The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lorelei of the Red Mist, by
Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury
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Title: Lorelei of the Red Mist
Author: Leigh Brackett
Ray Bradbury
Release Date: November 29, 2020 [EBook #63917]
Language: English
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LORELEI OF THE RED MIST
By Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury
He died--and then awakened in a new body.
He found himself on a world of bizarre
loveliness, a powerful, rich man. He took
pleasure in his turn of good luck ... until
he discovered that his new body was hated
by all on this strange planet, that his
soul was owned by Rann, devil-goddess of
Falga, who was using him for her own gain.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1946.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The Company dicks were good. They were plenty good. Hugh Starke began
to think maybe this time he wasn't going to get away with it.
His small stringy body hunched over the control bank, nursing the last
ounce of power out of the Kallman. The hot night sky of Venus fled past
the ports in tattered veils of indigo. Starke wasn't sure where he was
any more. Venus was a frontier planet, and still mostly a big X, except
to the Venusians--who weren't sending out any maps. He did know that
he was getting dangerously close to the Mountains of White Cloud. The
backbone of the planet, towering far into the stratosphere, magnetic
trap, with God knew what beyond. Maybe even God wasn't sure.
But it looked like over the mountains or out. Death under the guns of
the Terro-Venus Mines, Incorporated, Special Police, or back to the
Luna cell blocks for life as an habitual felon.
Starke decided he would go over.
Whatever happened, he'd pulled off the biggest lone-wolf caper in
history. The T-V Mines payroll ship, for close to a million credits. He
cuddled the metal strongbox between his feet and grinned. It would be a
long time before anybody equaled that.
His mass indicators began to jitter. Vaguely, a dim purple shadow in
the sky ahead, the Mountains of White Cloud stood like a wall against
him. Starke checked the positions of the pursuing ships. There was no
way through them. He said flatly, "All right, damn you," and sent the
Kallman angling up into the thick blue sky.
He had no very clear memories after that. Crazy magnetic vagaries,
always a hazard on Venus, made his instruments useless. He flew by the
seat of his pants and he got over, and the T-V men didn't. He was free,
with a million credits in his kick.
Far below in the virgin darkness he saw a sullen crimson smear on the
night, as though someone had rubbed it with a bloody thumb. The Kallman
dipped toward it. The control bank flickered with blue flame, the jet
timers blew, and then there was just the screaming of air against the
falling hull.
Hugh Starke sat still and waited....
He knew, before he opened his eyes, that he was dying. He didn't feel
any pain, he didn't feel anything, but he knew just the same. Part of
him was cut loose. He was still there, but not attached any more.
He raised his eyelids. There was a ceiling. It was a long way off. It
was black stone veined with smoky reds and ambers. He had never seen it
before.
His head was tilted toward the right. He let his gaze move down that
way. There were dim tapestries, more of the black stone, and three tall
archways giving onto a balcony. Beyond the balcony was a sky veiled and
clouded with red mist. Under the mist, spreading away from a murky line
of cliffs, was an ocean. It wasn't water and it didn't have any waves
on it, but there was nothing else to call it. It burned, deep down
inside itself, breathing up the red fog. Little angry bursts of flame
coiled up under the flat surface, sending circles of sparks flaring out
like ripples from a dropped stone.
He closed his eyes and frowned and moved his head restively. There was
the texture of fur against his skin. Through the cracks of his eyelids
he saw that he lay on a high bed piled with silks and soft tanned
pelts. His body was covered. He was rather glad he couldn't see it. It
didn't matter because he wouldn't be using it any more anyway, and it
hadn't been such a hell of a body to begin with. But he was used to it,
and he didn't want to see it now, the way he knew it would have to look.
He looked along over the foot of the bed, and he saw the woman.
She sat watching him from a massive carved chair softened with a single
huge white pelt like a drift of snow. She smiled, and let him look. A
pulse began to beat under his jaw, very feebly.
She was tall and sleek and insolently curved. She wore a sort of tabard
of pale grey spider-silk, held to her body by a jeweled girdle, but it
was just a nice piece of ornamentation. Her face was narrow, finely
cut, secret, faintly amused. Her lips, her eyes, and her flowing silken
hair were all the same pale cool shade of aquamarine.
Her skin was white, with no hint of rose. Her shoulders, her forearms,
the long flat curve of her thighs, the pale-green tips of her breasts,
were dusted with tiny particles that glistened like powdered diamond.
She sparkled softly like a fairy thing against the snowy fur, a
creature of foam and moonlight and clear shallow water. Her eyes never
left his, and they were not human, but he knew that they would have
done things to him if he had had any feeling below the neck.
* * * * *
He started to speak. He had no strength to move his tongue. The woman
leaned forward, and as though her movement were a signal four men rose
from the tapestried shadows by the wall. They were like her. Their eyes
were pale and strange like hers.
She said, in liquid High Venusian, "You're dying, in this body. But
_you_ will not die. You will sleep now, and wake in a strange body,
in a strange place. Don't be afraid. My mind will be with yours, I'll
guide you, don't be afraid. I can't explain now, there isn't time, but
don't be afraid."
He drew back his thin lips baring his teeth in what might have been a
smile. If it was, it was wolfish and bitter, like his face.
The woman's eyes began to pour coolness into his skull. They were
like two little rivers running through the channels of his own eyes,
spreading in silver-green quiet across the tortured surface of his
brain. His brain relaxed. It lay floating on the water, and then the
twin streams became one broad flowing stream, and his mind, or ego, the
thing that was intimately himself, vanished along it.
It took him a long, long time to regain consciousness. He felt as
though he'd been shaken until pieces of him were scattered all over
inside. Also, he had an instinctive premonition that the minute he woke
up he would be sorry he had. He took it easy, putting himself together.
He remembered his name, Hugh Starke. He remembered the mining asteroid
where he was born. He remembered the Luna cell blocks where he had
once come near dying. There wasn't much to choose between them. He
remembered his face decorating half the bulletin boards between Mercury
and The Belt. He remembered hearing about himself over the telecasts,
stuff to frighten babies with, and he thought of himself committing his
first crime--a stunted scrawny kid of eighteen swinging a spanner on a
grown man who was trying to steal his food.
The rest of it came fast, then. The T-V Mines job, the getaway that
didn't get, the Mountains of White Cloud. The crash....
The woman.
That did it. His brain leaped shatteringly. Light, feeling, a naked
sense of reality swept over him. He lay perfectly still with his eyes
shut, and his mind clawed at the picture of the shining woman with
sea-green hair and the sound of her voice saying, _You will not die,
you will wake in a strange body, don't be afraid...._
He was afraid. His skin pricked and ran cold with it. His stomach
knotted with it. His skin, his stomach, and yet somehow they didn't
feel just right, like a new coat that hasn't shaped to you....
He opened his eyes, a cautious crack.
He saw a body sprawled on its side in dirty straw. The body belonged
to him, because he could feel the straw pricking it, and the itch of
little things that crawled and ate and crawled again.
It was a powerful body, rangy and flat-muscled, much bigger than his
old one. It had obviously not been starved the first twenty-some years
of its life. It was stark naked. Weather and violence had written
history on it, wealed white marks on leathery bronze, but nothing
seemed to be missing. There was black hair on its chest and thighs and
forearms, and its hands were lean and sinewy for killing.
It was a human body. That was something. There were so many other
things it might have been that his racial snobbery wouldn't call human.
Like the nameless shimmering creature who smiled with strange pale lips.
Starke shut his eyes again.
He lay, the intangible self that was Hugh Starke, bellied down in the
darkness of the alien shell, quiet, indrawn, waiting. Panic crept up
on its soft black paws. It walked around the crouching ego and sniffed
and patted and nuzzled, whining, and then struck with its raking claws.
After a while it went away, empty.
The lips that were now Starke's lips twitched in a thin, cruel smile.
He had done six months once in the Luna solitary crypts. If a man
could do that, and come out sane and on his two feet, he could stand
anything. Even this.
It came to him then, rather deflatingly, that the woman and her four
companions had probably softened the shock by hypnotic suggestion.
His subconscious understood and accepted the change. It was only his
conscious mind that was superficially scared to death.
Hugh Starke cursed the woman with great thoroughness, in seven
languages and some odd dialects. He became healthily enraged that any
dame should play around with him like that. Then he thought, What the
hell, I'm alive. And it looks like I got the best of the trade-in!
He opened his eyes again, secretly, on his new world.
* * * * *
He lay at one end of a square stone hall, good sized, with two straight
lines of pillars cut from some dark Venusian wood. There were long
crude benches and tables. Fires had been burning on round brick hearths
spaced between the pillars. They were embers now. The smoke climbed
up, tarnishing the gold and bronze of shields hung on the walls and
pediments, dulling the blades of longswords, the spears, the tapestries
and hides and trophies.
It was very quiet in the hall. Somewhere outside of it there was
fighting going on. Heavy, vicious fighting. The noise of it didn't
touch the silence, except to make it deeper.
There were two men besides Starke in the hall.
They were close to him, on a low dais. One of them sat in a carved high
seat, not moving, his big scarred hands flat on the table in front of
him. The other crouched on the floor by his feet. His head was bent
forward so that his mop of lint-white hair hid his face and the harp
between his thighs. He was a little man, a swamp-edger from his albino
coloring. Starke looked back at the man in the chair.
The man spoke harshly. "Why doesn't she send word?"
The harp gave out a sudden bitter chord. That was all.
Starke hardly noticed. His whole attention was drawn to the speaker.
His heart began to pound. His muscles coiled and lay ready. There was
a bitter taste in his mouth. He recognized it. It was hate.
He had never seen the man before, but his hands twitched with the urge
to kill.
He was big, nearly seven feet, and muscled like a draft horse. But his
body, naked above a gold-bossed leather kilt, was lithe and quick as a
greyhound in spite of its weight. His face was square, strong-boned,
weathered, and still young. It was a face that had laughed a lot once,
and liked wine and pretty girls. It had forgotten those things now,
except maybe the wine. It was drawn and cruel with pain, a look as of
something in a cage. Starke had seen that look before, in the Luna
blocks. There was a thick white scar across the man's forehead. Under
it his blue eyes were sunken and dark behind half-closed lids. The man
was blind.
Outside, in the distance, men screamed and died.
Starke had been increasingly aware of a soreness and stricture around
his neck. He raised a hand, careful not to rustle the straw. His
fingers found a long tangled beard, felt under it, and touched a band
of metal.
Starke's new body wore a collar, like a vicious dog.
There was a chain attached to the collar. Starke couldn't find any
fastening. The business had been welded on for keeps. His body didn't
seem to have liked it much. The neck was galled and chafed.
The blood began to crawl up hot into Starke's head. He'd worn chains
before. He didn't like them. Especially around the neck.
A door opened suddenly at the far end of the hall. Fog and red daylight
spilled in across the black stone floor. A man came in. He was big,
half naked, blond, and bloody. His long blade trailed harshly on the
flags. His chest was laid open to the bone and he held the wound
together with his free hand.
"Word from Beudag," he said. "They've driven us back into the city, but
so far we're holding the Gate."
No one spoke. The little man nodded his white head. The man with the
slashed chest turned and went out again, closing the door.
A peculiar change came over Starke at the mention of the name Beudag.
He had never heard it before, but it hung in his mind like a spear
point, barbed with strange emotion. He couldn't identify the feeling,
but it brushed the blind man aside. The hot simple hatred cooled.
Starke relaxed in a sort of icy quiet, deceptively calm as a sleeping
cobra. He didn't question this. He waited, for Beudag.
The blind man struck his hands down suddenly on the table and stood up.
"Romna," he said, "give me my sword."
The little man looked at him. He had milk-blue eyes and a face like a
friendly bulldog. He said, "Don't be a fool, Faolan."
Faolan said softly, "Damn you. Give me my sword."
Men were dying outside the hall, and not dying silently. Faolan's skin
was greasy with sweat. He made a sudden, darting grab toward Romna.
Romna dodged him. There were tears in his pale eyes. He said brutally,
"You'd only be in the way. Sit down."
"I can find the point," Faolan said, "to fall on it."
Romna's voice went up to a harsh scream. "Shut up. Shut up and sit
down."
Faolan caught the edge of the table and bent over it. He shivered and
closed his eyes, and the tears ran out hot under the lids. The bard
turned away, and his harp cried out like a woman.
Faolan drew a long sighing breath. He straightened slowly, came round
the carved high seat, and walked steadily toward Starke.
"You're very quiet, Conan," he said. "What's the matter? You ought to
be happy, Conan. You ought to laugh and rattle your chain. You're going
to get what you wanted. Are you sad because you haven't a mind any
more, to understand that with?"
He stopped and felt with one sandaled foot across the straw until he
touched Starke's thigh. Starke lay motionless.
"Conan," said the blind man gently, pressing Starke's belly with his
foot. "Conan the dog, the betrayer, the butcher, the knife in the back.
Remember what you did at Falga, Conan? No, you don't remember now. I've
been a little rough with you, and you don't remember any more. But I
remember, Conan. As long as I live in darkness, I'll remember."
* * * * *
Romna stroked the harp strings and they wept, savage tears for strong
men dead of treachery. Low music, distant but not soft. Faolan began to
tremble, a shallow animal twitching of the muscles. The flesh of his
face was drawn, iron shaping under the hammer. Quite suddenly he went
down on his knees. His hands struck Starke's shoulders, slid inward to
the throat, and locked there.
Outside, the sound of fighting had died away.
Starke moved, very quickly. As though he had seen it and knew it was
there, his hand swept out and gathered in the slack of the heavy chain
and swung it.
It started out to be a killing blow. Starke wanted with all his heart
to beat Faolan's brains out. But at the last second he pulled it,
slapping the big man with exquisite judgment across the back of the
head. Faolan grunted and fell sideways, and by that time Romna had come
up. He had dropped his harp and drawn a knife. His eyes were startled.
Starke sprang up. He backed off, swinging the slack of the chain
warningly. His new body moved magnificently. Outside everything was
fine, but inside his psycho-neural setup had exploded into civil war.
