Beneath Strange Stars

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  Again the Heart of Baal was surrounded by silence and light. The craft reeled, and Kira clung to the rail to keep from being tossed into the scintillating sea. The strange energies that played upon and within the sea, between the craft of two distant times, lit the world for an instant. In that moment of timeless eternity, Kira saw near them a dark island rising to a volcanic cone, with fabulous and ethereal structures climbing its sides like pale fungi and glimmering polyps.

  The dolphin-ship burst into a flower of searing light, unfolding and rising, vanishing in a blaze of destruction. A circle of azure fire spread in all directions, one with the mounting sea. It passed through the hull of the Phoenician trader, but one had no effect upon the other. It seemed to Kira that the world was fading around them, but who was to say which was more the specter, them or this long-dead world.

  The craft pitched again as it was surrounded by blinding brightness. Its motions tried to tear away Kira’s grip but she would not let go. Then there was utter blackness and a sensation of falling, followed by a jarring splash and the slow murmur of the sea. After a long moment, Kira released her desperate hold and stood.

  The night was filled with acrid smoke from charred wood and flesh. A few fires burned, but they quickly died, as if the flames could not breathe. Kira herself could hardly breathe; no matter how deeply her lungs sucked in the air, there did not seem enough of it.

  The sea, now faintly phosphorescent, was sluggish and smelled of brine. It was utterly flat and waveless, and even the motions of the ship did little to disturb it. Kira noticed that the ship rode high upon it, far above its normal waterline, though its battim was still filled with all manner of goods. This sea was obviously far saltier than any normal ocean.

  There were no clouds. A few stars shone but did not twinkle. A pale sphere loomed over the sea, scarred and gangrenous, a vast orb like the unblinking eye of a Titan, and beyond it was another sphere, so huge that only a portion of it could be perceived rising above the Earth’s curve, dull and ruddy like a dying ember.

  The moon, Kira thought, staggering at the realization, and the sun behind.

  Men still lived upon the Heart of Baal, as did its master, and Kira sought him.

  “Have we moved to an even more distant age?” she asked. “When did the moon ever loom so large that it seemed ready to plummet? Or the sun so swollen, and sullen enough to allow even such feeble stars to shine by day? How can this dusk be day?”

  “The twilight of days to come,” Ashbhanubal whispered weakly. He had not emerged from the conflict unscathed. Blood stained his clothing and he trembled mightily as he stood, but he refused to fall. “The magick of that ancient time combined with that which I received from the Dravidian sorcerer to propel us further forward than we traveled back. We now sail in the duskingtide of the world, when perhaps even the gods have die of old age.”

  Ashbhanubal left her to ponder what had happened while he saw to what remained of his ship and crew.

  They appeared alone upon the sea, not another vessel in sight. And if men yet called the carrion Earth their home, what manner of men would they be? A shudder passed through her. Then she realized a shudder also passed through the ship, transmitted from the apparently motionless sea. A long moment later there was another tremble, then, later, another, like the slow rhythms of a dying heart.

  As her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness she perceived vast shapes rising around them, tortured spires of land almost lost in the dusk. They were, she realized, the remnant of islands, once low upon the sea but now far above where the level of the sea had fallen. She understood now why it seemed the ship fell and why the ocean had become brine.

  Aside from the sounds made by the men, this was a silent world, and even the noises made as the men nursed themselves and their ship were thin, muted, transient. Just as the air had become too thin to breathe comfortably, it no longer carried sound. It was also a breathless world, for the sails hung limp, putting no strain upon charred lines.

  And yet they moved among those islands than had become mountains upon the sea, pushed by thick slow currents. Cold blue points of light burned upon those summits, in the round windows of clustered domes and spires. The dusk did not reveal much of those far cities, and nothing of the beings that called them home.

  Now that Kira had observed their surroundings for a length of time she saw that the sea was not as motionless as she had first supposed, that there were writhings within and unnatural swellings. The diminished ocean level had resulted in a deadly brine, but even in this most remote realm the sea was still the cradle of life, as it had been since the beginning.

