Khal Kan reined up and came riding back. The dust-cloud of their pursuers was ominously big and close.
“Ride on!” Zoor cried, his wizened face unperturbed. “You can make the ridges without me.”
“We can’t make them,” Khal Kan denied coolly. “And it’s not our way to separate in face of danger.”
He dismounted. Golden Wings was looking westward with exultation in her black eyes. “Did I not tell you I’d see you caught!” she cried.
Khal Kan cut free her hands and feet. He reached up and set his lips against hers, bruisingly. Then he stepped back, releasing her.
“You can ride back and meet your father’s warriors with the glad news that we’re here for the taking, my sweet,” he told her.
“You’re letting her go?” yelled Brusul. “We could hold her hostage.”
“No,” declared Khal Kan. “I’ll not see her harmed in the fight.”
He laughed up at her, as she sat in the saddle looking down at him with wide, strangely bewildered eyes.
“Too bad I couldn’t get you to Jotan with me, my little desert-cat. “But you’ll have the pleasure of seeing us killed. Tell your father’s warriors to come with their swords out!”
For a long moment, Golden Wings looked down at him. Then she set spur to the pony and galloped away to the oncoming dust-cloud.
Khal Kan and his two comrades drew their swords and waited. And soon they saw the force of a hundred drylanders riding up to them. Bladomir was in the lead, his beard bristling. And Golden Wings rode beside him.
“The little hell-cat wants to help kill us,” growled Brusul. “You should have slit her throat.”
Khal Kan shrugged. “I’d liefer slit my own. Too bad we have to end in a skirmish like this, old friends. I dragged you into it.”
“Oh, it’s all right, except that we won’t be with the armies of Jotan when they go out to meet Egir and the Bunts,” muttered Brusul.
The drylanders were not charging. No sword was unsheathed as they came forward, though old Bladomir was frowning blackly. The desert chieftain halted his horse ten paces away, and spoke to Khal Kan in a roaring voice.
“I ought to kill you all, Jotanians, for taking my daughter away with you. But we’re a free people. Since she says she goes with you of her own free will, I’ll not interfere.”
“Of her own free will?” gasped Brusul. “What in the sun’s name—”
Golden Wings had dismounted and came toward Khal Kan. Her dark eyes met him levelly. She did not speak, nor did he, as she took his hand.
Bladomir laid a sword-blade across their clasped hands, and tossed a handful of the yellow desert sand upon it. Khal Kan felt his heart in his throat. It was the marriage rite of the drylanders.
Zoor and Brusul were staring unbelievingly, the drylanders sadly. But Golden Wings’ red lips were sweet fire under his mouth.
“You said that for each lash-stroke last night, I’d pay a hundred kisses,” she whispered. “That will take long—my lord.”
He looked earnestly into the brooding sweetness of her face. “No deceptions between us, my little sandcat!” he said. “When I freed you and let you go to your father, I was gambling that you’d come back—like this.”
For a moment her eyes flared surprise and anger. And then she laughed. “No deceptions, my lord! Last night, in my father’s pavilion, I knew you were the mate I’d long awaited. But—I thought the lashing would teach you to value me the more!”
Bladomir had mounted his horse. The stoical old desert chieftain and his men called their farewells, and then rode back westward.
They had left horse and sword for Golden Wings. She rode knee to knee with Khal Kan as they spurred up the sloping sands toward the first red ridges of the Dragals.
Dusk came upon them hours later as they climbed the steep pass toward the highest ridge of the range. One of the pink moons was up and the other was rising. The desert was a vague unreality far behind and below.
“Look back and you can see the campfires of your people,” he told the girl.
Her dark head did not turn. “My people are ahead now, in Jotan.”
They topped the ridge. A yell of horror burst from Brusul.
“The Bunts are in Galoon! Hell take the green devils—they’ve marched leagues north in the last two days!”
Khal Kan’s fierce rage choked him as he too saw. Far, far to the east beneath the rosy moons, the lowland plain below the Dragals stretched out to the silvery immensity of the Zambrian Sea.