He was furious with himself for not having killed Faolan. He was
furious with himself for losing control enough to want to kill a man
without reason. He hated Faolan. He did not hate Faolan because he
didn't know him well enough. Starke's trained, calculating, unemotional
brain was at grips with a tidal wave of baseless emotion.
He hadn't realized it was baseless until his mental monitor,
conditioned through years of bitter control, had stopped him from
killing. Now he remembered the woman's voice saying, _My mind will be
with yours, I'll guide you...._
Catspaw, huh? Just a hired hand, paid off with a new body in return for
two lives. Yeah, two. This Beudag, whoever he was. Starke knew now what
that cold alien emotion had been leading up to.
"Hold it," said Starke hoarsely. "Hold everything. _Catspaw! You
green-eyed she-devil! You picked the wrong guy this time._"
Just for a fleeting instant he saw her again, leaning forward with her
hair like running water across the soft foam-sparkle of her shoulders.
Her sea-pale eyes were full of mocking laughter, and a direct,
provocative admiration. Starke heard her quite plainly:
"You may not have any choice, Hugh Starke. They know Conan, even if
you don't. Besides, it's of no great importance. The end will be the
same for them--it's just a matter of time. You can save your new body
or not, as you wish." She smiled. "I'd like it if you did. It's a good
body. I knew it, before Conan's mind broke and left it empty."
A sudden thought came to Starke. "My box, the million credits."
"Come and get them." She was gone. Starke's mind was clear, with no
alien will tramping around in it. Faolan crouched on the floor, holding
his head. He said:
"Who spoke?"
Romna the bard stood staring. His lips moved, but no sound came out.
Starke said, "I spoke. Me, Hugh Starke. I'm not Conan, and I never
heard of Falga, and I'll brain the first guy that comes near me."
Faolan stayed motionless, his face blank, his breath sobbing in his
throat. Romna began to curse, very softly, not as though he were
thinking about it. Starke watched them.
Down the hall the doors burst open. The heavy reddish mist coiled in
with the daylight across the flags, and with them a press of bodies hot
from battle, bringing a smell of blood.
Starke felt the heart contract in the hairy breast of the body named
Conan, watching the single figure that led the pack.
Romna called out, "Beudag!"
She was tall. She was built and muscled like a lioness, and she walked
with a flat-hipped arrogance, and her hair was like coiled flame. Her
eyes were blue, hot and bright, as Faolan's might have been once.
She looked like Faolan. She was dressed like him, in a leather kilt
and sandals, her magnificent body bare above the waist. She carried
a longsword slung across her back, the hilt standing above the left
shoulder. She had been using it. Her skin was smeared with blood and
grime. There was a long cut on her thigh and another across her flat
belly, and bitter weariness lay on her like a burden in spite of her
denial of it.
"We've stopped them, Faolan," she said. "They can't breach the Gate,
and we can hold Crom Dhu as long as we have food. And the sea feeds
us." She laughed, but there was a hollow sound to it. "Gods, I'm tired!"
She halted then, below the dais. Her flame-blue gaze swept across
Faolan, across Romna, and rose to meet Hugh Starke's, and stayed there.
The pulse began to beat under Starke's jaw again, and this time his
body was strong, and the pulse was like a drum throbbing.
Romna said, "His mind has come back."
* * * * *
There was a long, hard silence. No one in the hall moved. Then the men
back of Beudag, big brawny kilted warriors, began to close in on the
dais, talking in low snarling undertones that rose toward a mob howl.
Faolan rose up and faced them, and bellowed them to quiet.
"He's mine to take! Let him alone."
Beudag sprang up onto the dais, one beautiful flowing movement. "It
isn't possible," she said. "His mind broke under torture. He's been
a drooling idiot with barely the sense to feed himself. And now,
suddenly, you say he's normal again?"
Starke said, "You know I'm normal. You can see it in my eyes."
"Yes."
He didn't like the way she said that. "Listen, my name is Hugh Starke.
I'm an Earthman. This isn't Conan's brain come back. This is a new
deal. I got shoved into this body. What it did before I got it I don't
know, and I'm not responsible."
Faolan said, "He doesn't remember Falga. He doesn't remember the
longships at the bottom of the sea." Faolan laughed.
Romna said quietly, "He didn't kill you, though. He could have, easily.
Would Conan have spared you?"
Beudag said, "Yes, if he had a better plan. Conan's mind was like a
snake. It crawled in the dark, and you never knew where it was going to
strike."
Starke began to tell them how it happened, the chain swinging idly in
his hand. While he was talking he saw a face reflected in a polished
shield hung on a pillar. Mostly it was just a tangled black mass of
hair, mounted on a frame of long, harsh, jutting bone. The mouth was
sensuous, with a dark sort of laughter on it. The eyes were yellow. The
cruel, brilliant yellow of a killer hawk.
Starke realized with a shock that the face belonged to him.
"A woman with pale green hair," said Beudag softly. "Rann," said
Faolan, and Romna's harp made a sound like a high-priest's curse.
"Her people have that power," Romna said. "They can think a man's soul
into a spider, and step on it."
"They have many powers. Maybe Rann followed Conan's mind, wherever it
went, and told it what to say, and brought it back again."
"Listen," said Starke angrily. "I didn't ask...."
Suddenly, without warning, Romna drew Beudag's sword and threw it at
Starke.
Starke dodged it. He looked at Romna with ugly yellow eyes. "That's
fine. Chain me up so I can't fight and kill me from a distance." He
did not pick up the sword. He'd never used one. The chain felt better,
not being too different from a heavy belt or a length of cable, or the
other chains he'd swung on occasion.
Romna said, "Is that Conan?"
Faolan snarled, "What happened?"
"Romna threw my sword at Conan. He dodged it, and left it on the
ground." Beudag's eyes were narrowed. "Conan could catch a flying sword
by the hilt, and he was the best fighter on the Red Sea, barring you,
Faolan."
"He's trying to trick us. Rann guides him."
"The hell with Rann!" Starke clashed his chain. "She wants me to kill
the both of you, I still don't know why. All right. I could have killed
Faolan, easy. But I'm not a killer. I never put down anyone except to
save my own neck. So I didn't kill him in spite of Rann. And I don't
want any part of you, or Rann either. All I want is to get the hell out
of here!"
Beudag said, "His accent isn't Conan's. And the look in his eyes is
different, too." Her voice had an odd note in it. Romna glanced at her.
He fingered a few rippling chords on his harp, and said:
"There's one way you could tell for sure."
A sullen flush began to burn on Beudag's cheekbones. Romna slid
unobtrusively out of reach. His eyes danced with malicious laughter.
Beudag smiled, the smile of an angry cat, all teeth and no humor.
Suddenly she walked toward Starke, her head erect, her hands swinging
loose and empty at her sides. Starke tensed warily, but the blood
leaped pleasantly in his borrowed veins.
Beudag kissed him.
Starke dropped the chain. He had something better to do with his hands.
After a while he raised his head for breath, and she stepped back, and
whispered wonderingly,
"It isn't Conan."
* * * * *
The hall had been cleared. Starke had washed and shaved himself. His
new face wasn't bad. Not bad at all. In fact, it was pretty damn good.
And it wasn't known around the System. It was a face that could own a
million credits and no questions asked. It was a face that could have a
lot of fun on a million credits.
All he had to figure out now was a way to save the neck the face was
mounted on, and get his million credits back from that beautiful
she-devil named Rann.
He was still chained, but the straw had been cleaned up and he wore
a leather kilt and a pair of sandals. Faolan sat in his high seat
nursing a flagon of wine. Beudag sprawled wearily on a fur rug beside
him. Romna sat cross-legged, his eyes veiled sleepily, stroking soft
wandering music out of his harp. He looked fey. Starke knew his
swamp-edgers. He wasn't surprised.
"This man is telling the truth," Romna said. "But there's another mind
touching his. Rann's, I think. Don't trust him."
Faolan growled, "I couldn't trust a god in Conan's body."
Starke said, "What's the setup? All the fighting out there, and this
Rann dame trying to plant a killer on the inside. And what happened at
Falga? I never heard of this whole damn ocean, let alone a place called
Falga."
The bard swept his hand across the strings. "I'll tell you, Hugh
Starke. And maybe you won't want to stay in that body any longer."
Starke grinned. He glanced at Beudag. She was watching him with a queer
intensity from under lowered lids. Starke's grin changed. He began
to sweat. Get rid of this body, hell! It was really a body. His own
stringy little carcass had never felt like this.
The bard said, "In the beginning, in the Red Sea, was a race of people
having still their fins and scales. They were amphibious, but after a
while part of this race wanted to remain entirely on land. There was
a quarrel, and a battle, and some of the people left the sea forever.
They settled along the shore. They lost their fins and most of their
scales. They had great mental powers and they loved ruling. They
subjugated the human peoples and kept them almost in slavery. They
hated their brothers who still lived in the sea, and their brothers
hated them.
"After a time a third people came to the Red Sea. They were rovers from
the North. They raided and rieved and wore no man's collar. They made a
settlement on Crom Dhu, the Black Rock, and built longships, and took
toll of the coastal towns.
"But the slave people didn't want to fight against the rovers. They
wanted to fight with them and destroy the sea-folk. The rovers were
human, and blood calls to blood. And the rovers like to rule, too,
and this is a rich country. Also, the time had come in their tribal
development when they were ready to change from nomadic warriors to
builders in their own country.
"So the rovers, and the sea-folk, and the slave-people who are caught
between the two of them, began their struggle for the land."
The bard's fingers thrummed against the strings so that they beat like
angry hearts. Starke saw that Beudag was still watching him, weighing
every change of expression on his face. Romna went on:
"There was a woman named Rann, who had green hair and great beauty, and
ruled the sea-folk. There was a man called Faolan of the Ships, and
his sister Beudag, which means Dagger-in-the-Sheath, and they two ruled
the outland rovers. And there was the man called Conan."
The harp crashed out like a sword-blade striking.
"Conan was a great fighter and a great lover. He was next under Faolan
of the Ships, and Beudag loved him, and they were plighted. Then Conan
was taken prisoner by the sea-folk during a skirmish, and Rann saw
him--and Conan saw Rann."
Hugh Starke had a fleeting memory of Rann's face smiling, and her low
voice saying, _It's a good body. I knew it, before_....
Beudag's eyes were two stones of blue vitriol under her narrow lids.
"Conan stayed a long time at Falga with Rann of the Red Sea. Then he
came back to Crom Dhu, and said that he had escaped, and had discovered
a way to take the longships into the harbor of Falga, at the back of
Rann's fleet, and from there it would be easy to take the city, and
Rann with it. And Conan and Beudag were married."
Starke's yellow hawk eyes slid over Beudag, sprawled like a young
lioness in power and beauty. A muscle began to twitch under his
cheekbone. Beudag flushed, a slow deep color. Her gaze did not waver.
"So the longships went out from Crom Dhu, across the Red Sea. And
Conan led them into a trap at Falga, and more than half of them were
sunk. Conan thought his ship was free, that he had Rann and all she'd
promised him, but Faolan saw what had happened and went after him. They
fought, and Conan laid his sword across Faolan's brow and blinded him;
but Conan lost the fight. Beudag brought them home.
"Conan was chained naked in the market place. The people were careful
not to kill him. From time to time other things were done to him. After
a while his mind broke, and Faolan had him chained here in the hall,
where he could hear him babble and play with his chain. It made the
darkness easier to bear.
"But since Falga, things have gone badly from Crom Dhu. Too many men
were lost, too many ships. Now Rann's people have us bottled up here.
They can't break in, we can't break out. And so we stay, until...." The
harp cried out a bitter question, and was still.
* * * * *
After a minute or two Starke said slowly, "Yeah, I get it. Stalemate
for both of you. And Rann figured if I could kill off the leaders,
your people might give up." He began to curse. "What a lousy, dirty,
sneaking trick! And who told her she could use me...." He paused.
After all, he'd be dead now. After all, a new body, and a cool million
credits. Ah, the hell with Rann. He hadn't asked her to do it. And
he was nobody's hired killer. Where did she get off, sneaking around
his mind, trying to make him do things he didn't even know about?
Especially to someone like Beudag.
Still, Rann herself was nobody's crud.
And just where was Hugh Starke supposed to cut in on this deal? Cut was
right. Probably with a longsword, right through the belly. Swell spot
he was in, and a good three strikes on him already.
He was beginning to wish he'd never seen the T-V Mines payroll ship,
because then he might never have seen the Mountains of White Cloud.
He said, because everybody seemed to be waiting for him to say
something, "Usually when there's a deadlock like this, somebody calls
in a third party. Isn't there somebody you can yell for?"
Faolan shook his rough red head. "The slave people might rise, but
they haven't arms and they're not used to fighting. They'd only get
massacred, and it wouldn't help us any."
"What about those other--uh--people that live in the sea? And just what
is that sea, anyhow? Some radiation from it wrecked my ship and got me
into this bloody mess."
Beudag said lazily, "I don't know what it is. The seas our forefathers
sailed on were water, but this is different. It will float a ship, if
you know how to build the hull--very thin, of a white metal we mine
from the foothills. But when you swim in it, it's like being in a cloud
of bubbles. It tingles, and the farther down you go in it the stranger
it gets, dark and full of fire. I stay down for hours sometimes,
hunting the beasts that live there."
Starke said, "For hours? You have diving suits, then."
"What are they?" Starke told her. She shook her head, laughing. "Why
weigh yourself down that way? There's no trouble to breathe in this
ocean."
"For cripesake," said Starke. "Well I'll be damned. Must be a heavy
gas, then, radioactive, surface tension under atmospheric pressure,
enough to float a light hull, and high oxygen content without any
dangerous mixture. Well, well. Okay, why doesn't somebody go down and
see if the sea-people will help? They don't like Rann's branch of the
family, you said."
"They don't like us, either," said Faolan. "We stay out of the southern
part of the sea. They wreck our ships, sometimes." His bitter mouth
twisted in a smile. "Did you want to go to them for help?"
