The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  Ahrian whispered. The crystal glowed in the moonlight, and there was in her face a magnificent and awful strength. David gave a low wail of agony. The cords stood out on the backs of his hands. The eyes of the woman from Altair blazed like purple stars. The gunstock settled into place, and David’s finger curled in on the trigger.

  Someone sped by me, off to one side and going like the wind. Someone in a plaid robe, headed not for David, but for Ahrian.

  There was a scream, I don’t know whose. Maybe mine. The gun let off, both barrels, right above my shoulder, and the hot metal seared my hand where I shoved the thing up at the last second so that it hit nothing but the treetops. David groaned and let it drop, and so did I. I reeled around, and there was Marthe leaning over the stone balustrade, shivering, sobbing, triumphant, holding in one hand the crystal tiara.

  I carried Ahrian into the house. Her body, light and frail as a bird’s, was broken. It was a long fall into the garden, and she had hit hard. Her hair had come loose and hung over my arm in a long thick pall, dark purple in the moonlight.

  I laid her on the couch, as gently as I could. She looked up at me and said quite clearly, “The beasts I could force against their will. The human mind is stronger. With all my skill and care—a little too strong.”

  She was still a while, and then she whispered, “I am sad, Rafe, that I must die so far away from home.”

  That was all.

  The shot had roused the servants, who began to straggle in from the far wing of the house. I told them that David thought he had heard prowlers and fired at them, and in the excitement Ahrian had fallen from the terrace. They believed it. Why not? David was still sitting out there, doubled up on the cold stone, looking at nothing. Somehow I couldn’t speak to him, or touch him. I sent the servants to get him in, and told them to call the people who had to be called. Then I took Marthe up to her room.

  “It’ll be all right,” I told her. “It was an accident. Let me tell the story. You won’t even be named.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, in a strange harsh voice. “All I care about is you, and you’re alive and safe.” She put her arms around me, a fierce and painful grip. “I’m sorry I killed her, I didn’t mean to, but I’d do it again, Rafe, I’d do it again—she wanted to kill you!” She caught her breath, still clinging to me, and then she began to cry. “You fool, oh you fool, rushing David like that to make him fire at you instead of me.” She said some more things, and then her voice got faint. I put her on the bed and made her take a sedative, and presently she was asleep.

  I left the maid with her, and went downstairs. There were things I had to say to David.

  That was how the McQuarrie tradition came to an end after two hundred years. Even the house is gone, for none of us could bear it any longer. David will never go to space again.

  I’m glad. What did it gain the McQuarries? What has it ever gained men? Have men ever brought back more happiness from the stars? Will they ever?

  Well, it’s too late now to wonder about that. It’s been too late, ever since the first skin-clad barbarian stared up at the moon and lusted for it. If Marthe and I have sons, I am afraid that McQuarries will go to space again.

  The Last Days of Shandakor

  1

  He came alone into the wineshop, wrapped in a dark red cloak, with the cowl drawn over his head. He stood for a moment by the doorway and one of the slim dark predatory women who live in those places went to him, with a silvery chiming from the little bells that were almost all she wore.

  I saw her smile up at him. And then, suddenly, the smile became fixed and something happened to her eyes. She was no longer looking at the cloaked man but through him. In the oddest fashion—it was as though he had become invisible.

  She went by him. Whether she passed some word along or not I couldn’t tell but an empty space widened around the stranger. And no one looked at him. They did not avoid looking at him. They simply refused to see him.

  He began to walk slowly across the crowded room. He was very tall and he moved with a fluid, powerful grace that was beautiful to watch. People drifted out of his way, not seeming to, but doing it. The air was thick with nameless smells, shrill with the laughter of women.

  Two tall barbarians, far gone in wine, were carrying on some intertribal feud and the yelling crowd had made room for them to fight. There was a silver pipe and a drum and a double-banked harp making old wild music. Lithe brown bodies leaped and whirled through the laughter and the shouting and the smoke.

  The stranger walked through all this, alone, untouched, unseen. He passed close to where I sat. Perhaps because I, of all the people in that place, not only saw him but stared at him, he gave me a glance of black eyes from under the shadow of his cowl-eyes like blown coals, bright with suffering and rage.

  I caught only a glimpse of his muffled face. The merest glimpse—but that was enough. Why did he have to show his face to me in that wineshop in Barrakesh?

  He passed on. There was no space in the shadowy corner where he went but space was made, a circle of it, a moat between the stranger and the crowd. He sat down. I saw him lay a coin on the outer edge of the table. Presently a serving wench came up, picked up the coin and set down a cup of wine. But it was as if she waited on an empty table.

  I turned to Kardak, my head drover, a Shunni with massive shoulders and uncut hair braided in an intricate tribal knot. “What’s all that about?” I asked.

  Kardak shrugged. “Who knows?” He started to rise. “Come, JonRoss. It is time we got back to the serai.”

  “We’re not leaving for hours yet. And don’t lie to me, I’ve been on Mars a long time. What is that man? Where does he come from?”

