The Sword of Rhiannon

by Leigh Brackett

  The doom of Rhiannon, dealt unto him forever by the Quiru who are lords of space and time!

  Carse pushed the metal door aside and stepped through. And then he stood quite still, looking.

  Beyond the door was a great stone chamber as large as the one behind him.

  But in this room there was only one thing.

  It was a great bubble of darkness. A big, brooding sphere of quivering blackness, through which shot little coruscating particles of brilliance like falling stars seen from another world. And from this weird bubble of throbbing darkness the lamplight recoiled, afraid.

  Something—awe, superstition or some purely physical force—sent a cold tingling shock racing through Carse’s body. He felt his hair rising and his flesh seemed to draw away from his bones. He tried to speak and could not, his throat knotted with anxiety and tension.

  “This is the thing I told you of,” whispered Penkawr. “This is the thing I told you I saw.”

  Carse hardly heard him. A conjecture so vast that he could not grasp it shook his brain. The scholar’s ecstasy was upon him, the ecstasy of discovery that is akin to madness.

  This brooding bubble of darkness—it was strangely like the darkness of those lank black spots far out in the galaxy which some scientists have dreamed are holes in the continuum itself, windows into the infinite outside our universe!

  Incredible, surely, and yet that cryptic Quiru inscription—fascinated by the thing, despite its aura of danger, Carse took two steps toward it.

  He heard the swift scrape of sandals on the stone floor behind him as Penkawr moved fast. Carse knew instantly that he had blundered in turning his back on the disgruntled little thief. He started to whirl and raise the sword.

  Penkawr’s thrusting hands jabbed his back before he could complete the movement. Carse felt himself pitched into the brooding blackness.

  He felt a terrible rending shock through each atom of his body, and then the world seemed to fall away from him.

  “Go share Rhiannon’s doom, Earthman! I told you I could get another partner!”

  Penkawr’s snarling shout came to him from a great distance as he tumbled into a black, bottomless infinity.

  CHAPTER II

  Alien World

  Carse seemed to plunge through a nighted abyss, buffeted by all the shrieking winds of space. An endless, endless fall with the timelessness and the choking horror of a nightmare.

  He struggled with the fierce revulsion of an animal trapped by the unknown. His struggle was not physical, for in that blind and screaming nothingness his body was useless. It was a mental fight, the man’s inner core of courage reasserting itself, willing itself to stop this nightmare fall through darkness.

  And then as he fell, a more terrifying sensation shook him. A feeling that he was not alone in this nightmare plunge through infinity, that a dark strong, pulsating presence was close beside him, grasping for him, groping with eager fingers for his brain.

  Carse made a supreme desperate mental effort. His sensation of falling seemed to lessen and then he felt solid rock slipping under his hands and feet. He scrambled frantically forward, in physical effort this time.

  He found himself quite suddenly outside the dark bubble again on the floor of the inner chamber of the Tomb.

  “What in the Nine Hells…” he began shakily and then stopped because the oath seemed so pitifully inadequate for what had happened.

  The little krypton-lamp hooked to his belt still cast its reddish glow, the sword of Rhiannon still glittered in his hand.

  And the bubble of darkness still gloomed and brooded a foot away from him, flickering with its whirl of diamond motes.

  Carse realized that all his nightmare plunging through space had been during the moment he was inside the bubble. What devil’s trick of ancient science was the thing anyway? Some queer perpetual vortex of force that the mysterious Quiru of long ago had set up, he supposed.

  But why had he seemed to fall through infinities inside the thing? And whence had come that terrifying sensation of strong fingers groping eagerly at his brain as he fell?

  “A trick of old Quiru science,” he muttered shakenly. “And Penkawr’s superstitions made him think he could kill me by pushing me into it.”

  Penkawr? Carse leaped to his feet, the sword of Rhiannon glittering wickedly in his hand.

  “Blast his thieving little soul!”

