Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  This was not—Earth.

  I remembered briefly how Euripides had closed his terrible story of Medea and Jason, and the lines seemed to ring with prophetic force in my mind now.

  —to man strange dooms are given . . .

  And the end men looked for cometh not,

  And a path is there where no man thought . . .

  A path that had led me—where? To the Earth of legend, perhaps! A long-forgotten world where the Isle of the Enchantress lay on some mystic Aegean, worshipping the tri-formed goddess.

  Until now I had been caught in the grip of forces almost beyond my control. Quite beyond, if you consider that one such force lay across my mind like a spur and a rein combined—Jason’s memories. It was dreamlike. And in that dream it had seemed right to me that I bend to the wind’s will, the wind that filled Argo’s sails and carried Circe’s voice to me under the dark cypresses, Man bows always to the thralldom of enchantment, in his superstitious soul. Especially the man of long ago—of now—whose daily life was peopled with the gods and demons of his own fear-wrought imaginings.

  Fear.

  The word roused me.

  I knew quite suddenly what it was that brooded like a thunderous shadow above Jason’s memories. Fear—of what? Why was I there?

  Memories of the ancient wisdom of Euripides stirred in my mind again. What had it been that—

  —over sundering seas

  Drew me to Hellas, and the breeze

  Of midnight shivered, and the door

  Closed of the salt unsounded water . . .

  I looked around me with suddenly frightened eyes. The green light that crawled upon the altar showed me every detail of Hecate’s temple, and every detail was alien. Panic rose in my throat and the floor sloped beneath my feet downward into a black abyss.

  I knew with a sudden unanswerable terror that this was impossible. Either I was sane or I was frantically insane, and in either case it was horrible! Nightmare—The old woman’s eyes were upon me, and I thought the closed lids of the living head she held flickered to look, too.

  I whirled and ran.

  Perhaps I ran because I was sane again. Perhaps because the memories of Jason overwhelmed me. I seemed to feel again the planks of the Argo shattering beneath me.

  Nothing was solid.

  Nothing was real.

  There was a stirring among the robed figures at the door of the temple. I heard a thin, cracked voice crying behind me, “Panyr—Panyr! After him!”

  And I remember hearing a loud staccato of footsteps ringing hollowly in the still temple. Then I was out among the cypresses and running, running—

  What I ran from I don’t know. From this fantastic world itself, perhaps, or from Jason. Yes, that was it. I ran from Jason, who clung inexorably to the fabric of my mind, pouring the black blind panic of his fear into my soul. Such fear as we have no name for today!

  It was terror that only primitive peoples know, assailed by the vastness of the unknown. A fear like an ecstasy that used to fall upon men in the old days when Pan himself peered out at them, horned and grinning, through the trees.

  Panic they called it, because they knew that horned head by name.

  I ran toward the distant murmur of the sea. Mist drew its soft veils before me, blurring the way. And behind me, muffled by the pounding of my own feet, I heard the clatter of feet that followed. A clatter like hoofbeats thudding upon turf and stone—after me!

  I could feel the aching pound of my heart crashing against my ribs. My breath sobbed between dry lips. I ran blindly, wildly, not knowing where I ran or why—until I could run no more.

  Utterly spent at last, I dropped by a bubbling green pool in a little glade where all quiet seemed to dwell. Exhausted with flight and terror, I buried my face in the sword and lay breathing in racking gasps.

  Someone—something—came quietly up beside me, and paused.

  Within me some last extremity of terror—Jason’s terror—bade me cower here in the grass forever, if need be, before I lifted my head and looked the terror in the face. But my own mind, swallowed up In Jason’s, roused a little at that, and rebelled. Whatever Jason’s experiences in life might have been, Jay Seward knew better than that.

  There are no fears in any man’s life which cowering can solve.

  With an infinite effort, that seemed to crack the rebellious muscles of my neck, I lifted my face so that I could see who stood beside me.

  CHAPTER IV

  Trust Not a Faun

  LATER, I came to know Panyr very well. But he never seemed less strange to me than in that first moment when our eyes met by the pool. The barrier of his alienage always had power to make me pause a little in sheer disbelief. Yet most of him was—human. I think if he had been less nearly human he would have been easier to accept.

  Goat-horns and goat-legs—that was the measure of his difference from the rest of mankind. Everything else was normal enough on the surface. Perhaps his bearded face, with the slant yellow eyes and the snub nose, held a wisdom and a queer, malicious kindness unknown to ordinary men. He did not look old. His tangled curls were black and glossy, but his eyes were betraying.

  “So now the fear has gone?” he asked in his strangely deep voice, looking down on me with a faint grin. His tone was conversational. He was squatting on his hairy haunches very comfortably and his eyes were at once amused and understanding.

  “There’ll be a song to sing about Panyr,” he went on, and suddenly laughed, a flat bray of sound. “Panyr the Mighty. So terrible even the hero Jason flees from him like a frightened boy.”

  I watched in silence, swallowing the indignation that swelled in my throat, knowing he had the right to laugh. But at Jason, not at me. Did he know that? He rose on his crooked legs and walked, with an odd, rocking gait, toward the pool, stood looking down at his own reflection thoughtfully.

  “My beard wants combing,” he said, scratching it with strong, hairy fingers. “Should I summon a dryad from that olive tree yonder—I wonder, now, Jason. Would you fly in terror from a young dryad, too? Perhaps I’d better not risk it. The pretty thing would weep, thinking you scorned her, and then I would have to console her—and to tell you the truth, Jason of Iolcus, I’m a little tired after the run you gave me.”

