shallow landlocked waters choked with weed and fouled with shifting reefs of mud, cut into a maze of lakes and blind channels by the jutting headlands of the mountains.
The wind dropped to a flat calm. They left the open water behind them, where it was swept clean by the tides from the Sea of Morning Opals. The floating weed thickened around them, a blotched ochre plain that stirred with its own dim mindless life. The air smelled rotten.
Under Heath’s direction they swung the weed-knife into place, the great braced blade that fitted over the prow. Then, using the heavy sweep as a sculling oar, they began to push the Ethne forward by the strength of their sweating backs.
Clouds of the little bright-scaled dragons rose with hissing screams, disturbed by the ship. This was their breeding ground. They fought and nested in the weed and the steaming air was full of the sound of their wings. They perched on the rail and in the rigging, watching with their red eyes. The creature that rode Heath’s shoulder emitted harsh cries of excitement. Heath tossed him into the air and he flew away to join his mates.
There was life under the weed, spawning in the hot stagnant waters, multiform and formless, swarming, endlessly hungry. Small reptilian creatures flopped and slithered through the weed, eating the dragon’s eggs, and here and there a flat dark head would break through with a snap and a crunch, and it would watch the Ethne with incurious eyes while it chewed and swallowed.
Constantly Heath kept watch.
The sun rose high above the eternal clouds. The heat seeped down and gathered. The scull moved back and forth, the knife bit, the weed dragged against the hull and behind them the cut closed slowly as the stuff wrapped and coiled upon itself.
Heath’s eyes kept turning to Alor.
He did not want to look at her. He did not wish to remember the touch of her hand on his. He wished only to remember Ethne, to remember the agony of the Moonfire and to think of the reward that lay beyond it if he could endure. What could a temple wench mean to him beside that?
But he kept looking at her covertly. Her white limbs glistened with sweat and her red mouth was sullen with weariness and even so there was a strange wild beauty about her. Time and again her gaze would meet his, a quick hungry glance from under her lashes, and her eyes were not the eyes of a temple wench. Heath cursed Broca in his heart for making him think of Alor and he cursed himself because now he could not stop thinking of her.
They toiled until they could not stand. Then they sprawled on the deck in the breathless heat to rest. Broca pulled Alor to him.
“Soon this will all be over,” he said. “Soon we will reach the Moonfire. You will like that, Alor—to be mated to a god!”
She lay unrespons
ive in the circle of his arm, her head turned away. She did not answer.
Broca laughed. “God and goddess. Two of a land as we are now. We’ll build our thrones so high the sun can see them.” He rolled her head on his shoulder, looking down intently into her face. “Power, Alor. Strength. We will have them together.” He covered her mouth with his, and his free hand caressed her, deliberate, possessive.
She thrust him away. “Don’t,” she said angrily. “It’s too hot and I’m too tired.” She got up and walked to the side, standing with her back to Broca.
Broca looked at her. Then he turned and looked at Heath. A dark flush reddened his skin. He said slowly, “Too hot and too tired—and besides, the Earthman is watching.”
He sprang up and caught Alor and swung her around, one huge hand tangled in her hair, holding her. As soon as he touched her Heath also sprang up and said harshly, “Let her alone!”
Broca said, “She is my mate but I may not touch her.” He glared down into Alor’s blazing eyes and said, “She is my mate—or isn’t she?”
He flung her away. He turned his head from side to side, half blind with rage.
“Do you think I didn’t see you?” he asked thickly. “All day, looking at each other.”
Heath said, “You’re crazy.”
“Yes,” answered Broca, “I am.” He took two steps toward Heath and added, “Crazy enough to kill you.”
Alor said, “If you do you’ll never reach the Moonfire.”
Broca paused, trapped for one moment between his passion and his dream. He was facing the stern. Something caused his gaze to waver from Heath and then, gradually, his expression changed. Heath swung around and Alor gave a smothered cry.
Far behind them, vague in the steaming air, was an emerald sail.
The Lahal must have come through the Dragon’s Throat as soon as the storm was over. With men to man the rowing benches she had gained on the Ethne during the calm. Now she too was in the weed, and the oars were useless but there were men to scull her. She would move faster than the Ethne and without pause.
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