  Strange creatures occasionally breached the surface, with polypetalous tentacles and iridescent bladders and sheening black bulks and eyes like molten platters, but they kept respectful distances. A glittering sea-snake with a man’s face rose above them, regarded them with amber eyes, then arched gracefully back into the depths. A trio of beings very much like dolphins, but with vast malformed heads and flippers that were too much like hands, rose from the sea; the dolphins of Kira’s time were gentle, playful creatures, friends of mankind who guided ships and sometimes rescued distressed mariners, but these strange children of later ages were somber in demeanor, and regarded the Heart of Baal and its crew with malevolent gazes. As the ship passed a low black rock, Kira saw that it was covered with giant crabs, eye-stalks weaving about and their claws making disturbing patterns of sound.

  “I should not have taken you aboard,” Ashbhanubal murmured.

  Kira did not look at the man, did not answer him.

  “I knew who you were when we met in Parros,” he continued. “I did not know if you knew me, but your comment about Albion, your apparent desire to journey to Colchis, and your openness about your flight from Rhymada made me wonder otherwise.”

  “My ignorance made you decide not to murder me.”

  After a long moment, Ashbhanubal nodded. “It gave me an excuse not to do what I did not want to do.”

  “I knew who you were,” she said. “And what you did.”

  “You did not leave Rhymada immediately after your arrival,” he observed.

  “No, not immediately, though I immediately learned to take to hiding,” she replied. “The forces of the Crown-Prince pursued me from the moment I entered Rhymada, even coming as I did through the obscure Pauper’s Gate near the Canal of Sorrows. By stealth I traveled Rhymada’s hidden ways, by guile I learned of what crimes I had been convicted, condemned at the Star Court through testimony given by a half-caste Phoenician captain.”

  “False testimony which the gods have punished.”

  “Testimony that was designed to prevent me from returning to Rhymada.”

  “Never to return, never to search for the gold and silver no longer awaiting you,” Ashbhanubal explained.

  “Did you murder the Priest of the Purple Twilight or Dysmian the Necromancer?” she demanded.

  He shook his head. “I had dealings with Dysmian upon other matters. He had spoken of you and the treasure often, and when he was killed by one of his necromantic summonings I merely took advantage of the situation. As to the Priest, he tracked a stolen idol to Dysmian’s workshop, arriving in time to share the necromancer’s fate. Since it was well known you had had some sour dealings with the Keepers before mysteriously departing Rhymada, it was not hard to bend their Order and the Crown-Prince to the idea you had killed both men.”

  “And the other crimes heaped upon me?”

  “Cobbled from the real and the imaginary, a tapestry woven so fine that the false threads could not be separated from the true,” he explained. “It was nothing against you, Kira; I only wanted the treasure Dysmian held in trust.”

  “I suppose it was foolish to trust a necromancer,” she mused, “but I had little choice.”

  “Perhaps there is something about a necromancer’s work that makes him receptive to conversations with the living, even with strangers,” Ashbhanubal mused. “Dysmian was surprisingly trust
ing of me. He valued knowledge more than treasure. But he, and you, would have been better off had he prized silence as highly.”

  “A thief,” Kira sighed.

  “There is something of the thief in every merchant, the pirate in every mariner,” he replied. “I gave in to the moment, then wished I had not, but by then it was too late. When a ship enters a river’s rapids, all you can do is hope to come out the other side relatively unscathed.” He craned his neck to take in the full sweep of the darkling world about them and its phantasmagoric creatures. “If this is the other side of the rapids, then your revenge is a complete one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The treasure,” he explained. “It is still in Rhymada, in a thaumaturgically bound lock-box hidden under the flagstones of Dysmian’s workshop. I was going to retrieve it at the close of the next sailing season, when I planned to retire from the mercantile life and live the remainder of my days in a villa far from the sea.”

  “This may be a fitting end to a quest for wealth that was not yours,” she admitted, “but it would be more fitting were I not also at your side.”

