* * * * *
His voice rang back from the empty upper tiers, and it brought every
eye upon him. There was desperation in it, and triumph, and the anger
of a man driven beyond the bounds of reason.
"Wait, you men of Mars! You came to see a show. Very well, I'll give
you one. You, Kor Hal! You told me something, down there in Valkis. You
told me of the men of Caer Dhu who first made Shanga, and how in one
generation they were destroyed by it. _One_ generation!"
He stepped forward, finding release for his tortured nerves in this
denunciation.
"We of Earth are a young race. We're still close to our beginnings, and
for that you hate and mock us, calling us apes. Very well. But that
youth gives us strength. We go very slowly down the road of Shanga.
"But you of Mars are old. You have followed the circle of time a
long way round, and the end is always close to the beginning. In one
generation the men of Caer Dhu were gone. Our fibres are iron, but
theirs were only straw.
"That's why no Martian will practice Shanga--why it was forbidden by
the City-States. You don't dare to practice it, because it hurls you
headlong down that road--toward your end or your beginning, who knows?
But you haven't the strength to take it, and you're afraid."
A jeering, angry howl rose from the crowd. Kor Hal shouted,
"Listen to the ape! Listen to the beast we drove through the streets of
Valkis!"
"Yes, listen to him!" Winters cried. "Because the Lady Fand is gone,
and only the ape knows where she is!"
That silenced them, and in the quiet Winters laughed.
"Perhaps you don't believe me. Shall I tell you how I did it?" He told
them, and when he was through telling he listened, while they called
him liar, and he jeered in Kor Hal's face.
"Wait," he shouted. "Wait, and I'll bring her to you."
He turned and went toward the clearing. He went fast, because the
beasts were already beginning to stir and rouse from their temporary
stupor. He remembered from his own experience with Shanga that before
consciousness returned there was a period of delirium, so that even in
the Trade City solariums the people were not turned loose until it had
passed.
Threading his way between the brutish bodies, leaping over them,
avoiding the touch of the scaly things, he came to the clump of
flowering shrubs by the lake and crawled in among them.
He had not known. He had guessed from Kor Hal's statement that the
metamorphosis was swift, but he had not known. There were some things
that a man could not even guess at.
In spite of himself, he cried out. He did not want to look at the thing
that lay there, did not even want to know that such a form of life had
existed, or could exist. But he had to look at it. He had to go close
to it, so that he might undo the silken bonds that held it to the roots
of the shrubs. He had to touch it. He had to lay his hands upon its
softness, lift its flaccid weight, hold its slippery squirming against
his own body.
It had eyes. That was the worst of it. It had eyes, and it looked at
him.
He went away from the thicket, carrying his burden. Back across the
clearing, where two great males were already fighting over a she, out
into the open space before the royal box, where all could plainly see.
He lifted the thing over his head, high into the sunlight.
"Here!" he shouted. "Don't you recognize her? Last of the royal house
of Valkis--the Lady Fand!"
Around a portion of the wriggling anatomy that might once have been a
neck, the collar of golden plaques swung shining.
For a moment he held her so, while the faces of the Martians stared
like the masks of dead men and Kor Hal rose and gripped the edges of
the stone. Then he laid his burden down and stepped back from it where
it moved horribly across the turf.
"Look there, you Martians," he said. "That is your own beginning."
In the utter, stricken silence the old woman rose. She stood for a
moment looking down, and it seemed that she was about to speak or cry
out, but no sound came. Then she fell, out over the wall and down the
sheer drop into the arena. She did not move again.
As though she had led them, the Martians rose with one low terrible cry
and followed her. Not to death, as they dropped over the wall, but to
vengeance.
* * * * *
Winters ran. He had Jill free in a minute, dragging her away into
denser cover. The mouth of the tunnel was not far distant.
The Martians swarmed in upon the clearing, and then the beasts of
Shanga saw them. With roars and screams, they surged out to meet their
attackers.
Knife and short sword and spiked brass knuckles against fang and claw
and the powerful muscles of the brute. The scaly creatures darted here
and there, hissing, slashing with their rows of needle-sharp reptilian
teeth. Great hands ripped and tore, snapping bones like matchsticks,
cracking skulls. And the slim blades flickered in the sunlight, bright
tongues speaking death.
Vengeance was done that day in the garden of Shanga. The vengeance
of Earth on Mars, and the vengeance of men upon the shame of their
heritage.
Winters saw Kor Hal run his sword through the creeping horror that had
been Fand, through and through again until all motion stopped. Then he
shouted Winters' name.
Winters went to him.
Neither spoke. There was nothing more to say. Bare-handed, Winters went
against the Martian's sword. With the nightmare carnage of the battle
going on around them, they two were alone. They two had a special score
to settle.
Winters took one long gash above the heart before he caught Kor Hal's
arm and broke it. The Martian never whimpered. With his left hand he
reached for the knife at his girdle, but it never left the sheathe.
Winters laid Kor Hal backward across his knee and placed one thigh
across his loins and an elbow across his throat. After a moment he
dropped the broken body and went away, taking the sword.
The guards came running into the arena through the tunnel.
The fight was spreading outward from the lake. Locked in struggling,
swaying knots, the beasts of Shanga slew the Martians and were slain.
The waters of the lake were stained red, and the corpse of a Martian
was being dragged stealthily into it from the mud of the bank. There
was something hidden below the surface, something that could no longer
fight on land, but only lay quietly in wait, and fed.
Now the guards had come with their long spears, and Winters knew that
in the end there would not be one creature left alive in the garden.
And it was well.
He took Jill's hand and led her toward the tunnel, running in the
shelter of the trees. The fight was occupying everyone's attention. The
brute males were hard to kill, and they fought for the love of it. The
tunnel was empty, the gate open, the guards inside the arena, hard at
work. Winters and the girl fled through it, taking cover outside the
amphitheatre just before another group of guards came down from the
palace.
From there, with infinite haste and caution, they made their way down
the cliffs through the dead ruins of Valkis, and then out across the
desert, skirting the living town by the canal. Kor Hal's flier was on
the field where Winters remembered it.
He thrust Jill inside, and as he followed her he saw the angry mob
start to pour out of Valkis, where word of his crime and his escape had
been brought, a little too late.
He took the flier up, setting a course for Kahora. And now that it was
all over, he felt a great weariness and an over-whelming desire to
forget the very name of Shanga.
* * * * *
But he knew that he could never forget. The golden fire had burned too
deep. He knew that he would always be haunted by the beautiful face of
Fand as it had looked when he shackled her in the clearing, and by the
memory of the high thin screaming as the light poured down from the
prisms. Even the psychos could never make him forget.
The governments of Earth and Mars would see to it now that Shanga was
stamped out forever. He was glad, and a little proud, because it had
been his doing. But even so....
He looked over at Jill. Someday, he prayed, she would be herself again.
The taint of Shanga would pass her, and she would once more be the Jill
Leland he had given his heart to.
_But will it pass entirely?_ For a moment it seemed that he heard the
mocking voice of Fand, speaking in his soul. _Will it pass from you,
Burk Winters? Can one who has run with the beasts of Shanga ever be the
same again?_
He did not know. Looking back, he saw the smoke rising from the unholy
garden--and he did not know.