Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  BENEATH my feet the deck felt real. The salt spray tasted of brine; the wind that filing it in my face was a real wind. And yet I knew there was about this incredible ship something wildly unreal.

  For I could see the rowers below me, and through them I could see the long pale swelling of the waves. Every muscle of those bending backs was clear as they leaned to the oar-pull, but clear in the way a dream might be in the instant of awakening. The oarsmen did not see me. Their faces were set with the strain, of the work they bent to, skillfully driving toward—what goal?

  I stood there dazed for a moment, peering about me into the mist, balancing to the roll of the ship with a deftness not my own, as if my body had slipped smoothly into even the physical and muscular memories of another body, as my brain had meshed memories with another brain.

  Except for the noises of the ship herself there was no sound around me. I heard the slap of waves against the prow, the creak of timber, the rhythmic song of oars against their locks. I could hear clearly the music of that lyre on the arm of the shadowy figure in the prow. But the men were voiceless.

  I remember how the hair lifted on my head when I first saw a translucent warrior throw back his bearded chin and bellow out a song that swept from rower to rower along the benches until the double ranks swayed to a single rhythm and the hand of the lyrist swept his strings to lead them—in silence.

  The music. I could hear; the men were ghosts.

  The sound of my own voice startled me. All my bewilderment and the deep, stirring terrors that had been moving at the back of my brain seemed to crystallize suddenly in the shout I gave.

  “Who are you?” I roared at the voicelessly singing oarsmen. “Answer me! Who are you?”

  My own voice rolled back to me out of the mist as if from a ghostly sounding-board.

  “Who are you—are you—are you? And I knew I could no more reply than the oarsmen could. Who was I, indeed? Jay Seward, Doctor of Medicine? Or Jason son of Aeson, King of Iolcus? Or a ghost on a ghostly ship, manned by—what? I shouted again, an angry, wordless cry, and leaped down to the nearest galley bench, reaching to seize the shoulder of the oarsman nearest me.

  My hand shot helplessly through empty air. The oarsmen sang on.

  I don’t know how long it was I raged up and down the galley benches, shouting to the heedless singers, dashing my fists through their unreal bodies, trying in vain to wrench the oars from those misty hands that would not yield an inch to all my tugging.

  I gave it up at last and climbed back onto the raised central deck, panting and bewildered. The shadowy man at the prow still swept the lyre-strings in a strangely ringing melody, oblivious to me as his companions were. The same breeze lifted my hair and tossed the pale curling beard of the lyrist, but I might have been the ghost and he the reality for all the heed he paid me. I reached for his wrist to halt the music, and his wrist passed through my fingers like the breeze.

  I touched the harp. Like the relentlessly plying oars, the harp was real. I could touch it, but I could not move it. Even the strings were rigid to my hand, though they vibrated with wild, strange music to the lyrist’s touch.

  I said, “Orpheus—Orpheus?” in an uncertain voice, remembering who it was who had stood at the prow of Argo, and yet unsure of myself when I spoke his name. For Orpheus, if he ever lived at all, must have been dead for more than three thousand years.

  He did not hear me. He played on; the rowers toiled, the ship slid forward through the mist. She at least was real, alive with that strange life all ships share, breathing with the motion of plank on plank as the seas lifted her. Out of my memories of the past I knew Jason’s old love for his ship—Jason’s only love, I thought, despite his many lighter loves for womankind. Jason was a strange man while he lived, blind in so many ways, ruthless, ready to betray all who trusted him. In his grim pursuit of his goal. But to Argo herself he was faithful all his life—and in the end it was Argo who slew him.

  HER bubbling voice, not for my ears, spoke mysteriously between the waves and the decks. She was more than ship as she drove on toward—toward whatever end my fate and Jason’s had decreed. And then as if the mist itself were answering my wonder, the silvery blindness parted before me and I saw—

  Sunlight struck down upon the water and turned it to a dark and dazzling blue. A long row of blinding white breakers dashed themselves high against the marble walls of—an island? A castled island, fortified down to the very brink of the sea, and lifting white towers against a sky as blue as the water. All white and deep dark blue was that scene unveiled before me.

