He was so excited he would have left the village even in the night to return to Uphor, but Fiachra the harper dissuaded him. "Even our most experienced hunters do not go abroad at night, for then the alokans and the thudans are out in full force. The weapon you call The Imp might see you safely through—but why take the chance?”
The old man made sense, Craig admitted, and so he sought out Fiona where she worked a small hand-loom, weaving cloth. As the bodkin flashed back and forth, he sat on a stool and watched her nimble fingers.
"The people of the city, Fiona—where did they bury their dead? We've seen nothing of any graveyard, no tombs or mausoleums. Did they cremate—burn them?”
She halted the progress of the heddle, staring at him, frowning slightly. “Their dead? Why, I do not know. I don't think anyone knows. I have never seen their graves.”
"They must have died. They must be buried somewhere.
She nodded, her hazel eyes rounding to her thoughts. The girl was highly intelligent, she was apparently following his own thought processes, for she leaned closer, mouth open, rapt in her own conjectures.
"You saw the boy and the things they put in with his little dead body. Yes. And you think, there will be things buried with the others, the people of the city. Oh, yes. It may be, it may be.”
Her slim brown fingers came off the loom and her palms clapped together. She laughed, but instantly sobered. “It is not good to laugh with little Bayonral dead—but I am happy for you. We shall look for the tombs tomorrow at sunrise.
After a moment she rose to her feet and caught his hand. "Come, we shall go find Fiachra. If anyone can tell us this, he can. He knows all the knowledge of the tribe. He keeps those things in his head.”
Oral tradition came long before the written word, the commander knew. It was a facet of all the dawn cultures. He found that his heart was thumping in excitement. He had been compelled to feel his way all through this assignment, ever since he had been hurtling toward the Enigma. Nothing was ever simple about this planet Rhyllan.
Fiachra was strumming the wires of his harp. They made a faint, pulsing sound as if they sounded far away, like thunder over distant hills.
His lips smiled when Fiona, kneeling before him, explained what Craig wanted to know. His forehead wrinkled, his fingers plucked at one chord and then another as if the music might help his thinking.
“Long ago I learned the lay of the death of Gakan Nor. He was a great chief in the old days. Long ago, when the people lived in Uphor. I am trying to remember the tale as it was taught to me. It was so many years ago—I was quite a young man. Let me see. It went....”
The fingers grew strength, hit the chords firmly so that the harp sounds flew across the great hall. They stirred echoes inside Craig waking dim, ancestral memories, causing him to sit up straighter and draw his sword closer to his hand.
Old Fiachra began to sing.
"And they buried Gakan Nor in a tomb or rock and stone
“They piled the bodies high, and they slew last his horse Akone
“So that he should ride with splendor, set high amid his foes
“Who lay so still around him, as they had in their death throes.
"And last of all they laid his sword, the bright and gleaming Flane
"Close by his hand, his princely hand, so he could once more rain
"Death blows on his enemies, who had brought him to his bier.
"Casket in stone, stone in wall, he rests for many a year.”
The harp stilled as Fiachra placed his palms flat upon its strings. His head was bent a moment, then he glanced up.
"I have not sung that lay in a very longtime. I had almost forgotten the of the great Gakan Nor.” He brooding. Then he sighed and murmured,
"There is a story that the heroes were placed deep beneath the city, where none should ever disturb their sleep. In a tomb of rock and stone-sealed away in subterranean chambers, perhaps—they lie there now, all dead, all waiting for Rhythane their god to call them to ever lasting life.”
Craig nodded. Where the race is humanoid in shape, they are also humanoid in thinking, in their emotional reactions to stimuli. In death, a man or a boy, a woman or a girl, was laid away with their most cherished possessions. If he could come upon the body of a historian, there might be some shreds of a book, a printed pamphlet perhaps, that might tell him what he wanted to know.
Thanking Fiachra, he walked with Fiona out into the moon-drenched night. It was a still, warm evening, the sky was clear, the planets visible at this time of year gleaming like pinpoints. The thought touched hi at he was far away from home. Elva Marlowe and Intelligence Commander Dan Ingalls might well not exist for him. He could live out his life with this little pagan beauty, Fiona of the tribe of Rhydd, sealed into the black enigma, and know happiness with her.
Her hand was warm in his fingers. As if she sensed the thoughts going through his head, she turned and looked up at him. Her eyes were dark, mysterious behind their long lashes; her thick black hair that rippled down her back was perfumed; she was warm and soft, Commander John Craig drew her in against him and kissed her.
She clung to him a moment, then against his lips she whispered, "Do not go into Uphor any more, John. Stay here in the village with me. You may find terrible things in those graves."
He was tempted. It would have been so easy to let his duty go, to take this girl as his bride and live in this barbaric Elysia. He could not ever remember being so close to turning back on what he had been trained to do.
"I need to think,” he smiled. Fiona cuddled closer, hugging him, and Craig wondered if she guessed how weak was his willpower at this moment. Her softness, her femininity, reached out with delicate tendrils to caress and seduce him. He kissed her again, hungrily, and then turned her about and walked her back to the great hall.
In the quiet night, her sigh was loud.
