The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  I went on to tell him all the things we had that Shandakor did not. “You never went beyond the beast of burden and the simple wheel. We achieved flight long ago. We have conquered space and the planets. We’ll go on to conquer the stars!”

  Rhul nodded. “Perhaps we were wrong. We remained here and conquered ourselves.” He looked out toward the slopes where the barbarian army waited and he sighed. “In the end it is all the same.”

  Days and nights and Duani, bringing me food, sharing her water, asking questions, taking me through the city. The only thing she would not show me was something they called the Place of Sleep. “I shall be there soon enough,” she said and shivered.

  “How long?” I asked. It was an ugly thing to say.

  “We are not told. Rhul watches the level in the cisterns and when it’s time…” She made a gesture with her hands. “Let us go up on the wall.”

  We went up among the ghostly soldiery and the phantom banners. Outside there were darkness and death and the coming of death. Inside there were light and beauty, the last proud blaze of Shandakor under the shadow of its doom. There was an eerie magic in it that had begun to tell on me. I watched Duani. She leaned against the parapet, looking outward. The wind ruffled her silver crest, pressed her garments close against her body. Her eyes were full of moonlight and I could not read them. Then I saw that there were tears.

  I put my arm around her shoulders. She was only a child, an alien child, not of my race or breed…

  “JonRoss.”

  “Yes?”

  “There are so many things I will never know.”

  It was the first time I had touched her. Those curious curls stirred under my fingers, warm and alive. The tips of her pointed ears were soft as a kitten’s.

  “Duani.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know…”

  I kissed her. She drew back and gave me a startled look from those black brilliant eyes and suddenly I stopped thinking that she was a child and I forgot that she was not human and—I didn’t care.

  “Duani, listen. You don’t have to go to the Place of Sleep.”

  She looked at me, her cloak spread out upon the night wind, her hands against my chest.

  “There’s a whole world out there to live in. And if you aren’t happy there I’ll take you to my world, to Earth. There isn’t any reason why you have to die!”

  Still she looked at me and did not speak. In the streets below the silent throngs went by and the towers glowed with many colors. Duani’s gaze moved slowly to the darkness beyond the wall, to the barren valley and the hostile rocks.

  “No.”

  “Why not? Because of Rhul, because of all this talk of pride and race?”

  “Because of truth. Corin learned it.”

  I didn’t want to think about Corin. “He was alone. You’re not. You’d never be alone.”

  She brought her hands up and laid them on my cheeks very gently. “That green star, that is your world. Suppose it were to vanish and you were the last of all the men of Earth. Suppose you lived with me in Shandakor forever—would you not be alone?”

  “It wouldn’t matter if I had you.”

  She shook her head. “It would matter. And our two races are as far apart as the stars. We would have nothing to share between us.”

  Remembering what Rhul had told me I flared up and said some angry things, She let me say them and then she smiled. “It is none of that, JonRoss.” She turned to look out over the city. “This is my place and no other. When it is gone I must be gone too.”

  Quite suddenly I hated Shandakor.

  I didn’t sleep much after that. Every time Duani left me I was afraid she might never come back. Rhul would tell me nothing and I didn’t dare to question him too much. The hours rushed by like seconds and Duani was happy and I was not. My shackles had magnetic locks. I couldn’t break them and I couldn’t cut the chains.

  One evening Duani came to me with something in her face and in the way she moved that told me the truth long before I could make her put it into words. She clung to me, not wanting to talk, but at last she said, “Today there was a casting of lots and the first hundred have gone to the Place of Sleep.”

  “It is the beginning, then.”

  She nodded. “Every day there will be another hundred until all are gone.”

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. I thrust her away and stood up. “You know where the ‘keys’ are. Get these chains off me!”

  She shook her head. “Let us not quarrel now, JonRoss. Come. I want to walk in the city.”

  We had quarreled more than once, and fiercely. She would not leave Shandakor and I couldn’t take her out by force as long as I was chained. And I was not to be released until everyone but Rhul had entered the Place of Sleep and the last page of that long history had been written.

  I walked with her among the dancers and the slaves and the bright-cloaked princes. There were no temples in Shandakor. If they worshipped anything it was beauty and to that their whole city was a shrine. Duani’s eyes were rapt and there was a remoteness on her now.

  I held her hand and looked at the towers of turquoise and cinnabar, the pavings of rose quartz and marble, the walls of pink and white and deep red coral, and to me they were hideous. The ghostly crowds, the mockery of life, the phantom splendors of the past were hideous, a drug, a snare.

  “The faculty of reason!” I thought and saw no reason in any of it.

  I looked up to where the great globe turned and turned against the sky, keeping these mockeries alive. “Have you ever seen the city as it is—without the Shadows?”

  “No. I think only Rhul, who is the oldest, remembers it that way. I think it must have been very lonely. Even then there were less than three thousand of us left.”

  It must indeed have been lonely. They must have wanted the Shadows as much to people the empty streets as to fend off the enemies who believed in magic.

  I kept looking at the globe. We walked for a long time. And then I said, “I must go back to the tower.”