  “This isn’t out of our time,” I thought, staring. “It can’t be. This is something seen through the lens of legend—wine-dark waters and encastled shores like something Euripides might have written millenniums ago.”

  The mists drew farther back, and it was Hot an island but a long peninsula, walled to the water’s edge and separated from the mainland by a mighty wall that reared its bulk like a tower into the blue air. For a moment the scene lay motionless before me, without life, a city of legend.

  Then I heard trumpets and there was a sudden stirring along the walls. Voices echoed across the water. The Argo swept forward parallel with the shore. I thought the rhythm of the lyre had quickened a little. There was uneasiness in it now, and the oarsmen bent to their work with a swifter stroke.

  The trumpets roared louder. I caught the distinct clashing, as of weapons against shields, and suddenly out from beyond the seaward tip of the promontory a blinding vessel swept. She was all gold. The eye could not look upon her directly in that blaze of sunlight. But in my first glimpse before I had to screen my gaze I saw the double rows of oars flashing along her sides as she swept toward us, water foaming away from her dazzling prow.

  The music of Orpheus’ lyre was a wild alarm now. Rhythm beat fast upon rhythm until the oars of the Argo were pumping like the beats of a quickened heart. Swifter and swifter we flew over the water, that tower-walled promontory sweeping away past us and behind us, shouts from the golden ship echoing over the distance between.

  She was a bireme, with twice the power of ours, but she was heavier in proportion and the Argo’s hull slipped over the water with a lightness that touched my heart somewhere at a point where it was Jason’s heart answering to the beauty and the swiftness of his beloved ship.

  The city fell astern. We were running through mist again, but the outlines of wooded shores and low hills loomed up alongside now and fell behind again as the Argo answered the beat of her ghostly rowers. And ever behind us the bellow of horns rolled out upon the fog and the golden ship at our stern blazed even through the mists between us.

  It was a close race, and a very long one. Not until nearly at the end of it did I know what our goal was. Then out of the fog the cypress island loomed, low-shored, edged with white beaches, and the dark trees brooding down to the edge of the pale sand. Jason knew the island.

  “Aeaea,” his memory murmured in my brain. And subtle fears stirred with it. “Aeaea, Island of the Enchantress.”

  From astern the cries of the pursuers were as loud as they had been at the beginning of the chase, hours ago now. The clashings of their weapons were like the clash of metallic teeth in a dragon’s jaws, stretched to devour us. When the golden ship’s lookout sighted the cypress trees in the fog he must have signaled for redoubled speed, for I heard the sharp crack of whips, and the blinding vessel fairly leaped forward. She was overhauling us fast, though Orpheus’ disembodied lyre screamed out in rhythms that made the pulses pound in answer, and the ghostly oarsmen bent their sinewy backs desperately over the oars.

  For one flashing moment the golden ship stood almost alongside, and I could look with half-blinded eyes across her shining decks and see the men in shining armor that matched their ship, straining across the rails and shaking swords and javelins at us.

  Then she sprang ahead. There was an Instant when the blaze of her blotted out that dark island before us. Suicidally she shot across
our bows, and I could see the tense, excited faces of her crew turned toward us, pale against the dazzle of their shining mail.

  Orpheus’ lyre broke the rhythm of the stroke for one heartbeat. Then the shadowy fingers swept those magical strings and a scream of hatred and vengeance leaped from the lyre. It shrieked like a living thing, like a Fury ravening for the kill.

  All around me I saw the voiceless shout of answer sweeping the Argo’s crew. I saw the bearded heads go back, grinning with effort and triumph, and I saw the brawny backs bending as one in a last tremendous pull that shot their craft forward—forward straight into the golden side looming before us.

  For one heartbeart I realized vividly how vulnerable I was—I alone, among all this bodiless crew to whom destruction could mean nothing. Argo and I were real, and the golden ship was real, and the ghostly Argonauts were driving us both to what looked like certain doom.