  “The point is well made.” For a long while they stood upon the deck watching the eldritch world slip by. “Do you hate me?”

  “I did.” She paused. “I do not forgive you for what you did, but I cannot hate a man for being weak of will, only evil. You are impulsive, passionate, violent, prideful, greedy, ruthless, arrogant and vengeful.”

  “But not evil?”

  “But not evil,” she said. “I planned at first to tear the truth from you, then punish you for your crimes, then I saw how you captained this vessel, commanded these men. I learned what kind of man you truly are, a man you might not entirely know yourself. As to your present situation, it is less likely the Goddess, or the gods, exacting revenge for my sake, than that you are finally reaping the rewards of your own impulsiveness and arrogance.”

  Ashbhanubal nodded. “And as you said, you are at my side.”

  Kira made no response, made no acknowledgment. Her attention was suddenly fastened upon the wonders around them, or, more precisely, the wondrous beings no longer around them.

  “They are all fleeing,” Ashbhanubal observed. “Back to tell tales of a ghost ship and its spectral crew.”

  “No,” Kira replied. “Just fleeing...as we cannot.”

  “But what could...”

  The words died upon Ashbhanubal’s full lips as he saw something move toward them through the murky twilight, something as vast as the mountainous islands. Its general form was that of a column of grey flesh covered with writhing tentacles, weaving eyes and appendages the purpose of which escaped human comprehension; its specific form, however, was undefined, elastic, constantly surging and retreating as it moved toward them. Nor was it the only monster of the dusk.

  Other beings as large, and a few that dwarfed even them, were gliding into view from behind the rising islands. Some seemed to slowly skim the surface of the brine while others swam or waded; a few floated toward them like aerial jellyfishes or arachnoid bats. They surrounded the ship.

  Kira started to withdraw her sword from its scabbard, but Ashbhanubal restrained her hand with a gentle touch.

  “Are these the masters of the world, or its gods?” he asked. “Have the accomplishments of man given way to these monsters at the end of time? Has the struggle of life been for naught but this?”

  The vast beings moved closer, examining the ship and its crew with eyes and spheres bigger than palaces, vision that contained undeniable intelligence and purpose. The crew was terrified and felt the nearness of death, but a single word from Ashbhanubal kept them where they stood and their weapons down.

  As suddenly as they had appeared and for reasons just as mysterious, the vast creatures began to move away. At the same time a new sound reached the ship out of time, the rush of the wind where there could be no wind.

  Kira saw the craft first and pointed it out to Ashbhanubal as it descended from the nearly starless dusk. The embering sun and leprous moon glinted dully from a baroque metallic hull of impossible curves and dizzying arabesques.

  “It must have come from one of those summit cities,” Kira said.

  “Then men still hold sway here,” Ashbhanubal observed, his voice holding both a trace of relief and a glimmer of hope. “The struggle is not futile.”

  “If a man guides that flying ship,” Kira agreed.”

  Ashbhanubal looked at her oddly for a moment, but he did not have a chance to voice his concerns. Rays of various colors swept down from the strange whispering craft, playing over the Heart of Baal. Sounds and sensations swept through Kira, and she heard a voice in her mind, or thought she did.

  It was a voice, and yet not a voice, for it did not utter words that Kira could either understand or recall. There was no language. It was neither male nor female. There was no sound and yet Kira heard it clearly. She did not respond with words and yet she answered it. She could make no sense of any of it, and yet there was understanding. She shared the hopes and fears of her turbulent life with someone or something aboard the ship, a being who was as far beyond her as she was beyond an ant beneath her boot; despite the long roll of aeons, however, some trace of kinship yet remained, and Kira could not hold back a faint wan smile from her lips.

  The mariners were also bathed in that alien light, all gazing upward, all in rapt communion with beings most of them could only relate to as gods. Even Ashbhanubal, who had never believed in much of anything beyond himself and his passions, spoke silently to an omnipotent ethereal manifestation.