  She smiled at me very tenderly. “Soon you will be free of the tower—and of these.” She touched the chains. “No, don’t be sad, JonRoss. You will remember me and Shandakor as one remembers a dream.” She held up her face, that was so lovely and so unlike the meaty faces of human women, and her eyes were full of somber lights. I kissed her and then I caught her up in my arms and carried her back to the tower.

  In that room, where the great shaft turned, I told her, “I have to tend the things below. Go up onto the platform, Duani, where you can see all Shandakor. I’ll be with you soon.”

  I don’t know whether she had some hint of what was in my mind or whether it was only the imminence of parting that made her look at me as she did. I thought she was going to speak but she did not, climbing the ladder obediently. I watched her slender golden body vanish upward. Then I went into the chamber below.

  There was a heavy metal bar there that was part of a manual control for regulating the rate of turn. I took it off its pin. Then I closed the simple switches on the power plant. I tore out all the leads and smashed the connections with the bar. I did what damage I could to the cogs and the offset shaft. I worked very fast. Then I went up into the main chamber again. The great shaft was still turning but slowly, ever more slowly.

  There was a cry from above me and I saw Duani. I sprang up the ladder, thrusting her back onto the platform. The globe moved heavily of its own momentum. Soon it would stop but the white fires still nickered in the crystal rods. I climbed up onto the railing, clinging to a strut. The chains on my wrists and ankles made it hard but I could reach. Duani tried to pull me down. I think she was screaming. I hung on and smashed the crystal rods with the bar, as many as I could.

  There was no more motion, no more light. I got down on the platform again and dropped the bar. Duani had forgotten me. She was looking at the city.

  The lights of many colors that had burned there were burning still but they were old
and dim, cold embers without radiance. The towers of jade and turquoise rose up against the little moons and they were broken and cracked with time and there was no glory in them. They were desolate and very sad. The night lay clotted around their feet. The streets, the plazas and the market-squares were empty, their marble paving blank and bare. The soldiers had gone from the walls of Shandakor, with their banners and their bright mail, and there was no longer any movement anywhere within the gates.

  Duani let out one small voiceless cry. And as though in answer to it, suddenly from the darkness of the valley and the slopes beyond there rose a thin fierce howling as of wolves.

  “Why?” she whispered. “Why?” She turned to me. Her face was pitiful. I caught her to me.

  “I couldn’t let you die! Not for dreams and visions, nothing. Look, Duani. Look at Shandakor.” I wanted to force her to understand. “Shandakor is broken and ugly and forlorn. It is a dead city—but you’re alive. There are many cities but only one life for you.”

  Still she looked at me and it was hard to meet her eyes. She said, “We knew all that, JonRoss.”

  “Duani, you’re a child, you’ve only a child’s way of thought. Forget the past and think of tomorrow. We can get through the barbarians. Corin did. And after that…”

  “And after that you would still be human—and I would not.”

  From below us in the dim and empty streets there came a sound of lamentation. I tried to hold her but she slipped out from between my hands. “And I am glad that you are human,” she whispered. “You will never understand what you have done.”

  And she was gone before I could stop her, down into the tower.

  I went after her. Down the endless winding stairs with my chains clattering between my feet, out into the streets, the dark and broken and deserted streets of Shandakor. I called her name and her golden body went before me, fleet and slender, distant and more distant. The chains dragged upon my feet and the night took her away from me.

  I stopped. The whelming silence rushed smoothly over me and I was bitterly afraid of this dark dead Shandakor that I did not know. I called again to Duani and then I began to search for her in the shattered shadowed streets. I know now how long it must have been before I found her.

  For when I found her, she was with the others. The last people of Shandakor, the men and the women, the women first, were walking silently in a long line toward a low flat-roofed building that I knew without telling was the Place of Sleep.

  They were going to die and there was no pride in their faces now. There was a sickness in them, a sickness and a hurt in their eyes as they moved heavily forward, not looking, not wanting to look at the sordid ancient streets that I had stripped of glory.

  “Duani!” I called, and ran forward but she did not turn in her place in the line. And I saw that she was weeping.

  Rhul turned toward me, and his look had a weary contempt that was bitterer than a curse. “Of what use, after all, to kill you now?”

  “But I did this thing! I did it!”

  “You are only human.”

  The long line shuffled on and Duani’s little feet were closer to that final doorway. Rhul looked upward at the sky. “There is still time before the sunrise. The women at least will be spared the indignity of spears.”

  “Let me go with her!”

  I tried to follow her, to take my place in line. And the weapon in Rhul’s hand moved and there was the pain and I lay as Corin had lain while they went silently on into the Place of Sleep.

  The barbarians found me when they came, still half doubtful, into the city after dawn. I think they were afraid of me. I think they feared me as a wizard who had somehow destroyed all the folk of Shandakor.

  For they broke my chains and healed my wounds and later they even gave me out of the loot of Shandakor the only thing I wanted—a bit of porcelain, shaped like the head of a young girl.

  I sit in the Chair that I craved at the University and my name is written on the roll of the discoverers. I am eminent, I am respectable—I, who murdered the glory of a race.