Down there to the right, on the coast, should have shone the bright lights of the city Galoon, southern most port of Jotanland.
But instead the city was scarred by hideous red fires, that smoldered through the night like baleful, unwinking eyes.
“Egir’s led the green men farther north than I dreamed!’” Khal Kan muttered. “Oh, damn that traitor! If I had my sword at his throat—”
“We’d best ride hard for Jotan before we’re cut off,” Zoor cried.
They rode north along the ridges, until the red fires of burning Galoon receded from sight. Then they moved down the western slopes of the mountains, and galloped on north along the easier coast road.
Galloping under the rosy moons, Khal Kan pointed far along the shore to a yellow beacon-fire atop the lighthouse tower outside Jotan.
The square black towers of Jotan loomed sheer on the edge of the silver sea, surrounded by the high black wall which had only two openings—a big water-gate on the sea side, and a smaller gate on the other. The rosy moonlight glinted off the arms of sentries posted thick on the wall, and a sharp challenge was flung down as Khal Kan rode up to the closed gate.
Joyful cries greeted the disclosure of his identity. The gates ground slowly open, and he and Golden Wings galloped in with Brusul and Zoor. Khal Kan led the way through the black-paved stone streets of Jotan to the low, brooding mass of the palace.
When, with Golden Wings’ hand in his, he hurried into the great domed, torchlit marble Hall of the Kings, he found his father awaiting him.
Kan Abul’s iron-hard face seemed even grimmer than usual.
“The Bunts—” Khal Kan began, but the king finished for him.
“I know—the green men have captured and sacked Galoon, led by my traitorous brother. We’ve been gathering our forces. Tomorrow we march south to attack—it’s good you*re in time to join us. But who’s this?”
Khal Kan grinned. “I found no Bunts over the Dragais, but I did find a princess for Jotan. They call her Golden Wings—Bladomir’s daughter.”
Kan Abul grunted. “A dryland princess? Well, you’ve made a bad bargain, girl—this son of mine’s an empty-skulled rascal. And tomorrow he goes south with us to battle.”
“And I go with him!” declared Golden Wings. “Do you think I’m one of your Jotan girls that cannot ride or fight?”
Khal Kin laughed. “We’ll argue that the morrow.”
Later that night, in his great chamber of seaward windows, with Golden Wings sleeping in his arms, Khal Kan also slept—
Henry Stevens brooded as he sat waiting in the office of the psychoanalyst, the next afternoon. Things couldn’t go on this way! He’d been reprimanded twice this day by Carson for neglect of his work.
Since he’d awakened this morning, the danger to Jotan had been obsessing his thoughts.
It was queer, but he had had more time to reflect upon the peril than had Khal Kan himself in the dream.
“You can go in now, Mr. Stevens,” smiled the receptionist.
Doctor Thorn’s alert young eyes caught the haggardness of Henry’s face but he was casual as he pushed cigarettes across the desk.
“You had the same dream last night?” he asked Henry.
Henry Stevens nodded. “Yes, and things are getting worse—over there in Thar. The Bunts have taken Galoon in some way, and Egir must be planning to lead them on against Jotan.”
“Egir?” questioned the psychoanalyst.
Henry explained. “Egir w
as my—I mean Khal Kan’s—uncle, the younger brother of Kan Abul. He’s a renegade to Jotan. He fled from there about—let’s see, about four Thar years ago, after Kan Abul discovered his plot to usurp the throne. Since then, he’s been conspiring with the Bunts.”
Henry took a pencil and drew a little map on a sheet of paper. It showed a curving, crescent-like coast.
“This is the Zambrian Sea,” he explained. “On the north of this indented gulf is Jotan, my city—I mean, Khal Kan’s city. Away to the south here across the gulf is Buntland, where the barbarian green men live. On the coast between Buntland and Jotan are the independent city of Kaubos and the southernmost Jotanian city of Galoon.
