The Mask of Circe

by Henry Kuttner

  Slowly the serpent-heads curved around toward me, sluggish with the blood-feast. If I had had time to think, I must have been too congealed with horror to move. But my eyes were on that shining, incredible thing glittering with a thousand lights even now, in the full glow of the garden.

  I reached out an unsteady hand. I touched the Golden Fleece.

  Astride a writhing branch, I lifted it from its age-old limb. A shimmering ripple of glory flowed across the Fleece as it shook in my hands, vibrant, alive, incredible.

  I swung it across my shoulders like a cloak. It clung there, needing no fastening.

  It was alive.

  And until this moment I had been dead flesh!

  Only dead guardsmen were left when I came down from the tree. All the living had fled. The centaur watched me warily, his eyes showing white like a frightened horse. Even Panyr kept a safe distance. And the flowers at my feet withered and crisped to burned embers as I walked among them.

  I never knew the principle of the Fleece. Those ringlets of delicate golden wire might have been antennae, picking up energy from some unknown source, energy that poured into my body and mind and flooded me with miraculous power. Hephaestus, greatest craftsman of an inhumanly great race, had made the Fleece, and though it was a machine, it supersedes the simple colloid which is its basic structure. What form of physiopsychic symbiosis made its operation possible I never understood.

  I wondered if my body and mind could bear this overload long enough. For it was dangerous to wear the Fleece, but more dangerous not to, at this point. And that flooding ecstasy which the wearing of it poured through me made even the danger a delight. No man has lived at all, I thought, who has not worn the Fleece!

  I went back through the window into the temple hall. Panyr stood back for me; the centaur floundered again across the sill and followed at a distance, warily, like a skittish horse. I had almost forgotten them. The walls gave back the glowing of the Fleece and sang faintly with an echo of its power.

  We came out of the corridor into an enormous hall, deafening with the tumult of battle. The centaur-army had plunged this far in its invasion, and the hall was a battlefield.

  But a field that parted before me and fell silent as I strode forward wrapped in the Golden Fleece. A cry of terror swept the crowd when they saw me, but I scarcely heard it. All I could hear was the faint, thin singing of the Fleece’s ringlets, pouring power through my brain and body.

  I followed Panyr on and on, through great rooms filled with carnage and which fell silent as we came. I think we left peace behind us everywhere, for when these struggling masses saw the Fleece, they knew the time for human conflict had ended. The power had passed from them and it was the gods now who must meet in the final battle for supremacy.

  We came at last to the threshold of that chamber I had seen through Hecate’s eyes.

  It was dim now—very dim, and full of the voices and the ceaseless swaying motion of the praying throng. Against the black walls the golden robes of the priests glowed dully. I saw the masks they wore—round sun-discs, featureless, hiding every face behind the enigmatic symbol of Apollo. And the discs glowed too, casting a strange, dim light over the crowd.

  Apollo’s sun-circle on the wall was no longer as I had seen it in my vision, a half-eclipsed disc. Now it was a flickering ring, like the corona in the dark sky above Helios. The Eclipse was complete.

  “Turn thy dark face from us, O Apollo,” the swaying throng wailed endlessly. “Look not upon Helios in the dark of the Eclipse.”

  On the altar beneath the sun-corona a golden cloth lay molded to the curves of the body it shrouded. Cyane, I thought, waiting the sacrifice. And the hour of the sacrifice must be very near—must be almost upon us.

  The priests were moving and bending in ritual gestures. I knew Phrontis by his height, though the sun-disc masked his face. The chant went on, but it was rising to a climax now as the moment when blood should flow to Apollo drew near.

  I stepped across the threshold.

  Little rippling flashes of light flared out from the Fleece and eddied through the dark air of the temple like ripples through water. And for a heartbeat the chanting ceased and there was deathly silence in the sanctum of the sun-god. Every face turned. Even the faceless discs of the priests lifted.

