Beneath Strange Stars

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  “How are they coming on so fast?” one of the sailors wondered.

  It was a question without an answer, for in plain fact the other ship should not have been gaining on them. The wind was the wind for both ships, and men’s backs, whether those men be motivated by greed or fear of death, can only bend so far before they snap. Though their vision of the other ship was not entirely clear across the moonlit sea, it was obvious that it too had about twenty oars to a side. And yet the ship closed upon them.

  Rhythmic words in a language unknown to Kira came to her ears. The speaker, or rather chanter, was Ashbhanubal. Kira frowned. While there were indeed tongues she did not speak, there were very few of them, and she could usually puzzle out something of the meaning of a language first heard if only because nearly all languages ultimately descend from the original primal words of the Goddess, a fact actively forgotten in the lands where male gods now held sway.

  But Kira could make nothing of the words that flowed from the Phoenician captain. There was an antique quality to them, a sense that made the ancient words of the Goddess seem recent in comparison, which flew against reason and knowledge and all the tenants of her ancient heritage, for how could anything predate humanity’s first words?

  A soft glow emanated from the bow of the Phoenician trader, coming from the quartz disc and the crystalline rods of the enigmatic device. Kira suddenly noticed that although she could still hear Ashbhanubal’s usually stentorian voice, it was dim and seemed to come from a great distance; she could, however, hear nothing else—the ripping oars splashed silently in a soundless sea, the sails were bellied with the breathless wind, and the rigging was tautly quiet. The air felt dead against Kira’s ears though the wind still worked with the oarsmen to shoot them across the sea. She felt a pressure that was painful to endure. The glow from the device swiftly surrounded the Heart of Baal, causing the rigging, the cross-masts and all the fittings to glow with a cold phosphorescence, such as ships upon the deep sea at times acquire when running in the calm before the storm. The iron swords of the sailors also glowed frigidly, but none more so than Kira’s bronze blade and the bronze fittings upon her leather. The eyes of the horse-headed prow glowed as with swirling fire.

  The other ship was much closer now. The faces of the pirates could be seen quite clearly in the mingled moonlight and preternatural glow surrounding the Heart of Baal. The eyes that watched them were cruel eyes, set in cruel faces, human visages warped by years of evil deeds. Their lives were revealed in their forms. Now that they were within arrow-shot, the mystery of how they were able to overtake the Phoenician craft was divulged, and yet the revelation pointed to an even greater enigma.

  Two taut iron cables stretched from port and starboard of the prow into the quicksilver sea where a black mass undulated, writhing and surging, pulling the ship forward, as would one of the sea god’s steeds his chariot. It was neither whale nor shark nor tentacled leviathan, but something else, vast and loathsome and totally unknown, even to those who had lived their lives upon the sea. It was this harnessed sea-beast with eyes like molten platters that had allowed the pirates to exceed the limits of wind and muscle.

  As the Heart of Baal sprinted through silent currents, so did the pirate vessel. As it closed, the oarsmen on the near side shipped their oars. It was clear they first intended to cripple the Phoenician craft by shearing off the oars on that side by raking them with the bulk of their hull -- it was a familiar enough tactic in galley battles in close quarters but rarely possible upon the open sea. Kira tried to shout a warning below, but her words seemed dim and hollow, all but swallowed by the strangely torpid air. Fortunately, the rowing master had observed the danger through the ship’s occulus, so when the pirate ship did come into contact, the contact was between hulls only, resulting in little damage to either ship.

  Kira and the others felt the shock of the collision but heard nothing of it. Several pirates, not realizing that the raking maneuver had failed, made the leap between ships, and found themselves outnumbered among sailors spoiling for a good fight. One of the attackers sneered at the antique bronze of Kira’s blade, confident in the power of iron, the new metal, but his keen iron blade vanished into the turbulent ocean, still gripped by his insolent hand, lopped off at the wrist. Kira swiftly sent him after his hand and weapon, and dispatched a second assailant hard behind.

  Ashbhanubal shouted a final word.

  And then there was absolute, utter silence.

