by Lin Carter
But she did not.
He wondered, what had robbed her of her youth; and what weird and unholy shadow hung over her, blighting and withering her charm.
Well, there were a lot of things he would never know; most likely, this was only one of them.
Finally Chastar made up his mind. The blustering bully seemed to find it difficult to control his temper and his nervous energy long enough to arrive at any decision. But he abruptly stated one afternoon that since all was ready, it was time to depart. On the morrow they would saddle up and ride out of the dead city and seek the Valley Where Life Was Bom.
There was an uncanny glitter in his eyes as he gave the command. And a look passed between him and the gaunt, hunched old priest, whom M’Cord neither understood nor liked. He would like very much to have known just what it was they hoped to find in the fabulous Valley. Well, soon enough, he would know!
So the time had come at last for the adventure to begin. They no longer had any reason to remain in the ruins of Ygnarh. M’Cord was as healed as he would ever be; if he could walk none too well, at least he could ride without pain. And now Chastar fretted to be off.
The Nordgrens were to accompany them, after all. The decision had been Chastar’s alone, and it came as a surprise. M’Cord decided that the canny outlaw must have felt that the more hostages to fortune he could bring, the better. Chastar still suspected Thaklar of leading them into some kind of a trap. And while he knew that Thaklar had no particular reason to place any value on the lives of the two Earthsiders, at least they could be forced to ride in the fore, so that if any traps were to be sprung, it would be Karl and Inga Nordgren who would suffer, and not he or Phuun or Zerild.
And after them would ride M’Cord. He was saving M’Cord because he knew very well that Thaklar prized the life of the Hated One he called his brother. Thaklar would do much to keep M’Cord from harm, the outlaw knew. M’Cord was the best hostage of all.
So they packed their gear—the Nordgrens bundling up their possessions under the fierce, suspicious eye of Chastar himself, who was wary of F’yagha magic—and loaded the pack-beasts with food and blankets and waterskins. The Nordgrens had their own pressure-still, and the outlaws another; the one M’Cord had been using on his prospecting trip had broken down in the Regio. But there would be enough for all to eat and drink, and the beasts as well.
“It is criminal to require me to abandon all my records and notes!” Nordgren protested to M’Cord as they saddled the slidars. “Why can they not simply leave us here, as they found us? I have no interest in this treasure of theirs, this sacred Valley, which is only a myth anyway! I have my work to do; and what we have discovered here is of immense importance to science! The oldest city on Mars—perhaps even the very first city, if the legends are true—oh, why can’t they leave Inga and me here to do our work in peace?”
“Be glad you’ve still got a whole skin,” M’Cord growled under his breath. “If Chastar didn’t need us to test the way for deadfalls and man traps, he’d as lief slit our throats and leave us all here. Think of your sister, man, and forget about your notes.”
“But all my work …” Nordgren protested feebly. Then he caught the fierce, hard glint in M’Cord’s eye and wilted.
“Inga, of course … yes, there’s Inga. But the notes and the photographs …”
M’Cord said nothing further, but his lips tightened a little. Like most hard men who lived under the harsh law of survive-or-die, there was little room in him for the softer sentiments. But he had a rough chivalry of his own and it galled him to listen to this vapid fool babbling about his precious bits of paper, and holding them more valuable than the girl who stood at his side, silently strapping the saddle on her beast without asking for help or even complaining.
He knew she had overheard them, for her face was carefully blank and her eyes, when he caught a glimpse of them, were dull and empty. For a moment or two he wondered why a young and handsome woman had bound herself into servitude to her brother’s career, rather than making one of her own, or getting a husband and a family-
Then he shrugged and climbed into the saddle. It was none of his business, after all.
They rode out of Ygnarh, the three Earthsiders leading, the outlaws riding behind, with Thaklar between them. Nordgren continued to fuss and fret, mumbling under his breath until M’Cord, whose leg was hurting him a little, growled at him.