Starke didn't quite like the way Faolan sounded. "It was just a
suggestion," he said.
Beudag rose, stretching, wincing as the stiffened wounds pulled her
flesh. "Come, on, Faolan. Let's sleep."
He rose and laid his hand on her shoulder. Romna's harpstrings breathed
a subtle little mockery of sound. The bard's eyes were veiled and
sleepy. Beudag did not look at Starke, called Conan.
Starke said, "What about me?"
"You stay chained," said Faolan. "There's plenty of time to think. As
long as we have food--and the sea feeds us."
He followed Beudag, through a curtained entrance to the left. Romna got
up, slowly, slinging the harp over one white shoulder. He stood looking
steadily into Starke's eyes in the dying light of the fires.
"I don't know," he murmured.
Starke waited, not speaking. His face was without expression.
"Conan we knew. Starke we don't know. Perhaps it would have been better
if Conan had come back." He ran his thumb absently over the hilt of the
knife in his girdle. "I don't know. Perhaps it would have been better
for all of us if I'd cut your throat before Beudag came in."
Starke's mouth twitched. It was not exactly a smile.
"You see," said the bard seriously, "to you, from Outside, none of this
is important, except as it touches you. But we live in this little
world. We die in it. To us, it's important."
The knife was in his hand now. It leaped up glittering into the dregs
of the firelight, and fell, and leaped again.
"You fight for yourself, Hugh Starke. Rann also fights through you. I
don't know."
Starke's gaze did not waver.
Romna shrugged and put away the knife. "It is written of the gods," he
said, sighing. "I hope they haven't done a bad job of the writing."
He went out. Starke began to shiver slightly. It was completely quiet
in the hall. He examined his collar, the rivets, every separate link of
the chain, the staple to which it was fixed. Then he sat down on the
fur rug provided for him in place of the straw. He put his face in his
hands and cursed, steadily, for several minutes, and then struck his
fists down hard on the floor. After that he lay down and was quiet. He
thought Rann would speak to him. She did not.
The silent black hours that walked across his heart were worse than any
he had spent in the Luna crypts.
* * * * *
She came soft-shod, bearing a candle. Beudag, the Dagger-in-the-Sheath.
Starke was not sleeping. He rose and stood waiting. She set the candle
on the table and came, not quite to him, and stopped. She wore a length
of thin white cloth twisted loosely at the waist and dropping to her
ankles. Her body rose out of it straight and lovely, touched mystically
with shadows in the little wavering light.
"Who are you?" she whispered. "What are you?"
"A man. Not Conan. Maybe not Hugh Starke any more. Just a man."
"I loved the man called Conan, until...." She caught her breath, and
moved closer. She put her hand on Starke's arm. The touch went through
him like white fire. The warm clean healthy fragrance of her tasted
sweet in his throat. Her eyes searched his.
"If Rann has such great powers, couldn't it be that Conan was forced to
do what he did? Couldn't it be that Rann took his mind and moulded it
her way, perhaps without his knowing it?"
"It could be."
"Conan was hot-tempered and quarrelsome, but he...."
Starke said slowly, "I don't think you could have loved him if he
hadn't been straight."
Her hand lay still on his forearm. She stood looking at him, and then
her hand began to tremble, and in a moment she was crying, making no
noise about it. Starke drew her gently to him. His eyes blazed yellowly
in the candlelight.
"Woman's tears," she said impatiently, after a bit. She tried to draw
away. "I've been fighting too long, and losing, and I'm tired."
He let her step back, not far. "Do all the women of Crom Dhu fight like
men?"
"If they want to. There have always been shield-maidens. And since
Falga, I would have had to fight anyway, to keep from thinking." She
touched the collar on Starke's neck. "And from seeing."
He thought of Conan in the market square, and Conan shaking his chain
and gibbering in Faolan's hall, and Beudag watching it. Starke's
fingers tightened. He slid his palms upward along the smooth muscles of
her arms, across the straight, broad planes of her shoulders, onto her
neck, the proud strength of it pulsing under his hands. Her hair fell
loose. He could feel the redness of it burning him.
She whispered, "You don't love me."
"No."
"You're an honest man, Hugh Starke."
"You want me to kiss you."
"Yes."
"You're an honest woman, Beudag."
Her lips were hungry, passionate, touched with the bitterness of tears.
After a while Starke blew out the candle....
"I could love you, Beudag."
"Not the way I mean."
"The way you mean. I've never said that to any woman before. But you're
not like any woman before. And--I'm a different man."
"Strange--so strange. Conan, and yet not Conan."
"I could love you, Beudag--if I lived."
Harpstrings gave a thrumming sigh in the darkness, the faintest whisper
of sound. Beudag started, sighed, and rose from the fur rug. In a
minute she had found flint and steel and got the candle lighted. Romna
the bard stood in the curtained doorway, watching them.
Presently he said, "You're going to let him go."
Beudag said, "Yes."
Romna nodded. He did not seem surprised. He walked across the dais,
laying his harp on the table, and went into another room. He came back
almost at once with a hacksaw.
"Bend your neck," he said to Starke.
The metal of the collar was soft. When it was cut through Starke got
his fingers under it and bent the ends outward, without trouble. His
old body could never have done that. His old body could never have done
a lot of things. He figured Rann hadn't cheated him. Not much.
He got up, looking at Beudag. Beudag's head was dropped forward, her
face veiled behind shining hair.
"There's only one possible way out of Crom Dhu," she said. There was no
emotion in her voice. "There's a passage leading down through the rock
to a secret harbor, just large enough to moor a skiff or two. Perhaps,
with the night and the fog, you can slip through Rann's blockade. Or
you can go aboard one of her ships, for Falga." She picked up the
candle. "I'll take you down."
"Wait," Starke said. "What about you?"
She glanced at him, surprised. "I'll stay, of course."
He looked into her eyes. "It's going to be hard to know each other that
way."
"You can't stay here, Hugh Starke. The people would tear you to pieces
the moment you went into the street. They may even storm the hall, to
take you. Look here." She set the candle down and led him to a narrow
window, drawing back the hide that covered it.
Starke saw narrow twisting streets dropping steeply toward the sullen
sea. The longships were broken and sunk in the harbor. Out beyond,
riding lights flickering in the red fog, were other ships. Rann's ships.
"Over there," said Beudag, "is the mainland. Crom Dhu is connected to
it by a tongue of rock. The sea-folk hold the land beyond it, but we
can hold the rock bridge as long as we live. We have enough water,
enough food from the sea. But there's no soil nor game on Crom Dhu.
We'll be naked after a while, without leather or flax, and we'll have
scurvy without grain and fruit. We're beaten, unless the gods send us
a miracle. And we're beaten because of what was done at Falga. You can
see how the people feel."
Starke looked at the dark streets and the silent houses leaning on each
other's shoulders, and the mocking lights out in the fog. "Yeah," he
said. "I can see."
"Besides, there's Faolan. I don't know whether he believes your story.
I don't know whether it would matter."
Starke nodded. "But you won't come with me?"
She turned away sharply and picked up the candle again. "Are you
coming, Romna?"
The bard nodded. He slung his harp over his shoulder. Beudag held back
the curtain of a small doorway far to the side. Starke went through it
and Romna followed, and Beudag went ahead with the candle. No one spoke.
* * * * *
They went along a narrow passage, past store rooms and armories. They
paused once while Starke chose a knife, and Romna whispered: "Wait!"
He listened intently. Starke and Beudag strained their ears along with
him. There was no sound in the sleeping dun. Romna shrugged. "I thought
I heard sandals scraping stone," he said. They went on.
The passage lay behind a wooden door. It led downward steeply through
the rock, a single narrow way without side galleries or branches. In
some places there were winding steps. It ended, finally, in a flat
ledge low to the surface of the cove, which was a small cavern closed
in with the black rock. Beudag set the candle down.
There were two little skiffs built of some light metal moored to rings
in the ledge. Two long sweeps leaned against the cave wall. They were
of a different metal, oddly vaned. Beudag laid one across the thwarts
of the nearest boat. Then she turned to Starke. Romna hung back in the
shadows by the tunnel mouth.
Beudag said quietly, "Goodbye, man without a name."
"It has to be goodbye."
"I'm leader now, in Faolan's place. Besides, these are my people."
Her fingers tightened on his wrists. "If you could...." Her eyes held
a brief blaze of hope. Then she dropped her head and said, "I keep
forgetting you're not one of us. Goodbye."
"Goodbye, Beudag."
Starke put his arms around her. He found her mouth, almost cruelly. Her
arms were tight about him, her eyes half closed and dreaming. Starke's
hands slip upward, toward her throat, and locked on it.
She bent back, her body like a steel bow. Her eyes got fire in them,
looking into Starke's but only for a moment. His fingers pressed
expertly on the nerve centers. Beudag's head fell forward limply, and
then Romna was on Starke's back and his knife was pricking Starke's
throat.
Starke caught his wrist and turned the blade away. Blood ran onto his
chest, but the cut was not into the artery. He threw himself backward
onto the stone. Romna couldn't get clear in time. The breath went out
of him in a rushing gasp. He didn't let go of the knife. Starke rolled
over. The little man didn't have a chance with him. He was tough and
quick, but Starke's sheer size smothered him. Starke could remember
when Romna would not have seemed small to him. He hit the bard's jaw
with his fist. Romna's head cracked hard against the stone. He let go
of the knife. He seemed to be through fighting. Starke got up. He was
sweating, breathing heavily, not because of his exertion. His mouth was
glistening and eager, like a dog's. His muscles twitched, his belly was
hot and knotted with excitement. His yellow eyes had a strange look.
He went back to Beudag.
She lay on the black rock, on her back. Candlelight ran pale gold
across her brown skin, skirting the sharp strong hollows between her
breasts and under the arching rim of her rib-case. Starke knelt, across
her body, his weight pressed down against her harsh breathing. He
stared at her. Sweat stood out on his face. He took her throat between
his hands again.
He watched the blood grow dark in her checks. He watched the veins coil
on her forehead. He watched the redness blacken in her lips. She fought
a little, very vaguely, like someone moving in a dream. Starke breathed
hoarsely, animal-like, through an open mouth.
Then, gradually his body became rigid. His hands froze, not releasing
pressure, but not adding any. His yellow eyes widened. It was as though
he were trying to see Beudag's face and it was hidden in dense clouds.
Back of him, back in the tunnel, was the soft, faint whisper of sandals
on uneven rock. Sandals, walking slowly. Starke did not hear. Beudag's
face glimmered deep in a heavy mist below him, a blasphemy of a face,
distorted, blackened.
Starke's hands began to open.
They opened slowly. Muscles stood like coiled ropes in his arms and
shoulders, as though he moved them against heavy weights. His lips
peeled back from his teeth. He bent his neck, and sweat dropped from
his face and glittered on Beudag's breast.
Starke was now barely touching Beudag's neck. She began to breathe
again, painfully.
Starke began to laugh. It was not nice laughter. "Rann," he whispered.
"Rann, you she-devil." He half fell away from Beudag and stood up,
holding himself against the wall. He was shaking violently. "I wouldn't
use your hate for killing, so you tried to use my passion." He cursed
her in a flat sibilant whisper. He had never in his profane life really
cursed anyone before.
He heard an echo of laughter dancing in his brain.
Starke turned. Faolan of the Ships stood in the tunnel mouth. His head
was bent, listening, his blind dark eyes fixed on Starke as though he
saw him.
* * * * *
Faolan said softly "I hear you, Starke. I hear the other breathing, but
they don't speak."
"They're all right. I didn't mean to do...."
Faolan smiled. He stepped out on the narrow ledge. He knew where he was
going, and his smile was not pleasant.
"I heard your steps in the passage beyond my room. I knew Beudag was
leading you, and where, and why. I would have been here sooner, but
it's a slow way in the dark."
The candle lay in his path. He felt the heat of it close to his leg,
and stopped and felt for it, and ground it out. It was dark, then. Very
dark, except for a faint smudgy glow from the scrap of ocean that lay
along the cave floor.
"It doesn't matter," Faolan said, "as long as I came in time."
Starke shifted his weight warily. "Faolan...."
"I wanted you alone. On this night of all nights I wanted you alone.
Beudag fights in my place now, Conan. My manhood needs proving."
Starke strained his eyes in the gloom, measuring the ledge, measuring
the place where the skiff was moored. He didn't want to fight Faolan.
In Faolan's place he would have felt the same. Starke understood
perfectly. He didn't hate Faolan, he didn't want to kill him, and he
was afraid of Rann's power over him when his emotions got control.
You couldn't keep a determined man from killing you and still be
uninvolved emotionally. Starke would be damned if he'd kill anyone to
suit Rann.
He moved, silently, trying to slip past Faolan on the outside and get
into the skiff. Faolan gave no sign of hearing him. Starke did not
breathe. His sandals came down lighter than snowflakes. Faolan did not
swerve. He would pass Starke with a foot to spare. They came abreast.
Faolan's hand shot out and caught in Starke's long black hair. The
blind man laughed softly and closed in.
Starke swung one from the floor. Do it the quickest way and get clear.
But Faolan was fast. He came in so swiftly that Starke's fist jarred
harmlessly along his ribs. He was bigger than Starke, and heavier, and
the darkness didn't bother him.
Starke bared his teeth. Do it quick, brother, and clear out! Or that
green-eyed she-cat.... Faolan's brute bulk weighed him down. Faolan's
arm crushed his neck. Faolan's fist was knocking his guts loose. Starke
got moving.
He'd fought in a lot of places. He'd learned from stokers and tramps,
Martian Low-Canalers, red-eyed Nahali in the running gutters of Lhi.
He didn't use his knife. He used his knees and feet and elbows and his
hands, fist and flat. It was a good fight. Faolan was a good fighter,
but Starke knew more tricks.