  The eerie illumination increased.

  They became a fire upon the sea surrounded by blackness as they lost sight of the stars and moon. Even the close-by pirate ship was swallowed by darkness. They seemed adrift in the Primal Night such as was upon the world before the coming of the Goddess. The pressure of the air forced others to their knees in pain, but Kira remained standing.

  Then the tension of the air vanished.

  The moon shimmered in and out of view, and the glittering stars swirled across the sky.

  The glow about the ship quickly abated.

  Silence flowed away like tendrils of a departing fog, and the sounds of sea and air came softly surging back.

  They were alone upon the ocean.

  There was no sign of the craft that had come so close to overwhelming them. Even the apostasic sailors among the crew fell to their knees and gave thanks to gods they had not spoken to in years. Kira stayed standing, looked about to make sure they really were alone, then wiped the blood from her sword and returned it to its scabbard. She glanced to the moon, the visible face of the Goddess, but it had vanished from the indigo sky.

  “The captain!” one of the sailors cried.

  Ashbhanubal lay collapsed in a heap before the strange device, which was now darkened and lifeless, the quartz disc cracked and several of the crystal rods shattered. Kira kneeled at his side. He breathed but shallowly and a bright ribbon of blood trickled from out his left ear.

  “Pick him up,” Kira commanded.

  Four men lifted him, but when they saw that Kira intended they should take him within the cabin that was the sole domain of their captain, they refused. Exasperated, Kira grabbed the unconscious man, slung him over her shoulder and carried him within herself.

  “Bring fresh cold water from the cistern,” Kira directed as she lay him on his cot, but they were reluctant to even come near the doorway. “Now!”

  A youngster vanished to do Kira’s bidding.

  “All watches to the rigging and the oars,” one of the mates shouted at the rest of the crew, mobilizing the still-stunned men into furious action.

  Kira looked around the dim room lit by a single taper in a secured brass fitting. Its pale flickering revealed shelves with barrier bars against the motions of the sea. Upon those shelves were hundreds of scrolls, statuettes of gods known and unknown, and devices fully as strange and wonderful and enigmatic as that which lay shattered on deck. The boy brought a bowl of water, but would bring it no further than the doorway, extending it inward with a trembling hand while remaining outside. Kira took it, and after tearing off some strips of cloth began to staunch the blood and bathe the unconscious man’s forehead.

  In a few moments Ashbhanubal’s eyelids flickered open.

  “The pirates...” he murmured.

  “There is no sign of them,” Kira reported. “We seem to be alone upon the sea. Where are we?”

  “I will have to take a sighting.” He started to stir from his cot, but the ordeal he had endured overcame even his great strength and he sank back with a sigh. His eyes widened. “You are in my cabin.”

  “It was either carry you in here or push you into the sea, but I couldn’t leave you on deck and expect you to recover,” she explained. “Your secrets are still safe.”

  After a moment the captain nodded and took a sip of cool water from the bowl. “The men...”

  “Your crew is fine, thanks to whatever magick your machine worked upon the ship.”

  “And the machine?”

  She shook h
er head.

  He settled back onto the cot with a weary sigh. “The Dravidian magician in Rhymada said it was dangerous, said there might be no turning back. Perhaps I should have let you and the men have at them with swords and arrows, clubs and knives. But if they were able to harness that beast...”

  “No turning back from what?” Kira demanded.

  “Help me up, Kira, and grab that astrolabe and other instruments in that wooden case upon the second shelf, next to the statue of Astarte,” Ashbhanubal instructed.

  Kira followed his orders without hesitation, pausing only after she had grasped the indicated case. Perhaps there was something inherent in the authority of a ship’s captain, at least a good one. She helped him on deck and to the prow.

  “It’s as I feared,” he said after examining the remains of the device. “All right, let us see where we are.” He took up the instruments and took sightings to various stars. He uttered a sharp gasp, then sat heavily on the deck, attracting the attention of the men.

  Kira squatted before him and stared into his sooty eyes. “What is it? What do you see?”