  I remember the terrific, rending crash as we struck. The deck jolted beneath me and there was a blaze ahead as if the golden ship were incandescent and flashing into flame with its own brilliance in that moment of disaster. I remember shouts and screams, the clash of weapon on shield, and above it all the wild, shrill keening of lyre-strings swept by no mortal hands.

  Then Argo fell apart beneath me and the cold seas met above my head . . .

  CHAPTER III

  Temple in the Grove

  A VOICE was calling through billows of thinning mists. “Jason of Iolcus,” it cried very sweetly in my dreams. “Jason of Thessaly—Jason of the Argo—waken—waken and answer me!”

  I sat up on the pale, cool sand and listened. Waves lapped shore still marked with the track where I must have dragged myself out of the placid surf. My clothes were stiff with brine, but dry. I must have lain here a long while.

  The dark cypress trees rustled secretly together, hiding whatever lay behind them. There was no other sound. No sign of survivors from the golden ship, no sign of the ship itself. The Argo I had last felt shattering asunder beneath my feet might have returned with its ghostly crew to the land of ghosts for all I could see of it now. I was alone on the pale sands of Aeaea, which was the Enchantress’ Isle.

  “Jason of the Argo—answer me, come tome—Jason, Jason! Do you hear?”

  The voice had a clear, inhuman sweetness, as if the island itself were calling me by name. And the call was compelling. I found myself on my feet, and swaying a little, without knowing I had risen. The summons seemed to come from between the cypresses directly at my back. I floundered up the sand and plunged into the grove, only partly of my own volition, so sweetly compelling was that cry from the misty depths of the isle.

  I could see only a little way ahead, for the fog seemed to hang in veils among the trees. But I thought that I was no longer alone. There was deep silence all around me, but a listening and watching silence. Not inimical—not menacing. Interested—that was it. Detached interest watched me on my way through the mist-drenched grove, eyes that followed me aloofly, not caring, but interested to see what my fate would be.

  In that silence punctuated by the dripping of mist and moisture from the trees, and by no other earthly sound, I followed the calling voice through fog and forest, to the very heart of the island.

  When I saw the white temple looming against the dark trees I was not surprised. Jason had been here before. He knew the way. Perhaps he knew who called, but I did not. I thought when I saw the face of the speaker, I would not feel surprised either, but I could not picture her yet.

  Motion stirred among the pillars of the temple as I crossed the misty clearing. Robed and veiled figures came out from the shadow of the columns and bent their hidden heads in greeting. No one spoke. I knew, somehow, perhaps with Jason’s age-old knowledge, that while that voice called from the temple, no one on the island must speak but the Voice itself—and I?

  “Jason of Thessaly,” the voice was saying in a low, caressing cadence. “Jason, my lover—enter! Come to me, Jason, my beloved.”

  The robed figures stepped back. I went under the shadow of the portico and into the temple.

  Except for the flame that moved restlessly upon the altar, it was dark here. I could see a tall triple image looming up majestic and terrible behind the fire, and even the fire was strange, burning greenish, with a cold flickering cadence, and its motion more like the ceaseless, uneasy twisting of serpents than the warm flicker of ordinary firelight.

  The woman before the altar was completely robed, like the others. I thought she moved with an odd sort of stiffness in her concealing garments. At the sound of my foot on the marble she swung around, and when I saw her face I forgot for a timeless moment her curious slowness of movement; and the altar, fires, and even, the identity of that triple figure above us, whose dark import I knew, well.

  It was a pale face, inhumanly pale and smooth, like a face of alabaster. There was the purity of alabaster in the long, sloping planes of the cheeks and the modeling of the eye-sockets and the delicately flattened brow. But a warmth burned beneath the smoothness, and the lips were dark red and warmly full. And the eyes burned with a lambent flame as green and strange as the strange fire on the altar.

  Black brows swept in a winged arc above them in a look of delicate surprise, and her hair was glossily black, lustrous with purple highlights, dressed elaborately in a stately display of ringlets. But I found that Jason knew that hair unbound, how it fell in a shining black river over shoulders, as smoothly curved as the alabaster of her face, and each separate hair of it burning the flesh like a blue-hot wire when he brushed it with his hand.

