Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

He remembered a heavy blow at the base of the skull, and after that he floated in a whirling of stars that closed over his head in fathomless darkness . . .

  “And your coming here was no accident, William Boyce.” Tancred leaned back in the window seat and looked at Boyce under meeting brows, his black eyes piercing.

  Boyce looked away. His glance wandered about the small stone room, the canopy above the bed in which he lay, the tapestries on the walls, all of it very familiar to him now, after this long, long while of convalescence. He was tired still. He did not really want to delve any deeper into the mysteries that had brought him here.

  The deep scar upon his shoulder had all but healed by now, but there was a deeper weariness in his mind. Perhaps it was the sight of the drifting mists beyond his window, changeless, grey clouds rolling eternally over a weary land.

  He could see the mirages from here, too. Behind Tancred now the unreal towers of a mosque-like city were taking shape in the fog. At first he had thought it delirium when he saw these visions forming and fading again upon the mist. But others saw them too. And no one could tell him certainly whether or not the visions were wholly unreal.

  “No one dares go far from Kerak,” Godfrey had warned him. “The land—changes. Perhaps it is sorcery that makes the pictures. In the fog. Perhaps they are mirages like those we saw in the desert before Jerusalem. Or perhaps—Dieu lo vult—these are real things we see. Cities that drift like the mist. Gardens and orchards going by like ships in a sea of fog. There is no way to be sure—and return to tell of it.”

  He would not think of the mirages now. Tancred was speaking, and he would have to listen.

  “I say it was no accident that sent you among us with Guillaume’s face and name,” Tancred repeated, stroking his beard with a jeweled hand. “The story you tell is such a strange one I am inclined to believe it. I believe much, because of the things I know, which my companions would think rank heresy.”

  He hesitated, turning a ring upon his finger, then shot a keen glance at Boyce lying among the bed-cushions.

  “I could even guess,” he said, “what it is that lies hidden in that lost year you speak of. But I am not free to tell you what I suspect. This much I can say—I think you were a tool for someone stronger and less scrupulous than I. Perhaps this woman you tell me of. And if you were a tool, then tool you remain!

  “For you have not yet performed whatever function they meant you for. And I think you may have been chosen for that function because of your kinship with Guillaume.” The black eyes narrowed. “That means, you see, the City.

  “Someone chose you from among all the men of your world, someone used you for a year there, in ways so terrible your mind has closed up against remembering. And in the end, someone made it possible for you to follow your forgotten memories into this land, where a timeless struggle still is waged between Kerak and the Sorcerers’ City.”

  He was silent awhile, his face creased in lines of worried thought, his big ringed hand moving with a steady, unconscious motion over his white beard.

  SOMETHING in Boyce’s mind did not want to follow that thought. It was like an alien thing, curled in the center of his brain, trying to shut his ears and his eyes to the things Tancred was saying. An alien thing? Some other mind reaching out from distances across the mist to quiet his questioning, keep him in ignorance of things the alien creature did not wish him to know?

  “Tell me,” he said uncomfortably, not entirely sure the words came from his own mind, and not that half-sensed invader in his brain. “How did your people come here? I—Godfrey asks me so many questions about the countries he remembers, and I find it hard to answer him. You see—”

  Tancred laughed.

  “I know. I think I alone among us knows the truth. It has been a very long time since we Crusaders rode to Jerusalem, has it not? You were wise not to answer Godfrey too truthfully. How long in the years of our old world has it been, William Boyce?”

  Boyce’s eyes met the old magician’s.

  “Six hundred years.”

  There was awe and weariness on the bearded face. Tancred nodded.

  “So long, then? A very long time indeed. I had not realized quite how many centuries we must have spent in this accursed land where time stands still.” He was silent for a moment again, then he shrugged and said, “You must hear the story, William Boyce. You are the first from our old world to find your way through the fog to our gateway.

  “There have been others—a few—from other times and lands. You must not believe yourself the only tool they of the City have tried to use against us! But you will learn enough of that later by yourself, I think.

  “We of Kerak lived in Normandy when the Day of Judgment was only a little way behind us.” He laughed. “Perhaps you know that when the year one thousand dawned the world believed its end was near and the eternal Trumpet ready to call us to account. My father’s father was a boy then. He told me the story many times.

  “We were a credulous people in those days, ready to believe whatever men told us if they spoke with the voice of authority. Well, we lived past the Day of Judgment, but my friends and I fell into a strange sort of Judgment of our own and we linger in it yet, and perhaps will always linger.

  “Sir Guillaume was our lord and leader. We took the cross when the Crusade was preached through Normandy, and rode away to free Jerusalem from the infidel. Perhaps you know the story of our ride. We went,a long way, for a long, long time, through strange alien lands with every hand against us. We suffered much. There were those of us who died to see Jerusalem.

  “We never saw it. We lost our way, like so many others, and in the Valley of Hebron we met a stranger fate, I think, than any band of men has ever met before.

  “In the Valley a castle stood. And Guillaume, liking it, thought to make himself its lord. That was the way we went through the eastern lands in those days, taking what we could and holding it until a stronger man came by. So we attacked the castle. I remember it yet—black from foundation to battlement with a scarlet banner flying from its donjon-keep.” He nodded.