  Then a hushed murmuring swept the worshippers. The priests froze in their places. All but Phrontis. There was no need to see his face beneath the mask he wore. I knew how it must have convulsed with rage and terror as he sprang for the altar with one long bound, his hand going out for the sacrificial knife.

  I thought the moment was not quite ripe for that sacrifice, but Phrontis could not wait any longer. He would disrupt the ceremony if need be, but he knew Cyane must die—quickly, before Hecate came for her priestess. He seized the knife. He braced himself with one hand upon the altar, swung the blade high.

  Briefly it shone like a bright star in the light-ripples from the Fleece, a star that trembled and shook. From all that packed chamber there came no sound at all.

  Not until that moment did I know how much the Fleece could do. Involuntarily I had started forward, throwing out one hand to stop the fall of the blade, futilely, as if my arm could reach Phrontis’ wrist and halt it—

  And the wrist did halt. Between my hand and his, a lance of power seemed to stretch. I felt the strong golden energy of the Fleece pour through me and I knew that among all human creatures I was a god myself now—godlike in power, godlike in the destroying violence of the Fleece.

  Among gods? Well, there was time enough to test that.

  Phrontis’ face was hidden, but I could almost feel the panic-stricken stare behind it as he found he could not move his lifted hand. I saw the quiver of muscles beneath his robe as he strove in vain to break the frozen rigidity which the Fleece had locked upon him at the command of my miraculously augmented will.

  I moved forward warily, not sure how long the spell would hold him. The throng drew back on each side, leaving me a broad aisle. I came to the altar.

  Phrontis and I faced each other, for an instant motionless, across Cyane’s gold-shrouded body. I wished I could see his face. I put out my hand and tossed the golden altar cloth aside.

  Cyane’s eyes were open, but drowned in a drugged sleep. I think she did not see me. Golden fetters locked her to the block, wrist and ankle, as she had lain once before waiting the knife.

  I wound the chains about my hand and snapped them like straws. And above the metallic sound of their breaking, I heard the low thunder of hoofbeats approaching down the hall outside.

  I turned to look. The centaurs were coming. And the foremost held the Mask of Circe in his two outstretched hands. The eyes were closed and I think it slept. But from lids and closed lips faint lines of green fire gleamed. Circe waited to be freed.

  In a deathly silence the centaurs wound their way down the aisle that had just opened to let me by. Their hoofs fell muffled upon the floor of Apollo’s sanctum. They were terrible, blood-splashed figures, still panting from the heat of combat, red drops falling with soft splashes to the floor as they paced slowly forward to restore the Mask of Circe from the dead priestess to the living one.

  I saw Phrontis quiver with a long, convulsive shudder. He was still frozen as the power of the Fleece had caught him, knife poised above Cyane. But I knew he watched through the sun-disc across his face, and I knew the frantic emotions that must fill him as he saw all but the last of the old prophecies come true—the Fleece in Helios, the Mask and the Circe here at the sun-god’s altar. There remained now only the fulfillment of the last prophecy.

  The centaur circled me, still holding the Mask upon his outstretched hands. He paced to the head of the altar, where Cyane lay.

  Chapter XIV

  End of a God

  Sternly I was watching Phrontis. Now I let my hand fall, that had stricken him motionless from the full width of the temple away. And his hand fell with it, the k
nife clattering to the floor, very loud in that breathless silence He lifted a trembling arm and pulled down the sun-disc so that it hung across his chest. Above it his eyes met mine.

  I saw incredulous horror there, pure terror convulsing that clever face. He had not shared the superstitions of his fellows. Cold logic had solved his problems—until now. But logic and science had failed him alike in this moment and I thought I could see the shattering apart of the whole fabric that had been Phrontis’ mind.

  From the crowd a gasping cry went up. I turned. Cyane was rising from the altar. Cyane?

  The inhuman beauty of Circe’s Mask watched us, nimbused with green flame, alive, enigmatic.

  And then above us all, from that corona of dim fire above the altar, the blinded sun-symbol of Apollo, a gush of sudden, intolerable heat burst forth. And with it a sound—a sound like Olympian laughter.

