Eric John Stark

by Leigh Brackett

  He faced the ring of bestial, Shanga-sodden men who walled him off from what he had been sent to do. There was a reddish tinge to his vision, partly blood, partly sheer rage. He could see Freka standing erect in the corner, his head weaving from side to side brutishly.

  Stark raised the whip and strode into the ring of men who were no longer quite men.

  Hands struck and clawed him. Bodies reeled and fell away. Blank eyes glittered, and red mouths squealed, and there was a mingling of snarls and bestial laughter in his ears. The blood-lust had spread to these creatures now. They swarmed upon Stark and bore him down with the weight of their writhing bodies.

  They hit him and savaged him in a blind way, and he fought his way up again, shaking them off with his great shoulders, trampling them under his boots. The lash hissed and sang, and the smell of blood rose on the choking air. Freka’s dazed, brutish face swam before Stark. The Martian growled and flung himself forward. Stark swung the loaded butt of the whip. It cracked solidly on the Shunni’s temple, and he sagged into Stark’s arms.

  Out of the corner of his eyes, Stark saw Luhar. He had risen and crept around the edge of the fight. He was behind Stark now, and there was a knife in his hand.

  Hampered by Freka’s weight, Stark could not leap aside. As Luhar rushed in, he crouched and went backward, his head and shoulders taking the Venusian low in the belly. He felt the hot kiss of the blade in his flesh, but the wound was glancing, and before Luhar could strike again, Stark twisted like a great cat and struck down. Luhar’s skull rang on the flagging. The Earthman’s fist rose and fell twice. After that, Luhar did not move.

  Stark got to his feet. He stood with his knees bent and his shoulders flexed, looking from side to side, and the sound that came out of his throat was one of pure savagery.

  He moved forward a step or two, half naked, bleeding, towering like a dark colossus over the lean Martians, and the brutish throng gave back from him. They had taken more mauling than they liked, and there was something about the Outlander’s simple desire to rend them apart that penetrated even their Shanga-clouded minds.

  Kala sat up on the floor, and snarled, “Get out.”

  Stark stood a moment or two longer, looking at them. Then he lifted Freka to his feet and laid him over his shoulder like a sack of meal and went out, moving neither fast nor slow, but in a straight line, and way was made for him.

  He carried the Shunni down through the silent streets, and into the twisting, crowded ways of Valkis. There, too, the people stared at him and drew back, out of his path. He came to Delgaun’s palace. The guards closed in behind him, but they did not ask that he stop.

  Delgaun was in the council room, and Berild was still with him. It seemed that they had been waiting, over their wine and their private talk. Delgaun rose to his feet as Stark came in, so sharply that his goblet fell and spilled a red pool of wine at his feet. Stark let the Shunni drop to the floor.

  “I have brought Freka,” he said. “Luhar is still at Kala’s.”

  He looked into Delgaun’s eyes, golden and cruel, the eyes of his dream. It was hard not to kill.

  Suddenly the woman laughed, very clear and ringing, and her laughter was all for Delgaun.

  “Well done, wild man,” she said to Stark. “Kynon is lucky to have such a captain. One word for the future, though—watch out for Freka. He won’t forgive you this.”

  Stark said thickly, looking at Delgaun, “This hasn’t been a night for forgiveness.” Then he added, “I can handle Freka.”

  Berild said, “I like you, wild man.” Her eyes dwelt on Stark’s face, curious, compelling. “Ride beside me when we go. I would know more about you.”

  And she smiled.

  A dank flush crept over Delgaun’s face. In a voice tight with fury, he said, “Perhaps you’ve forgotten something Berild. There is nothing for you in this barbarian, this creature of an hour!”

  He would have said more in his anger, but Berild said sharply, “We will not speak of time. Go now, Stark. Be ready at midnight.”

  Stark went. And as he went, his brow was furrowed deeply by a strange doubt.