One more, Starke thought. One more and he's out. He drew back for it,
and his heel struck Romna, lying on the rock. He staggered, and Faolan
caught him with a clean swinging blow. Starke fell backward against the
cave wall. His head cracked the rock. Light flooded crimson across his
brain and then paled and grew cooler, a wash of clear silver-green like
water. He sank under it....
He was tired, desperately tired. His head ached. He wanted to rest, but
he could feel that he was sitting up, doing something that had to be
done. He opened his eyes.
He sat in the stern of a skiff. The long sweep was laid into its
crutch, held like a tiller bar against his body. The blade of the sweep
trailed astern in the red sea, and where the metal touched there was a
spurt of silver fire and a swirling of brilliant motes. The skiff moved
rapidly through the sullen fog, through a mist of blood in the hot
Venusian night.
Beudag crouched in the bow, facing Starke. She was bound securely with
strips of the white cloth she had worn. Bruises showed dark on her
throat. She was watching Starke with the intent, unwinking, perfectly
expressionless gaze of a tigress.
Starke looked away, down at himself. There was blood on his kilt, a
brown smear of it across his chest. It was not his blood. He drew the
knife slowly out of its sheath. The blade was dull and crusted, still a
little wet.
Starke looked at Beudag. His lips were stiff, swollen. He moistened
them and said hoarsely, "What happened?"
She shook her head, slowly, not speaking. Her eyes did not waver.
A black, cold rage took hold of Starke and shook him. Rann! He rose and
went forward, letting the sweep go where it would. He began to untie
Beudag's wrists.
A shape swam toward them out of the red mist. A longship with two heavy
sweeps bursting fire astern and a slender figurehead shaped like a
woman. A woman with hair and eyes of aquamarine. It came alongside the
skiff.
A rope ladder snaked down. Men lined the low rail. Slender men with
skin that glistened white like powdered snow, and hair the color of
distant shallows.
One of them said, "Come aboard, Hugh Starke."
Starke went back to the sweep. It bit into the sea, sending the skiff
in a swift arc away from Rann's ship.
Grapnels flew, hooking the skiff at thwart and gunwale. Bows appeared
in the hands of the men, wicked curving things with barbed metal shafts
on the string. The man said again, politely, "Come aboard."
Hugh Starke finished untying Beudag. He didn't speak. There seemed to
be nothing to say. He stood back while she climbed the ladder and then
followed. The skiff was cast loose. The longship veered away, gathering
speed.
Starke said, "Where are we going?"
The man smiled. "To Falga."
Starke nodded. He went below with Beudag into a cabin with soft couches
covered with spider-silk and panels of dark wood beautifully painted,
dim fantastic scenes from the past of Rann's people. They sat opposite
each other. They still did not speak.
* * * * *
They raised Falga in the opal dawn--a citadel of basalt cliffs rising
sheer from the burning sea, with a long arm holding a harbor full of
ships. There were green fields inland, and beyond, cloaked in the
eternal mists of Venus, the Mountains of White Clouds lifted spaceward.
Starke wished that he had never seen the Mountains of White Cloud.
Then, looking at his hands, lean and strong on his long thighs, he
wasn't so sure. He thought of Rann waiting for him. Anger, excitement,
a confused violence of emotion set him pacing nervously.
Beudag sat quietly, withdrawn, waiting.
The longship threaded the crowded moorings and slid into place
alongside a stone quay. Men rushed to make fast. They were human
men, as Starke judged humans, like Beudag and himself. They had the
shimmering silver hair and fair skin of the plateau peoples, the
fine-cut faces and straight bodies. They wore leather collars with
metal tags and they went naked like beasts, and they were gaunt and
bowed with labor. Here and there a man with pale blue-green hair and
resplendent harness stood godlike above the swarming masses.
Starke and Beudag went ashore. They might have been prisoners or
honored guests, surrounded by their escort from the ship. Streets ran
back from the harbor, twisting and climbing crazily up the cliffs.
Houses climbed on each others backs. It had begun to rain, the heavy
steaming downpour of Venus, and the moist heat brought out the choking
stench of people, too many people.
They climbed, ankle deep in water sweeping down the streets that were
half stairway. Thin naked children peered out of the houses, out of
narrow alleys. Twice they passed through market squares where women
with the blank faces of defeat drew back from stalls of coarse food to
let the party through.
There was something wrong. After a while Starke realized it was the
silence. In all that horde of humanity no one laughed, or sang, or
shouted. Even the children never spoke above a whisper. Starke began to
feel a little sick. Their eyes had a look in them....
He glanced at Beudag, and away again.
The waterfront streets ended in a sheer basalt face honeycombed with
galleries. Starke's party entered them, still climbing. They passed
level after level of huge caverns, open to the sea. There was the
same crowding, the same stench, the same silence. Eyes glinted in the
half-light, bare feet moved furtively on stone. Somewhere a baby cried
thinly, and was hushed at once.
They came out on the cliff top, into the clean high air. There was a
city here. Broad streets, lined with trees, low rambling villas of the
black rock set in walled gardens, drowned in brilliant vines and giant
ferns and flowers. Naked men and women worked in the gardens, or hauled
carts of rubbish through the alleys, or hurried on errands, slipping
furtively across the main streets where they intersected the mews.
The party turned away from the sea, heading toward an ebon palace that
sat like a crown above the city. The steaming rain beat on Starke's
bare body, and up here you could get the smell of the rain, even
through the heavy perfume of the flowers. You could smell Venus in the
rain--musky and primitive and savagely alive, a fecund giantess with
passion flowers in her outstretched hands. Starke set his feet down
like a panther and his eyes burned a smoky amber.
They entered the palace of Rann....
She received them in the same apartment where Starke had come to after
the crash. Through a broad archway he could see the high bed where his
old body had lain before the life went out of it. The red sea steamed
under the rain outside, the rusty fog coiling languidly through the
open arches of the gallery. Rann watched them lazily from a raised
couch set massively into the wall. Her long sparkling legs sprawled
arrogantly across the black spider-silk draperies. This time her tabard
was a pale yellow. Her eyes were still the color of shoal-water, still
amused, still secret, still dangerous.
Starke said, "So you made me do it after all."
"And you're angry." She laughed, her teeth showing white and pointed as
bone needles. Her gaze held Starke's. There was nothing casual about
it. Starke's hawk eyes turned molten yellow, like hot gold, and did not
waver.
Beudag stood like a bronze spear, her forearms crossed beneath her bare
sharp breasts. Two of Rann's palace guards stood behind her.
Starke began to walk toward Rann.
She watched him come. She let him get close enough to reach out and
touch her, and then she said slyly, "It's a good body, isn't it?"
* * * * *
Starke looked at her for a moment. Then he laughed. He threw back his
head and roared, and struck the great corded muscles of his belly with
his fist. Presently he looked straight into Rann's eyes and said:
"I know you."
She nodded. "We know each other. Sit down, Hugh Starke." She swung her
long legs over to make room, half erect now, looking at Beudag. Starke
sat down. He did not look at Beudag.
Rann said, "Will your people surrender now?"
Beudag did not move, not even her eyelids. "If Faolan is dead--yes."
"And if he's not?"
Beudag stiffened. Starke did too.
"Then," said Beudag quietly, "they'll wait."
"Until he is?"
"Or until they must surrender."
Rann nodded. To the guards she said, "See that this woman is well fed
and well treated."
Beudag and her escort had turned to go when Starke said, "Wait." The
guards looked at Rann, who nodded, and glanced quizzically at Starke.
Starke said:
"Is Faolan dead?"
Rann hesitated. Then she smiled. "No. You have the most damnably tough
mind, Starke. You struck deep, but not deep enough. He may still die,
but.... No, he's not dead." She turned to Beudag and said with easy
mockery, "You needn't hold anger against Starke. I'm the one who should
be angry." Her eyes came back to Starke. They didn't look angry.
Starke said, "There's something else. Conan--the Conan that used to
be, before Falga."
"Beudag's Conan."
"Yeah. Why did he betray his people?"
Rann studied him. Her strange pale lips curved, her sharp white teeth
glistening wickedly with barbed humor. Then she turned to Beudag.
Beudag was still standing like a carved image, but her smooth muscles
were ridged with tension, and her eyes were not the eyes of an image.
"Conan or Starke," said Rann, "she's still Beudag, isn't she? All
right, I'll tell you. Conan betrayed his people because I put it into
his mind to do it. He fought me. He made a good fight of it. But he
wasn't quite as tough as you are, Starke."
There was a silence. For the first time since entering the room, Hugh
Starke looked at Beudag. After a moment she sighed and lifted her chin
and smiled, a deep, faint smile. The guards walked out beside her, but
she was more erect and lighter of step than either of them.
"Well," said Rann, when they were gone, "and what about you,
Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan."
"Have I any choice?"
"I always keep my bargains."
"Then give me my dough and let me clear the hell out of here."
"Sure that's what you want?"
"That's what I want."
"You could stay a while, you know."
"With you."
Rann lifted her frosty-white shoulders. "I'm not promising half my
kingdom, or even part of it. But you might be amused."
"I got no sense of humor."
"Don't you even want to see what happens to Crom Dhu?"
Starke got up. He said savagely, "The hell with Crom Dhu."
"And Beudag."
"And Beudag." He stopped, then fixed Rann with uncompromising yellow
eyes. "No. Not Beudag. What are you going to do to her?"
"Nothing."
"Don't give me that."
"I say again, nothing. Whatever is done, her own people will do."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that little Dagger-in-the-Sheath will be rested, cared for, and
fattened, for a few days. Then I shall take her aboard my own ship and
join the fleet before Crom Dhu. Beudag will be made quite comfortable
at the masthead, where her people can see her plainly. She will stay
there until the Rock surrenders. It depends on her own people how long
she stays. She'll be given water. Not much, but enough."
Starke stared at her. He stared at her a long time. Then he spat
deliberately on the floor and said in a perfectly flat voice: "How soon
can I get out of here?"
Rann laughed, a small casual chuckle. "Humans," she said, "are so
damned queer. I don't think I'll ever understand them." She reached out
and struck a gong that stood in a carved frame beside the couch. The
soft deep shimmering note had a sad quality of nostalgia. Rann lay back
against the silken cushions and sighed.
"Goodbye, Hugh Starke."
A pause. Then, regretfully:
"Goodbye--Conan!"
* * * * *
They had made good time along the rim of the Red Sea. One of Rann's
galleys had taken them to the edge of the Southern Ocean and left them
on a narrow shingle beach under the cliffs. From there they had climbed
to the rimrock and gone on foot--Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan and four of
Rann's arrogant shining men. They were supposed to be guide and escort.
They were courteous, and they kept pace uncomplainingly though Starke
marched as though the devil were pricking his heels. But they were
armed, and Starke was not.
Sometimes, very faintly. Starke was aware of Rann's mind touching his
with the velvet delicacy of a cat's paw. Sometimes he started out of
his sleep with her image sharp in his mind, her lips touched with the
mocking, secret smile. He didn't like that. He didn't like it at all.
But he liked even less the picture that stayed with him waking or
sleeping. The picture he wouldn't look at. The picture of a tall woman
with hair like loose fire on her neck, walking on light proud feet
between her guards.
She'll be given water, Rann said. Not much, but enough.
Starke gripped the solid squareness of the box that held his million
credits and set the miles reeling backward from under his sandals.
On the fifth night one of Rann's men spoke quietly across the campfire.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we'll reach the pass."
Starke got up and went away by himself, to the edge of the rimrock that
fell sheer to the burning sea. He sat down. The red fog wrapped him
like a mist of blood. He thought of the blood on Beudag's breast the
first time he saw her. He thought of the blood on his knife, crusted
and dried. He thought of the blood poured rank and smoking into the
gutters of Crom Dhu. The fog has to be red, he thought. Of all the
goddam colors in the universe, it has to be red. Red like Beudag's hair.
He held out his hands and looked at them, because he could still feel
the silken warmth of that hair against his skin. There was nothing
there now but the old white scars of another man's battles.
He set his fists against his temples and wished for his old body back
again--the little stunted abortion that had clawed and scratched its
way to survival through sheer force of mind. A most damnably tough
mind, Rann had said. Yeah. It had had to be tough. But a mind was a
mind. It didn't have emotions. It just figured out something coldly
and then went ahead and never questioned, and it controlled the body
utterly, because the body was only the worthless machinery that carried
the mind around. Worthless. Yeah. The few women he'd ever looked at
had told him that--and he hadn't even minded much. The old body hadn't
given him any trouble.
He was having trouble now.
Starke got up and walked.
Tomorrow we reach the pass.
Tomorrow we go away from the Red Sea. There are nine planets and the
whole damn Belt. There are women on all of them. All shapes, colors,
and sizes, human, semi-human, and God knows what. With a million
credits a guy could buy half of them, and with Conan's body he could
buy the rest. What's a woman, anyway? Only a....
_Water. She'll be given water. Not much, but enough._
Conan reached out and took hold of a spire of rock, and his muscles
stood out like knotted ropes. "Oh God," he whispered, "what's the
matter with me?"
"_Love._"
It wasn't God who answered. It was Rann. He saw her plainly in his
mind, heard her voice like a silver bell.
"Conan was a man, Hugh Starke. He was whole, body and heart and brain.
He knew how to love, and with him it wasn't women, but one woman--and
her name was Beudag. I broke him, but it wasn't easy. I can't break
you."
Starke stood for a long, long time. He did not move, except that he
trembled. Then he took from his belt the box containing his million
credits and threw it out as far as he could over the cliff edge. The
red mist swallowed it up. He did not hear it strike the surface of the
sea. Perhaps in that sea there was no splashing. He did not wait to
find out.
He turned back along the rimrock, toward a place where he remembered
a cleft, or chimney, leading down. And the four shining men who wore
Rann's harness came silently out of the heavy luminous night and ringed
him in. Their sword-points caught sharp red glimmers from the sky.
Starke had nothing on him but a kilt and sandals, and a cloak of
tight-woven spider-silk that shed the rain.
"Rann sent you?" he said.
The men nodded.
"To kill me?"