  “Yes, the banner we fly today from our own donjon. A terrible banner, my friend.

  We laid siege to the black castle. For many days we camped about its walls, thinking to starve the garrison out if we could not overwhelm the place by force. We did not guess who dwelt there, or what strange powers he had.

  “One night a man came secretly to us from the castle, offering, for money, to lead us by a hidden way into the stronghold. We agreed.

  The next day we mounted and armed ourselves and in the earliest dimness of the day we followed the castle traitor up into the hills where he said the entrance of the secret way was hidden. He led us from a distance, carrying a crimson banner on a stall that we might see to follow.

  “Many of our women rode with us. All you have seen here were in that doomed caravan. We rode and rode, through winding ways in the hills, following the red flag in the dawn. We rode a long, long way, for a long, long while, wondering why the sun rose no higher. We began to suspect magic after a time.

  “I was a skilled magician even then, though I had much to learn. Presently I knew there was evil in the air, and I persuaded Guillaume to call a halt. We sent esquires ahead to ask of him who carried the flag where we were going and why it took so long.

  “After a time the esquires came back, white-faced, carrying the crimson banner. There had been none, they said, beneath it. The flag itself had led us, flying like a great crimson bird through the dawn. We found no men but ourselves in all those hills, in all that misty dimness.

  “Well, there was nothing to be done, then. We tried to retrace our steps, but we were lost. We were not to see our own land again, nor the friends we had left behind. We were never to look upon Jerusalem nor upon our homes. We were not to see the blue skies, and in that misty dawn the sun never rose again.

  “We built this castle here, as you see it. All the land around us I think—I believe—drifts slowly pa
st the anchor of these hills. In those days there was a strange, swarthy people who came through the fog and traded with us, food for trinkets and labor for a horse or two. We could not speak their tongue nor they ours. Eventually they ceased to come. I think their land drifted too far away.

  “By then I had learned more than the people of my own land had ever guessed at For this is a place of strange power, William Boyce. For him who knows how to look, and when, and where, much wisdom lies open for the taking. I was able to feed and clothe us through powers. I had never dreamed of at home. This is a world of magic.”

  “Magic?” Boyce said, his voice tinged with disbelief.

  “To us, yes,” Tancred nodded. “Because we know only a part of the laws that make such things possible. If we knew all those laws, it would be the science you speak of, not magic. I have learned many things here . . . I think that there are many worlds. And each has different physical laws. What is possible in some is impossible in others.

  “It may be that this is a central world where others converge, so that the lores of many such worlds are mingled here, where there is no time, and where space itself may move. Because we know so little of these alien, strange sciences, we call them—sorcery.”

  BOYCE nodded. He could understand that. Even on Earth, different physical areas had different laws—if you didn’t know the answer. Water boils at different temperatures at sea level and far above it. Rubber is pliable under normal conditions, but at sub-zero temperatures it is brittle, and in Death Valley it melts. If you know the physical laws that caused these phenomena, you called it science.

  And if you didn’t know—it was magic! “You built this castle,” Boyce prompted. “Then?”

  Tancred’s shrug was eloquent.

  “After we had finished, we woke one morning to find the crimson banner flying at our donjon-height. There is magic in that banner, but no magic I know how to combat. In a way, perhaps it protects us. We have lost three men who tried to cut it down. Its redness may be the blood of those who have tried in ages past.

  “We never knew whose power it was that sent us here. The magician of the black castle is another mystery among all the unanswered mysteries of our lives. And for the most part, our people have ceased to question. There is no day or night here, though we count the hours and call them days, and we sleep and call it night.

  “But time itself stands still. There is no way to explain that to you, or how it is we can count the hours and days, and still remain ignorant of the years. Something in the air wipes our minds clean of memory when we try to recognize time as once we knew it. This is an eternal present. We grow no older. We never die of age or sickness.”

  Tancred sighed deeply and the stroking hand paused upon his beard. The black eyes were veiled.

  “There must be ways in and out of this world,” Boyce said. “I came, for one. And you say I am not the first. And someone, somehow, must have come out of here into my own world and time.”

  Tancred nodded.

  “There are ways. After we had been here—I cannot say how long—and after enough wisdom had come to me, I discovered how to open the paths outside. If I had learned that sooner, we might have been saved. But it was too late then. Two of our men went through despite my warnings, and when they had passed the gateway they fell into dust.

  “All their years came on them in the flicker of an eye and they were in that instant as they would have been had they dwelt in their own world all the time that had passed. So we knew then that there was no returning for us. You, perhaps, could go back, unless you wait too long. But I think it would avail you little. Your problem is here, William Boyce. And here I think you must fight it out.”

  He slept. In his mind, something urged him to sleep and not to listen. He was still weary and sleep came easily. And how can a man fight the commands that rise from the center of his own brain?

  Voices woke him.

  “Hush—du Boyce sleeps. Speak softly.” He recognized Sir Guillaume’s heavy whisper in reply and lay quiet, wondering if he should let the two men know he was awake.

  Tancred, apparently still seated in the window, was speaking.