“For God’s sake, man, stop whining and whimpering like a child deprived of his favorite toys! Your stuff will be safe—didn’t we bundle it up in airtight plasticine so nothing could damage it?—it will still be here when we get back, won’t it?”
“Yes, of course, you’re right. I really shouldn’t fret so, but how do we know we ever will get back, after all?” the other man pursued the point, querulously. “I mean, we don’t even know where we’re going, do we—actually? The native literature is filled with legends of lost cities and fabulous treasure-troves, but only seldom is there anything to substantiate them . ..”
He cantered ahead of them a bit, still complaining to himself. M’Cord fell back to ride with Inga. She sat stiffly in the saddle, staring straight ahead, her eyes heavy, her face expressionless under the respirator which masked her nose and mouth.
“I… I’m sorry,” he said gruffly.
“Don’t be sorry, Cn. M’Cord,” she said tonelessly. “I don’t mind; really I don’t. Karl’s work always comes first … it really is very important, you know.”
There was nothing else to say, so he said nothing. But he was thinking about where they were going, and wondering if they would get there.
By this time they had all seen the map. Chastar had forced Zerild to show it openly. It was a thin plate of worn old silver, engraved with a pattern of delicate lines. As Thaklar had claimed, a portion of it was smooth and blank. That was the portion that lay at the end of the Road, just before they supposedly were to enter the mystic Valley where the Pool of Life waited to be found. But there would be many days of riding before they reached that point.
Comparing the old silver plate to CA survey charts he had seen, M’Cord realized that if the Valley existed at all, which was probably the case, it was deep in the very center of a region the Earthmen knew as Meridiani Sinus, which lay due west of the Sabaeus. In fact, it occurred to him to wonder if the place they were headed for might not be a small crater in the middle of the Meridiani the Earthmen called Airy, for some obscure reason. If his hunch proved correct, it would be a rather amusing coincidence. Because it was that particular crater, a small and unimportant one, that the mapmakers back on Earth had chosen to mark the position of the prime meridian—the Martian Greenwich, they called it.
It would certainly be an odd coincidence….
So they rode out of the gates of age-old Ygnarh one chilly dawn and M’Cord went with them. He kept his eyes on Thaklar as best he could, waiting for a sign.
Whenever the signal came, he planned to be ready.
At last they were on the move, he thought with dour satisfaction. Any change in the intolerable tensions that had grown between them from being cooped up together all this while would be a change for the better.
However, it was not exactly the most pleasant trip he could imagine, nor the easiest.
They were already in the least known, least explored part of the ancient planet. Here, at least, they were safe. But now they were setting out into the unknown … with a million-year-old map to guide them … bound for a forgotten paradise of the gods, which had been forbidden to man since the beginnings of human life on this planet.
Their leader was a ravenous wolf—a madman, a killer. And by his side went a sullen renegade priest who was no less mad; and a witch-girl who betrayed friend and comrade and lover alike, for her own zest and pleasure.
And ahead of them lay a mystery that had been hidden from the dawn of time. They would be the first to trespass upon its secrets.
He only hoped they would not awaken whatever forgotten gods or gh
osts or devils had slept there undisturbed down the dim corridors of immeasurable ages.
XII. The Road
So they rode out of the gates of elder Ygnarh one morning quite early when the black-purple night sky had barely paled with dawn to the color of dark slate, under a dim and wintry sun.
The city was built in a wide, circular depression in the plateau, which was hundreds of feet below the surface of the tableland. When the seas had dried up, the continental land-surfaces had cracked and split apart and were cloven by deep gorges and ravines, too many to be explored in a thousand years, too many even to be mapped.
But the worn old map on the plate of ancient silver showed the way.