Again they nodded. The blood drained out of Starke's face, leaving it
grey and stony under the bronze. His hand went to his throat, over the
gold fastening of his cloak.
The four men closed in like dancers.
* * * * *
Starke loosed his cloak and swung it like a whip across their faces. It
confused them for a second, for a heartbeat--no more, but long enough.
Starke left two of them to tangle their blades in the heavy fabric and
leaped aside. A sharp edge slipped and turned along his ribs, and then
he had reached in low and caught a man around the ankles, and used the
thrashing body for a flail.
The body was strangely light, as though the bones in it were no more
than rigid membrane, like a fish.
If he had stayed to fight, they would have finished him in seconds.
They were fighting men, and quick. But Starke didn't stay. He gained
his moment's grace and used it. They were hard on his heels, their
points all but pricking his back as he ran, but he made it. Along the
rimrock, out along a narrow tongue that jutted over the sea, and then
outward, far outward, into red fog and dim fire that rolled around his
plummeting body.
Oh God, he thought, if I guessed wrong and there _is_ a beach....
The breath tore out of his lungs. His ears cracked, went dead. He held
his arms out beyond his head, the thumbs locked together, his neck
braced forward against the terrific upward push. He struck the surface
of the sea.
There was no splash.
Dim coiling fire that drifted with infinite laziness around him,
caressing his body with slow, tingling sparks. A feeling of lightness,
as though his flesh had become one with the drifting fire. A sense
of suffocation that had no basis in fact and gave way gradually to
a strange exhilaration. There was no shock of impact, no crushing
pressure. Merely a cushioning softness, like dropping into a bed of
compressed air. Starke felt himself turning end over end, pinwheel
fashion, and then that stopped, so that he sank quietly and without
haste to the bottom.
Or rather, into the crystalline upper reaches of what seemed to be a
forest.
He could see it spreading away along the downward-sloping floor of the
ocean, into the vague red shadows of distance. Slender fantastic trunks
upholding a maze of delicate shining branches, without leaves or fruit.
They were like trees exquisitely molded from ice, transparent, holding
the lambent shifting fire of the strange sea. Starke didn't think they
were, or ever had been, alive. More like coral, he thought, or some
vagary of mineral deposit. Beautiful, though. Like something you'd see
in a dream. Beautiful, silent, and somehow deadly.
He couldn't explain that feeling of deadliness. Nothing moved in
the red drifts between the trunks. It was nothing about the trees
themselves. It was just something he sensed.
He began to move among the upper branches, following the downward drop
of the slope.
He found that he could swim quite easily. Or perhaps it was more like
flying. The dense gas buoyed him up, almost balancing the weight of
his body, so that it was easy to swoop along, catching a crystal branch
and using it as a lever to throw himself forward to the next one.
He went deeper and deeper into the heart of the forbidden Southern
Ocean. Nothing stirred. The fairy forest stretched limitless ahead. And
Starke was afraid.
Rann came into his mind abruptly. Her face, clearly outlined, was full
of mockery.
"I'm going to watch you die, Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan. But before you
die, I'll show you something. Look."
Her face dimmed, and in its place was Crom Dhu rising bleak into the
red fog, the longships broken and sunk in the harbor, and Rann's fleet
around it in a shining circle.
One ship in particular. The flagship. The vision in Starke's mind
rushed toward it, narrowed down to the masthead platform. To the woman
who stood there, naked, erect, her body lashed tight with thin cruel
cords.
A woman with red hair blowing in the slow wind, and blue eyes that
looked straight ahead like a falcon's, at Crom Dhu.
Beudag.
Rann's laughter ran across the picture and blurred it like a ripple of
ice-cold water.
"You'd have done better," she said, "to take the clean steel when I
offered it to you."
She was gone, and Starke's mind was as empty and cold as the mind of a
corpse. He found that he was standing still, clinging to a branch, his
face upturned as though by some blind instinct, his sight blurred.
He had never cried before in all his life, nor prayed.
There was no such thing as time, down there in the smoky shadows of the
sea bottom. It might have been minutes or hours later that Hugh Starke
discovered he was being hunted.
* * * * *
There were three of them, slipping easily among the shining branches.
They were pale golden, almost phosphorescent, about the size of large
hounds. Their eyes were huge, jewel-like in their slim sharp faces.
They possessed four members that might have been legs and arms,
retracted now against their arrowing bodies. Golden membranes spread
wing-like from head to flank, and they moved like wings, balancing
expertly the thrust of the flat, powerful tails.
They could have closed in on him easily, but they didn't seem to be
in any hurry. Starke had sense enough not to wear himself out trying
to get away. He kept on going, watching them. He discovered that the
crystal branches could be broken, and he selected himself one with
a sharp forked tip, shoving it swordwise under his belt. He didn't
suppose it would do much good, but it made him feel better.
He wondered why the things didn't jump him and get it over with. They
looked hungry enough, the way they were showing him their teeth.
But they kept about the same distance away, in a sort of crescent
formation, and every so often the ones on the outside would make a
tentative dart at him, then fall back as he swerved away. It wasn't
like being hunted so much as....
Starke's eyes narrowed. He began suddenly to feel much more afraid than
he had before, and he wouldn't have believed that possible.
The things weren't hunting him at all. They were herding him.
There was nothing he could do about it. He tried stopping, and they
swooped in and snapped at him, working expertly together so that while
he was trying to stab one of them with his clumsy weapon, the others
were worrying his heels like sheepdogs at a recalcitrant wether.
Starke, like the wether, bowed to the inevitable and went where he was
driven. The golden hounds showed their teeth in animal laughter and
sniffed hungrily at the thread of blood he left behind him in the slow
red coils of fire.
After a while he heard the music.
It seemed to be some sort of a harp, with a strange quality of
vibration in the notes. It wasn't like anything he'd ever heard before.
Perhaps the gas of which the sea was composed was an extraordinarily
good conductor of sound, with a property of diffusion that made the
music seem to come from everywhere at once--softly at first, like
something touched upon in a dream, and then, as he drew closer to the
source, swelling into a racing, rippling flood of melody that wrapped
itself around his nerves with a demoniac shiver of ecstasy.
The golden hounds began to fret with excitement, spreading their
shining wings, driving him impatiently faster through the crystal
branches.
Starke could feel the vibration growing in him--the very fibres of his
muscles shuddering in sympathy with the unearthly harp. He guessed
there was a lot of the music he couldn't hear. Too high, too low for
his ears to register. But he could feel it.
He began to go faster, not because of the hounds, but because he wanted
to. The deep quivering in his flesh excited him. He began to breathe
harder, partly because of increased exertion, and some chemical quality
of the mixture he breathed made him slightly drunk.
The thrumming harp-song stroked and stung him, waking a deeper, darker
music, and suddenly he saw Beudag clearly--half-veiled and mystic in
the candle light at Faolan's dun; smooth curving bronze, her hair loose
fire about her throat. A great stab of agony went through him. He
called her name, once, and the harp-song swept it up and away, and then
suddenly there was no music any more, and no forest, and nothing but
cold embers in Starke's heart.
He could see everything quite clearly in the time it took him to float
from the top of the last tree to the floor of the plain. He had no idea
how long a time that was. It didn't matter. It was one of those moments
when time doesn't have any meaning.
The rim of the forest fell away in a long curve that melted glistening
into the spark-shot sea. From it the plain stretched out, a level
glassy floor of black obsidian, the spew of some long-dead volcano. Or
was it dead? It seemed to Starke that the light here was redder, more
vital, as though he were close to the source from which it sprang.
As he looked farther over the plain, the light seemed to coalesce
into a shimmering curtain that wavered like the heat veils that
dance along the Mercurian Twilight Belt at high noon. For one brief
instant he glimpsed a picture on the curtain--a city, black, shining,
fantastically turreted, the gigantic reflection of a Titan's dream.
Then it was gone, and the immediate menace of the foreground took all
of Starke's attention.
* * * * *
He saw the flock, herded by more of the golden hounds. And he saw the
shepherd, with the harp held silent between his hands.
The flock moved sluggishly, phosphorescently.
One hundred, two hundred silent, limply floating warriors drifting down
the red dimness. In pairs, singly, or in pallid clusters they came. The
golden hounds winged silently, leisurely around them, channeling them
in tides that sluiced toward the fantastic ebon city.
The shepherd stood, a crop of obsidian, turning his shark-pale face.
His sharp, aquamarine eyes found Starke. His silvery hand leapt
beckoning over hard-threads, striking them a blow. Reverberations ran
out, seized Starke, shook him. He dropped his crystal dagger.
Hot screens of fire exploded in his eyes, bubbles whirled and danced in
his eardrums. He lost all muscular control. His dark head fell forward
against the thick blackness of hair on his chest; his golden eyes
dissolved into weak, inane yellow, and his mouth loosened. He wanted to
fight, but it was useless. This shepherd was one of the sea-people he
had come to see, and one way or another he would see him.
Dark blood filled his aching eyes. He felt himself led, nudged, forced
first this way, then that. A golden hound slipped by, gave him a
pressure which roiled him over into a current of sea-blood. It ran down
past where the shepherd stood with only a harp for a weapon.
Starke wondered dimly whether these other warriors in the flock,
drifting, were dead or alive like himself. He had another surprise
coming.
They were all Rann's men. Men of Falga. Silver men with burning green
hair. Rann's men. One of them, a huge warrior colored like powdered
salt, wandered aimlessly by on another tide, his green eyes dull. He
looked dead.
What business had the sea-people with the dead warriors of Falga? Why
the hounds and the shepherd's harp? Questions eddied like lifted silt
in Starke's tired, hanging head. Eddied and settled flat.
Starke joined the pilgrimage.
The hounds with deft flickerings of wings, ushered him into the midst
of the flock. Bodies brushed against him. _Cold_ bodies. He wanted to
cry out. The cords of his neck constricted. In his mind the cry went
forward:
"Are you alive, men of Falga?"
No answer; but the drift of scarred, pale bodies. The eyes in them knew
nothing. They had forgotten Falga. They had forgotten Rann for whom
they had lifted blade. Their tongues lolling in mouths asked nothing
but sleep. They were getting it.
A hundred, two hundred strong they made a strange human river slipping
toward the gigantic city wall. Starke-called-Conan and his bitter
enemies going together. From the corners of his eyes, Starke saw the
shepherd move. The shepherd was like Rann and her people who had years
ago abandoned the sea to live on land. The shepherd seemed colder, more
fish-like, though. There were small translucent webs between the thin
fingers and spanning the long-toed feet. Thin, scar-like gills in the
shadow of his tapered chin, lifted and sealed in the current, eating,
taking sustenance from the blood-colored sea.
The harp spoke and the golden hounds obeyed. The harp spoke and the
bodies twisted uneasily, as in a troubled sleep. A triple chord of it
came straight at Starke. His fingers clenched.
"--and the dead shall walk again--"
Another ironic ripple of music.
"--and Rann's men will rise again, this time against her--"
Starke had time to feel a brief, bewildered shivering, before the
current hurled him forward. Clamoring drunkenly, witlessly, all about
him, the dead, muscleless warriors of Falga, tried to crush past him,
all of them at once....
Long ago some vast sea Titan had dreamed of avenues struck from black
stone. Each stone the size of three men tall. There had been a dream
of walls going up and up until they dissolved into scarlet mist. There
had been another dream of sea-gardens in which fish hung like erotic
flowers, on tendrils of sensitive film-tissue. Whole beds of fish clung
to garden base, like colonies of flowers aglow with sunlight. And on
occasion a black amoebic presence filtered by, playing the gardener,
weeding out an amber flower here, an amythystine bloom there.
And the sea Titan had dreamed of endless balustrades and battlements,
of windowless turrets where creatures swayed like radium-skinned
phantoms, carrying their green plumes of hair in their lifted palms
and looked down with curious, insolent eyes from on high. Women with
shimmering bodies like some incredible coral harvested and kept high
over these black stone streets, each in its archway.
Starke was alone. Falga's warriors had gone off along a dim
subterranean vent, vanished. Now the faint beckoning of harp and the
golden hounds behind him, turned him down a passage that opened out
into a large circular stone room, one end of which opened out into a
hall. Around the ebon ceiling, slender schools of fish swam. It was
their bright effulgence that gave light to the room. They had been
there, breeding, eating, dying, a thousand years, giving light to the
place, and they would be there, breeding and dying, a thousand more.
The harp faded until it was only a murmur.
Starke found his feet. Strength returned to him. He was able to see the
man in the center of the room well. Too well.
The man hung in the fire tide. Chains of wrought bronze held his thin
fleshless ankles so he couldn't escape. His body desired it. It floated
up.
It had been dead a long time. It was gaseous with decomposition and
it wanted to rise to the surface of the Red Sea. The chains prevented
this. Its arms weaved like white scarves before a sunken white face.
Black hair trembled on end.
* * * * *
He was one of Faolan's men. One of the Rovers. One of those who had
gone down at Falga because of Conan.
His name was Geil.
Starke remembered.
The part of him that was Conan remembered the name.
The dead lips moved.
"Conan. What luck is this! Conan. I make you welcome."
The words were cruel, the lips around them loose and dead. It seemed to
Starke an anger and embittered wrath lay deep in those hollow eyes. The
lips twitched again.
"I went down at Falga for you and Rann, Conan. Remember?"
Part of Starke remembered and twisted in agony.
"We're all here, Conan. All of us. Clev and Mannt and Bron and Aesur.
Remember Aesur, who could shape metal over his spine, prying it with
his fingers? Aesur is here, big as a sea-monster, waiting in a niche,
cold and loose as string. The sea-shepherds collected us. Collected us
for a purpose of irony. Look!"
The boneless fingers hung out, as in a wind, pointing.
Starke turned slowly, and his heart pounded an uneven, shattering drum
beat. His jaw clinched and his eyes blurred. That part of him that
was Conan cried out. Conan was so much of him and he so much of Conan
it was impossible for a cleavage. They'd grown together like pearl
material around sand-specule, layer on layer. Starke cried out.
