The Eeima, as Jarvis had known them through Eluola, had been partly familiar through legends of the fairy folk, of Queen Mab and Puck and the horde of “Little People”. On the other hand, the Sea People were of an unfamiliar category. Why such beauty of soul had been blended with such hideous physical trappings was a mystery known only to the Divine Mind that caused such things to be. Jarvis only dimly sensed what had happened on the world of Eloraspon, through the inevitable working of natural selection in the specialization of species through evolution.
Tossed on a bed of thorny thought, his mind prickled with questions. He reviewed all that he knew of this alien world, combined it with all that Eluola had managed to convey to him, and still he knew nothing. Of one thing he was certain, evolution on Eloraspon had followed spiritual paths along with the physical. The planet had developed not one, but several races of telepathic beings; and this somehow tied in with the obvious lack of culture of both the Eeima and the Sea People. What culture was possible when each race expressed only a single facet of being?
Eloraspon was either a very young world, or a very old one, he could not be sure which. If the planet were old, from what had the Eeima and the Sea People sprung?. And if these two races existed, others must also, each probably reflecting single-facetted existence. And what did it all add up to? The Mighty, undoubtedly…and who were they? Every way he turned presented a question, and in no direction was there an answer…
* * * *
They marched for three days along giant limbs of the forest, and in all that great wood no animal roamed. If there were fish in the black, tarn-like pools over which they flitted, he had no means of catching them. They had water only at night when it rained, and the store of smoked shellfish with which they had started was gone.
When glum daylight filtered into the forest depths on the fourth morning of their progress, Jarvis knew that they were lost.
Climbing the tree seemed more arduous than it had ever been, but he had to catch a glimpse of the sun to orient their direction. Perhaps, from the roof of the forest, he could see some end to their journey, or make up his mind to turn back before they starved in the limitless reaches of limbs and leaves.
The sky was cloudy when he reached the top, and it was only guesswork when he thought he detected the direction of the sun. It was, perhaps, because the sun was hidden that he searched the sky more minutely than he might have, and in the search detected the dancing motes high up. Had the sun been shining, they would have passed unheard and unseen. As it was, his sharpened senses detected a song in the distance—faint and wavering—the soul-song of the Eeima.
He thought of reaching out with his mind and calling to them, but he had no way of knowing that he could be received so far away, or if the Eeima might not remain indifferent, even if they heard. Even as he watched, the tiny swarm flitted lower and lower and soon was lost behind the fringing tree tops, and he sank back in the crotch that held him, holding his aching head in his hands.
Then, suddenly, clear and strong, the magic of tempestuously passionate song smote again into his soul. He lifted his head and peered among the screens of greenery, calling out gladly in his mind to guide the winged one he knew was there, seeking him. Tendrils of fire enlaced his brain with ecstasy, and a blaze of color fluttered into view, and he knew it was Eluola who had found him.
A flash of gold, of turquoise, blue and scarlet blazed against the leaden sky, and she planed down through the interstices among the branches and perched within arm’s length of him, slowly fanning the air with her wings.
“Now I have found you again after much searching, Child of the Mighty,” her sweet inward voice sang. “From the Mothering Pits northward I sought you, over the sea of water and over the sea of grass. Upon the Great Cliffs I looked for trace of your passing, and found your cold fires, and the tracks your feet had made in the mud of river banks. In the forest I hunted you and found you not. In the land of the Sea People, among the deadly nets they spread for me, I looked and did not find. Many times my companions would have turned back, but I spoke and they stayed, until now that I have found you, they have gone their way and accompany me no longer. For the song of your soul is the Song of Power, and few among the Eeima can bear it in their souls, though to me it is as the quenching of a thirst to feel my being drenched with it.”
The sense of Eluola’s angelic song did not come to Jarvis as if it had been an outpouring of speech, but as sharp slivers and darts of thought punctuating the aria that trilled from her soul. She clung to her limb, peering gladly into his face, her elfin head tilted toward one shoulder, her wings glinting with every color, slowly fanning like butterfly wings.
Once, he remembered, Eluola’s song had power to intoxicate him, to rend him with passionate desire. Though he heard it now gladly, it was only a song, nothing more, and he knew that his love for Jo, expressed at last, had built around his heart an armor of love, proof against any dart of alien passion.
He learned then why Eluola had left them. She had enjoyed her mating flight, from the consequences of which Jarvis had rescued her, and her time had been upon her when the flight of Eeima, migrating southward to the Mothering Pits, had come by, and so she had joined them. They had all been females, returning to the age-old pits to lay their eggs, and she had joined them for the self-same purpose.
What were the Mothering Pits, he wanted to know? In his mind, he caught a sensation of being in a tremendous, luminous cavern beneath the surface of Eloraspon, and he understood that there were many such, interconnected, through which the Eeima flitted, shining in the pale, cadaverous light that came from fungus-like growths covering walls, floor and ceiling.
These were the Pits where the female of the Eeima laid their eggs, then fluttered again to the open air, while the young, grub-like, fat-bodies, that developed from the eggs foraged among the glowing growths and in time became Eeima also, splitting their slug-skins and emerging full grown and winged, flitting forth to join the concourse of their kind in the bright upper air.
