Stark had been in places before that oppressed him with a sense of
their strangeness or their wickedness--Sinharat, the lovely ruin
of coral and gold lost in the Martian wastes; Jekkara, Valkis--the
Low-Canal towns that smell of blood and wine; the cliff-caves of
Arianrhod on the edge of Darkside, the buried tomb-cities of Callisto.
But this--this was nightmare to haunt a man's dreams.
He stared about him as he went in the long line of slaves, and felt
such a cold shuddering contraction of his belly as he had never known
before.
Wide avenues paved with polished blocks of stone, perfect as ebon
mirrors. Buildings, tall and stately, pure and plain, with a calm
strength that could outlast the ages. Black, all black, with no
fripperies of paint or carving to soften them, only here and there a
window like a drowned jewel glinting through the red.
_Vines like drifts of snow cascading down the stones. Gardens with
close-clipped turf and flowers lifting bright on their green stalks,
their petals open to a daylight that was gone, their head bending as
though to some forgotten breeze. All neat, all tended, the branches
pruned, the fresh soil turned this morning--by whose hand?_
Stark remembered the great forest dreaming at the bottom of the gulf,
and shivered. He did not like to think how long ago these flowers must
have opened their young bloom to the last light they were ever going to
see. For they were dead--dead as the forest, dead as the city. Forever
bright--and dead.
Stark thought that it must always have been a silent city. It was
impossible to imagine noisy throngs flocking to a market square down
those immense avenues. The black walls were not made to echo song or
laughter. Even the children must have moved quietly along the garden
paths, small wise creatures born to an ancient dignity.
He was beginning to understand now the meaning of that weird forest.
The Gulf of Shuruun had not always been a gulf. It had been a valley,
rich, fertile, with this great city in its arms, and here and there on
the upper slopes the retreat of some noble or philosopher--of which the
castle of the Lhari was a survivor.
A wall or rock had held back the Red Sea from this valley. And then,
somehow, the wall had cracked, and the sullen crimson tide had flowed
slowly, slowly into the fertile bottoms, rising higher, lapping the
towers and the tree-tops in swirling flame, drowning the land forever.
Stark wondered if the people had known the disaster was coming, if they
had gone forth to tend their gardens for the last time so that they
might remain perfect in the embalming gases of the sea.
* * * * *
The columns of slaves, herded by overseers armed with small black
weapons similar to the one Egil had used, came out into a broad square
whose farther edges were veiled in the red murk. And Stark looked on
ruin.
A great building had fallen in the centre of the square. The gods only
knew what force had burst its walls and tossed the giant blocks like
pebbles into a heap. But there it was, the one untidy thing in the
city, a mountain of debris.
Nothing else was damaged. It seemed that this had been the place of
temples, and they stood unharmed, ranked around the sides of the
square, the dim fires rippling through their open porticoes. Deep in
their inner shadows Stark thought he could make out images, gigantic
things brooding in the spark-shot gloom.
He had no chance to study them. The overseers cursed them on, and now
he saw what use the slaves were put to. They were clearing away the
wreckage of the fallen building.
Helvi whispered, "For sixteen years men have slaved and died down here,
and the work is not half done. And why do the Lhari want it done at
all? I'll tell you why. Because they are mad, mad as swamp-dragons gone
_musth_ in the spring!"
It seemed madness indeed, to labour at this pile of rocks in a dead
city at the bottom of the sea. It was madness. And yet the Lhari,
though they might be insane, were not fools. There was a reason for it,
and Stark was sure it was a good reason--good for the Lhari, at any
rate.
An overseer came up to Stark, thrusting him roughly toward a sledge
already partly loaded with broken rocks. Stark hesitated, his eyes
turning ugly, and Helvi said,
"Come on, you fool! Do you want to be down flat on your back again?"
Stark glanced at the little weapon, blunt and ready, and turned
reluctantly to obey. And there began his servitude.
It was a weird sort of life he led. For a while he tried to reckon time
by the periods of work and sleep, but he lost count, and it did not
greatly matter anyway.
He laboured with the others, hauling the huge blocks away, clearing
out the cellars that were partly bared, shoring up weak walls
underground. The slaves clung to their old habit of thought, calling
the work-periods "days" and the sleep-periods "nights".
Each "day" Egil, or his brother Cond, came to see what had been done,
and went away black-browed and disappointed, ordering the work speeded
up.
Treon was there also much of the time. He would come slowly in his
awkward crabwise way and perch like a pale gargoyle on the stones,
never speaking, watching with his sad beautiful eyes. He woke a vague
foreboding in Stark. There was something awesome in Treon's silent
patience, as though he waited the coming of some black doom, long
delayed but inevitable. Stark would remember the prophecy, and shiver.
It was obvious to Stark after a while that the Lhari were clearing
the building to get at the cellars underneath. The great dark caverns
already bared had yielded nothing, but the brothers still hoped. Over
and over Cond and Egil sounded the walls and the floors, prying here
and there, and chafing at the delay in opening up the underground
labyrinth. What they hoped to find, no one knew.