In the hall which this circular room overlooked, stood a thousand men.
In lines of fifty across, shoulder to shoulder, the men of Crom Dhu
stared unseeingly up at Starke. Here and there a face became shockingly
familiar. Old memory cried their names.
"Bron! Clev! Mannt! Aesur!"
The collected decomposition of their bodily fluids raised them, drifted
them above the flaggings. Each of them was chained, like Geil.
Geil whispered. "We have made a union with the men of Falga!"
Starke pulled back.
"Falga!"
"In death, all men are equals." He took his time with it. He was in no
hurry. Dead bodies under-sea are never in a hurry. They sort of bump
and drift and bide their time. "The dead serve those who give them a
semblance of life. Tomorrow we march against Crom Dhu."
"You're crazy! Crom Dhu is _your_ home! It's the place of Beudag and
Faolan--"
"And--" interrupted the hanging corpse, quietly, "Conan? Eh?" He
laughed. A crystal dribble of bubbles ran up from the slack mouth.
"Especially Conan. Conan who sank us at Falga...."
Starke moved swiftly. Nobody stopped him. He had the corpse's short
blade in an instant. Geil's chest made a cold, silent sheathe for it.
The blade went like a fork through butter.
Coldly, without noticing this, Geil's voice spoke out:
"Stab me, cut me. You can't kill me any deader. Make sections of me.
Play butcher. A flank, a hand, a heart! And while you're at it, I'll
tell you the plan."
Snarling, Starke seized the blade out again. With blind violence he
gave sharp blow after blow at the body, cursing bitterly, and the body
took each blow, rocking in the red tide a little, and said with a
matter-of-fact tone:
"We'll march out of the sea to Crom Dhu's gates. Romna and the others,
looking down, recognizing us, will have the gates thrown wide to
welcome us." The head tilted lazily, the lips peeled wide and folded
down languidly over the words. "Think of the elation, Conan! The moment
when Bron and Mannt and Aesur and I and yourself, yes, even yourself,
Conan, return to Crom Dhu!"
* * * * *
Starke saw it, vividly. Saw it like a tapestry woven for him. He stood
back, gasping for breath, his nostrils flaring, seeing what his blade
had done to Geil's body, and seeing the great stone gates of Crom Dhu
crashing open. The deliberation. The happiness, the elation to Faolan
and Romna to see old friends returned. Old Rovers, long thought dead.
Alive again, come to help! It made a picture!
With great deliberation, Starke struck flat across before him.
Geil's head, severed from its lazy body, began, with infinite
tiredness, to float toward the ceiling. As it traveled upward, now
facing, now bobbling the back of its skull toward Starke, it finished
its nightmare speaking:
"And then, once inside the gates, what then, Conan? Can you guess? Can
you guess what we'll do, Conan?"
Starke stared at nothingness, the sword trembling in his fist. From far
away he heard Geil's voice:
"--we will kill Faolan in his hall. He will die with surprised lips.
Romna's harp will lie in his disemboweled stomach. His heart with its
last pulsings will sound the strings. And as for Beudag--"
Starke tried to push the thoughts away, raging and helpless. Geil's
body was no longer anything to look at. He had done all he could to
it. Starke's face was bleached white and scraped down to the insane
bone of it, "You'd kill your own people!"
Geil's separated head lingered at the ceiling, light-fish illuminating
its ghastly features. "Our people? But we have no people! We're another
race now. The dead. We do the biddings of the sea-shepherds."
Starke looked out into the hall, then he looked at the circular wall.
"Okay," he said, without tone in his voice. "Come out. Where ever
you're hiding and using this voice-throwing act. Come on out and talk
straight."
In answer, an entire section of ebon stones fell back on silent
hingework. Starke saw a long slender black marble table. Six people sat
behind it in carven midnight thrones.
They were all men. Naked except for film-like garments about their
loins. They looked at Starke with no particular hatred or curiosity.
One of them cradled a harp. It was the shepherd who'd drawn Starke
through the gate. Amusedly, his webbed fingers lay on the strings, now
and then bringing out a clear sound from one of the two hundred strands.
The shepherd stopped Starke's rush forward with a cry of that harp!
The blade in his hand was red hot. He dropped it.
The shepherd put a head on the story. "And then? And then we will march
Rann's dead warriors all the way to Falga. There, Rann's people, seeing
the warriors, will be overjoyed, hysterical to find their friends and
relatives returned. They, too, will fling wide Falga's defenses. And
death will walk in, disguised as resurrection."
Starke nodded, slowly, wiping his hand across his cheek. "Back on Earth
we call that psychology. _Good_ psychology. But will it fool Rann?"
"Rann will be with her ships at Crom Dhu. While she's gone, the
innocent population will let in their lost warriors gladly." The
shepherd had amused green eyes. He looked like a youth of some
seventeen years. Deceptively young. If Starke guessed right, the youth
was nearer to two centuries old. That's how you lived and looked when
you were under the Red Sea. Something about the emanations of it kept
part of you young.
Starke lidded his yellow hawks' eyes thoughtfully. "You've got all
aces. You'll win. But what's Crom Dhu to you? Why not just Rann? She's
one of you, you hate her more than you do the Rovers. Her ancestors
came up on land, you never got over hating them for that--"
The shepherd shrugged. "Toward Crom Dhu we have little actual hatred.
Except that they are by nature land-men, even if they do rove by boat,
and pillagers. One day they might try their luck on the sunken devices
of this city."
Starke put a hand out. "We're fighting Rann, too. Don't forget, we're
on your side!"
"Whereas we are on no one's," retorted the green-haired youth, "Except
our own. Welcome to the army which will attack Crom Dhu."
"Me! By the gods, over my dead body!"
"That," said the youth, amusedly, "is what we intend. We've worked many
years, you see, to perfect the plan. We're not much good out on land.
We needed bodies that could do the work for us. So, every time Faolan
lost a ship or Rann lost a ship, we were there, with our golden hounds,
waiting. Collecting. Saving. Waiting until we had enough of each side's
warriors. They'll do the fighting for us. Oh, not for long, of course.
The Source energy will give them a semblance of life, a momentary
electrical ability of walk and combat, but once out of water they'll
last only half an hour. But that should be time enough once the gates
of Crom Dhu and Falga are open."
* * * * *
Starke said, "Rann will find some way around you. Get her first. Attack
Crom Dhu the following day."
The youth deliberated. "You're stalling. But there's sense in it. Rann
is most important. We'll get Falga first, then. You'll have a bit of
time in which to raise false hopes."
Starke began to get sick again. The room swam.
Very quietly, very easily, Rann came into his mind again. He felt her
glide in like the merest touch of a sea fern weaving in a tide pool.
He closed his mind down, but not before she snatched at a shred of
thought. Her aquamarine eyes reflected desire and inquiry.
"Hugh Starke, you're with the sea people?"
Her voice was soft. He shook his head.
"Tell me, Hugh Starke. How are you plotting against Falga?"
He said nothing. He thought nothing. He shut his eyes.
Her fingernails glittered, raking at his mind. "Tell me!"
His thoughts rolled tightly into a metal sphere which nothing could
dent.
Rann laughed unpleasantly and leaned forward until she filled every
dark horizon of his skull with her shimmering body. "All right. I
_gave_ you Conan's body. Now I'll take it away."
She struck him a combined blow of her eyes, her writhing lips, her
bone-sharp teeth. "Go back to your old body, go back to your old body,
Hugh Starke," she hissed. "Go back! Leave Conan to his idiocy. Go back
to your old body!"
Fear had him. He fell down upon his face, quivering and jerking. You
could fight a man with a sword. But how could you fight this thing in
your brain? He began to suck sobbing breaths through his lips. He was
screaming. He could not hear himself. Her voice rushed in from the dim
outer red universe, destroying him.
"Hugh Starke! Go back to your old body!"
His old body was--dead!
And she was sending him back into it.
Part of him shot endwise through red fog.
He lay on a mountain plateau overlooking the harbor of Falga.
Red fog coiled and snaked around him. Flame birds dived eerily down at
his staring, blind eyes.
His old body held him.
Putrefaction stuffed his nostrils. The flesh sagged and slipped
greasily on his loosened structure. He felt small again and ugly. Flame
birds nibbled, picking, choosing between his ribs. Pain gorged him.
Cold, blackness, nothingness filled him. Back in his old body. Forever.
He didn't want that.
The plateau, the red fog vanished. The flame birds, too.
He lay once more on the floor of the sea shepherds, struggling.
"That was just a start," Rann told him. "Next time, I'll leave you up
there on the plateau in that body. _Now_, will you tell the plans of
the sea people? And go on living in Conan? He's yours, if you tell."
She smirked. "You don't want to be dead."
Starke tried to reason it out. Any way he turned was the wrong way. He
grunted out a breath. "If I tell, you'll still kill Beudag."
"Her life in exchange for what you know, Hugh Starke."
Her answer was too swift. It had the sound of treachery. Starke did not
believe. He would die. That would solve it. Then, at least, Rann would
die when the sea people carried out their strategy. That much revenge,
at least, damn it.
Then he got the idea.
He coughed out a laugh, raised his weak head to look at the startled
sea shepherd. His little dialogue with Rann had taken about ten
seconds, actually, but it had seemed a century. The sea shepherd
stepped forward.
Starke tried to get to his feet. "Got--got a proposition for you. You
with the harp. Rann's inside me. _Now._ Unless you guarantee Crom Dhu
and Beudag's safety, I'll tell her some things she might want to be in
on!"
The sea shepherd drew a knife.
Starke shook his head, coldly. "Put it away. Even if you get me I'll
give the whole damned strategy to Rann."
The shepherd dropped his hand. He was no fool.
Rann tore at Starke's brain. "Tell me! Tell me their plan!"
He felt like a guy in a revolving door. Starke got the sea men in
focus. He saw that they were afraid now, doubtful and nervous. "I'll be
dead in a minute," said Starke. "Promise me the safety of Crom Dhu and
I'll die without telling Rann a thing."
The sea shepherd hesitated, then raised his palm upward. "I promise,"
he said. "Crom Dhu will go untouched."
Starke sighed. He let his head fall forward until it hit the floor.
Then he rolled over, put his hands over his eyes. "It's a deal. Go give
Rann hell for me, will you, boys? Give her hell!"
As he drifted into mind darkness, Rann waited for him. Feebly, he told
her. "Okay, duchess. You'd kill me even if I'd told you the idea. I'm
ready. Try your god-awfullest to shove me back into that stinking body
of mine. I'll fight you all the way there!"
Rann screamed. It was a pretty frustrated scream. Then the pains began.
She did a lot of work on his mind in the next minute.
That part of him that was Conan held on like a clam holding to its
precious contents.
The odor of putrid flesh returned. The blood mist returned. The flame
birds fell down at him in spirals of sparks and blistering smoke, to
winnow his naked ribs.
Starke spoke one last word before the blackness took him.
"Beudag."
* * * * *
He never expected to awaken again.
He awoke just the same.
There was red sea all around him. He lay on a kind of stone bed, and
the young sea shepherd sat beside him, looking down at him, smiling
delicately.
Starke did not dare move for a while. He was afraid his head might
fall off and whirl away like a big fish, using its ears as propellers.
"Lord," he muttered, barely turning his head.
The sea creature stirred. "You won. You fought Rann, and won."
Starke groaned. "I feel like something passed through a wild-cat's
intestines. She's gone. Rann's gone." He laughed. "That makes me sad.
Somebody cheer me up. Rann's gone." He felt of his big, flat-muscled
body. "She was bluffing. Trying to drive me batty. She knew she
couldn't really tuck me back into that carcass, but she didn't want me
to know. It was like a baby's nightmare before it's born. Or maybe you
haven't got a memory like me." He rolled over, stretching. "She won't
ever get in my head again. I've locked the gate and swallowed the key."
His eyes dilated. "What's _your_ name?"
"Linnl," said the man with the harp. "You didn't tell Rann our
strategy?"
"What do _you_ think?"
Linnl smiled sincerely. "I think I like you, man of Crom Dhu. I think
I like your hatred for Rann. I think I like the way you handled the
entire matter, wanted to kill Rann and save Crom Dhu, and being so
willing to die to accomplish either."
"That's a lot of thinking. Yeah, and what about that promise you made?"
"It will be kept."
Starke gave him a hand. "Linnl, you're okay. If I ever get back to
Earth, so help me, I'll never bait a hook again and drop it in the
sea." It was lost to Linnl. Starke forgot it, and went on, laughing.
There was an edge of hysteria to it. Relief. You got booted around
for days, people milled in and out of your mind like it was a bargain
basement counter, pawing over the treads and convolutions, yelling
and fighting; the woman you loved was starved on a ship masthead, and
as a climax a lady with green eyes tried to make you a filling for an
accident-mangled body. And now you had an ally.
And you couldn't believe it.
He laughed in little starts and stops, his eyes shut.
"Will you let me take care of Rann when the time comes?"
His fingers groped hungrily upward, closed on an imaginary figure of
her, pressed, tightened, choked.
Linnl said, "She's yours. I'd like the pleasure, but you have as much
if not more of a revenge to take. Come along. We start now. You've been
asleep for one entire period."
Starke let himself down gingerly. He didn't want to break a leg off. He
felt if someone touched him he might disintegrate.
He managed to let the tide handle him, do all the work. He swam
carefully after Linnl down three passageways where an occasional silver
inhabitant of the city slid by.
Drifting below them in a vast square hall, each gravitating but
imprisoned by leg-shackles, the warriors of Falga looked up with pale
cold eyes at Starke and Linnl. Occasional discharges of light-fish from
interstices in the walls, passed luminous, fleeting glows over the
warriors. The light-fish flirted briefly in a long shining rope that
tied knots around the dead faces and as quickly untied them. Then the
light-fish pulsed away and the red color of the sea took over.
Bathed in wine, thought Starke, without humor. He leaned forward.
"Men of Falga!"
Linnl plucked a series of harp-threads.
"Aye." A deep suggestion of sound issued from a thousand dead lips.
