“The caravan,” said Berild. “Kynon…and the others…are here.”
“Why are they camped below the city instead of in it?” asked Stark.
She gave him a mocking sidelong glance. “This was the old city of the Ramas, and its name still has power. The people of the Drylands don’t like to enter it. When the hordes gather here, you will see. They will camp outside.”
“For fear of the Ramas? But the Ramas are gone, long ago.”
“Of course—but old fears die slowly.” Berild laughed. “Kynon has no such superstitions. He will be up there in the city.”
As they plodded nearer, they were seen. Riders started to race out toward them from the encampment, and figures hurried between the skin tents. Soon they were near enough to hear a distant crying of excited voices.
Stark walked stolidly on, his face set straight ahead. It seemed to him that the shimmering haze around them had darkened, a little. A vein in his temple had begun to throb.
The racing Shunni riders reached them, voices shouted to them. Berild answered, but Stark said nothing. He walked on, and his eyes were on the city.
Berild plucked his arm, and spoke his name urgently, repeating it so that he would listen.
“Stark! I know what is in your mind, but it is not the way. You must wait….”
He plodded on and did not answer, or look at her. Now they were near enough to the camp that tribesmen were all around them, calling Berild’s name in a rising uproar of excitement, while others of them ran toward the great stairway, carved in the coral, that led up into Sinharat.
The camp of the caravan was below that stairway, and not far from the encampment was a big arched opening in the coral cliff, a natural cavern. Men came from it with heavy water-skins, so that it was evident that there was a well in the cavern. But Stark saw only the great stairway that led upward, and as he walked on toward it, the tribesmen around them stopped the excited shouting. They fell silent, watching Stark’s face, and drew away from him as he set foot upon the lowest step of the stair.
“You must listen!” Berild, somewhere in the darkening haze beside him, was clinging to his am, speaking almost in his ear. “Kynon will kill you if you do this thing. I know him, Stark.”
But he was not Stark any more, he was N’Chaka. The enemies of N’Chaka had dealt him a cruel death, but it had passed him by, he had not died and now it was his turn. They were up there, on the cliffs where even the great lizards did not go, and they thought they were safe from him but he would climb, and climb, and slay….
He climbed, and the darkness of his vision deepened, and then all of a sudden it cleared away and he stood in the hard clear sunlight in a great square of the city Sinharat.
All around the square rose the sculptured fronts of buildings, dazzling in the morning light. On them marched files of carven figures in the dress of ancient Mars, and the sun struck glints from jeweled eyes, and harshened the outlines of the faces so that it seemed that all the pride and glory and cruelty of the Ramas of old still held sway here.
But Stark had eyes only for the living, for men who were coming across the square. Kynon, a gun in his hand, was walking out from the biggest palace, and ahead of him came Luhar.
Luhar.
“Stark, stop!” Kynon’s voice rang.
Stark did not even look at him. He had eyes only for Luhar, who stood there fresh from sleep, his pale hair tumbled, his eyes still drowsy but now, sharply, awakening.
“I will shoot you unless you stop, Stark!” warned Kynon.
From beside him, Stark vaguely heard Berild’s cry. “But for him, I’d be dead in the desert, Kynon!”
Kynon made a decisive gesture. “If he saved you, I will thank him. But he must not touch Luhar! Come here, Berild!”
Voices. And what were voices to N’Chaka when the time for slaying, for vengeance, had come?
Berild had left him, had hurried forward to run past Luhar in the direction of Kynon, who stood, grim with the levelled gun. And still Stark moved on.
He saw the first sharp alarm in Luhar’s face now replaced by a triumphant, taunting smile. The man whom Luhar had killed had come back to life, but he was going to be killed a second time, here and now, and all was well. Luhar’s smile deepened.
Berild, running past Luhar, seemed to stumble and pitch against him, and then recovered herself.