  Penkawr was not here now. But he wouldn’t have had time to go far. The smile on Carse’s face was not pleasant as he went through the doorway.

  In the outer chamber he suddenly stopped dead. There were things here now—big strange glittering objects—that had not been here before.

  Where had they come from? Had he been longer in that bubble of darkness than he thought? Had Penkawr found these things in hidden crypts and arranged them here to await his return?

  Carse’s wonder increased as he examined the objects that now loomed amid the mail and other relics he had seen before. These objects did not look like mere art-relics—they looked like carefully fashioned, complicated instruments of unguessable purpose.

  The biggest of them was a crystal wheel, the size of a small table, mounted horizontally atop a dull metal sphere. The wheel’s rim glistened with jewels cut in precise polyhedrons. And there were other smaller devices of linked crystal prisms and tubes and things built of concentric metal rings and squat looped tubes of massive metal.

  Could these glittering objects be the incomprehensible devices of an ancient alien Martian science? That supposition seemed incredible. The Mars of the far past, scholars knew, had been a world of only rudimentary science, a world of sword-fighting sea-warriors whose galleys and kingdoms had clashed on long-lost oceans.

  Yet, perhaps, in the Mars of the even farther past, there had been a science whose techniques were unfamiliar and unrecognizable?

  “But where could Penkawr have found them when we didn’t see them before? And why didn’t he take any of them with him?”

  Memory of Penkawr reminded him that the little thief would be getting farther away every moment. Grimly gripping the sword, Carse turned and hurried down the square stone corridor toward the outer world.

  As he strode on Carse became aware that the air in the tomb was now strangely damp. Moisture glistened on the walls. He had not noticed that most un-Martian dampness before and it startled him.

  “Probably seepage from underground springs, like those that feed the canals,” he thought. “But it wasn’t there before.”

  His glance fell on the floor of the corridor. The drifted dust lay over it thickly as when they had entered. But there were no footprints in it now. No prints at all except those he was now making.

  A horrible doubt, a feeling of unreality, clawed at Carse. The un-Martian dampness, the vanishing of their footprints—what had happened to everything in the moment he’d been inside the dark bubble?

  He came to the end of the square stone corridor. And it was closed. It was closed by a massive slab of monolithic stone.

  Carse stopped, staring at the slab. He fought down his increasing sense of weird unreality and made explanation for himself.

  “There must have been a stone door I didn’t see—and Penkawr has closed it to lock me in.”

  He tried to move the slab. It would not budge nor was there any sign of key, knob or hinge.

  Finally Carse stepped back and leveled his proton-pistol. Its hissing streak of atomic flame crackled in the rock slab, searing and splitting it.

  The slab was thick. He kept the trigger of his gun depressed for minutes. Then, with a hollowly reverberating crash the fragments of the split slab fell back in toward him.

  But beyond, instead of the open air, there lay a solid mass of dark red soil.

  “The whole Tomb of Rhiannon—buried, now; Penkawr must have started a cave-in.”

  Carse didn’t believe that. He didn’t believe it at all but he tried to make himself believe, for he was becoming more and more afraid. And the th
ing of which he was afraid was impossible.

  With blind anger he used the flaming beam of the pistol to undercut the mass of soil that blocked his way. He worked outward until the beam suddenly died as the charge of the gun ran out. He flung away the useless pistol and attacked the hot smoking mass of soil with the sword.

  Panting, dripping, his mind a whirl of confused speculations, he dug outward through the soft soil till a small hole of brilliant daylight opened in front of him.

  Daylight? Then he’d been in the weird bubble of darkness longer than he had imagined.

  The wind blew in through the little opening, upon his face. And it was warm wind. A warm wind and a damp wind, such as never blows on desert Mars.

  Carse squeezed through and stood in the bright day looking outward.

  There are times when a man has no emotion, no reaction. Times when all the centers are numbed and the eyes see and the ears hear but nothing communicates itself to the brain, which is protected in this way from madness.