"We go to sack Rann's citadel!"
"Rann!" came the muffled thunder of voices.
At the sound of another tune, the golden hounds appeared. They touched
the chains. The men of Falga, released, danced through the red sea
substance.
Siphoned into a valve mouth, they were drawn out into a great volcanic
courtyard. Starke went close after. He stared down into a black ravine,
at the bottom of which was a blazing caldera.
This was the Source Life of the Red Sea. Here it had begun a millennium
ago. Here the savage cyclones of sparks and fire energy belched up,
shaking titanic black garden walls, causing currents and whirlpools
that threatened to suck you forward and shoot you violently up to the
surface, in cannulas of force, thrust, in capillaries of ignited mist,
in chutes of color that threatened to cremate but only exhilarated you,
gave you a seething rebirth!
He braced his legs and fought the suction. An unbelievable sinew of
fire sprang up from out the ravine, crackling and roaring.
The men of Falga did not fight the attraction.
They moved forward in their silence and hung over the incandescence.
The vitality of the Source grew upward in them. It seemed to touch
their sandaled toes first, and then by a process of shining osmosis,
climb up the limbs, into the loins, into the vitals, delineating their
strong bone structure as mercury delineates the glass thermometer with
a rise of temperature. The bones flickered like carved polished ivory
through the momentarily film-like flesh. The ribs of a thousand men
expanded like silvered spider legs, clenched, then expanded again.
Their spines straightened, their shoulders flattened back. Their eyes,
the last to take the fire, now were ignited and glowed like candles in
refurbished sepulchers. The chins snapped up, the entire outer skins of
their bodies broke into silver brilliance.
Swimming through the storm of energy like nightmare figments, entering
cold, they reached the far side of the ravine resembling smelted metal
from blast furnaces. When they brushed into one another, purple sparks
sizzled, jumped from head to head, from hand to hand.
Linnl touched Starke's arm. "You're next."
"No thank you."
"Afraid?" laughed the harp-shepherd. "You're tired. It will give you
new life. You're next."
* * * * *
Starke hesitated only a moment. Then he let the tide drift him rapidly
out. He was afraid. Damned afraid. A belch of fire caught him as he
arrived in the core of the ravine. He was wrapped in layers of ecstasy.
Beudag pressed against him. It was her consuming hair that netted him
and branded him. It was her warmth that crept up his body into his
chest and into his head. Somebody yelled somewhere in animal delight
and unbearable passion. Somebody danced and threw out his hands and
crushed that solar warmth deeper into his huge body. Somebody felt
all tiredness, oldness flumed away, a whole new feeling of warmth and
strength inserted.
That somebody was Starke.
Waiting on the other side of the ravine were a thousand men of Falga.
What sounded like a thousand harps began playing now, and as Starke
reached the other side, the harps began marching, and the warriors
marched with them. They were still dead, but you would never know
it. There were no minds inside those bodies. The bodies were being
activated from outside. But you would never know it.
They left the city behind. In embering ranks, the soldier-fighters
were led by golden hounds and distant harps to a place where a huge
intra-coastal tide swept by.
They got on the tide for a free ride. Linnl beside him, using his harp,
Starke felt himself sucked down through a deep where strange monsters
sprawled. They looked at Starke with hungry eyes. But the harp wall
swept them back.
[Illustration: _The dead warriors of Falga moved silently to battle._]
Starke glanced about at the men. They don't know what they're doing, he
thought. Going home to kill their parents and their children, to set
the flame to Falga, and they don't know it. Their alive-but-dead faces
tilted up, always upward, as though visions of Rann's citadel were
there.
Rann. Starke let the wrath simmer in him. He let it cool. Then it was
cold. Rann hadn't bothered him now for hours. Was there a chance she'd
read his thought in the midst of that fighting nightmare? Did she know
this plan for Falga? Was that an explanation for her silence now?
He sent his mind ahead, subtly. _Rann. Rann._ The only answer was the
move of silver bodies through the fiery deeps.
Just before dawn they broke the surface of the sea.
Falga drowsed in the red-smeared fog silence. Its slave streets were
empty and dew-covered. High up, the first light was bathing Rann's
gardens and setting her citadel aglow.
Linnl lay in the shallows beside Starke. They both were smiling
half-cruel smiles. They had waited long for this.
Linnl nodded. "This is the day of the carnival. Fruit, wine and love
will be offered the returned soldiers of Rann. In the streets there'll
be dancing."
Far over to the right lay a rise of mountain. At its blunt peak--Starke
stared at it intently--rested a body of a little, scrawny Earthman,
with flame-birds clustered on it. He'd climb that mountain later. When
it was over and there was time.
"What are you searching for?" asked Linnl.
Starke's voice was distant. "Someone I used to know."
Filing out on the stone quays, their rustling sandals eroded by time,
the men stood clean and bright. Starke paced, a caged animal, at their
center, so his dark body would pass unnoticed.
They were seen.
The cliff guard looked down over the dirty slave dwellings, from their
arrow galleries, and set up a cry. Hands waved, pointed frosty white
in the dawn. More guards loped down the ramps and galleries, meeting,
joining others and coming on.
Linnl, in the sea by the quay, suggested a theme on the harp. The other
harps took it up. The shuddering music lifted from the water and with
a gentle firmness, set the dead feet marching down the quays, upward
through the narrow, stifling alleys of the slaves, to meet the guard.
Slave people peered out at them tiredly from their choked quarters. The
passing of warriors was old to them, of no significance.
These warriors carried no weapons. Starke didn't like that part of it.
A length of chain even, he wanted. But this emptiness of the hands.
His teeth ached from too long a time of clenching his jaws tight. The
muscles of his arms were feverish and nervous.
At the edge of the slave community, at the cliff base, the guard
confronted them. Running down off the galleries, swords naked, they ran
to intercept what they took to be an enemy.
The guards stopped in blank confusion.
* * * * *
A little laugh escaped Starke's lips. It was a dream. With fog over,
under and in between its parts. It wasn't real to the guard, who
couldn't believe it. It wasn't real to these dead men either, who were
walking around. He felt alone. He was the only live one. He didn't like
walking with dead men.
The captain of the guard came down warily, his green eyes suspicious.
The suspicion faded. His face fell apart. He had lain on his fur pelts
for months thinking of his son who had died to defend Falga.
Now his son stood before him. Alive.
The captain forgot he was captain. He forgot everything. His sandals
scraped over stones. You could hear the air go out of his lungs and
come back in in a numbed prayer.
"My son! In Rann's name. They said you were slain by Faolan's men one
hundred darknesses ago. My son!"
A harp tinkled somewhere.
The son stepped forward, smiling.
They embraced. The son said nothing. He couldn't speak.
This was the signal for the others. The whole guard, shocked and
surprised, put away their swords and sought out old friends, brothers,
fathers, uncles, sons!
They moved up the galleries, the guard and the returned warriors,
Starke in their midst. Threading up the cliff, through passage after
passage, all talking at once. Or so it seemed. The guards did the
talking. None of the dead warriors replied. They only _seemed_ to.
Starke heard the music strong and clear everywhere.
They reached the green gardens atop the cliff. By this time the entire
city was awake. Women came running, bare-breasted and sobbing, and
throwing themselves forward into the ranks of their lovers. Flowers
showered over them.
"So this is war," muttered Starke, uneasily.
They stopped in the center of the great gardens. The crowd milled
happily, not yet aware of the strange silence from their men. They were
too happy to notice.
"Now," cried Starke to himself. "Now's the time. Now!"
As if in answer, a wild skirling of harps out of the sky.
The crowd stopped laughing only when the returned warriors of Falga
swept forward, their hands lifted and groping before them....
The crying in the streets was like a far siren wailing. Metal made a
harsh clangor that was sheathed in silence at the same moment metal
found flesh to lie in. A vicious pantomime was concluded in the green
moist gardens.
Starke watched from Rann's empty citadel. Fog plumes strolled by the
archways and a thick rain fell. It came like a blood squall and washed
the garden below until you could not tell rain from blood.
The returned warriors had gotten their swords by now. First they killed
those nearest them in the celebration. Then they took the weapons from
the victims. It was very simple and very unpleasant.
The slaves had joined battle now. Swarming up from the slave town,
plucking up fallen daggers and short swords, they circled the gardens,
happening upon the arrogant shining warriors of Rann who had so far
escaped the quiet, deadly killing of the alive-but-dead men.
Dead father killed startled, alive son. Dead brother garroted
unbelieving brother. Carnival indeed in Falga.
An old man waited alone. Starke saw him. The old man had a weapon, but
refused to use it. A young warrior of Falga, harped on by Linnl's harp,
walked quietly up to the old man. The old man cried out. His mouth
formed words. "Son! What _is_ this?" He flung down his blade and made
to plead with his boy.
The son stabbed him with silent efficiency, and without a glance at the
body, walked onward to find another.
Starke turned away, sick and cold.
A thousand such scenes were being finished.
He set fire to the black spider-silk tapestries. They whispered and
talked with flame. The stone echoed his feet as he searched room after
room. Rann had gone, probably last night. That meant that Crom Dhu
was on the verge of falling. Was Faolan dead? Had the people of Crom
Dhu, seeing Beudag's suffering, given in? Falga's harbor was completely
devoid of ships, except for small fishing skiffs.
The fog waited him when he returned to the garden. Rain found his face.
The citadel of Rann was fire-encrusted and smoke shrouded as he looked
up at it.
A silence lay in the garden. The fight was over.
The men of Falga, still shining with Source-Life, hung their blades
from uncomprehending fingers, the light beginning to leave their green
eyes. Their skin looked dirty and dull.
Starke wasted no time getting down the galleries, through the slave
quarter, and to the quays again.
Linnl awaited him, gently petting the obedient harp.
"It's over. The slaves will own what's left. They'll be our allies,
since we've freed them."
Starke didn't hear. He was squinting off over the Red Sea.
Linnl understood. He plucked two tones from the harp, which pronounced
the two words uppermost in Starke's thought.
"Crom Dhu."
"If we're not too late." Starke leaned forward. "If Faolan lives. If
Beudag still stands at the masthead."
Like a blind man he walked straight ahead, until he fell into the sea.
* * * * *
It was not quite a million miles to Crom Dhu. It only seemed that far.
A sweep of tide picked them up just off shore from Falga and siphoned
them rapidly, through deeps along coastal latitudes, through crystal
forests. He cursed every mile of the way.
He cursed the time it took to pause at the Titan's city to gather fresh
men. To gather Clev and Mannt and Aesur and Bruce. Impatiently, Starke
watched the whole drama of the Source-Fire and the bodies again. This
time it was the bodies of Crom Dhu men, hung like beasts on slow-turned
spits, their limbs and vitals soaking through and through, their
skins taking bronze color, their eyes holding flint-sparks. And then
the harps wove a garment around each, and the garment moved the men
instead of the men the garment.
In the tidal basilic now, Starke twisted. Coursing behind him were the
new bodies of Clev and Aesur! The current elevated them, poked them
through obsidian needle-eyes like spider-silk threads.
There was good irony in this. Crom Dhu's men, fallen at Falga under
Conan's treachery, returned now under Conan, to exonerate that
treachery.
Suddenly they were in Crom Dhu's outer basin. Shadows swept over them.
The long dark falling shadows of Falga's longboats lying in that
harbor. Shadows like black culling-nets let down. The school of men
cleaved the shadow nets. The tide ceased here, eddied and distilled
them.
Starke glared up at the immense silver bottom of a Falgian ship. He
felt his face stiffen and his throat tighten. Then, flexing knees, he
rammed upward, night air broke dark red around his head.
The harbor held flare torches on the rims of long ships. On the neck
of land that led from Crom Dhu to the mainland the continuing battle
sounded. Faint cries and clashing made their way through the fog veils.
They sounded like echoes of past dreams.
Linnl let Starke have the leash. Starke felt something pressed into his
fist. A coil of slender green woven reeds, a rope with hooked weights
on the end of it. He knew how to use it without asking. But he wished
for a knife, now, even though he realized carrying a knife in the sea
was all but impossible if you wanted to move fast.
He saw the sleek naked figurehead of Rann's best ship a hundred yards
away, a floating silhouette, its torches hanging fire like Beudag's
hair.
He swam toward it, breathing quietly. When at last the silvered
figurehead with the mocking green eyes and the flag of shoal-shallow
hair hung over him, he felt the cool white ship metal kiss his fingers.
The smell of torch-smoke lingered. A rise of faint shouts from the
land told of another rush upon the Gate. Behind him--a ripple. Then--a
thousand ripples.
The resurrected men of Crom Dhu rose in dents and stirrings of
sparkling wine. They stared at Crom Dhu and maybe they knew what it
was and maybe they didn't. For one moment, Starke felt apprehension.
Suppose Linnl was playing a game. Suppose, once these men had won the
battle, they went on into Crom Dhu, to rupture Romna's harp and make
Faolan the blinder? He shook the thought away. That would have to be
handled in time. On either side of him Clev and Mannt appeared. They
looked at Crom Dhu, their lips shut. Maybe they saw Faolan's eyrie and
heard a harp that was more than these harps that sang them to blade and
plunder--Romna's instrument telling bard-tales of the rovers and the
coastal wars and the old, living days. Their eyes looked and looked at
Crom Dhu, but saw nothing.
The sea shepherds appeared now; the followers of Linnl, each with his
harp and the harp music began, high. So high you couldn't hear it. It
wove a tension on the air.
Silently, with a grim certainty, the dead-but-not-dead gathered in a
bronze circle about Rann's ship. The very silence of their encirclement
made your skin crawl and sweat break cold on your cheeks.
A dozen ropes went raveling, looping over the ship side. They caught,
held, grapnelled, hooked.
Starke had thrown his, felt it bite and hold. Now he scrambled swiftly,
cursing, up its length, kicking and slipping at the silver hull.
He reached the top.
Beudag was there.
Half over the low rail he hesitated, just looking at her.