  Phrontis swayed. I saw the look of terror change upon his face, leap into a veritable madness of new fear.

  “No!” he gasped. “Apollo—no!” And almost automatically he broke into the chanting I had interrupted. “Look not upon us, O Apollo, in the Hour of the Eclipse.”

  The people took it up, and there was urgency in their voices now. This was no ritual prayer, but a vital cry of importuning:

  “Turn thy face away, Apollo! Look not upon us in thy dark hour!”

  And Apollo heard—and laughed!

  I remembered what Panyr had told me of another Eclipse in which the god had looked upon his people, and none lived to say what the aspect of his dark face might be. These people were doomed to know and never to tell the tale.

  Laughter rang from the darkened disc, louder and more dreadfully. And heat poured forth from it, black heat like black, invisible water, filling up the temple with an intolerable flood. Heat without light, and in it, strangely, a core of pure cold that touched only the mind.

  Behind me the centaurs wheeled. I heard the low thunder of their hoofs beating out a rising tumult as they clattered from the room through the terrified crowd. Echo upon echo rolled from the ceiling and through the halls outside as they fled.

  The herd was racing from doomed Helios. The priests were scattering. The people were scrambling and fighting to be free. Now even Panyr turned away, with one last long glance of the yellow goat-eyes into mine in farewell.

  Only Circe and I remained—and Phrontis facing us across the altar. He had been so sure of himself. He had scorned to kneel before a god he knew was no god. But he did not know enough. Apollo was still not divine, but his powers were so far above human powers that to Phrontis now he must seem truly the god men called him.

  Still that terrible heat poured out of the darkened sun-circle. And now a Face began to take shape within it. I could not look. I knew that Face in the glory of its sun-brightness, and even then it was too dreadful in its beauty for me to look upon. But Apollo’s dark face—No, not even when I was armored in the Fleece would I gaze upon that sight!

  Circe moved to my side, walking smoothly, surely, haloed in green light. I heard her voice, very sweet, not Cyane’s voice but the Enchantress herself speaking as she had spoken three thousand years ago.

  “Hecate,” she called. “Mother Hecate!”

  And the goddess heard, and answered. For a pool of green light began to glimmer at our feet—began to shimmer and rise.

  We stood as if in a pool of translucent water, permeated and surrounded. It seemed to rise within us as well as all about us, cool and fresh, drowning out the heat. I saw Phrontis beyond the altar. He faced the sun upon the wall. He looked Apollo in the face.

  Revulsion seemed to make his very flesh crawl upon his hones, as my flesh had crawled. I saw the terrible shudders sweeping him—I saw him fall to his knees, groveling in utter abnegation before the god he had scorned. All logic and intellect stripped away, he knelt shivering before a sight no human flesh could face and remain unaltered.

  “Turn thy dark face from Helios,” I heard him sob—the old chant that could not help him now. “Look not upon us—in the Hour—of thine Eclipse—” His voice faltered, strangled, went on in broken rhythms.

  Behind us now the thunder of the centaurs’ retreat had passed. But the screaming of all Helios had risen to a crescendo that penetrated even these sacred walls. Phrontis in that frightful torrent of unseen fire began to shrivel as he knelt

  “Stoop not above our temple.”

  He could not tear his blinded gaze from that Face which even I dared not look upon. Burning, blackening in the full blaze of it, he croaked his useless plea.

  “Come not to us—Apollo—not to us—not—”

  The voice was stilled. The golden sun-mask melted upon his chest, the golden robes blackened and fell to cinders. Phrontis was no longer there—only a shriveling shape of blackness before Apollo’s dark, laughing face.

  And all around us Helios itself was dying.

  For Apollo poured out the black, lightless violence of his sun-heat in an invisible torrent that not flesh and blood, not metal nor stone could resist. And I thought I knew why. Hecate stood with us before Apollo’s altar, and that flood was focused upon her—upon us—the enemies of the sun.