  He tried finally to laugh at what he saw though he heard his own laughter as a dry choking cry.

  “Mirage, of course,” he whispered. “A big mirage. Big as all Mars.”

  The warm breeze lifted Carse’s tawny hair, blew his cloak against him. A cloud drifted over the sun and somewhere a bird screamed harshly. He did not move.

  He was looking at an ocean.

  It stretched out to the horizon ahead, a vast restlessness of water, milky-white and pale with a shimmering phosphorescence even in daylight.

  “Mirage,” he said again stubbornly, his reeling mind clinging with the desperation of fear to that one shred of explanation. “It has to be. Because this is still Mars.”

  Still Mars, still the same planet. The same high hills up into which Penkawr had led him by night.

  Or were they the same? Before, the foxhole entrance to the Tomb of Rhiannon had been in a steep cliff-face. Now he stood on the grassy slope of a great hill.

  And there were rolling green hills and dark forest down there below him, where before had been only desert. Green hills, green wood and a bright river that ran down a gorge to what had been dead sea-bottom but was now—sea.

  Carse’s numbed gaze swept along the great coast of the distant shoreline. And down on that far sunlight coast he saw the glitter of a white city and knew that it was Jekkara.

  Jekkara, bright and strong between the verdant hills and the mighty ocean, that ocean that had not been seen upon Mars for nearly a million years.

  Matthew Carse knew then that it was no mirage. He sat and hid his face in his hands. His body was shaken by deep tremors and his nails bit into his own flesh until blood trickled down his cheeks.

  He knew now what had happened to him in that vortex of darkness, and it seemed to him that a cold voice repeated a certain warning inscription in tones of distant thunder.

  “The Quiru are lords of space and time—of time—OF TIME!”

  Carse, staring out over the green hills and the milky ocean, made a terrible effort to grapple with the incredible.

  “I have come into the past of Mars. All my life I have studied and dreamed of that past. Now I am in it. I, Matthew Carse, archaeologist, renegade, looter of tombs.

  “The Quiru for their own reasons built a way and I came through it. Time is to us the unknown dimension but the Quiru knew it!”

  Carse had studied science. You had to know the elements of a half-dozen sciences to be a planetary archaeologist. He frantically ransacked memory now for an explanation.

  Had his first guess about that bubble of darkness been right? Was it really a hole in the continuum of the universe? If that were so he could dimly understand what had happened to him.

  For the space-time continuum of the universe was finite, limited. Einstein and Riemann had proved that long ago. And he had fallen clear out of that continuum and then back into it again—but into a different time-frame from his own.

  What was it that Kaufman had once written? “The Past is the Present-that-exists-at-a-distance.” He had come back into that other distant Present, that was all. There was no reason to be afraid.

  But he was afraid. The horror of that nightmare transition to this green and smiling Mars of long ago wrenched a gusty cry from his lips.

  Blindly, still gripping the jewelled sword, he leaped up and turned to re-enter the buried Tomb of Rhiannon.

  “I can go back the way I came, back through that hole in the continuum.”

  He stopped a convulsive shudder running through his frame. He could not make himself face again that bubble of glittering gloom, that dreadful plunge through inter-dimensional infinity.

  He dared not. He had not the Quiru’s wisdom. In that perilous plunge across time mere chance had flung him into his past age. He could not count on chance to return him to his own far-future age.

  “I’m here,” he said. “I’m here in the distant past of Mars and I’m here to stay.”

  He turned back around and gazed out again upon that incredible vista. He stayed there a long time, unmoving. The sea birds came and looked at him and flashed away on their sharp white wings. The shadows lengthened.

  His eyes swung again to the white towers of Jekkara down in the distance, queenly in the sunlight above the harbor. It was not the Jekkara he knew, the thieves’ city of the Low Canals, rotting away into dust, but it was a link to the familiar and Carse desperately needed such a link.

  He would go to Jekkara. And he would try not to think. He must not think at all or surely his mind would crack.