* * * * *
Torchlight limned her, shadowed her. She was still erect; her head was
tired and her eyes were closed, her face thinned and less brown, but
she was still alive. She was coming out of a deep stupor now, at the
whistle of ropes and the grate of metal hooks on the deck.
She saw Starke and her lips parted. She did not look away from him. His
breath came out of him, choking.
It almost cost him his life, his standing there, looking at her.
A guard, with flesh like new snow, shafted his bow from the turret and
let it loose. A chain lay on deck. Thankfully, Starke took it.
Clev came over the rail beside Starke. His chest took the arrow. The
shaft burst half through and stopped, held. Clev kept going after the
man who had shot it. He caught up with him.
Beudag cried out. "Behind you, Conan!"
Conan! In her excitement, she gave the old name.
Conan he _was_. Whirling, he confronted a wiry little fellow, chained
him brutally across the face, seized the man's falling sword, used it
on him. Then he walked in, got the man's jaw, unbalanced him over into
the sea.
The ship was awake now. Most of the men had been down below, resting
from the battles. Now they came pouring up, in a silver spate. Their
yelling was in strange contrast to the calm silence of Crom Dhu's men.
Starke found himself busy.
Conan had been a healthy animal, with great recuperative powers. Now
his muscles responded to every trick asked of them. Starke leaped
cleanly across the deck, watching for Rann, but she was no where to be
seen. He engaged two blades, dispatched one of them. More ropes raveled
high and snaked him. Every ship in the harbor was exploding with
violence. More men swarmed over the rail behind Starke, silently.
Above the shouting, Beudag's voice came, at sight of the fighting men.
"Clev! Mannt! Aesur!"
Starke was a god, anything he wanted he could have. A man's head? He
could have it. It meant acting the guillotine with knife and wrist
and lunged body. Like--_this_! His eyes were smoking amber and there
were deep lines of grim pleasure tugging at his lips. An enemy cannot
fight without hands. One man, facing Starke, suddenly displayed violent
stumps before his face, not believing them.
Are you watching, Faolan, cried Starke inside himself, delivering
blows. Look here, Faolan! God, no, you're blind. _Listen_ then! Hear
the ring of steel on steel. Does the smell of hot blood and hot bodies
reach you? Oh, if you could see this tonight, Faolan. Falga would
be forgotten. This is Conan, out of idiocy, with a guy named Starke
wearing him and telling him where to go!
It was not safe on deck. Starke hadn't particularly noticed before, but
the warriors of Crom Dhu didn't care whom they attacked now. They were
beginning to do surgery to one another. They excised one another's
shoulders, severed limbs in blind instantaneous obedience. This was no
place for Beudag and himself.
He cut her free of the masthead, drew her quickly to the rail.
Beudag was laughing. She could do nothing but laugh. Her eyes were
shocked. She saw dead men alive again, lashing out with weapons; she
had been starved and made to stand night and day, and now she could
only laugh.
Starke shook her.
She did not stop laughing.
"Beudag! You're all right. You're free."
She stared at nothing. "I'll--I'll be all right in a minute."
He had to ward off a blow from one of his own men. He parried the
thrust, then got in and pushed the man off the deck, over into the sea.
That was the only thing to do. You couldn't kill them.
Beudag stared down at the tumbling body.
"Where's Rann?" Starke's yellow eyes narrowed, searching.
"She _was_ here." Beudag trembled.
Rann looked out of her eyes. Out of the tired numbness of Beudag, an
echo of Rann. Rann was nearby, and this was her doing.
Instinctively, Starke raised his eyes.
Rann appeared at the masthead, like a flurry of snow. Her green-tipped
breasts were rising and falling with emotion. Pure hatred lay in her
eyes. Starke licked his lips and readied his sword.
Rann snapped a glance at Beudag. Stooping, as in a dream, Beudag picked
up a dagger and held it to her own breast.
Starke froze.
Rann nodded, with satisfaction. "Well, Starke? How will it be? Will you
come at me and have Beudag die? Or will you let me go free?"
Starke's palms felt sweaty and greasy. "There's no place for you to go.
Falga's taken. I can't guarantee your freedom. If you want to go over
the side, into the sea, that's your chance. You might make shore and
your own men."
"Swimming? With the sea-_beasts_ waiting?" She accented the _beasts_
heavily. She was one of the sea-_people_. They, Linnl and his men, were
sea-_beasts_. "No, Hugh Starke. I'll take a skiff. Put Beudag at the
rail where I can watch her all the way. Guarantee my passage to shore
and my own men there, and Beudag lives."
Starke waved his sword. "Get going."
He didn't want to let her go. He had other plans, good plans for
her. He shouted the deal down at Linnl. Linnl nodded back, with much
reluctance.
Rann, in a small silver skiff, headed toward land. She handled the
boat and looked back at Beudag all the while. She passed through the
sea-beasts and touched the shore. She lifted her hand and brought it
smashing down.
Whirling, Starke swung his fist against Beudag's jaw. Her hand was
already striking the blade into her breast. Her head flopped back.
His fist carried through. She fell. The blade clattered. He kicked it
overboard. Then he lifted Beudag. She was warm and good to hold. The
blade had only pricked her breast. A small rivulet of blood ran.
On the shore, Rann vanished upward on the rocks, hurrying to find her
men.
In the harbor the harp music paused. The ships were taken. Their crews
lay filling the decks. Crom Dhu's men stopped fighting as quickly as
they'd started. Some of the bright shining had dulled from the bronze
of their arms and bare torsos. The ships began to sink.
Linnl swam below, looking up at Starke. Starke looked back at him and
nodded at the beach. "Swell. Now, let's go get that she-devil," he said.
* * * * *
Faolan waited on his great stone balcony, overlooking Crom Dhu. Behind
him the fires blazed high and their eating sound of flame on wood
filled the pillared gloom with sound and furious light.
Faolan leaned against the rim, his chest swathed in bandage and healing
ointment, his blind eyes flickering, looking down again and again with
a fixed intensity, his head tilted to listen.
Romna stood beside him, filled and refilled the cup that Faolan
emptied into his thirsty mouth, and told him what happened. Told of
the men pouring out of the sea, and Rann appearing on the rocky shore.
Sometimes Faolan leaned to one side, weakly, toward Romna's words.
Sometimes he twisted to hear the thing itself, the thing that happened
down beyond the Gate of besieged Falga.
Romna's harp lay untouched. He didn't play it. He didn't need to. From
below, a great echoing of harps, more liquid than his, like a waterfall
drenched the city, making the fog sob down red tears.
"Are those harps?" cried Faolan.
"Yes, harps!"
"What was that?" Faolan listened, breathing harshly, clutching for
support.
"A skirmish," said Romna.
"Who won?"
"_We_ won."
"And _that_?" Faolan's blind eyes tried to see until they watered.
"The enemy falling back from the Gate!"
"And that sound, and that sound!" Faolan went on and on, feverishly,
turning this way and that, the lines of his face agonized and attentive
to each eddy and current and change of tide. The rhythm of swords
through fog and body was a complicated music whose themes he must
recognize. "Another fell! I heard him cry. And another of Rann's men!"
"Yes," said Romna.
"But why do our warriors fight so quietly? I've heard nothing from
their lips. So quiet."
Romna scowled. "Quiet. Yes--quiet."
"And where did they come from? All our men are in the city?"
"Aye." Romna shifted. He hesitated, squinting. He rubbed his bulldog
jaw. "Except those that died at--Falga."
Faolan stood there a moment. Then he rapped his empty cup.
"More wine, bard. More wine."
He turned to the battle again.
"Oh, gods, if I could see it, if I could only see it!"
Below, a ringing crash. A silence. A shouting, a pouring of noise.
"The Gate!" Faolan was stricken with fear. "We've lost! My sword!"
"Stay, Faolan!" Romna laughed. Then he sighed. It was a sigh that did
not believe. "In the name of ten thousand mighty gods. Would that I
were blind now, or could see better."
Faolan's hand caught, held him. "What _is_ it? Tell!"
"Clev! And Tlan! And Conan! And Blucc! And Mannt! Standing in the gate,
like wine visions! Swords in their hands!"
Faolan's hand relaxed, then tightened. "Speak their names again, and
speak them slowly. And tell the truth." His skin shivered like that of
a nervous animal. "You said--Clev? Mannt? Blucc?"
"And Tlan! And Conan! Back from Falga. They've opened the Gate and the
battle's won. It's over, Faolan. Crom Dhu will sleep tonight."
Faolan let him go. A sob broke from his lips. "I will get drunk.
Drunker than ever in my life. Gloriously drunk. Gods, but if I could
have seen it. Been in it. Tell me again of it, Romna...."
* * * * *
Faolan sat in the great hall, on his carved high-seat, waiting.
The pad of sandals on stone, outside, the jangle of chains.
A door flung wide, red fog sluiced in, and in the sluice, people
walking. Faolan started up. "Clev? Mannt? Aesur!"
Starke came forward into the firelight. He pressed his right hand to
the open mouth of the wound on his thigh. "No, Faolan. Myself and two
others."
"Beudag?"
"Yes." And Beudag came wearily to him.
Faolan stared. "Who's the other? It walks light. It's a woman."
Starke nodded. "Rann."
Faolan rose carefully from his seat. He thought the name over. He took
a short sword from a place beside the high seat. He stepped down. He
walked toward Starke. "You brought Rann alive to me?"
Starke pulled the chain that bound Rann. She ran forward in little
steps, her white face down, her eyes slitted with animal fury.
"Faolan's blind," said Starke. "I let you live for one damned good
reason, Rann. Okay, go ahead."
Faolan stopped walking, curious. He waited.
Rann did nothing.
Starke took her hand and wrenched it behind her back. "I said 'go
ahead.' Maybe you didn't hear me."
"I will," she gasped, in pain.
Starke released her. "Tell me what happens, Faolan."
Rann gazed steadily at Faolan's tall figure there in the light.
Faolan suddenly threw his hands to his eyes and choked.
Beudag cried out, seized his arm.
"I can see!" Faolan staggered, as if jolted. "I can see!" First he
shouted it, then he whispered it. "_I can see._"
Starke's eyes blurred. He whispered to Rann, tightly. "Make him see it,
Rann or you die now. Make him see it!" to Faolan. "What do you see?"
Faolan was bewildered, he swayed. He put out his hands to shape the
vision. "I--I see Crom Dhu. It's a good sight. I see the ships of Rann.
Sinking!" He laughed a broken laugh. "I--see the fight beyond the gate!"
Silence swam in the room, over their heads.
Faolan's voice went alone, and hypnotized, into that silence.
He put out his big fists, shook them, opened them. "I see Mannt, and
Aesur and Clev! Fighting as they always fought. I see Conan as he
was. I see Beudag wielding steel again, on the shore! I see the enemy
killed! I see men pouring out of the sea with brown skins and dark
hair. Men I knew a long darkness ago. Men that roved the sea with me.
_I see Rann captured!_" He began to sob with it, his lungs filling and
releasing it, sucking in on it, blowing it out. Tears ran down from his
vacant, blazing eyes. "I see Crom Dhu as it was and is and shall be! _I
see, I see, I see!_"
Starke felt the chill on the back of his neck.
"I see Rann captured and held, and her men dead around her on the land
before the Gate. I see the Gate thrown open--" Faolan halted. He looked
at Starke. "Where are Clev and Mannt? Where is Blucc and Aesur?"
Starke let the fires burn on the hearths a long moment. Then he replied.
"They went back into the sea, Faolan."
Faolan's fingers fell emptily. "Yes," he said, heavily. "They had to
go back, didn't they? They couldn't stay, could they? Not even for one
night of food on the table, and wine in the mouth, and women in the
deep warm furs before the hearth. Not even for one toast." He turned.
"A drink, Romna. A drink for everyone."
Romna gave him a full cup. He dropped it, fell down to his knees,
clawed at his breasts. "My heart!"
"Rann, you sea-devil!"
Starke held her instantly by the throat. He put pressure on the small
raging pulses on either side of her snow-white neck. "Let him go,
Rann!" More pressure. "_Let him go!_" Faolan grunted. Starke held her
until her white face was dirty and strange with death.
It seemed like an hour later when he released her. She fell softly and
did not move. She wouldn't move again.
Starke turned slowly to look at Faolan.
"You saw, didn't you, Faolan?" he said.
Faolan nodded blindly, weakly. He roused himself from the floor,
groping. "I saw. For a moment, I saw everything. And Gods! but it made
good seeing! Here, Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan, give this other side of me
something to lean on."
* * * * *
Beudag and Starke climbed the mountain above Falga the next day. Starke
went ahead a little way, and with his coming the flame birds scattered,
glittering away.
He dug the shallow grave and did what had to be done with the body he
found there, and then when the grave was covered with thick grey stones
he went back for Beudag. They stood together over it. He had never
expected to stand over a part of himself, but here he was, and Beudag's
hand gripped his.
He looked suddenly a million years old standing there. He thought of
Earth and the Belt and Jupiter, of the joy streets in the Jekkara Low
Canals of Mars. He thought of space and the ships going through it, and
himself inside them. He thought of the million credits he had taken in
that last job. He laughed ironically.
"Tomorrow, I'll have the sea creatures hunt for a little metal box full
of credits." He nodded solemnly at the grave. "He wanted that. Or at
least he thought. He killed himself getting it. So if the sea people
find it, I'll send it up here to the mountain and bury it down under
the rocks in his fingers. I guess that's the best place."
Beudag drew him away. They walked down the mountain toward Falga's
harbor where a ship waited them. Walking, Starke lifted his face.
Beudag was with him, and the sails of the ship were rising to take the
wind, and the Red Sea waited for them to travel it. What lay on its far
side was something for Beudag and Faolan-of-the-Ships and Romna and
Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan to discover. He felt damned good about it. He
walked on steadily, holding Beudag near.
And on the mountain, as the ship sailed, the flame birds soared down
fitfully and frustratedly to beat at the stone mound; ceased, and
mourning shrilly, flew away.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lorelei of the Red Mist, by
Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury
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