Stark saw it rising against the morning sky--a city of gold and marble,
high on an island of rose-red coral laid bare by the vanished sea.
Sinharat, the Ever-Living.
Yet it had died. As he came closer to it, plodding slowly through the
sand, he saw that the place was no more than a beautiful corpse, the
lovely towers broken, the roofless palaces open to the sky. Whatever
life Kynon and his armies might have foisted upon Sinharat was no more
than the fleeting passage of ants across the perfect bones of the dead.
"What was it like before?" he asked, "with the blue water around it,
and the banners flying?"
Berild turned a dark, calculating look upon him.
"I told you before to forget that madness. If you talk it, no one will
believe you."
"No one?"
"You had best not anger me, wild man," she said quietly. "I may be your
only hope of life, before this is over."
They did not speak again, going with slow weary steps toward the city.
In the desert below the coral cliffs the armies of Kynon were encamped.
The tall warriors of Kesh and Shun waiting, with their women and their
beasts and their shining spears, for the pipers to cry them over
the Border. The skin tents and the long picket lines were too many
to count. In the distance, a convertible Kallman spacer that Stark
recognized as Knighton's made an ugly, jarring incongruity.
Lookouts sighted the two toiling figures in the distance. Men and women
and children began to stream out across the sand, and presently a
great cheering arose. Where he had looked on emptiness for days, Stark
was smothered now by the press of thousands. Berild was picked up and
carried on the shoulders of two chiefs, and men would have carried
Stark also, but he fought them off.
Broad flights of steps were cut in the coral. The throng flowed upward
along them. Ahead of them all went Eric John Stark, and he was smiling.
From time to time he asked a question, and men drew back from that
question, and his smile.
Up the steps and into the streets of Sinharat he went, with a slow,
restless stride, asking,
"Where is Luhar of Venus?"
Every man there read death in his face, but they did not try to stop
him.
People came out of the graceful ruins, drawn by the clamour, and the
tide rolled down the broad ways, the rose-red streets of coral, until
it spread out in the square before a great palace of gold and ivory and
white marble blinding in the sun.
Luhar of Venus came down the terraced steps, fresh from sleep, his pale
hair tumbled, his eyes still drowsy.
Others came through the door behind him. Stark did not see them. They
did not matter. Berild didn't matter, calling his name from where she
sat on the shoulders of the chiefs. Nothing, no one mattered, but
himself and Luhar.
He crossed the square, not hurrying, a dark ravaged giant in rags. He
saw Luhar pause on the bottom step. He saw the sleep and the vagueness
go out of the Venusian's eyes as they rested first on the red-haired
woman, then on himself. He saw the fear come into them, and the undying
hate.
Someone got between him and Luhar. Stark lifted the man and flung him
aside without breaking his stride, and went on. Luhar half turned. He
would have run away, back into the palace, but there were too many now
between him and the door. He crouched and drew his gun.
Stark sprang.
He came like a great black panther leaping, and he struck low. Luhar's
shot went over his back. After that there was no more shooting. There
was a moment, terribly short and silent, in which the two men lay
entangled, straining against each other in a sort of stasis. Then Luhar
screamed.
* * * * *
Stark knew dimly that there were hands, many of them, trying to drag
him away. He clung growling to the Venusian until he was torn loose by
main force. He struggled against his captors, and through a red haze he
saw Kynon's face, close to his and very angry. Luhar was not yet dead.
"I warned you, Stark!" said Kynon furiously. "I warned you."
Men were bending over Luhar. Knighton, Walsh, Themis, Arrod. Stark saw
that Delgaun was among them. He did not question at the time how word
had gone back to Valkis and sent Delgaun racing across the dead sea
bottom with his hired bravoes to search for the red-haired woman. It
was right that Delgaun should be there.
In short ragged sentences, Stark told how Luhar and Freka had tried to
kill him, and how Berild had been lost with him.
Kynon turned to the Venusian. Death was already glazing the cloud-grey
eyes, but it had not quenched the hatred and the venom.
"He lies," whispered Luhar. "I saw him--he tried to run away and take
the woman with him."