  Barrakesh is the gateway between north and south. Long ago, when there were oceans in equatorial and southern Mars, when Valkis and Jekkara were proud seats of empire and not thieves’ dens, here on the edge of the northern Drylands the great caravans had come and gone to Barrakesh for a thousand thousand years. It is a place of strangers.

  In the time-eaten streets of rock you see tall Keshi hillmen, nomads from the high plains of Upper Shun, lean dark men from the south who barter away the loot of forgotten tombs and temples, cosmopolitan sophisticates up from Kahora and the trade cities, where there are spaceports and all the appurtenances of modern civilization.

  The red-cloaked stranger was none of these.

  A glimpse of a face—I am a planetary anthropologist. I was supposed to be charting Martian ethnology and I was doing it on a fellowship grant I had wangled from a Terran university too ignorant to know that the vastness of Martian history makes such a project hopeless.

  I was in Barrakesh, gathering an outfit preparatory to a year’s study of the tribes of Upper Shun. And suddenly there had passed close by me a man with golden skin and un-Martian black eyes and a facial structure that belonged to no race I knew. I have seen the carven faces of fauns that were a little like it.

  Kardak said again, “It is time to go, JonRoss!”

  I looked at the stranger, drinking his wine in silence and alone. “Very well, I’ll ask him.”

  Kardak sighed. “Earthmen,” he said, “are not given much to wisdom.” He turned and left me.

  I crossed the room and stood beside the stranger. In the old courteous High Martian they speak in all the Low-Canal towns I asked permission to sit.

  Those raging, suffering eyes met mine. There was hatred in them, and scorn, and shame. “What breed of human are you?”

  “I am an Earthman.”

  He said the name over as though he had heard it before and was trying to remember. “Earthman. Then it is as the winds have said, blowing across the desert—that Mars is dead and men from other worlds defile her dust.” He looked out over the wineshop and all the people who would not admit his presence. “Change,” he whispered. “Death and change and the passing away of things.”

  The muscles of his face drew tight. He drank and I could see now that he had been drinking for a lon
g time, for days, perhaps for weeks. There was a quiet madness on him.

  “Why do the people shun you?”

  “Only a man of Earth would need to ask,” he said and made a sound of laughter, very dry and bitter.

  I was thinking, A new race, an unknown race! I was thinking of the fame that sometimes comes to men who discover a new thing, and of a Chair I might sit in at the University if I added one bright unheard-of piece of the shadowy mosaic of Martian history. I had had my share of wine and a bit more. That Chair looked a mile high and made of gold.

  The stranger said softly, “I go from place to place in this wallow of Barrakesh and everywhere it is the same. I have ceased to be.” His white teeth glittered for an instant in the shadow of the cowl. “They were wiser than I, my people. When Shandakor is dead, we are dead also, whether our bodies live or not.”

  “Shandakor?” I said. It had a sound of distant bells.

  “How should an Earthman know? Yes, Shandakor! Ask of the men of Kesh and the men of Shun! Ask the kings of Mekh, who are half around the world! Ask of all the men of Mars—they have not forgotten Shandakor! But they will not tell you. It is a bitter shame to them, the memory and the name.”

  He stared out across the turbulent throng that filled the room and flowed over to the noisy street outside. “And I am here among them—lost.”

  “Shandakor is dead?”

  “Dying. There were three of us who did not want to die. We came south across the desert—one turned back, one perished in the sand, I am here in Barrakesh.” The metal of the wine-cup bent between his hands.

  I said, “And you regret your coming.”

  “I should have stayed and died with Shandakor. I know that now. But I cannot go back.”

  “Why not?” I was thinking how the name John Ross would look, inscribed in golden letters on the scroll of the discoverers.

  “The desert is wide, Earthman. Too wide for one alone.”

  And I said, “I have a caravan. I am going north tonight.”

  A light came into his eyes, so strange and deadly that I was afraid. “No,” he whispered. “No!”

  I sat in silence, looking out across the crowd that had forgotten me as well, because I sat with the stranger. A new race, an unknown city. And I was drunk.

  After a long while the stranger asked me, “What does an Earthman want in Shandakor?”

  I told him. He laughed. “You study men,” he said and laughed again, so that the red cloak rippled.

  “If you want to go back I’ll take you. If you don’t, tell me where the city lies and I’ll find it. Your race, your city, should have their place in history.”

  He said nothing but the wine had made me very shrewd and I could guess at what was going on in the stranger’s mind. I got up.

  “Consider it,” I told him. “You can find me at the serai by the northern gate until the lesser moon is up. Then I’ll be gone.”

  “Wait.” His fingers fastened on my wrist. They hurt. I looked into his face and I did not like what I saw there. But, as Kardak had mentioned, I was not given much to wisdom.

  The stranger said, “Your men will not go beyond the Wells of Karthedon.”

  “Then we’ll go without them.”

  A long long silence. Then he said, “So be it.”

  I knew what he was thinking as plainly as though he had spoken the words. He was thinking that I was only an Earthman and that he would kill me when we came in sight of Shandakor.

