By the grace of Providence and his own swift reflexes, he caught its pack lashings, clinging with the tenacity of a man determined not to die. It floundered about, dragging them, until Berild managed to grasp its trailing halter rope. Between them, they fought the creature down.
Stark clung to its head while the woman clambered to its back, twisting her arm through the straps of the pad. A silken scarf whipped toward him. He took it and tied it over the head of the beast so it could breathe, and after that it was quieter.
There was no direction, no sight of anything, in that howling inferno. The caravan seemed to have been scattered like a drift of autumn leaves. Already, in the few brief moments he had stood still, Stark’s legs were buried to the knees in a substratum of sand that rolled like water. He pulled himself free and started on, going nowhere, remembering Kynon’s words.
Berild ripped her thin robe apart and gave him another strip of silk for himself. He bound it over his nose and eyes, and some of the choking and the blindness abated.
Stumbling, staggering, beaten by the wind as a child is beaten by a strong man, Stark went on, hoping desperately to find the main body of the caravan, and knowing somehow that the hope was futile.
The hours that followed were nightmare. He shut his mind to them, in a way that a civilized man would have found impossible. In his childhood there had been days, and nights, and the problems had been simple ones—how to survive one span of light that one might then survive the span of darkness that came after. One thing, one danger, at a time.
Now there was a single necessity. Keep moving. Forget tomorrow, or what happened to the caravan, or where the little Fianna with her bright eyes may be. Forget thirst, and the pain of breathing, and the fiery lash of sand on naked skin. Only don’t stand still.
It was growing dark when the beast fell against a half-buried boulder and mapped its foreleg. Stark gave it a quick and merciful death. They took the straps from the pad and linked themselves together. Each took as much food as he could carry, and Stark shouldered the single skin of water that fortune had vouchsafed them.
They staggered on, and Berild did not whimper.
Night came, and still the storm wind blew. Stark wondered at the woman’s strength, for he had to help her only when she fell. He had lost all feeling himself. His body was merely a thing that continued to move only because it had been ordered not to stop.
The haze in his own mind had grown as thick as the black obscurity of the night. Berild had ridden all day, but he had walked, and there was an end even to his strength. He was approaching it now, and was too weary even to be afraid.
He became aware at some indeterminate time that Berild had fallen and was dragging her weight against the straps. He turned blindly to help her up. She was saying something, crying his name, striking at him so that he should hear her words and understand.
At last he did. He pulled the mappings from his face and breathed clean air. The wind had fallen. The sky was growing clear.
He dropped in his tracks and slept, with the exhausted woman half dead beside him.
Thirst brought them both awake in the early dawn. They drank from the skin, and then sat for a time looking at the desert, and at each other, thinking of what lay ahead.
“Do you know where we are?” Stark asked.
“Not exactly.” Berild’s face was shadowed with weariness. It had changed, and somehow, to Stark, it had grown more beautiful, because there was no weakness in it.
She thought a minute, looking at the sun. “The wind blew from the north,” she said. “Therefore we have come south from the track. Sinharat lies that way, across the waste they call the Belly of Stones.” She pointed to the north and east.
“How far?”
“Seven, eight days, afoot.”
Stark measured their supply of water and shook his head. “It’ll be dry walking.”
He rose and took up the skin, and Berild came beside him without a word. Her red hair hung loose over her shoulders. The rags of her silken robe had been torn away by the wind, leaving her only the loose skirt of the desert women, and her belt and collar of jewels.
She walked erect with a steady, swinging stride, and it was almost impossible for Stark to remember her as she had been, riding like a lazy queen in her scarlet litter.
There was no way to shelter themselves from the midday sun. The sun of Mars at its worst, however, was only a pale candle beside the sun of Mercury, and it did not bother Stark. He made Berild lie in the shadow of his own body, and he watched her face, relaxed and unfamiliar in sleep.
For the first time, then, he was conscious of a strangeness in her. He had seen so little of her before, in Valkis, and almost nothing on the trail. Now, there was little of her mind or heart that she could conceal from him.
Or was there? There were moments, while she slept, when the shadows of strange dreams crossed her face. Sometimes, in the unguarded moment of waking, he would see in her eyes a look he could not read, and his primitive senses quivered with a vague ripple of warning.
Yet all through those blazing days and frosty nights, tortured with thirst and weary to exhaustion, Berild was magnificent. Her white skin was darkened by the sun and her hair became a wild red mane, but she smiled and set her feet resolutely by his, and Stark thought she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.
On the fourth day they climbed a scarp of limestone worn in ages past by the sea, and looked out over the place called the Belly of Stones.
The sea-bottom curved downward below them into a sort of gigantic basin, the farther rim of which was lost in shimmering distance. Stark thought that never, even on Mercury, had he seen a place more cruel and utterly forsaken of gods or men.
It seemed as though some primal glacier must have met its death here in the dim dawn of Mars, hollowing out its own grave. The body of the glacier had melted away, but its bones were left. Bones of basalt, of granite and marble and porphyry, of every conceivable shape and color and size, picked up by the ice as it marched southward from the pole and dropped here as a cairn to mark its passing.