All this he gathered from Eluola in short moments; then, recollecting the desperateness of their own plight, he quickly told her of their progress into the swamp from the sea and made known the dire fact that he was entirely lost.
“Have no fear,” she said. “Return to your companions below and I shall lead you from up here. The way you have been going is impassable, as you are going deeper and deeper into the swamp, and soon there will be no trees to carry you farther. But if you will turn southward now, you will come soon to the beginning of a grass land, where the ground rises to meet the towering hills in the west, where the city of Eamus Brock is and where you will find companionship among others of the Mighty whom he has gathered there.”
Jarvis’ mind reeled with this quickly delivered information, but Eluola could not clarify her meaning, even at his insistence. What was Eamus Brock, then—a man or a god? Who were the Mighty around him? What was this city to which she alluded but could not clearly picture in the music of her thought?
“Part of the way to the City of Brock I can lead you,” she said. “The rest of the way must be traveled by you three alone, for not even I can bear the majesty and might of the Song of Power that rolls from that mystic city in its cup in the mountains. No, I should die if I heard it too well; but from where I shall take you, you will find the way easily by yourself.”
She sprang lightly into the air, bright-hued wings sweeping, and took up a dodging, flitting movement that carried her upward and out of the forest, into the clear upper air, and Jarvis heard the impassioned song of her soul ringing sweet and clear in his mind.
Slowly, he began the long climb downward to his waiting companions.
CHAPTER 13
Days and days and days of travel later, they rested on the flank of a hogback, its great ridge towering over them, in a forest of conifers—of more Earthly proportions. The gr
ound was carpeted with brown needles among rock outcroppings, and a spring bubbled from a fissure where they camped.
“Tomorrow,” Eluola promised Jarvis, “I will show you a camping place of the Mighty.”
“The City of Brock?” he asked eagerly.
“Not yet, impatient Child of the Mighty! Here the Mighty camped in great numbers before the time of the Eeima, in the days of old, when only the Mighty walked the face of Eloraspon. It is told among the Eeima that there were none of us winged folk then, no Sea People, and no one of the many others who people our world with us. Then, indeed, were the camping places of the Mighty many in number, and the number of the Mighty was plentiful without end.”
“Is it still a city, then, this place you call a camp?”
“The remains of a city it is, Child of the Mighty. In the days and the years of the Mighty, this place was called Amenorha, and it was a place that shone upon the face of Eloraspon. It was a city, as you say, of light, which is the meaning of Amenorha, its name.”
“Where are those Mighty now?” he wanted to know. “Is Eamus Brock one of them?”
“Not he, nor any others of the Mighty with him, for the Mighty of old are gone forever, and the new Mighty who walk the forgotten ways today are not the same as those who are gone. But their soul song is the Song of Power, which was the soul-song of the elder Mighty, and so we call them also Mighty who are here few in number today.”
“What does Eamus Brock look like, Eluola? Is he a man—or something different from a man, as the Sea People are different from the Eeima?”
“I have never seen him, Jarvis of the Mighty. None of the Eeima has seen him, for it is only his thought which has reached out and communed with the Eeima, bearing the song of his soul, which is the Song of Power. That being so, Eamus Brock is of the Mighty, and therefore we call him such, even as I call you so, even in your childhood.”
“Then he could be a man of Earth—like me?”
“He could very well be. It is true that he is of Earth, though whether a man or some other Earth creature, I cannot say.”
That settled it, then, Jarvis thought. The Eamus Brock of Eloraspon and the Eamus Brock of Earth, financial wizard, inventor and technician were one and the same. His thoughts raced with excitement. Eamus Brock had been Toby’s childhood companion, had somehow exerted a spell over himself that had drawn him across two worlds to a puzzling rendezvous—what did it all mean? Where would it end? In sudden self-abasement, he wondered abjectedly if he had the strength of soul to withstand the knowledge that would have to be his before he could understand at all.
All living things, he thought, emit a soul-song, which characterizes them. Not just living things, Eluola corrected him. All things. Sticks, stones, water, air—all things had their song. That he, Jarvis, was still a Child explained why he could not hear all these songs—only certain extra powerful songs of the living were his to hear. “You will learn,” she assured him. “You will learn them all. Be content now with your Childhood, though tomorrow you will not hear the song of Amenorha, which rings forth from that ancient city with the melody of power. Many of the old places remain where the Mighty left them, and all sing the Song of Power in Things, which is similar to the soul-song of the Mighty themselves.”
* * * *
Amenorha, City of Light, far from lived up to its name. About mid-morning, Jarvis led his party out upon the brow of a low bluff. He looked down upon an almost circular valley of shelving perimeter, like a bowl measuring miles across. Through the center of the bowl meandered a stream, tree-banked, reflecting the eye-wrenching blue of the sky. If Eluola had not told him that the remains of a city lay here, he would not have known it. He saw only a valley floor dotted with overgrown hummocks and mounds, among which his eye occasionally caught the glint of some bright shard. And though he listened with all his soul, he could not hear the Song she assured him was there, and which marked all such places as this, wherein had dwelt the Mighty of old.