Next day, she was like an old companion, laughing, teasing, running ahead of him on slim brown legs like a wood dryad. Her black hair flew to her movements, her voice was a song between the tree boles. Always, she was filled with questions. Always, she wanted to know.
He could only shake his head, "No, I don't know where to look. Yes, I think that if we find the graves, well learn something from them. Maybe well see a Toparr today. No, yes. A girl back home? Well, I do know a few, one in particular. Her name is Elva. Like you? Oh, no.”
No, little Fiona with the black hair and brown skin and the laughing youth, she is not like you. She is ice to your fire, gold to your copper, and listless to your laughter. Craig welt a wrenching in his heart, thinking of both these women, each of whom he loved in a different way.
It was still early morning when they came into Uphor. Certain of the buildings which they had already explored, discarded in his plan to find mausoleums of the city dwellers. From old Fiachra he had learned the several symbols which denoted death in his language, and he scanned the stone lintels of the doorways, past which he walked for a carven duplicate of that sigil.
An hour before he had found such a mark, half erased by time, on the wall of what appeared to be a temple. It was a small building, with many columns about it forming porticoes on every side. Inside it, along the walls, were ancient metal designs inlaid in the stone, and from several of these—so much like the symbol the harper had scratched in the dirt for him short hours before—he found what he was seeking.
He discovered a stair in the stone floor behind the marble altar, an empty yawning into darkness down below. Craig fired up a pine torch he had brought along, and carrying it high, descended along the worn stairs. Fiona came after him timidly, looking around her as if there might be ghosts lurking in these pits.
The crypts were numbered, with names and dates and other information cut into the surface of the burial stones. Some of these Craig copied, since Fiachra might be able to interpret them. The stones themselves swung on pivots, he discovered, and opened into small vaults that honeycombed the city.
The air
in these small chambers was dry and musty, but breathable. A number of times the torch flickered where Fiona held it, but Craig worked swiftly, with the ease of long practice in searching out information.
From one vault he lifted a book, a dry, withered thing that would turn to powder if he handled it too roughly. This he laid aside carefully. From another vault he took a molding tapestry on which, in faded colors, was set a picture of space and two planets and from one to the other went a beam of—what? Light? Power? He could not say.
In a third tomb he found something that might be a weapon. It was of metal, long and thin and with something that could be a trigger. He did not dare to work it, here in these vaults; it would need a lot of study before he might come to that; it was best to set it aside with the book.
There was an ax, too, a magnificent weapon with twin faces of carved metal that showed not a single rust spot, and a handle of springy horn. Craig hefted it, staring down into the burial chamber of the big man who had carried his weapon in war. There was no skeleton as there was no coffin; both long since had turned to dust, but from those dusty outlines, a giant must have lain here, a man who had grown almost seven feet tall. Gakan Nor? Could this be his last resting place? He made a mental note to ask Fiachra.
He lost track of time in the subterranean corridors. There was a fascination in him for these tombs, these mementos of the past that held so much information for him, could he but interpret them. A dead world, a forgotten way of life lay here in these chambers. It was his task to bring it to vibrant life.
It was dark when they set out for the village. Craig carried the book and the ax gingerly, and in the sack on his shoulder lay the tapestry, carefully stowed. Desperately he wished that his spaceship were at hand; in it there were instruments which could photograph the book and the tapestry before the air shredded them to dust.
He would have to make do with what he had. The villagers had become worried at their long absence. A file of warriors bearing torches were hunting them in the forest; Craig could see the moving, bobbing torch flames between the boles and lower branches of the trees. He hallooed to them, saw them move their angle of travel to veer onto another pathway.
It was then that Fiona cried out, sharply and with fright in her voice. "John—there! A Toparr watching us.”
He saw the creature then, yellow and gaunt, crouched over and staring with its great saucer eyes unwinking. Craig moved with instinctive response. The Imp came up, flaring. The Toparr was caught full in that red flame. The trees on either side of him puffed into nothingness and then the Toparr was gone, too.
The others had heard her cry, had seen the red energy run through the darkness. They separated, ran with silent strides through the woods, weapons out and ready. Fiona came and pushed against Craig, whimpering.
"If they have been looking at us this night, only Rhythane knows how many other times they hid beside the paths, watching,” she sobbed.
"Easy, easy, he soothed, stroking her thick black hair. "It was only one.”
One Toparr is enough to spread the news where the village of the Rhyddoan raised its wooden timbers, he thought. On this night or on many others, such a Toparr may have crouched here beside the trail, silently, saying nothing, just waiting and spying. When they were certain of its location, they would come in force and attack the village.
The warriors with the lighted torches made daylight in the woods, but one after another they came back to report that there were no more yellow half anywhere in forest. The dead man had been a lone spy, apparently. Craig devoutly hoped so. He felt an uneasiness crawling in his middle, thinking what might happen to these good people, his friends, should the Toparrs attack in force.
There was little sleep in the village that night. Rhyddoan ordered out his warriors, saw them armed and ready. From now on, half of them would go into the woods to sleep with the coming of darkness. The others would remain within the village compound in case the Toparrs should attack. The men in the woods would spread the alarm, and form a guerrilla army to assault the yellow half-men before they might launch an all-out attack.