  The swirl of chromatic light was abruptly replaced by a column of brilliant blue-white fire. Men threw themselves to the deck and uttered cries thin and piteous. Kira tried to shield her eyes from the blinding source of light above, but ultimately had to turn away from it. Ashbhanubal alone remained gazing fixedly upward.

  The coruscating fire was cold. It surrounded the Phoenician trader like a shimmering wall of glass upon the briny sea.

  Kira saw the shattered relic of the device at the prow transform into a myriad of sparks and fly upward.

  The intensity of the already effulgent beam increased.

  Men screamed from the pain.

  Ashbhanubal made neither sound not movement.

  Kira buried her face in her hands.

  And then they were surrounded by darkness and silence.

  Kira stood and looked about. Her vision cleared slowly, and she heard the slapping of waves against the hull and felt the gentle motion of the ship before she actually saw the sea beneath the stars and the soft glow of the moon. Taking what she had learned from Ashbhanubal, Kira sought Thuban in the sky and saw with great relief and wonder that it had again become the axis of the sky.

  Not far from them floated another ship, silent upon the sea, charred, its crew dead and the sea-beast that had pulled it inert. It was slowly taking on water, and Kira watched as it slipped beneath the waves, taking its mysteries to the resting place of even greater mysteries.

  “We’ve returned, Ashbhanubal,” she said. “We’ve been set back home.”

  Ashbhanubal looked to her, but he did not see her. He did not see the ship that had been his life, nor the stars that had always been his friends in a friendless world. He had stared unblinking into the faces of the gods, and they had blinded him, perhaps as much for his temerity as his sins.

  “My men are safe?” he asked.

  “Yes, and the pirates were destroyed,” she replied. “But I do not know how.”

  “The backlash of using the device,” Ashbhanubal explained. “As when a sealed oil-skin is placed in a fire.”

  The man who had stood so resolutely and defiantly against the gazes of the gods at the end of time now sagged, reached for the railing to steady himself. Kira grasped his wrists and helped him find the rail.

  “I’m finished as a merchant, as a member of the Brotherhood of the Sea,” he said.

  “Your sight may return,” Kira t
old him. “I have seen men in battle lose their sight from grievous wounds, only to have it return later, partially or in wholeness. The same may happen to you.”

  Ashbhanubal shook his great weary head. “Whether or not it does, I am finished. Who can see what I saw and struggle on with hope?” He uttered a derisive sigh. “There remains yet one thing for me to do before I move on to whatever life awaits me.”

  Drawing himself to his full stature and squaring his shoulders, the Phoenician captain shouted commands that roused soul-shattered men from their stupor, set them to their tasks. He could no longer see the stars, but he did not have to. Sails were trimmed and men took to the oars, and he shouted a new course to the helmsmen.

  Slowly, like a wounded dog heeding the commands of a beloved master, the Heart of Baal turned and headed for distant Rhymada, sailing beneath familiar stars and away from the twilight.

  This story appeared in the so-called “Special Blasphemy Issue” of Aboriginal Science Fiction, but there really isn’t anything particularly blasphemous about it, but even publisher/editor Charles Ryan admitted that the magazine’s designation that month wasn’t due to any overtly blasphemous content, but because many of the stories dealt with religious themes, as did mine, and whenever religion is involved there are always fanatics ready to invoke the label of “blasphemer,” who think God/Allah is incompetent and needs their swords, guns or bombs to keep everyone (mostly writers and other questioners) in line. Since this was published in 1989, the plight of Salman Rushdie was the keynote of the editorial. Of course, back then Iran and its Muslim fanatics were viewed more as aberrations that harbingers of the future; little did we realize that less than two decades later violence and intolerance would come to define Islam worldwide, not because of the religion’s critics but through Islam defining itself through the actions of its most ardent supporters. I liked this particular issue (#18) for three reasons—the publisher showed courage in printing a bevy of tales with religious themes, my story is illustrated with a beautiful painting by Lucy Synk (she must like it too since it is still featured on her web-page after 25 years), and my name is listed on the cover. All right, you caught me—I like the last reason most of all.