  VI

  At midnight, in the great square of the slave market, Kynon’s caravan formed again and went out of Valkis with thundering drums and skirling pipes. Delgaun was there to see them go, and the cheering of the people rang after them on the desert wind.

  Stark rode alone. He was in a brooding mood and wanted no company, least of all that of the Lady Berild. She was beautiful, she was dangerous, and she belonged to Kynon, or to Delgaun, or perhaps to both of them. In Stark’s experience, women like that were sudden death, and he wanted no part of her. At any rate, not yet.

  Luhar rode ahead with Kynon. He had come dragging into the square at the mounting, his face battered and swollen, an ugly look in his eyes. Kynon gave one quick look from him to Stark, who had his own scars, and said harshly, “Delgaun tells me there’s a blood feud between you two. I want no more of it, understand? After you’re paid off you can kill each other and welcome, but not until then. Is that clear?”

  Stark nodded, keeping his mouth shut. Luhar muttered assent, and they had not looked at each other since.

  Freka rode in his customary place by Kynon, which put him near to Luhar. It seemed to Stark that their beasts swung close together more often than was necessary from the roughness of the track.

  The big barbarian captain sat rigidly erect in his saddle, but Stark had seen his face in the torchlight, sick and sweating, with the brute look still clouding his eyes. There was a purple mark on his temple, but Stark was quite sure that Berild had spoken the truth—Freka would not forgive him either the indignity or the hangover of his unfinished wallow under the lamps of Shanga.

  The dead sea bottom widened away under the black sky. As they left the light of Valkis behind, winding their way over the sand and the ribs of coral, dropping lower with every mile into the vast basin, it was hard to believe that there could be life anywhere on a world that could produce such cosmic desolation.

  The little moons fled away, trailing their eerie shadows over rock formations tortured into impossible shapes by wind and water, peering into clefts that seemed to have no bottom, turning the sand white as bone. The iron stars blazed, so close that the wind seemed edged with their frosty light. And in all that endless space nothing moved, and the silence was so deep that the coughing howl of a sand-cat far away to the east made Stark jump with its loudness.

  Yet Stark was not oppressed by the wilderness. Born and bred to the wild and barren places, this desert was more kin to him than the cities of men.

  After a while there was a jangling of bangles behind him and Fianna came up. He smiled at her, and she said rather sullenly, “The Lady Berild sent me, to remind you of her wish.”

  Stark glanced to where the scarlet-curtained litter rocked along, and his eyes glinted.

  “She’s not one to let go of a thing, is she?”

  “No.” Fianna saw that no one was within earshot, and then said quietly, “Was it as I said, at Kala’s?”

  Stark nodded. “I think, little one, that I owe you my life. Luhar would have killed me as soon as I tackled Freka.”

  He reached over and touched her hand where it lay on the bridle. She smiled, a young girl’s smile that seemed very sweet in the moonlight, honest and comradely.

  It was odd to be talking of death with a pretty girl in the moonlight.

  Stark said, “Why does Delgaun want to kill me?”

  “He gave no reason, when he spoke to the man from Venus. But perhaps I can guess. He knows that you’re as strong as he is, and so he fears you. Also, the Lady Berild looked at you in a certain way.”

  “I thought Berild was Kynon’s woman.”

  “Perhaps she is—for the time,” answered Fianna enigmatically. Then she shook her head, glancing around with what was almost fear. “I have
risked much already. Please—don’t let it be known that I’ve spoken to you, beyond what I was sent to say.”

  Her eyes pleaded with him, and Stark realized with a shock that Fianna, too, stood on the edge of a quicksand.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said, and meant it. “We’d better go.”

  She swung her beast around, and as she did so she whispered, “Be careful, Eric John Stark!”

  Stark nodded. He rode behind her, thinking that he liked the sound of his name on her lips.

  The Lady Berild lay among her furs and cushions, and even then there was no indolence about her. She was relaxed as a cat is, perfectly at ease and yet vibrant with life. In the shadows of the litter her skin showed silverwhite and her loosened hair was a sweet darkness.