  2

  The caravan tracks branch off at the Wells of Karthedon. One goes westward into Shun and one goes north through the passes of Outer Kesh. But there is a third one, more ancient than the others. It goes toward the east and it is never used. The deep rock wells are dry and the stone-built shelters have vanished under the rolling dunes. It is not until the track begins to climb the mountains that there are even memories.

  Kardak refused politely to go beyond the Wells. He would wait for me, he said, a certain length of time, and if I came back we would go on into Shun. If I didn’t—well, his full pay was left in charge of the local headman. He would collect it and go home. He had not liked having the stranger with us. He had doubled his price.

  In all that long march up from Barrakesh I had not been able to get a word out of Kardak or the men concerning Shandakor. The stranger had not spoken either. He had told me his name—Corin—and nothing more. Cloaked and cowled he rode alone and brooded. His private devils were still with him and he had a new one now—impatience. He would have ridden us all to death if I had let him.

  So Corin and I went east alone from Karthedon, with two led animals and all the water we could carry. And now I could not hold him back.

  “There is no time to stop,” he said. “The days are running out. There is no time!”

  When we reached the mountains we had only three animals left and when we crossed the first ridge we were afoot and leading the one remaining beast which carried the dwindling water skins.

  We were following a road now. Partly hewn and partly worn it led up and over the mountains, those naked leaning mountains that were full of silence and peopled only with the shapes of red rock that the wind had carved.

  “Armies used to come this way,” said Corin. “Kings and caravans and beggars and human slaves, singers and dancing girls and the embassies of princes. This was the road to Shandakor.”

  And we went along it at a madman’s pace.

  The beast fell in a slide of rock and broke its neck and we carried the last water skin between us. It was not a heavy burden. It grew lighter and then was almost gone.

  One afternoon, long before sunset, Corin said abruptly, “We will stop here.”

  The road went steeply up before us. There was nothing to be seen or heard. Corin sat down in the drifted dust. I crouched down too, a little distance from him. I watched him. His face was hidden and he did not speak.

  The shadows thickened in that deep and narrow way. Overhead the strip of sky flared saffron and then red—and then the bright cruel stars came out. The wind worked at its cutting and polishing of stone, muttering to itself, an old and senile wind full of dissatisfaction and complaint. There was the dry faint click of falling pebbles.

  The gun felt cold in my hand, covered with my cloak. I did not want to use it. But I did not want to die here on this silent pathway of vanished armies and caravans and kings.

  A shaft of greenish moonlight crept down between the walls. Corin stood up.

  “Twice now I have followed lies. Here I am met at last by truth.”

  I said, “I don’t understand you.”

  “I thought I could escape the destruction. That was a lie. Then I thought I could return to share it. That too was a lie. Now I see the truth. Shandakor is dying. I fled from that dying, which is the end of the city and the end of my race. The shame of flight is on me and I can never go back.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I will die here.”

  “And I?”

  “Did you think,” asked Corin softly, “that I would bring an alien creature in to watch the end of Shandakor?”

  I moved first. I didn’t know what weapons he might have, hidden under that dark red cloak. I threw myself over on the dusty rock. Something went past my head with a hiss and a rattle and a flame of light and then I cut the legs from under him and he fell down forward and I got on top of him, very fast.

  He had vitality. I had to hit his head twice against the rock before I could take out of his hands the vicious little instrument of metal rods. I threw it far away. I could not feel any other weapons on him except a knife and I took that, too. Then I got up.

  I said, “I will carry you to Shandakor.”

  He lay still, draped in the tumbled folds of his cloak. His breath made a harsh sighing in his throat. “So be it.” And then he asked for water.

  I went to where the skin lay and picked it up, thinking that there was perhaps a cupful left. I didn’t hear him move. What he did was done very silently wi
th a sharp-edged ornament. I brought him the water and it was already over. I tried to lift him up. His eyes looked at me with a curiously brilliant look. Then he whispered three words, in a language I didn’t know, and died. I let him down again.

  His blood had poured out across the dust. And even in the moonlight I could see that it was not the color of human blood.

  I crouched there for a long while, overcome with a strange sickness. Then I reached out and pushed that red cowl back to bare his head. It was a beautiful head. I had never seen it. If I had, I would not have gone alone with Corin into the mountains. I would have understood many things if I had seen it and not for fame nor money would I have gone to Shandakor.

  His skull was narrow and arched and the shaping of the bones was very fine. On that skull was a covering of short curling fibers that had an almost metallic luster in the moonlight, silvery and bright. They stirred under my hand, soft silken wires responding of themselves to an alien touch. And even as I took my hand away the luster faded from them and the texture changed.

  When I touched them again they did not stir. Corin’s ears were pointed and there were silvery tufts on the tips of them. On them and on his forearms and his breast were the faint, faint memories of scales, a powdering of shining dust across the golden skin. I looked at his teeth and they were not human either.

  I knew now why Corin had laughed when I told him that I studied men.

  It was very still. I could hear the falling of pebbles and the little stones that rolled all lonely down the cliffs and the shift and whisper of dust in the settling cracks. The Wells of Karthedon were far away. Too far by several lifetimes for one man on foot with a cup of water.