Varra came, too. Alone, and often, she would drift down through the
dim mist-fires and watch, smiling a secret smile, her hair like blown
silver where the currents played with it. She had nothing but curt
words for Egil, but she kept her eyes on the great dark Earthman, and
there was a look in them that stirred his blood. Egil was not blind,
and it stirred his too, but in a different way.
* * * * *
Zareth saw that look. She kept as close to Stark as possible, asking
no favours, but following him around with a sort of quiet devotion,
seeming contented only when she was near him. One "night" in the slave
barracks she crouched beside his pallet, her hand on his bare knee. She
did not speak, and her face was hidden by the floating masses of her
hair.
Stark turned her head so that he could see her, pushing the pale cloud
gently away.
"What troubles you, little sister?"
Her eyes were wide and shadowed with some vague fear. But she only
said, "It's not my place to speak."
"Why not?"
"Because...." Her mouth trembled, and then suddenly she said, "Oh, it's
foolish, I know. But the woman of the Lhari...."
"What about her?"
"She watches you. Always she watches you! And the Lord Egil is angry.
There is something in her mind, and it will bring you only evil. I know
it!"
"It seems to me," said Stark wryly, "that the Lhari have already done
as much evil as possible to all of us."
"No," answered Zareth, with an odd wisdom. "Our hearts are still clean."
Stark smiled. He leaned over and kissed her. "I'll be careful, little
sister."
Quite suddenly she flung her arms around his neck and clung to him
tightly, and Stark's face sobered. He patted her, rather awkwardly, and
then she had gone, to curl up on her own pallet with her head buried in
her arms.
Stark lay down. His heart was sad, and there was a stinging moisture
in his eyes.
The red eternities dragged on. Stark learned what Helvi had meant when
he said that the mind broke before the body. The sea-bottom was no
place for creatures of the upper air. He learned also the meaning of
the metal collars, and the manner of Tobal's death.
Helvi explained.
"There are boundaries laid down. Within them we may range, if we have
the strength and the desire after work. Beyond them we may not go. And
there is no chance of escape by breaking through the barrier. How this
is done I do not understand, but it is so, and the collars are the key
to it.
"When a slave approaches the barrier the collar brightens as though
with fire, and the slave falls. I have tried this myself, and I know.
Half-paralyzed, you may still crawl back to safety. But if you are mad,
as Tobal was, and charge the barrier strongly...."
He made a cutting motion with his hands.
Stark nodded. He did not attempt to explain electricity or electronic
vibrations to Helvi, but it seemed plain enough that the force with
which the Lhari kept their slaves in check was something of the sort.
The collars acted as conductors, perhaps for the same type of beam that
was generated in the hand-weapons. When the metal broke the invisible
boundary line it triggered off a force-beam from the central power
station, in the manner of the obedient electric eye that opens doors
and rings alarm bells. First a warning--then death.
* * * * *
The boundaries were wide enough, extending around the city and
enclosing a good bit of forest beyond it. There was no possibility of a
slave hiding among the trees, because the collar could be traced by the
same type of beam, turned to low power, and the punishment meted out to
a retaken man was such that few were foolish enough to try that game.
The surface, of course, was utterly forbidden. The one unguarded spot
was the island where the central power station was, and here the slaves
were allowed to come sometimes at night. The Lhari had discovered that
they lived longer and worked better if they had an occasional breath of
air and a look at the sky.
Many times Stark made that pilgrimage with the others. Up from the
red depths they would come, through the reeling bands of fire where
the currents ran, through the clouds of crimson sparks and the sullen
patches of stillness that were like pools of blood, a company of white
ghosts shrouded in flame, rising from their tomb for a little taste of
the world they had lost.
It didn't matter that they were so weary they had barely the strength
to get back to the barracks and sleep. They found the strength. To walk
again on the open ground, to be rid of the eternal crimson dusk and
the oppressive weight on the chest--to look up into the hot blue night
of Venus and smell the fragrance of the _liha_-trees borne on the land
wind.... They found the strength.
They sang here, sitting on the island rocks and staring through the
mists toward the shore they would never see again. It was their
chanting that Stark had heard when he came down the gulf with Malthor,
that wordless cry of grief and loss. Now he was here himself, holding
Zareth close to comfort her and joining his own deep voice into that
primitive reproach to the gods.
While he sat, howling like the savage he was, he studied the power
plant, a squat blockhouse of a place. On the nights the slaves came
guards were stationed outside to warn them away. The blockhouse was
doubly guarded with the shock-beam. To attempt to take it by force
would only mean death for all concerned.
Stark gave that idea up for the time being. There was never a second
when escape was not in his thoughts, but he was too old in the game to
break his neck against a stone wall. Like Malthor, he would wait.
Zareth and Helvi both changed after Stark's coming. Though they never
talked of breaking free, both of them lost their air of hopelessness.
Stark made neither plans nor promises. But Helvi knew him from of old,
and the girl had her own subtle understanding, and they held up their
heads again.
Then, one "day" as the work was ending, Varra came smiling out of the
red murk and beckoned to him, and Stark's heart gave a great leap.
Without a backward look he left Helvi and Zareth, and went with her,
down the wide still avenue that led outward to the forest.