So this, Jarvis thought moodily, was Amenorha, built beside the sea in the long ago, before there were Eeima, when a race of preposterous beings called the Mighty populated Eloraspon. As Jarvis set his foot upon the way leading down the face of the bluff, Jo grasped his arm.
“Let Toby go down first and look around,” she murmured. “I—I’d rather wait a little while.”
Strangely enough, Jarvis understood her feeling, for he somewhat shared it himself—a reluctance to enter this ancient graveyard, manifested by a sensation of primeval fear that lifted the hackles at the back of his neck.
He motioned Toby ahead. “Go on down, Toby. We’ll be down in a little bit.”
The boy darted ahead, slim, graceful, burned by the sun to the hue and beauty of walnut uttering whoops of delight. Half sliding, half running, he descended in a hail of small stones and dust, Eluola fluttering over his head, and set off at a swift lope to investigate the nearest of the many mounds.
“The thought of the uncounted centuries hovering over this place kind of gets you, doesn’t it?” Jarvis remarked.
“It isn’t the ruins that scare me, Jeff,” she said moodily, placing an arm around his waist. “I can’t put a name to what it is, but the ruins symbolize it. And in just what way eludes me. I am scared. Not of here and now, but of tomorrow and the day after. I—I don’t know what it is!”
He sat down and drew her down beside him.
“Once a kind of people lived here,” she murmured dreamily, “as once there was an Earth where our kind of people lived. How did we come here, Jeff? What was it that sucked us into this alien world?”
He felt her need to cry, and he let her, holding her close against him for all the comfort he could afford her.
“Don’t be afraid,” he murmured. “We’ll be joining Eamus Brock soon, and then all our worries will be over.”
“Oh, God! It’s that I’m afraid of!” she cried hysterically. “I could not dare to put it into words—but that’s what it is—Eamus Brock!”
“Maybe I’ve misled you with some of my ramblings,” he tried to reassure her. “After all, Eamus Brock is just another man—a man of Earth—like ourselves. This stuff about Song of Power and all that—well, I’ve tried as best I can to get across what Eluola has told me, but I guess it just isn’t possible. What I think she says may not be what she is saying at all…”
Jo straightened, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. She laughed shakily.
“There, it’s all right now, Jeff. I was a fool to break down like that. I won’t do it again.”
“You had every right to,” he said, “but I’m glad you feel better now. Shall we go down…into Amenorha?”
Viewing the remains close up, Jarvis supposed that a million years was not too short a time to guess the age of this ancient city. It was probably older. Toby came running up with glittering fragments of crystal that glowed with prismatic colors, and in sudden revulsion, Jarvis dashed them from his hand, knowing them for what they were—the petrified bones of a civilization long dead.
More such fragments were visible frozen into the face of the bluff behind them, taking on seeming outlines of doorways, of pillars, walls and towers, and he wanted to deny that this was a city at all, that the Mighty had ever been, and to assert that Time began and ended now, and who they were and where they were was all that there was to the endless puzzle of existence.
“Let’s get out of this place!” he muttered gruffly, and led off at a fast pace, as if to cover in a few strides the half-day’s march that lay yet between them and the opposite wall of the valley that sheltered Amenorha and its glittering, crystal shards of ancient glory.
CHAPTER 14
How old could a planet be? Five billion years? Was that the age of the Universe? Suppose it was five billion years. Eloraspon, then, was no older than Earth, but life must have developed here firs
t…and more swiftly. Toby’s phenomenal growth in the past few months demonstrated how quickly the organism developed to maturity on Eloraspon. The growth of a child from birth to adulthood could not require more than three or four years—five at the most. The thought was startling.
Had the Mighty been men? Their civilization had developed to its utmost a million years or more before Mankind had emerged on Earth to replace the dinosaurs and the Tertiary apes. But, if the Mighty had been men, why was Eloraspon now destitute of their seed, and whence had come today’s freakish population—the Eeima, the Sea People and others that Eluola had hinted at? What had proved mightier than the Mighty and had destroyed them, leaving only fragments of their great cities to remind the passerby that others had been here before him?
Eamus Brock was not of the Mighty of old, but of a new Mighty, and he had come from Earth. Somehow, Eamus Brock had discovered Eloraspon long before the cataclysm that had dashed Jarvis from one planet to the other and he was as well known—or as little known, however you looked at it—here as on Earth.
They had marched many more days. Eluola fluttered down as the party paused for rest and perched on Jarvis’ shoulder.
“The song of Eamus Brock’s camping place is loud in my soul,” she complained. “I have come as close as I dare.” She fanned her wings with a quick, nervous movement that betokened physical distress. “I leave you now, Jarvis of the Mighty. Your path lies straight ahead, through the pass between those two mountain peaks. Beyond, upon a plain, lies the city you seek, at the foot of a new mountain, which was not there before the earthquakes. May the Song of Power fill your soul with gladness. We shall not meet again.”
She rose fluttering, wheeled in a flash of color against the stark blue of the sky, then swiftly dwindled into a dot that vanished in the distance.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 63