  “Guillaume, you’re a reckless fool. You know you must not do it.”

  “I do as I please,” Guillaume growled. “If the plan works, we may all be saved. If it fails, I’ll suffer for it alone.”

  “Perhaps not alone. Have you thought you may return to us as Hugh de Mandois returned? How do you know what they may do to you if they catch you in the City?”

  “I tell you, Tancred, I know what I’m doing. It will not be the first trip I’ve made into the City. I have my own friends there now. Men who know me—or think they do—by another name. A turncoat from Kerak is a prize for the City spies. They’ll buy all the information I give and beg for more. You knew my work there, Tancred. You never said no before. Why now? Since Hugh de Mandois, I feel more eager than ever to make this attempt.”

  “Because of Hugh, my friend. Because I know now how deep their powers go. Never before have they worked a spy into our midst in the very likeness of ourselves. How can we trust you, Guillaume, even if you do come back?”

  “You have the Oracle,” Guillaume said gruffly.

  Tancred did not speak for a moment. When he did, his voice was soft and Boyce thought he heard sorrow in it.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes—we have the Oracle.”

  “Very well, then. I see no cause for waiting. Two attacks from the City in so short a time must mean they plan to move upon us with all their forces. I say, learn what we can from them whatever the cost may be. If I risk my neck, who’s to forbid me in Kerak? Not you nor anyone!”

  “You risk more than your life, Guillaume,” Tancred said.

  There was no answer but a snort.

  “Very well.” Tancred’s voice was level. “You are master here.”

  Heavy feet crossed the floor. The door opened and closed. Lying with closed eyes, Boyce heard Tancred sigh. He thought of one question that he meant to ask, but it did not seem to him that just now was the moment to ask it. He wanted to know more of the ice-pale girl whom the Crusaders called the Oracle, who and what she was, and why Tancred spoke to her with gentleness and heard her name with such sorrow in his voice.

  CHAPTER VI

  The Sleeping Spell

  IN KERAK CASTLE time stood still. But space around it flowed slowly by. Now that Boyce knew, he thought he could see the slow, slow ebbing past his window. The City itself, Tancred had told him, had drifted out of some distant foggy region into their valley. In time—no, in the passage of space, not time—it would float on and each citadel would forget the other.

  But now, like enemy ships passing each other in neutral waters, they were engaged in battle and only the destruction of one—or both—or the widening of space between them could make an end to the conflict.

  Guillaume had gone. Boyce knew it only because he missed the arrogant, deep-voiced presence on his convalescent journeys about the castle. No one would answer his questions when he inquired after his namesake. Godfrey had vanished too. Even Tancred had withdrawn and spent most of the waking hours locked in his towerheight, busy with secrets of his own. No man or woman in Kerak, except Tancred himself, knew what lay behind that tower door.

  “He had a pool of water there,” one of the castle women whispered to Boyce when he spoke casually of the room. “No one knows how, but he uses it in his magic. And they say he has mirrors in his room that show a man his own thoughts.

  “Voices come out of the room when we know only Tancred is within, and sometimes very sweet singing, like the voices of angels. And once a strange little beast, bright gold, with a blue halo around it, escaped under the door and ran down the stairs. The boy who caught it burnt his hands on the halo.”

  Boyce had no way of guessing how much time went by before the morning of the Silence. It was very curious how impossible it was to measure time in this grey world. One could make a tally of the hours and still be
helpless to reckon them up in intervals of longer than a week or two. Time was too slippery for the mind to grasp.

  But one morning—though there was neither night nor morning in Kerak—Boyce woke to an awareness of profound silence. He sat up in his canopied bed and listened, bewildered, oddly sure that it was the silence itself that had awakened him. Silence and a—sense of pressure in the air.

  He dressed rapidly and ran down the twisting stairs to the great hall of the castle, where at this hour the trestle tables should be set up and the castle folk gathered noisily at breakfast.

  There were men and women in the hall, but they were not noisy. They lay silent in attitudes like those of puppets dropped in mid-stage when the hands of the puppet-master failed. Some had fallen over loads of wood brought to feed the great fire that should now be roaring up the chimney instead of smouldering in sullen ash beneath the stone hood of the fireplace.

  Some lay with broken dishes and spilled food beside them. The dogs stretched silent in the rushes. Hawks in feathered hoods clasped their perches along the wall, rigid as hawks of stone.

  Boyce stared in bewilderment over the silent room. Nothing moved—and yet it seemed to him that the air itself was in motion. It was as if people went by him unseen, brushing his shoulder in passing but weightless as the air they displaced. And there was a strange, sweet, pungent odor in the castle—very faint, nothing he had ever smelled before.

  “Magic,” he whispered to himself, without any reason whatever. “The smell of magic!” He needed no reason for that thought. It came unbidden to his mind and he knew that he was not mistaken.

  These people were not dead. They slept. He went among them anxiously, shaking the sleepers by the shoulder, calling their names. No one stirred. He dashed cold water in the face of a serving wench who slumbered beside her pitcher. She did not even sigh. It was a magical slumber and no power, he realized at last, but the power of him who had cast the spell could waken these people from the depths of enchantment in which they lay.