  “Impossible,” he murmured. “The axis of the world no longer wheels about Thuban, but Ursae Phoenicia; in Albion it is Scip-Steorra, the ship-star, and among the Hebrews Kohabh.”

  “But what does that mean?” Kira persisted

  “We are no longer in our cycle of time.”

  “Explain yourself, Ashbhanubal,” Kira demanded.

  “Before the rise of the present kingdoms about the Central Sea, before even the founding of Khemet upon the Nile by the gods, there were civilizations that are now legend,” Ashbhanubal explained. “Atlantis, Lemuria, Thule—their names are now the stuff of campfire tales, but in their day they ruled the seas and at times the air. I have read their astronomical texts, and learned from them to read the stars, to know them as another might see the lights upon a darkened shore and know that he has come to one land or another. I have learned that the sky is not immutable, that it changes like the phasing moon or the seasons in their turn, but over hundreds of generations, cycle upon long cycle. The star called Thuban now points the way northward, but three thousand years hence it shall be this star, called many names but known also as Polaris.”

  “Three thousand years,” Kira breathed.

  Ashbhanubal chuckled and shook his head. “Cycle upon cycle. The star that manifests north in three millennia also pointed the way twenty-three thousand years ago, just as Thuban shall return twenty-three thousand years hence.”

  Kira straightened and turned away from the Phoenician captain, stood at the railing and gazed across the sea under a miter of strange stars. There should be a dawning, she thought, if only to lighten the burden of the soul, but would the coming of the sun actually dismiss the darkness that weighed so heavily upon them? She evaded the answer whispered within her own mind.

  “A ship,” the lookout called from his high perch. “A ship to port! It might be a ship.”

  Kira helped Ashbhanubal to his feet.

  “Times past,” he muttered, “or times to come?”

  “It does not matter,” Kira said softly. “Wherever we are, your men need their captain.”

  After a moment, Ashbhanubal nodded and strode confidently forward, shouting orders and directing the crew to their tasks. Whether under familiar skies or upon an unknown twilight sea beneath stranger stars, he was yet their captain and they bent their backs to his will.

  “Archers to the rail,” he shouted, “and all hands to arms! Helmsmen, turn about! Rowing master hold fast, but keep the oars unshipped and ready for action!”

  Kira peered across the sea. “Not pirates?”

  “Not with running lights port and starboard,” Ashbhanubal replied. “And look at her lines. Have you ever seen a vessel with such form as that?”

  It was hard to see it at all by naught but starlight, but what Kira could make of it convinced her it did not hail from any port she knew. It seemed to have neither sails nor oars, yet it glided as serenely as a swan. Its general form was that of a dolphin, or, rather, as a man might design a ship if he loved dolphins above all else. Its running lights were its eyes, but the lights did not flicker, as would a torch or a captive oil flame; the unnatural steadiness of those lights chilled Kira more than had the sight of the sea-beast harnessed to the pirate ship. In size, it was just a little larger than the Heart of Baal. Men moved upon it.

  “By the gods,” Ashbhanubal murmured when the strange delphinic craft swung alongside.

  Kira, who was rarely surprised by anything, uttered a sharp gasp. The ship’s hull was not composed of wood, or even stitched hide, as were some of the trading craft Kira had seen upon the Yam-Suph Sea and the Sea of Dilmun, where the floodwaters first settled. This craft which glided impossibly across the waters was composed of plates of what appeared to be copper, fastened together in an unknown fashion. Now that it was closer, she heard the waves slap its prow, but above that she heard a distinct humming, like a swarm of unseen wasps, which she took to be a manifestation of its mysterious propulsive force.

  The ships edged closer slowly, the captains still wary of each other’s craft, but both seemingly dismissing the likelihood of immediate attack. Ashbhanubal called out to his opposite number.

  There was an answering hail, but in a tongue unknown to Kira...unknown yet somehow familiar, and listening to the words she felt a memory, or the ghost of a memory, stir deep within her, a dream half recalled, like a wafted scent or a dimly heard sound. Ashbhanubal looked to her, but after a moment’s consideration she could only shake her head.