  “Are you stubborn, wild man?” she asked. “Or do you find me distasteful?”

  He had not realized before how rich and soft her voice was. He looked down at the magnificent supple length of her, and said, “I find you most damnably attractive—and that’s why I’m stubborn.”

  “Afraid?”

  “I’m taking Kynon’s pay. Should I take his woman also?”

  She laughed, half scornfully. “Kynon’s ambitions leave no room for me. We have an agreement, because a king must have a queen—and he finds my counsel useful. You see, I am ambitious too! Apart from that, there is nothing.”

  Stark looked at her, trying to read her smoke-gray eyes in the gloom. “And Delgaun?”

  “He wants me, but…” She hesitated, and then went on, in a tone quite different from before, her voice low and throbbing with a secret pleasure as vast and elemental as the star-shot sky.

  “I belong to no one,” she said. “I am my own.”

  Stark knew that for the moment she had forgotten him. He rode for a time in silence and then he said slowly, repeating Delgaun’s words, “Perhaps you have forgotten something, Berild. There is nothing for you in me, the creature of an hour.”

  He saw her start, and for a moment her eyes blazed and her breath was sharply drawn. Then she laughed, and said, “The wild man is also a parrot. And an hour can be a long time—as long as eternity, if one wills it so.”

  “Yes,” said Stark, “I have often thought so, waiting for death to come at me out of a crevice in the rocks. The great lizard stings, and his bite is fatal.”

  He leaned over in the saddle, his shoulders looming above hers, naked in the biting wind.

  “My hours with women are short ones,” he said. “They come after the battle, when there is time for such things. Perhaps then I’ll come and see you.”

  He spurred away and left her without a backward look, and the skin of his back tingled with the expectancy of a flying knife. But the only thing that followed him was an echo of disturbing laughter down the wind.

  Dawn came. Kynon beckoned Stark to his side, and pointed out at the cruel waste of sand, with here and there a reef of basalt black against the burning white.

  “This is the country you will lead your men over. Learn it.” He was speaking to Luhar as well. “Learn every water hole, every vantage point, every trail that leads toward the Border. There are no better fighters than the Dryland men when they’re well led, and you must prove to them that you can lead. You’ll work with their own Chieftains—Freka, and the others you’ll meet after we reach Sinharat.”

  Luhar said, “Sinharat?”

  “My headquarters. It’s about seven days’ march—an island city, old as the moons. The Rama cult was strong there, legend has it, and it’s a sort of holy, taboo place to the tribesmen. That’s why I picked it.”

  He took a deep breath and smiled, looking out over the dead sea bottom toward the Border, and his eyes held the same pitiless light as the sun that baked the desert.

  “Very soon, now,” he said, more to himself than the others. “Only a handful of days before we drown the Border states in their own blood. And after that…”

  He laughed, very softly, and said no more. Stark could believe that what Berild said of him was true. There was a flame of ambition in Kynon that would let nothing stand in its way. He measured the size and the strength of the tall barbarian, the eagle look of his face and the iron that lay beneath his joviality. Then Stark, too, stared off toward the Border and wondered if he would ever see Tarak or hear Simon Ashton’s voice again.

  For three days they marched without incident. At noon they made a dry camp and slept away the blazing hours, and then went on again under a darkening sky, a long line of tall men and rangy beasts, with the scarlet litter blooming like a strange flower in the midst of it. Jingling bridles and dust, and padded hoofs trampling the bones of the sea, toward the island city of Sinharat.

  Stark did not speak again to Berild, nor did she send for him. Fianna would pass him in the camp, and smile sidelong, and go on. For her sake, he did not stop her.

  Neither Luhar nor Freka came near him. They avoided him pointedly, except when Kynon called them all together to discuss some point of strategy. But the two seemed to have become friends, and drank together from the same bottle of wine.