All that first day they followed one particular gorge that zigzagged deep into the center of the plateau. Toward nightfall they came to an abrupt turning point which was clearly indicated on the chart, which was their guide. From here they must ascend to the upper surface of the tableland, but this proved not to be very difficult, for the strata had worn away over the ages into a series of stone steps like a staircase built by giants, and the slidars could climb as well as any man.
The first night they made camp in a bowl-shaped degression atop the plateau, under the blaze of the naked stars. Nordgren thought it likely that the bowl was a very ancient impact crater. All this equatorial region of Mars had been peppered by meteorites since the time, long ago, when the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the youthful planet had begun to thin. The crater was so worn that it could have been a million years old, he theorized; perhaps more. M’Cord couldn’t have cared less. His leg was aching abominably from his first day in the saddle and all he wanted to do was huddle in his thermosac and nurse the hot core of agony within himself in silence.
They were all in a quiet, somber mood, for some reason—perhaps just from the weariness of a long day of hard riding. All but Chastar, that is. The outlaw chieftain was in a heady mood of exaltation; he boasted and swaggered, belching loudly after the meal, cursing the chill edge of the wind—for the air currents here, so high above the surface of the dustlands, could be surprisingly strong— and he became offensive in his manner toward Zerild. The dancing girl endured his lewd gestures and coarse remarks in moody silence as long as she could, then rose and stalked away to make her bed at the far edge of the crater. Usually she could fend for herself in these verbal exchanges, and could puncture Chastar’s boastful swaggerings with an adroit and stinging remark, for she knew where all the soft places in his armor were. But tonight she was silent and withdrawn, and, somehow, vulnerable.
Thaklar gazed after her, an unreadable expression on his hawk-like face. Almost a yearning expression, thought, M’Cord. He wondered what thoughts were passing through the mind of the other. Then he dismissed it from his mind, rolled over and slept—the deep, numb slumber of the bone-weary.
It must have been just before dawn when the dream came.
They were riding—riding. Not down a road but through time itself. Back into the past, the centuries flitting past them like the miles. And as they rode ever on, the world became younger around them. Blue foliage sprouted where there had been naked, sterile rock and sand. A strange green sea lapped to the limits of the horizon, where only the endless dustlands had stretched before.
There were ghosts along the way.
They frowned or grimaced or howled soundlessly. A few laughed; a few watched them ride by with indifferent, uncaring eyes.
But all gestured—go back.
Ahead of them … was it a wall of mist? A dim, shadowy cloud that rose at the end of the Road of Millions of Years: a cloud, on this cold, empty world where no cloud had ever been glimpsed by man before?
Then the cloud resolved itself into a … Face.
Huge and awesome and solemn was that Face. It towered to the zenith of the heavens, and blocked all their way ahead.
It was beautiful, that Face, with a beauty that was beyond that of the flesh. Cold and utterly perfect—like a thing carved by a masterly skill into cold, flawless stone.
Only the eyes lived in all that expanse of perfect beauty.
And the eyes… warned!
He awoke drenched with icy sweat, shuddering in the clammy embrace of an unknown and nameless fear. He had awakened just a little before the others, for they were stirring and mumbling. He raised himself up on his elbows and peered ahead, across the level expanse of pitted and riven stone in the direction in which they were traveling … the way to Ophar the Holy, if legends were true. There was nothing to be seen in the pale light of a frosty dawn; the surface of the plateau stretched away into the illimitable distance like the top of a stone table built for Titans. It was vacant in the icy dim light.
Why, then, did he still quail in the cold breath of some nameless and inexplicable fear? He could not say. His rough, adventuring life had hardened him to peril; seldom did he feel the clammy touch of fear as he felt it now. Just a bad dream? Perhaps … or perhaps it was that keen, fine-honed sense that warns of dangers lurking near but unseen … that sense every adventurer, every explorer, must develop within himself if he is to survive.