Luhar’s smile of triumph suddenly blanked out. In his face was only an incredulous astonishment. He stood, and looked down at the slash in his tunic from which his heart’s blood was spurting, and then he crashed down to the flagging.
Stark stopped, then. He did not understand. But Kynon did and his voice came in a wrathful shout.
“Berild!”
Berild calmly threw away the little knife in her hand. Its thin blade glittered redly in the sun, and it rattled and tinkled on the stone paving. Her back was to Stark and he could not see her face, but he could hear the bitter passion that throbbed in her voice as she said to Kynon, “He was nearly my death. Do you understand that? He would have ended me!” She spoke the word as though she was uttering the most blackly blasphemous thing in the world. “What now, Kynon? Will you shoot me?”
There was a silence. N’Chaka was gone, and Eric John Stark stood looking down at the dead Venusian. He was not thinking of Luhar now. He was thinking that Berild must have had that little knife hidden in the waistband of her skirt all this time, and he was wondering how close he had come to getting it in his back.
And why, in the moment of her passion, had she spoken that odd word, accusing Luhar of nearly “ending” her?
Stark went on, toward Kynon. He saw the rage in Kynon’s face and he thought that he was going to shoot, after all. There was nothing of the jovial barbarian and hail-fellow about Kynon now. He looked as friendly as a frustrated tiger.
“Damn you, Berild, I needed that man!” he said.
Berild’s eyes blazed. “Why don’t you get down beside him and cry and cover your head? In his desire to murder Stark, he did not scruple to leave me to die also. Am I to forgive that?”
Kynon looked as though he was tempted to strike her. But Stark spoke, and asked, “Where is Freka?”
Kynon turned on him, and his face now was dark and dangerous. “Listen, Stark, you’d be dead on the stones right now instead of Luhar, if Berild hadn’t such a passion for revenge. You’re alive. You’re lucky. Don’t push it.”
Stark merely waited. Kynon went on, in a voice that cut as coldly as a wind from the pole.
“Freka is out with others, raising the Dryland fighting-men who will gather here. Freka will return. When he returns, I’ll kill the first of you two who makes a move at the other. Do you hear?”
Stark said, “I hear.”
Kynon’s piercing gaze hung on him, but apparently he decided not to push it either. He growled, “Hell take such allies! Old hatred, old feuds, always at each other’s throats.”
“I thought you wanted tough fighters,” said Stark. “If you wanted dear hearts and loving friendship, you sent for the wrong men.”
“I’m beginning to think I did,” said Kynon, scowling. “Well, it’s done for now. But it isn’t done for good. Delgaun was close with Luhar and he’ll want blood for this when he finds out about it. He and his cursed Low-Canallers have been difficult enough to handle, as it is.”
He turned angrily and started back toward the building from which he had come. Berild gave Stark an unfathomable look as they followed.
There came a sound that made the hair bristle a little on Stark’s neck. It was a murmuring, seeming to come from all the silent, dead white city around them, a sound not human in tone but rising and falling like distant voices. The morning breeze had begun to blow and the vague whispering seemed brought by it. Stark did not like it at all.
They went with Kynon into a room of polished marble, with fa
ded frescoes of the same figures in ancient dress that matched in the carvings outside. The frescoes were much more faded in some places than in others, so that only here and there did a shadowy face leap suddenly into being, prideful and mocking with smiling lips, or a procession pass solemnly toward some obliterated worship.
Kynon had here a folding wooden desk, with papers scattered on it, which looked utterly incongruous in this place.
“I sent riders back,” Kynon said abruptly, “to search for you. They didn’t find you. You were nowhere near Sinharat. And now you pop up out of nowhere.”
Berild said, “Your riders wouldn’t have found us. We came across the Belly of Stones.”
“With one skin of water? It’s impossible!”
Berild nodded. “But we had three skins that were on the packbeast that Stark caught. They were our life.”
So Berild had her secrets from Kynon, and one of them was the hidden well? Stark was not surprised. She was the kind of woman who would have many secrets.