  Why didn’t I go after Duani into the Place of Sleep? I could have crawled! I could have dragged myself across those stones. And I wish to God I had. I wish that I had died with Shandakor!

  Shannach—The Last

  1

  It was dark in the caves under Mercury. It was hot, and there was no sound in them but the slow plodding of Trevor’s heavy boots.

  Trevor had been wandering for a long time, lost in this labyrinth where no human being had ever gone before. And Trevor was an angry man. Through no fault or will of his own he was about to die, and he was not ready to die. Moreover, it seemed a wicked thing to come to his final moment here in the stifling dark, buried under alien mountains high as Everest.

  He wished now that he had stayed in the valley. Hunger and thirst would have done for him just the same, but at least he would have died in the open like a man, and not like a rat trapped in a drain.

  Yet there was not really much to choose between them as a decent place to die. A barren little hell-hole the valley had been, even before the quake, with nothing to draw a man there except the hope of finding sun-stones, one or two of which could transform a prospector into a plutocrat.

  Trevor had found no sun-stones. The quake had brought down a whole mountain wall on his ship, leaving him with a pocket torch, a handful of food tablets, a canteen of water, and the scant clothing he stood in.

  He had looked at the naked rocks, and the little river frothing green with chemical poisons, and he had gone away into the tunnels, the ancient blowholes of a cooling planet, gambling that he might find a way out of the valleys.

  Mercury’s Twilight Belt is cut into thousands of cliff-locked pockets, as a honeycomb is cut into cells. There is no way over the mountains, for the atmosphere is shallow, and the jagged peaks stand up into airless space. Trevor knew that only one more such pocket lay between him and the open plains. If he could get to and through that last pocket, he had thought…

  But he knew now that he was not going to make it.

  He was stripped to the skin already, in the terrible heat. When the weight of his miner’s boots became too much to drag, he shed them, padding on over the rough rock with bare feet. He had nothing left now but the torch. When the light went, his last hope went with it.

  After a while it went.

  The utter blackness of the grave shut down. Trevor stood still, listening to the pulse of his own blood in the silence, looking at that which no man needs a light to see. Then he flung the torch away and stumbled on, driven to fight still by the terror which was greater than his weakness.

  Twice he struck against the twisting walls, and fell, and struggled up again. The third time he remained on hands and knees, and crawled.

  He crept on, a tiny creature entombed in the bowels of a planet. The bore grew smaller and smaller, tightening around him. From time to time he lost consciousness, and it became increasingly painful to struggle back to an awareness of the heat and the silence and the pressing rock.

  After one of these periods of oblivion he began to hear a dull, steady thunder. He could no longer crawl. The bore had shrunk to a mere crack, barely large enough for him to pass through worm-like on his belly. He sensed now a deep, shuddering vibration in the rock. It grew stronger, terrifying in that enclosed space. Steam slipped wraithlike into the smothering air.

  The roar and the vibration grew to an unendurable pitch. Trevor was near to strangling in the steam. He was afraid to go on, but there was no other way to go. Quite suddenly his hands went out into nothingness.

  The rock at the lip of the bore must have been rotten with erosion. It gave under his weight and pitched him headfirst into a thundering rush of water that was blistering hot and going somewhere in a great hurry through the dark.

  After that Trevor was not sure of anything. There was the scalding heat and the struggle to keep his head up and the terrible speed of the sub-Mercurian river racing on to its de
stiny. He struck rock several times, and once he held his breath for a whole eternity until the roof of the tunnel rose up again.

  He was only dimly aware of a long sliding fall downward through a sudden brightness. It was much cooler. He splashed feebly, because his brain had not told his body to stop, and the water did not fight him.

  His feet and hands struck solid bottom. He floundered on, and presently the water was gone. He made one attempt to rise. After that he lay still.

  The great mountains leaned away from the Sun. Night came, and with it violent storm and rain. Trevor did not know it. He slept, and when he woke the savage dawn was making the high cliffs flame with white light.

  Something was screaming above his head.

  Aching and leaden still with exhaustion, he roused up and looked about him.

  He sat on a beach of pale gray sand. At his feet were the shallows of a gray-green lake that filled a stony basin some half-mile in breadth. To his left the underground river poured out of the cliff-face, spreading into a wide, riffling fan of foam. Off to his right, the water spilled over the rim of the basin to become a river again somewhere below, and beyond the rim, veiled in mist and the shadow of a mountain wall, was a valley.

  Behind him, crowding to the edge of the sand, were trees and ferns and flowers, alien in shape and color but triumphantly alive. And from what he could see of it, the broad valley was green and riotous with growth. The water was pure, the air had a good smell, and it came to Trevor that he had made it. He was going to live a while longer, after all.

  Forgetting his weariness, he sprang up, and the thing that had hissed and screamed above him swooped down and passed the claw tip of a leathery wing so close to his face that it nearly gashed him. He stumbled backward, crying out, and the creature rose in a soaring spiral and swooped again.

  Trevor saw a sort of flying lizard, jet black except for a saffron belly. He raised his arms to ward it off, but it did not attack him, and as it swept by he saw something that woke in him amazement, greed, and a peculiarly unpleasant chill of fear.