But now the others were stirring. He yawned a jawcracking yawn, climbed out of his sac, and put his night-fears behind him. A bit later, hunched over breakfast, he thought he caught a shadow of fear in the cat-like eyes of Zerild and in the surly gaze of Chastar. Had they shared the same dream, by some odd coincidence or curious magic? M’Cord shrugged and put side such unsettling notions.
None of them knew for certain exactly what lay ahead of them at journey’s end. It would be foolish to worry before any cause for worry presented itself. Time enough, when the moment of peril actually came, to be afraid.
All that long day they rode west across the roof of the vast, stony plateau. Jogging wearily in the saddle, nursing his aching leg and resolutely thinking about nothing, M’Cord happened to be riding beside Inga. She was still fresh, staring around with wide eyes, drinking in the experience and tasting its newness. She had exchanged only a few words with him during the whole of the ride, but he could feel her excitement and curiosity, and it amused him in a sour sort of way.
Long years of wandering through the dustlands and across the tablelands of ancient Mars had leached away all novelty in the experience for him. But he could guess how strange and wondrous the journey might seem to one newly come to Mars and to whom its strangeness and alienage had not yet grown stale. Actually, nowhere on Earth was there a geological formation remotely similar to this Sabaeus Sinus Plateau, across which they rode. Once, long ago, this had been a peninsula which thrust deeply out between the equatorial ocean and a long, landlocked bay. Even then, perhaps, it had been level land with few hills, if any, to mar its regularity. When the oceans shrank and dried to salty puddles, what had been a peninsula became a mighty barrier of rock thrusting up some hundreds of feet above the dead sea bottoms. Whatever topsoil had once covered the rocky surface of the peninsula had long since crumbled to dust and been blown away to mingle with the talcum-fine dust of the dead ocean’s floor.
On Earth there were plateaux, but however smooth of surface they might once have been, aeons of wind and rain had worn vast crevices and chasms into them, had shaped them into rough masses of crumbling stone. Nothing like this sheer, unbroken expanse of level rock could be found on Earth—if, indeed, anything like this had ever existed on that warmer, greener, more sunward world. But Mars has little or no weather: no seas for the hot sun to evaporate into clouds, bringing rain; no powerful climatic variations to cause winds or storms. What little air there is is thin and cold and dry, and the sun is too dim and cool, from Mars’s greater distance, to warm it. Once rock-stratum has been exposed, it remains virtually unchanged for millions of years, for in the desert world there is hardly anything to erode it.
It was an oddly unsettling thought. The rock across which their lopers paced had stood here, virtually unchanged, for perhaps a billion years. Only the craters, large and small, deep and shallow, which pockmarked the stony
tableland, were new. For the millions of micrometeorites that peppered Mars annually, as they peppered Earth, were not vaporized by the thin air as they were in Earth’s thicker, more oxygen-rich atmosphere.
His loper shied as a pebble was dislodged under its feet. That pebble might have been there for a million years or more before he came riding by to make it move.
And it might remain where it was now for another million years before being dislodged by the foot of a man, or being, yet unborn.
XIII. Under Two Moons
That second day they covered many miles. The long, loose-jointed strides of their ungainly scarlet steeds devoured the leagues tirelessly. In so unvarying a landscape, one had few visual reminders of the distance a day’s journey consumed. Had their party been composed of Earth-sider explorers, it would have been necessary to employ surveying instruments to ascertain their precise position— devices quite similar to the sextants employed by sea captains back on Earth in the days when ocean vessels were still being used for transoceanic voyages.
But the denizens of Mars, M’Cord knew, have an uncanny sense of distance and location and require no mechanical aids to tell them where they are and how far they have come. Back on Earth, it took sea voyagers thousands of years to perfect a method of discovering the exact location of a ship at sea. Dead reckoning was all very well, but an accurate measurement of precise degrees of longitude had to await the eighteenth century, when a canny Yorkshire carpenter perfected the marine chronometer and solved a problem that had baffled some of the finest intellects of all time, from Ptolemy and Mercator to Huygens and Cassini.