The Belly of Stones. Stark thought that its other name was Death.For the first time, Berild faltered. She sat down and bent her head over her hands.
“I am tired,” she said. “Also, I am afraid.”
Stark asked, “Has it ever been crossed?”
“Once, that I know of. But they were a war party, mounted and well supplied.”
Stark looked out across the stones. “We will cross it,” he said.
Berild raised her head. “Somehow I believe you.” She rose slowly and put her hands on his breast, over the strong beating of his heart.
“Give me your strength, wild man,” she whispered. “I shall need it.”
He drew her to him and kissed her, and it was a strange and painful kiss, for their lips were cracked and bleeding from their terrible thirst. Then they went down together into the place called the Belly of Stones.
VIII
The desert had been a pleasant and kindly place. Stark looked back upon it with longing. And yet this inferno of glaring rock was so like the valleys of his boyhood that it did not occur to him to lie down and die.
They rested for a time in the sheltered crevice under a great leaning slab of blood-red stone, moistening their swollen tongues with a few chops of stinking water from the skin. At nightfall they drank the last of it, but Berild would not let him throw the skin away.
Darkness, and a lunar silence. The chill air sucked the day’s heat out of the rocks and the iron frost came down, so that Stark and the red-haired woman must keep moving or freeze.
Stark’s mind grew clouded. He spoke from time to time, in a creaking whisper, dropping back into the harsh mother-tongue of the Twilight Belt. It seemed to him that he was hunting, as he had so many times before, in the waterless places—for the blood of the great lizard would save him from thi
rst.
But nothing lived in the Belly of Stones. Nothing, but the two who crept and staggered across it under the low moons.
Berild fell, and could not rise again. Stark crouched beside her. Her face stared up at him, white in the moonlight, her eyes burning and strange.
“I will not die!” she whispered, not to him, but to the gods. “I will not die!”
And she clawed the sand and the bitter rocks, dragging herself onward. It was uncanny, the madness that she had for life.
Stark raised her up and carried her. His breath came in deep, sobbing gasps. After a while he, too, fell. He went on like a beast on all fours, dragging the woman.
He knew dimly that he was climbing. There was a glimmering of dawn in the sky. His hands slipped on a lip of sand and he went rolling down the smooth slope. At length he stopped and lay on his back like a dead thing.
The sun was high when consciousness returned to him. He saw Berild lying near him and crawled to her, shaking her until her eyes opened. Her hands moved feebly and her lips formed the same four words. I will not die.
Stark strained his eyes to the horizon, praying for a glimpse of Sinharat, but there was nothing, only emptiness and sand and stone. With great difficulty he got the woman to her feet, and for a while he had to support her.
He tried to tell her that they must go on, but he could no longer form the words. He could only gesture and urge her forward, in the direction of the city.
But she refused to go. “Too far…die…without water…”
He knew that she was right, but still he was not ready to give up.
She began to move away from him, toward the south, and he thought that she had gone mad and was wandering. Then he saw that she was peering with awful intensity at the line of the scrap that formed this wall of the Belly of Stones. It rose into a great ridge, serrated like the backbone of a whale, and some three miles away a long dorsal fin of reddish rock curved out into the desert.
Berild made a little sobbing noise in her throat. She began to plod toward the distant promontory.
Stark caught up with her. He tried to stop her but she would not be stopped, turning a feral glare upon him.
She croaked, “Water!” and pointed.
He was sure now that she was mad. He told her so, forcing the painful words out of his throat, reminding her of Sinharat and that she was going away from any possible help.
She said again, “Too far. Two—three days, without water.” She pointed. “Very old well—a chance—”
Stark hesitated, standing with his head swaying drunkenly. He could not think very well. But he thought that the chances were a hundred to one that this was all only a hallucination born of Berild’s thirst-madness.
Yet they had very little to lose by taking the gamble. He knew now that they were not going to reach Sinharat. He nodded slowly, and went with her toward the curve of rock.
The three miles might have been three hundred. Each time either of them fell, they lay now for a longer time before struggling up again. Each time, Stark thought that it was the end for the woman. But every time, Berild finally got up and staggered forward again, and he went with her, forcing his body painfully forward on this last throw of the dice.
The sun was setting by the time they came up under the tagged cliffs, onto a little crest. The long, streaming light showed everything, pitilessly.
There was no well. There was a carven pillar, half buried on one side, and the mounded shape of an incalculably ancient ruin of which only the foundations and a few broken columns were left. That was all.
Berild pitched forward and lay still. Stark stood and stared, knowing that this was the end of everything, but unable to think, unable even to remember. He sagged down on his knees beside the woman, and the darkness slid over his mind.
He awoke later, and it was night, and cold. He was vaguely surprised to awaken at all, and he lay for some moments before he tried to raise his head. The two little moons cast a shifting brilliance. He looked for Berild, beside him.