  JASON’S memories welled up in my brain and Jason’s voice filled my throat with Jason’s own words in his own Grecian tongue.

  “Circe—” I heard myself saying thickly. “Circe, my beloved.”

  The fire leaped upon the altar, casting green highlights upward on her beautiful, terribly familiar face. And I could have sworn that a fire leaped green in her eyes to match it. The shadows in the temple swayed, and emerald flickerings ran shivering over the walls, like the light reflected from water.

  She stepped back away from me, toward the altar, putting out both hands stiffly in a strangely awkward gesture of renunciation.

  “No, no,” she said in that rich, sweet voice. “Not yet—not yet, Jason. Wait.” She turned away from me and faced the image above the flame. And this time I looked at it fully, and let my memories and Jason’s together tell me what goddess it was who stood tri-formed in her temple.

  Hecate.

  Goddess of the dark of the moon, as Diana was the bright goddess of the light of the moon. Hecate, She-Who-Works-From-Afar, mysterious patroness of sorcery about whom only half-truths have ever been known. Goddess of the crossways and the dark deeds, tri-formed to face the three ways at her sacred crossroads. Hellhounds follow her abroad by night, and when the dogs bay, Hellenes see her passing. Hecate, dark and alien mother of Circe the Enchantress.

  Circe’s robed arms moved about the flames in a ritual gesture. She said, quite softly, “Now he is come to us, Mother. Jason of Iolcus, is here again. Surely my task is done?”

  Silence.

  The green light crawled upon the walls, and the goddess’ faces looked impassively into nothingness. On the altar in the stillness that followed, the fire sank very low, sank to a soft greenish ember over which the light moved restlessly—coiling—twining slowly.

  Circe turned to face me, her robed shoulders drooping. The greenlit eyes met mine and there was infinite sadness and infinite sweetness in her voice.

  “It is not the hour,” she murmured. “It is not the place. Farewell for a little time, my beloved. I wish—but the hour will not be mine. Only remember me, Jason, and the hours of our love!”

  Before I could speak she lifted both hands to her head and moved long fingers across her face. Her head bent and the lustrous curls swung forward to hide her eyes. There was an inexplicable movement.

  For the second time I felt the separate hairs lift on my own hea
d. Because I was watching the impossible. I was watching Circe raise her head from her shoulders in both hands, and watching the head come free—

  It was a mask. It must have been a mask.

  She lowered it in her hands and looked at me above the lifeless alabaster features, the clustering dark curls. There was something shocking about the eyes that met mine in her altered face, but for the moment I was staring speechlessly at that impossibly severed head. All of it was there, the elaborate curls whose touch I half remembered, the warm red lips closed on a line of secret, smiling knowledge, the eyes that could burn so green closed, too, behind pale lids and thick shadowy lashes. It had lived and spoken. Now it slept and was only a waxen mask.

  Slowly I raised my eyes to the face of the woman who had worn the mask. And I saw gray hair, thin over a gray scalp, weary black eyes netted in wrinkles, a tired and wise and subtly terrified face grooved with the lines of old, old age.

  “You are—Jason,” she said in a cracked voice, thin and weary. “But Kronos has shaken the cup till the dice reverse themselves. The same dice, yes—but with new numbers upward.”

  Something seemed to click over in my brain as she stood there speaking, so that I heard her words only dimly in the sudden, appalling realization that this was I—Jay Seward—here on an incredible island facing an incredible altar.

  Perhaps it was the very matter-of-factness in that tired old voice that wakened me at last to my own predicament.

  KRONOS, she had said. The time-god. Had time swept backward three thousand years? Had the Argo really borne me back into the gray mists of the past, to a world that had been legend for all the ages while Hellas rose and crumbled at the feet of Rome? While Rome itself sent out its walking walls across Europe—while Kronos watched the sands trickling through his eternal fingers?

  No, it was not the whole answer. Some alien hand had stooped over this world. Strangeness whispered in the earth and waters and wind. Perhaps there is in men’s very flesh a certain buried sense that will warn him when he has left the world from which Adam’s flesh was shaped. For I knew that much.