“When my uncle Egir fled to the Bunts,” Henry went on earnestly, “he stirred them up to attack Kaubos, which they captured. We’ve been planning an expedition to drive them out of there. Five days ago I rode over the Dragal Mountains with two comrades to reconnoiter a possible route by which we could make a surprise march south. But now the Bunts are moving north and have sacked Galoon. There’s a big battle coming—”
Henry paused embarrassedly. He had suddenly awakened from his intense interest in exposition to become aware that Doctor Thorn was not looking at the map, but at his face.
“I know it all sounds crazy, to talk about a dream this way,” Henry mumbled. “But I can’t help worrying about Jotan. You see, if it turned out that Thar was real and that this was the dream—”
He broke off again, and then finished with an earnest plea. “That’s why I must know which is real—Thar or Earth, Khal Kan or myself!”
Doctor Thorn considered gravely. The young psychiatrist did not ridicule Henry’s bafflement, as he had half expected.
“Look at it from my point of view,” Thorn proposed. “You think it’s possible that I may be only a figment in a world dreamed by Khal Kan each night. But I know that I’m real, though I can’t very well prove it.”
“That’s it,” Henry murmured discouragedly. “People always take for granted that this world is real—they never even imagine that it may be just a dream. But none of them could prove that it isn’t a dream.”
“But suppose you could prove that Thar is a dream?” Thorn pursued. “Then you’d know that this must be the real existence.”
Henry considered. “That’s true. But how can I do that?”
“I want you to take this memory across into the dreamlife with you tonight,” Doctor Thorn said earnestly. “I want you, when you awake as Khal Kan, to say over and over to yourself—‘This isn’t real. I’m not real. Henry Stevens and Earth are the reality’.”
“You think that will have some effect?” Henry asked doubtfully.
“I think that in time your dream-world will begin to fade, if you keep saying that,” the psychoanalyst declared.
“Well, I’ll try it,” Henry promised thoughtfully. “If it has any effect, I’ll be sure then that Thar is the dream.”
Doctor Thorn remarked, “Probably the best thing to happen would be if Khal Kan got himself killed in that dreamlife. Then, the moment before he ‘died,’ the dream of Thar would vanish utterly as always in such dreams.”
Henry was a little appalled. “You mean—Thar and Jotan and Golden Wings and all the rest would be gone forever?”
“That’s right—you wouldn’t ever again be oppressed by the dream,” encouraged the psychoanalyst.
Henry Stevens felt a chill as he drove homeward. That was something he hadn’t forseen, that the death of Khal Kan in that other life would destroy Thar forever if Thar was the dream.
Henry didn’t want that. He had spent just as much of his life in Thar, as Khal Kan, as he had done here on Earth. No matter if that life should turn out to be merely a dream, it was real and vivid, and he didn’t want to see it utterly destroyed.
He felt a little panic as he pictured himself cut off from Thar forever, never again riding with Brusul and Zoor on crazy adventure, never seeing again that brooding smile in Golden Wings’ eyes, nor the towers of Jotan brooding under the rosy moons.
Life as Henry Stevens of Earth, without his nightly existence in Thar, would be tame and profitless. Yet he knew that he must once and for all settle the question of which of his lives was real, even though it risked destroying one of those lives.
“I’ll do what Doctor Thorn said, when I’m Khal Kan tonight,” Henry muttered. “I’ll tell myself Thar isn’t real, and see if it has any effect.”
He was so strung up by anticipation of the test he was about to make, that he paid even less attention than usual to Emma’s placid account of neighborhood gossip and small household happenings.
That night as he lay, waiting for sleep, Henry repeated over and over to himself the formula that he must repeat as Khal Kan. His last waking thought, as he drifted into sleep, was of that.
Khal Kan awoke with a vague sense of some duty oppressing his mind. There was something he must do, or say—
He opened his eyes, to look with contentment upon the dawnlit interior of his own black stone chamber in the great palace at Jotan. On the wall were his favorite weapons—the sword with which he’d killed a sea-dragon when he was fourteen years old, the battered shield with the great scar which he had borne in his first real battle.
Golden Wings stirred sleepily against him, her perfumed black hair brushing his cheek. He patted her head with rough tenderness. Then he became aware of the tramp of many feet outside, of distant clank of arms and hard voices barking orders, and rattle of hurrying hoofs.