She was gone.
Stark stared at the place in the sand where she had lain, and then after a moment he struggled up to his feet. He looked around, and saw Berild.
She was down there below the little crest on which he was. He saw her quite clearly in the moonlight, standing beside the half-buried pillar at the edge of the shapeless ruins. She leaned on the pillar, and her head hung downward as though she could not raise it. He wondered what last well-spring of strength had enabled her to awake and make her way down there.
As Stark watched, he saw Berild’s head come up. She looked this way and that through the flattened ruins, turning her head very slowly. After a little while, Stark got an uncanny feeling that she was trying to visualize the place as it had been, even though the walls must have been dust a thousand years ago.
Berild moved. She went inward into the ruin, slowly, carefully, and then she put out her hand as though she was touching the long-vanished wall, as though she was feeling along it for a doorway that had not been there for ages. She turned right after so many steps, and again moved carefully in a straight line, and then turned again to her left.
It almost seemed to Stark as though she could see the vanished walls, and was following them. He watched her, a white shape moving in the moonlight, stopping now and then to gather a little strength, but carefully, surely, threading though the desolation of the ancient flattened ruin.
Finally she halted, in a broad flat place that might once have been a central courtyard. There she fell on her knees and began to dig weakly.
The vagueness suddenly left Stark’s brain, and his body screamed with its need. There was only one thing Berild would dig for with dying strength. He lurched his way down the little slope, and got down beside her.
“Well,” she gasped. “Dig….”
They scrabbled like a pair of dogs in the yielding sand.
Stark’s nails slipped across something hard, and the moonlight struck a metallic glint from something beneath the dust. Within a few minutes they had bared a golden cover six feet across, very massive and wonderfully carved with the symbols of some lost god of the sea.
Stark struggled to lift the thing away. He could not move it. Then Berild pressed a hidden spring and the cover slid back of itself. Beneath it, sweet and cold, protected through all these ages, water stirred gently against mossy stones.
An hour later, Stark and Berild lay sleeping, soaked to the skin, their very hair dripping with the blessed dampness.
Next night, when the low moons roved again over the desert, they sat by the well, drowsy with an animal sense of rest and repletion. Stark looked at the woman, and said, “Who are you, Berild?”
“But you know that. I am a Shunni woman, and I am to be Kynon’s queen.”
“Are you, Berild? I think you are a witch. Only a witch could find a well, hidden for ages, here in a place where you have never been.”
She became very still. But when she answered, it was with a laugh.
“No witchcraft, wild man. I told you that a war-party once crossed the Belly of Stones. They followed old tradition, and finally found the well. My father was of that party.”
It could be, Stark thought. The secret of a well was a treasure beyond price in these Drylands, to be handed down from father to child.
“I did not know we were near the place,” she added, “until I saw the landmark, the fin of rock that juts from the great ridge. But I feared we would die before we reached it.”
Yes, thought Stark, it could very well be as she said.
But why did she walk through this place as though she knew and saw the walls as they were a thousand years ago? She does not know that I watched her, moving familiarly through this ancient ruin as one who lived here when it was whole would move.
“What are you dreaming of, wild man? The moon is in your eyes.�
��
“I don’t know,” said Stark.
Dreams, delusions, the unearthly suspicions that had crossed his mind? It could be that he had heard too much talk of old Martian legends, in this deathly wilderness where the dark memory of the Ramas haunted the minds of men.
“Forget your dreams, wild man. That which is real is better.”
He looked down at her in the pale light, and she was young, and beautifully made, and her lips were smiling.
He bent his head. Her arms went round him. Her hair blew soft against his cheek. Then, suddenly, she set her teeth cruelly into his lip. He cried out and thrust her away, and she sat back on her heels, mocking him.
Stark cursed her. There was a taste of blood in his mouth. He reached out and caught her, and again she laughed, a peculiarly sweet, wicked sound.
“That,” she said, “is because you called Fianna’s name instead of mine, when the storm broke.”
The wind blew over them, sighing, and the desert was very still.
For two days they remained among the ruins. At evening of the second day Stark filled the water skin, and Berild replaced the golden cover on the well. They began the last long march toward Sinharat.
IX
Stark saw it rising against the morning sky—a city of marble, high on an island of coral laid bare by the vanishing of the sea. The coral island stood up tall in the hard clear sunlight, its naked cliffs beautifully striated with deep rose and white and delicate pink. And from this lovely pedestal there rose walls and towers so perfectly built from many-shaded marble and so softly sculptured by time that it was difficult to tell where the work of men began and ended. Sinharat, the Ever-living…
Yet it had died. As he came closer to it, plodding slowly through the sand with Berild, he saw that the place was now no more than a beautiful corpse, many of the lovely towers broken, many of the palaces roofless and open to the sky. The only signs of life were outside and below the city, on the dry lagoon that surrounded it. Here were beasts and tents and men, a huddle of them that looked small and unimportant under the loom of the dead city.
Eric John Stark Page 5