  Carse gripped the haft of the jeweled sword and started down the grassy slope of the hill.

  CHAPTER III

  City of the Past

  It was a long way to the city. Carse moved at a steady plodding pace. He did not try to find the easiest path but rammed his way through and over all obstacles, never deviating from the straight line that led to Jekkara. His cloak hampered him and he tore it off. His face was empty of all expression, but sweat ran down his cheeks and mingled with the salt of tears.

  He walked between two worlds. He went through valleys drowsing in the heat of the summer day, where leafy branches of strange trees raked his face and the juice of crushed grasses stained his sandals. Life, winged and furred and soft of foot, fled from him with a stir and a rustle. And yet he knew that he walked in a desert, where even the wind had forgotten the names of the dead for whom he mourned.

  He crossed high ridges, where the sea lay before him and he could hear the boom of the surf on the beaches. And yet he saw only a vast dead plain, where the dust ran in little wavelets among the dry reefs. The truths of thirty years’ living are not easily forgotten.

  The sun sank slowly toward the horizon. As Carse topped the last ridge above the city and started down he walked under a vault of flame. The sea burned as the white phosphorescence took color from the clouds. With dazed wonder Carse saw the gold and crimson and purple splash down the long curve of the sky and run out over the water.

  He could look down under the harbor. The docks of marble that he had known so well, worn and cracked by ages and whelmed by desert sand, lying lonely beneath the moons. The same docks, and yet now, mirage-like, the sea filled the basin of the harbor.

  Round-hulled trading ships lay against the quays and the shouts of stevedores and sweating slaves rose up to him on the evening air. Shallops came and went amid the ships and out beyond the breakwater he saw the fishing fleet of Jekkara coming home with sails of cinnabar dark against the west.

  By the palace quays, near the very spot where he had gone with Penkawr to see the sword of Rhiannon, a long lean dark war-galley with a brazen ram crouched like a sullen black panther. Beyond it were other galleys. And above them, tall and proud, the white towers of the palace rose.

  “I have come far back into the past of Mars indeed! For this is the Mars of a million years ago that archaeology has always pictured!”

  A planet of conflicting civilizations which had developed little science yet w
hich cherished a legend of the superscience of the great Quiru who had been before even this time.

  “A planet of the lost past that God’s law intended no man of my own time ever to see!”

  Matthew Carse shivered as though it were very cold. Slowly, slowly, he went down into the streets of Jekkara and it seemed to him, in the sunset, that the whole city was stained with blood.

  The walls closed him in. There was a mist before his eyes and a roaring in his ears but he was aware of people. Lean lithe men and women who passed him in the narrow ways, who jostled against him and went on, then stopped and turned to stare. The dark and catlike people of Jekkara, Jekkara of the Low Canals and of this other age.

  He heard the music of the harps and the chiming whisper of the little bells the women wore. The wind touched his face but it was a moist wind and warm, heavy with the breath of the sea, and it was more than a man could bear.

  Carse went on but he had no idea where he was going or what he had to do. He went on only because he was already moving and he had not the wit to stop.

  One foot before the other, stolid, blind, like a man bewitched, he walked through the streets among the dark Jekkarans, a tall blond man trailing a naked sword.

  The people of the city watched him. People of the harborside, of the wine shops and the twisting alleys. They drew away before and closed in behind, following and staring at him.

  The gap of ages lay between them. His kilt was of a strange cloth, an unknown dye. His ornaments were of a time and country they would never see. And his face was alien.

  This very alienage held them back for a time. Some breath of the incredible truth clung to him and made them afraid. Then someone said a name and someone else repeated it and in the space of a few seconds there was no more mystery, no more fear—only hate.

  Carse heard the name. Dimly, from a great distance, he heard it as it grew from a whisper into a howling cry that ran wolf-like through the streets.

  “Khond! Khond! A spy from Khondor!” And then another word. “Slay!”