His pulse leaped. “Today we go south to meet Egir and the Bunts!”
Then he remembered what it was that dimly oppressed his mind. It was something from his dream—the queer nightly dream in which he was the timid little man Henry Stevens on that strange world called Earth.
He remembered now that Henry Stevens had promised a doctor that he would say aloud, “Thar isn’t real—I, Khal Kan, am not real.”
Khal Kan laughed. The idea of saying such a thing, of asserting that Thar and Jotan and everything else was not real, seemed idiotic.
“That timid little man I am in the dream each night—he thinks I would mouth such folly as that!” Khal Kan chuckled.
Golden Wings had awakened. Her slumbrous black eyes regarded him questioningly.
“It’s my own private joke, sweet,” he told her. And he went on to tell her of the nightly dream he had had since childhood, of a queer world, called Earth in which he was another man. “It’s the maddest world you can imagine, my pet—that dream-world. Men don’t even wear swords, they don’t know how to ride or fight like men, and they spend their lives plotting in stuffy rooms for a thing they call ‘money’—bits of paper and metal.
“And the cream of the joke,” Khal Kan laughed, “is that in my dream, I even doubt whether Thar is real. The dream-me believes that maybe this is the dream, that Jotan and Brusul and Zoor and even you are but phantom visions of my sleeping brain.”
He rose to his feet. “Enough of dreams and visions. Today we ride to meet Egir and the Bunts. That is no dream!”
Ten thousand strong massed the fighting-men of Jotan later that morning, outside the walls of the city. Under the red sun their bronzed faces were sternly confident and eager for battle.
Kan Abul rode out through their ranks, with his captains behind him in full armor. Khal Kan was among them, and beside him rode Golden Wings. The desert princess had fiercely refused to be left behind.
Their helmets flashed in die red sunlight, and the cheers of the troops were deafening as Kan Abul spoke to his captains.
“Egir’s main force is already ten leagues north of Galoon,” he told them. “There’s talk of some new weapon which the Bunts have, with which they claim to be invincible. So we’re going to take them by surprise.
“I’ll lead our main force of eight thousand archers and spearmen south along the coast road,” the king continued. “My son, you will take our two thousand horsemen and ride over the first ridge of the Dragals, then ride so
uth ten leagues. We’ll join battle with the Bunts down on the coastal plain, and you can come down from the Dragals and strike their flank. And the gods will be against us if we don’t roll them up and destroy them as our forefathers did, generations ago.”
Kan Abul led the troops down the coast road, and as they marched along they roared out the old fighting-song of Jotan.
“The Bunts came up to Jotan,
Long ago!”
Hours later, Khal Kan sat his horse amid a thin screen of brush high in the red easternmost ridge of the Dragals, leagues south of Jotan. Golden Wings sat her pony beside him, and their two thousand horsemen waited below the concealment of the ridge.
Down there below them, the red slopes dropped into a narrow plain between the mountains and the blue Zambrian. Far southward, a pall of black smoke marked the site of sacked Galoon. And from there, something like a glittering snake was crawling north along the coast.
“My Uncle Egir and his green devils,” muttered Khal Kan. “Now where are father and our footmen?”
“See—they come!” Golden Wings cried, pointing northward eagerly.
In the north, a glittering serpent of almost equal size seemed crawling southward to meet the advancing Bunt columns.
“Your desert eyes see well,” declared Khal Kan. “Now we wait.”
The two armies drew closer to each other. Horns were blaring now down in the Bunt columns, and the green bowmen were hastily forming up in double columns, a solid, blocky formation. More slowly, they advanced.
Trumpets roared in the north, where the footmen of Jotan marched steadily on. Faintly to the two on the ridge came the distant chorus.
“The Bunts fled back on the homeward track
When blood did flow!”
“There is my uncle, damn him!” exclaimed Khal Kan, pointing.
He felt the old, bitter rage as he saw the stalwart, bright-helmed figure that rode with a group of Bunts at the head of the green men’s army.
The Edmond Hamilton Megapack: 16 Classic Science Fiction Tales Page 14