“We shall be ready,” the chief promised. Over the late meal which Craig and Fiona shared between them, the commander spread out the tapestry so that old Fiachra could pore over its faded colors and designs. He placed the book in a wooden coffer, for its reading next day by the harper.
Fiachra was crooning almost to himself, scanning the old drapery. His finger touched the fabric gently, in love and reverence. His face seemed almost to shine in pleasure as his lips quivered to unspoken words.
"Here is the proof, here on this material,” he said to Craig who was crouched at his side, munching on a leg of mutton. “This is the planet of our birth, this is Rhythane.”
"The name of your god? The name of the planet They are the same?” he asked, seeing the old man nod his white head.
"Yes. Long ago our ancestors were born on that other planet. For many ages they lived there, in peace and plenty. The tales have come down to us of Rhythane, where no man worked, where everything was done for him by the god.”
His forefinger tapped the fabric. "Here is proof, man from another world. Here before you is the story. On this beam of light our ancestors traveled across space to this world of Rhyllan. Why, I do not know.
Craig brooded. It was impossible, what the old man said. Except for this planet where he squatted, there was no other habitable world in the space within the black enigma. He had checked them all with his instruments. Gingerly he leaned forward, taking care not to touch the tapestry, scanning the blackness of space for some hint as to what planet Rhythane might be.
He remembered his own findings out in space. The first planet of this system had been a molten ball of metal, bubbling from heat. Nothing human could ever have found life there! The second planet had been composed of a solid metal core less than a thousand miles across, and an atmosphere of seething gases. No man could exist there, either.
He stood now upon the third planet, Rhyllan.
The fourth planet had been cold and dead, as had the fifth and sixth. The latter two globes had been coated thickly in ice, and storms of inconceivable fury had swept across their surfaces. He had seen great chunks of ice hurtling along, banging into one another, sending showers of icicles down onto the frozen surface. How had man ever been born there?
Or on the next planet to Rhyllan, number four Craig scowled. It too, was cold and dead. Snow lay in great dunes upon its land masses. If there were water there, it was long since frozen solid. Man might have come into existence there, if ever it had been a warmer world. It had water vapor, the ice was proof of that, and an atmosphere of sorts. Man could not live there now, but perhaps, at one time ages ago, he might have swung down out of the trees and walked on two legs.
Desperately he wished he could re-examine the findings impressed on tape by the probes from the Staraine. They might help him solve the mystery.
Faichra sat back in his chair.
“The book? Let me see the book. Fiona, you and the women be careful with that tapestry. I will look at it tomorrow in the sunlight. But now, show me the book.”
His hands were shaking, they were so eager. felt like the student before the teacher as he lifted out the volume from the wooden box and placed it before the harper. His fingers that were so gentle with his harp-strings were even more tender with the pages of the book. Slowly he opened it, slowly, so slowly, and just as slowly let the covers fall back.
Fiachra bent his head. His words when he read were so soft that Craig had to bend nearer to understand them.
". . . and in their (desperation?) the men of Rhythane made (boats?) of strong metal and besought the god Rhythane to power them. In these (boats?) were placed the men and all the women and the children of the race, and with them many of the animals.
"As the power of the god waxd greater and ever greater, swiftly the (boats?) ran up of the planet and out into the cold deeps of space and to the sister planet of Rhythane w
here the men of Rhydd had gone many times but always to return.
"Yet now the people of Rhythane would no more come away from Rhyllan but would live there because...”
Fiachra frowned, bending close. "I cannot make out this word. It looks like 'danger', but I cannot be sure.”
He began reading again. The substance of the story was, Craig reflected as he listened, that some terrible danger had threatened their native planet and that the race of beings inhabiting it had made an excursion across space to this third planet, where they were to live out their days. Here, their children would be born, here they would die and be buried.
But—why? What threatened them on Rhythane? And—what manner of god was this who could send his people away from one world and to another? Craig realized that the book was written in allegoric fashion. The god actually did not empower the spaceships, it was only a manner of speaking. Perhaps Fiachra had read the writings incorrectly. They had been done so long ago, and the old harper had few opportunities to read. The word-meanings he assigned to that ancient printing might be all wrong.
There were other writings in the book to which listened until the candles guttered, and Craig understood that this was not a history book he had discovered, but rather a volume of essays and bits of poetry, of dissertations and pastiches. The dead man from whom he had taken the book might well have been its author.
The chief Rhyddoan was more impressed with the eat ax than with any tapestry or book. He sat upon is high seat with the ax across his knees and fondled it from time to time, gripping the horn handle, touching the steel-heads and sharp twin edges with admiring fingertips.
Yes, this might be an ax belonging to Gakan Nor, yet it was more likely that what Rhyddoan held was the war weapon of Wolla Kon, a giant who had been born to the Rhydd in their hour of need, just when the Toparrs first began appearing. Wolla Kon had slain many of the yellow half-men, went the tale. He had died in his old age when the Toparrs were no more a threat, and his ax had been buried with
Beyond the Black Enigma Page 6