  Stark slept always beside his mount, his back guarded and his gun loose. The hard lessons learned in his childhood had stayed with him, and if there was a footfall near him in the dust he woke often before the beast did.

  Toward morning of the fourth night the wind, that never seemed to falter from its steady blowing, began to drop. At dawn it was dead still, and the rising sun had a tinge of blood. The dust arose under the feet of the beasts and fell again where it had risen.

  Stark began to sniff the air. More and more often he looked toward the north, where there was a long slope as flat as his palm that stretched away farther than he could see.

  A restless unease grew within him. Presently he spurred ahead to join Kynon.

  “There is a storm coming,” he said, and turned his head northward again.

  Kynon looked at him curiously.

  “You even have the right direction,” he said. “One might think you were a native.” He, too, gazed with brooding anger at the long sweep of emptiness.

  “I wish we were closer to the city. But one place is as bad as another when the storm wind blows, and the only thing to do is to keep moving. You’re a dead dog if you stop—dead and buried.”

  He swore, with a curious admixture of Anglo-Saxon in his Martian profanity, as though the storm were a personal enemy.

  “Pass the word along to force it—dump whatever they have to lighten the loads. And get Berild out of that damned litter. Stick by her, will you, Stark? I’ve got to stay here, at the head of the line. And don’t get separated. Above all, don’t get separated.”

  Stark nodded and dropped back. He got Berild mounted, and they left the litter there, a bright patch of crimson on the sand, its curtains limp in the utter stillness.

  Nobody talked much. The beasts were urged on to the top of their speed. They were nervous and fidgety, inclined to break out of line and run for it. The sun rose higher.

  One hour.

  The windless air shimmered. The silence lay upon the caravan with a crushing hand. Stark went up and down the line, lending a hand to the sweating drovers with the pack animals that now carried only water skins and a bare supply of food. Fianna rode close beside Berild.

  Two hours.

  For the first time that day there was a sound in the desert.

  It came from far off, a moaning wail like the cry of a giantess in travail. It rushed closer, rising as it did so to a dry and bitter shriek that filled the whole sky, shook it, and tore it open, letting in all the winds of hell.

  It struck swiftly. One moment the air was clear and motionless. The next, it was blind with dust and screaming as it fled, tearing with demoniac fury at everything in its path.

  Stark spurred toward the women, who were only a few feet away but already hidden by the veil of
mingled dust and sand.

  Someone blundered into him in the murk. Long hair whipped across his face and he reached out, crying, “Fianna! Fianna!” A woman’s hand caught his, and a voice answered, but he could not hear the words.

  Then, suddenly, his beast was crowded by other scaly bodies. The woman’s grip had broken. Hard masculine hands clawed at him. He could make out, dimly, the features of two men, close to him.

  Luhar, and Freka.

  His beast gave a great lurch, and sprang forward. Stark was dragged from the saddle, to fall backward into the raging sand.

  VII

  He lay half-stunned for a moment, his breath knocked out of him. There was a terrible reptilian screaming sounding thin through the roar of the wind. Vague shapes bolted past him, and twice he was nearly crushed by their trampling boots.

  Luhar and Freka must have waited their chance. It was so beautifully easy. Leave Stark alone and afoot, and the storm and the desert between them would do the work, with no blame attaching to any man.

  Stark got to his feet and a human body struck him at the knees so that he went down again. He grappled with it, snarling, before he realized that the flesh between his hands was soft and draped in silken cloth. Then he saw he was holding Berild.

  “It was I,” she gasped, “and not Fianna.”

  Her words reached him very faintly, though he knew she was yelling at the top of her lungs. She must have been knocked from her own mount when Luhar thrust between them.

  Gripping her tightly, so that she should not be blown away, Stark struggled up again. With all his strength, it was almost impossible to stand.

  Blinded, deafened, half strangled, he fought his way forward a few paces, and suddenly one of the pack-beasts loomed shadow-like beside him, going by with a rush and a squeal.