But I have my secrets too, Berild. And I will not tell even you how I saw you walking to the moonlight with too great a knowledge of dead ages.
“It was not,” Berild was saying to Kynon, “exactly a pleasure journey. I want to test. Was Fianna saved?”
Kynon came out of some inner abstraction to answer, with a nod. “Yes, she and most of your things.”
Berild left. Kynon’s eyes followed her, and when she had gone he looked at Stark.
“Even with water, only a wild man could have done it,” he said. “But again I warn you—curb your wildness, Stark. Especially when Delgaun comes.”
Stark said. “Drylanders and low-Canallers and outland mercenaries—can you keep them from each other’s throats?”
“By all the gods, I’ll do it if I have to tear throats out myself!” Kynon swore viciously. “We can grab a world and only one thing could prevent it—the old feuds that have brought so many brave plans to wreck, in the past. They’ll not wreck my plans!”
They would if he could encompass it, Stark thought. He had known from the time that Ashton had given him his mission of stopping this thing, that the only possible leverage he would have was the ancient quarrels of Mars, that his only chance would be to turn these old enemies against each other. How he would do this, he did not know.
He found that he was swaying, and Kynon saw it and exclaimed, “Go get some rest before you drop here. I’ll say this, that you may be a wild man but you are indeed a man, to have come the way you did.”
He stepped closer and added flatly, “And I’ll tell you also, that I don’t quite like men who are as tough or almost as tough as I am. Get out.”
Stark went the way he pointed, into a broad and shadowy hallway. The first room he looked into had a sleeping-pad in the corner. He stumbled to it and fell, rather than lay down.
But even as he plunged into sleep, he heard the faint echoing whisper from outside, the uncanny murmurs, rising now into a strange, pulsating singing of sound that seemed to moan through the whole dead city like a dirge.
X
Stark awoke to find the room in semi-dusk, a narrow shaft of red sunset light striking in from a high loophole window. He sensed that a presence had awakened him and then he saw Fianna, sitting on a carved stone bench across the room. She was looking at him, her eyes serious and dark.
“You growled, before you awoke,” she said. “Like a great beast.”
“Perhaps that is what I am,” he said.
“Perhaps it is,” Fianna said, and nodded. “But if so, I will tell you this, beast: You have come into a trap.”
He got to his feet, every nerve waking to alertness. He went and stood looking down at her.
“What do you mean, little one?”
“Don’t call me ‘little one,’ ” she flashed. “It is not I who am foolish and young—it is you. If you were not, you would not be in Sinharat.”
“But you are here also, Fianna.”
She sighed. “I know. It is not a place where I would wish to be. But I serve the lady Berild, and must go where she takes me.”
He looked keenly down at her for a moment. “You serve her. Yet you hate her.”
She hesitated. “I don’t hate her. Sometimes, for all her wickednesses, I envy her—she lives so passionately and fully. But I fear her—I fear what she and Kynon may do to my people.”
Eric John Stark feared that too but he did not say so. Instead, he said, “Being a beast, I’m concerned for my hide. You spoke of a trap.”
“It is this,” said Fianna. “You are valuable to Kynon, to train his hordes, when they gather, in outland fighting-skills. But Delgaun and his support are even more valuable to Kynon. If Delgaun asks your death for Luhar’s…”
She did not finish, and Stark finished for her. “Why, then Kynon will very likely regretfully sacrifice one guerrilla fighter, to keep the Low-Canallers happy. Thanks for the warning. But this was already in my mind.”
Fianna said hopefully, “You could slip away before Delgaun comes. If you stole a mount and took water, you could escape.”
No, thought Stark. It is the sensible thing to do, if I want to save my skin, but Simon Ashton will be waiting in Tarak and I can’t go to him and say that I’ve quit the whole thing, it’s just too dangerous.
Besides, he thought, there’s something here that I can’t understand and that I must find out. Something….