Luhar of Venus, taking vengeance with his last breath.
Freka pushed forward, transparently eager to pick up his cue. "It is
so," he said. "I was with Luhar. I saw it also."
Delgaun laughed. Cruel, silent laughter. He stood up, and looked at
Berild.
Berild's eyes were blazing. She ignored Delgaun and spoke to Kynon.
"You fool. Can't you see that they hate him? What Stark says is true.
And I would have died in the desert because of them, if Stark hadn't
been a better man than all of you."
"Strange words," said Delgaun, "coming from a man's own mate. Perhaps
Luhar did lie, after all. Perhaps it was not Stark who tried to run
away, but you."
She cursed him, with an ancient curse, and Kynon looked at her
sullenly. He said to the men who held Stark, "Chain him below, in the
dungeons." Then he took Berild's arm and went with her into the palace.
Stark fought until someone behind him knocked him on the head with the
butt of a spear. The last thing he saw was the face of Fianna, standing
out from the crowd, wide-eyed with pity and love.
He came to in a place of cold, dry stone. There was an iron collar
around his neck, and a five-foot chain ran from it to a ring in the
wall. The cell was small. A gate of iron bars closed the single
entrance. Beyond was an open well, with other cell doors around it, and
above were thick stone gratings open to the sky. He guessed that the
place was built beneath some inner court of the palace.
There were no other prisoners. But there was a guard, a
thick-shouldered barbarian who sat on the execution block in the center
of the well, with a sword and a jug of wine. A guard who watched the
captive Stark smiled.
Freka.
When he saw that Stark was awake, Freka lifted up the jug and laughed.
"Here's to Death," he said. "For no one else comes here!"
He drank, and after that he did not speak, only sat and smiled.
Stark said nothing either. He waited, with the same unhuman patience he
had shown when he waited for his captors under the tor.
The dim daylight faded from the gratings. Darkness came, and the pale
glimmer of the moons. Freka became a silvered statue of a man, sitting
on the block. Stark's eyes glowed.
The empty jug dropped and broke. Freka rose. He took the naked sword in
his hand and crossed the open space to the cell. He lifted the outer
bar away. It fell with a great echoing clang, and Freka entered.
"Stand up, Outlander," he said. "Stand up and face the steel. After
that you'll sleep in a coral pit, and not even the worms will find you."
"Beast of Shanga!" Stark said contemptuously, and set his back against
the wall, to give himself all the slack of the chain.
He saw the bright steel glimmer in the air, up and down again, but when
the blow fell he had leaped aside, and the point struck ringing against
the stone. Stark darted in to grapple.
His fingers slipped on hard muscle, and Freka wrenched away. He was
a fighting man, and no weakling. The iron collar dug painfully into
the Earthman's throat and the heavy chain threw him backward. Freka
laughed, deep in his chest. The sword glinted hungrily.
* * * * *
Then, as though she had taken shape suddenly from the shadows, Fianna
was in the doorway. The little gun in her hand made a hissing spurt of
flame. Freka screamed once, and fell. He did not move again.
"The swine," Fianna said, without emotion. "Delgaun ordered him to
wait, until it was sure that Kynon would not come down to talk to you.
Then the story was to be that you had escaped somehow, with Berild's
aid."
She stepped over the body and unlocked the iron collar with a key she
took from her girdle.
Stark took her slender shoulders gently between his hands. "Are you a
witch-girl, that you know all things and always come when I need you?"
She gave him a deep, strange look. In the dusk, her proud young face
was unfamiliar, touched with something fey and sad. He wished that he
could see her eyes more clearly.
"I know all things because I must," she told him wearily. "And I think
that you are my only hope--perhaps the only hope of Mars."
He drew her to him, and kissed her, and stroked her dark head. "You're
too young to concern yourself with the destinies of worlds."
He felt her tremble. "The youth of the body is only illusion, when the
mind is old."
"And is yours old, little one?"
"Old," she whispered. "As old as Berild's."
He felt her tears warm against his skin, and she was like a child in
his arms.
"Then you know about her," said Stark.
"Yes."