  He meant to consume us in that fearful torrent if it meant consuming all Helios too.

  The green pool of radiance held us still. Apollo’s might beat in vain about us. But I felt the floor shudder in that bath of flame. The temple, the city, even the earth beneath the city, shivered in the pouring energy that must be violent enough, almost, to smash the atom itself asunder.

  A mounting thunder of sound spread through Helios, a shaking bellow of stone upon stone, metal shrieking upon metal, as Helios began to fall.

  When a people die, the voice of their agonies is a sound no brain that hears it could ever forget We heard those cries as Apollo’s people fell before the violence of his power. But when a city dies—no language spoken by human creatures could tell of the death-roar of its passing.

  Stone and steel screamed in their dissolution. Wall roared down upon wall and roofs crashed deafeningly, incredibly, in long, thundering echoes upon the defenseless heads of their builders. Earth itself shuddered and cracked beneath the titanic murdered city. Helios fell as Olympus itself might fall, in cataclysmic chaos.

  But we were not in Helios. We were no longer in this middle world of legend but in a place of inconceivable strangeness. The green light clouded around us, and when it thinned again we stood in the unknown world of the gods!

  Jason had caught glimpses of this place, three thousand years ago. He had not understood. And though I understood a little more clearly what it was I gazed on, I knew that no human mind could entirely comprehend the vast and godlike scope of this domain.

  There were things around me that my eyes could not quite see. Enormous structures—mighty colossi that dwarfed anything man might build—and were machines. Vast golden things rose into the golden sky so many thousands of feet that human eyes could not see all their heights. The topless towers of Ilium, I thought confusedly.

  Machines they were, but at once too complicated and far too incredibly simplified for human minds to grasp. A race of demigods had built them, for the purposes of their own strange, alien kind.

  A dead race! For the machines were silent. The mightiest science that ever existed, I thought, had gone down into the eternal silence of oblivion.

  There were traces of what must have been battle on some of those mountainous golden walls. Some stood half in ruins, their mysterious shining interiors open to the uncomprehending gaze. And some were smashed beyond all likeness to their originals. I wondered what titantic battle of the gods had raged here, and what its outcome was, millennia ago.

  A soundless wind carried us weightlessly through that fantastic city. And far away, but coming toward us, a shining thing moved.

  Hecate spoke in my mind.

  “We go to meet Apollo,” the voice said quietly. “He or I must be destroyed. And the Son
of Jason must know the reason why, so that this time he may not be tempted to fling down his armor and flee.

  “If you fail me now, you must know the price of failure.

  “I will tell you the secret of Apollo.

  “The time-streams crossed between two worlds more than seven thousand years ago. For awhile the twin worlds were one. And at that time our race was born—the race mankind called gods. They were not gods. They were mutations from human stock, born with strange powers, capable of a greater knowledge and a greater science than man could understand. Not all of us, but enough. Legends named them Zeus and Aphrodite, Hera, Ares, Pluto, Hephaestus—Hecate.

  “When the time-streams parted, our race moved on to the middle world, where Helios stood. We grew in power and knowledge. And in the end, we made this farther world, a place of our own, in an artificial space-time, where we were not bound by the laws of any planet

  “Here we built and here we rose to a summit of power that no race before or since has ever known. I was one of them, though not the greatest and not altogether of their blood. Even in the days of legend, the gods of Greece had little heed for mankind. Even then they were moving toward their Olympian goal, away from the world of Earth. But Hecate worked more closely with the sons of man. Necromancy and enchantment were my skills, and I needed men and women to help me. So when the race moved on, I lingered.

  “And when the final battle came, I was not among the slain.

  “You see, we knew we were not gods. We knew death must come for us some day, and we wished to create a race that could mount on our shoulders to a pinnacle higher than ever we had ever dared to dream. So there were many experiments. Many trials. Some were partly successful. We made the centaurs, the satyrs and fauns, and the children of wood and stream. They were nearly immortal, but failures because of their taint of the beast.”