Fianna, watching his face, said suddenly, “You’re going to stay. But don’t give me the lying reasons you’re now thinking up. You stay because of Berild.”
Stark smiled. “All women think that men do nothing except for a woman.”
“And all men deny it when it is true,” she said. “Tell me, were you and Berild lovers in the desert?”
“Jealous, Fianna?”
He expected her to sputter resentment at that, but she did not. Instead an enigmatic, almost pitying look came into her eyes, and she said softly, “No, not jealous, Eric John Stark. But saddened.”
She rose suddenly to her feet and said, formally, “I am sent to bring you to the Lady Berild.”
Stark’s eyes narrowed slightly. “With Kynon right here? Will he like that?”
Fianna smiled mirthlessly. “That’s a clever, cautious beast, to think of that. But Kynon is down in the camp below the city. And the Lady Berild does not like this place, and lives elsewhere. I will take you.”
He went out with her into the great square. There was no one in it at all, and its sculptured walls and towers rose into the flaring red sunset, wrapped in a silence that was oppressive. As they walked, their footfalls sounded loud upon the ancient flagstones, and it seemed to Stark that all the stones of dead Sinharat that loomed around them were listening, and watching.
The evening wind sprang up and touched his face. Suddenly, he stopped. He had heard a sound that began as an inaudible vibration and rose stealthily into his hearing. A whispering, a vast, vague murmuring that came from everywhere and nowhere, so that it seemed that Sinharat was not only listening and watching, but was now speaking.
All of a sudden, the whispering swelled up into musical voices. Organ-voices, that seemed to come from the very coral on which the city stood. Flute-voices, from the tall towers that caught the last red light. Shrill, distant voices as of the desert pipes, raging from the carven cornices of buildings far across the city.
Stark caught Fianna’s arm. “What is it?”
“The voices of the Ramas.”
He said roughly, “Make sense.”
She shrugged. “So all Drylanders believe. That is why they hate to come here. But others have said that it is only the wind that sings in the hollow coral.”
Stark understood. The massive coral pedestal on which the city stood was indeed a vast honeycomb of tiny air-passages, and the wind forcing up through them could create this eerie effect
.
“No wonder your barbarians don’t like it,” he muttered. “I’m a barbarian. I don’t like it.”
They went through streets that ran like topless tunnels between the walls and the towns that reached impossibly thin and tall into the evening sky. Some of them had lost their upper stories, and some had fallen entirely, but in the main they were still beautiful, the colors of the marble still lovely. And as the wind changed, the singing voices of Sinharat changed with it. Sometimes those voices were soft and gentle, murmuring about everlasting youth and its pleasures. And then they became strong and fierce with pride, crying You die, but I do not! Sometimes they swelled up, mad, laughing and hateful. But always their song was subtly evil.
In the outside world, even in Valkis, the Ramas had been only a legend, a shadowy tradition that a clever barbarian was using to give glamor to his leadership. But here in Sinharat, the Ramas seemed very real, and he began to understand why all this world in the long ago had feared them, and hated them, and envied them.
Fianna led him toward the western battlement of the high city, a point a little distance away from the great stair. She took him into a building that loomed in the gathering darkness like a white dream-castle, and along a hallway where flaring torches in sockets threw a shaking light over the caravan dancing-girls that seemed in that illumination to be moving along the walls. She opened a door and stepped aside for Stark to enter.
The room was low and long, and the soft glow that lighted it came from lamps with shades of alabaster as thin as paper. Berild came toward him, but not the Berild of the desert. She wore a jeweled girdle, and a wide collar of green jewels above her breasts, and a white cloak hanging from her shoulders.
“I hate that gloomy ruin where Kynon holds his councils,” she said. “This is better. Do you think it was the apartment of a queen?”
“It is now,” said Stark.
Her eyes softened. He took her by the shoulders, and her mocking smile flashed and she said, “But if I am a queen, I am not for you, wild man.”
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