  The ships were close enough now that both crews could see each other plainly, one by the glowing eyes of a copper dolphin, the other by honest torchlight. The men who rode the dolphin’s back were black. They were not dark of skin as were the men of Zinj and southern Al-Hind, but were utterly black as pitch, the ebony highlighted and made to appear even darker by soft sheens of starlight. Their hair and neatly trimmed beards were pale as moonlight, and their eyes gleamed like the eyes of cats. Most wore pastel robes, but the one who obviously captained this craft was alone in wearing a white robe trimmed with gold and decorated with clusters of glinting gems.

  “Look, Ashbhanubal, the markings upon the bow,” Kira said. “Do you recognize them?”

  “Yes, how very odd,” he murmured, stroking his rough beard. “The ancient glyphs of Kaphtor, used there before even a village existed at Knossos or Phaistos. They have not been used since...well, not for a long time.”

  A very long time, Kira thought. When the People of the Goddess first landed upon the narrow island of Kaphtor, long before the Minoans ever erected their bloody double-axes, they discovered the remnants of another race living miserable lives in the lees of crumbling ruins, dreaming of faded glory and telling of a proud civilization overtaken by gigantic doom. According to the old tales, these decadent survivors had lampblack skins and luminous eyes, but no one really knew the truth because the last of them perished upon the Crone’s altar long before the night-sun abandoned the Earth’s realm.

  “The past,” Kira said. “The long dead past.”

  “Or longer dead,” Ashbhanubal added. “The stars wander through their cycles without end—twenty-three thousand years ago, or twenty-six thousand before that, or longer. Unstuck from our own years, who can truly say what cycle of humanity we now sail within?”

  The black captain spoke softly to men on either side of him, then again called out in that familiar unknown tongue. When neither Kira nor Ashbhanubal could make an answer intelligible to the other mariners, an odd device was erected on the deck of the dolphin-ship, strange in form but vaguely resembling a kind of ballista, the projectile-hurling machine used so effectively from behind the beetling walls of Troy before the Horse put an end to all that. The likeness to that engine of war, however, was slight, and the longer Kira stared at it, with its gleaming metallic curves, its crystalline projections, and its filigreed domes and disks, the less it seemed lik
e what it had first appeared to be.

  “Ready to repel attack!” Ashbhanubal shouted. “Archers make ready to find targets!”

  “I do not think it is a weapon,” Kira said, but her words were ignored by the captain.

  An eerie glow surrounded the improbable device, reaching from one ship toward the other. Its true purpose would ever remain a mystery, however, for Ashbhanubal uttered a single barked command that loosed dozens of arrows from taut strings.

  The first victim was the black man behind the device, an arrow through his eye-socket, and he fell against the machine. The second was the captain who had never made an overt gesture of hostility, at least in Kira’s eyes though Ashbhanubal maintained differently to his end. The black man fell to his knees, an arrow in his chest and a crimson stain swarming across his snowy robe. More than anything else, he appeared surprised.

  The crew of the dolphin-ship retaliated with devices which, though as strange as the first, were undoubtedly weapons. Crewmen upon the Phoenician eikoseres burst into flames or fell with great holes mysteriously pierced through them; flames leaped from portions of the wooden craft and crawled along the lines. The seamen did not back down and continued to pelt the other craft with arrows and spears. Though some were reflected harmlessly by its copper skin, most found soft targets.

  It was too late, Kira saw. There was no way to undo what had been done, no way even to call a truce. Too much blood had been spilled, and no matter the time cycle in which they were now trapped, blood was yet blood.

  The first device continued to spread its glow across the sea, connecting the ships, but both crews were beyond caring. Unmanned and uninhibited, its cracking energies surged outward, lines of force snaking and whipping like the gorgon’s frenzied hair.

  Something of the device’s magick touched the mechanism that had carried them through the ages and awakened within it a quality that had not entirely died with the shattering of its crystalline rods. When one of the snarling bolts licked it, it screamed to sudden life, shooting beams of emerald and sapphire light.