  I think that from that moment I trusted Panyr—strange product of a strange, lost world. Even when I saw his yellow goat-pupiled eyes glancing toward the wood across my shoulder, saw the look of fleeting satisfaction cross his face. I thought then it was a dryad he watched, his talk had been so casually convincing. Yes, I trusted Panyr, with his snub nose and mocking grin, and those curved horns rising from the tangled curls. Even if the fear had not left me already, I believe Panyr’s words and his smile would have dispelled it.

  “Is the fear gone now?” he asked, suddenly quiet and unsmiling.

  I nodded. It was curious how completely that panic had drained out of me, perhaps in the catharsis of the chase itself, perhaps in some snapping of the link that had given Jason’s mind ascendency over mine.

  And yet the fear was not gone completely. Far back, deep down, the formless shadow still couched. Jason knew things I did not—yet. And perhaps he had reason for terror. Perhaps soon I too might know it.

  Panyr nodded at me as if he had been watching the thought processes move through my mind. He grinned, flirting his short tail, took a couple of prancing steps beside the water. He glanced down at it.

  “Drink,” he said. “You must be thirsty, after all that running. Bathe if you like. I’ll keep guard.”

  Guard against what? I wondered, but did not ask. I needed time to marshal my bewildered thoughts.

  First I drank, and then dropped my clothing from me and lowered myself into the icy waters. Panyr laughed at my involuntary gasp and shudder. The pool was not large enough for swimming, but I scooped up handsful of sand and scrubbed my skin until it burned. I was washing away the sweat of fear—of Jason’s fear, not mine.

  I was thinking, too. But I f
ound no answer. Not until I had emerged from the pool and was dressed again, and sat down on the moss to look at the satyr searchingly.

  “Well,” he said prosaically, “Circe had a fine welcome from her lover. You ran like a frightened hare. I never had much love for Jason, but if you are he—”

  I said, “I’m not Jason. I remember Jason’s life, but three thousand years have passed in my world since he died. New nations have risen, new tongues are spoken.” I paused there, startled, realizing for the first time that I was speaking the old Greek with effortless fluency, and with an accent quite different from the one I had learned at the university. Jason’s memories, couched in Jason’s tongue and flowing from my lips?

  “You speak well enough,” Panyr said, chewing a grass-blade. He rolled over on his stomach and kicked at the moss with one hoof. “Your world and mine are linked somehow, strangely. I don’t know how, nor do I care, really. There’s little the goat-men do care for.” A gleam showed yellow in his eyes. “Well, a few things. The hunt, and—we’re a free people. The hand of man is never raised against us, now. We walk in any city, in any forest, without harm. I might be a useful friend to you, Jason.”

  “I think I may need friends,” I said. “You could begin by telling me what really happened back there in the temple. And why I’m here.”

  PANYR leaned toward the pool and ruffled the waters with one hand. He stared down. “The naiad is silent,” he said with a sideward glance at me. “Well, there are heroes aplenty, and great deeds and mighty gods in the annals of this world. But the heroes are all long dead, and most of the gods with them. We fauns are not gods. Perhaps it’s the weakness in you I like, Jason. You’re no strutting hero. Perhaps it was the way you ran. Ohé, by my Father, how you ran! How your heels spurned the earth!” And the faun lay back and bellowed with rather embarrassing merriment.

  I could not repress a grin. I knew what a picture I must have made, fleeing through the forest. “You may have many days of laughter ahead of you, then,” I said. “Judging from what I’ve seen of this world of yours, I expect I may do a good deal of running.”

  Panyr’s shouts redoubled. Finally he sat up, wiping his eyes and still chuckling. “A man who can laugh at himself—” he said. “The heroes never knew how. Perhaps it means you’re not a hero, but—”

  “Of course,” I interrupted him. “When I have a little more knowledge and a weapon of some sort, in that case, others may do the running.”

  “That too I like,” Panyr said.

  “What was it that really happened in the temple?” I demanded, tired of circumlocutions. “Was the priestess Circe? Or was it a mask?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? I never wore it! I only know that since the first Circe died, whenever the priestess who prays in her name wears it, that priestess speaks with the same age-old voice and looks out with the same eyes that Odysseus once knew. When she lifts the mask, she is herself—as you saw. But something in the mask remains alive and haunted by an old, old love and an old hate—something that was Circe once and cannot rest. Because of Jason. You tell me what it was—or ask me no more questions.”

  “I don’t know what it was!” I said despairingly.

  “You’re here, though.” He scratched the curls at the root of his left horn and showed his teeth in a grin. “You’re here, and I think for a purpose. A pity you chose the wrong time to answer the Circe’s summons. If it had been I, I’d have answered when she was forty years younger. She was a pretty thing in those days. Oh, not for me. There are dryads enough to keep Panyr busy. But if the Circe had called me as she called you, I’d have come sooner. Or later. If the young Circe were alive, now, it might be worth your while to find her.”

  “The young Circe?” I echoed.

  “You saw how old the Old Circe is. Drawing very near her end, if you ask me.

  I was a young buck when Hecate’s curse was laid on Jason, and I’ve seen many Circes come and go since then. I forget how many—one loses count after one’s old friends go. As for the newest Circe—well, she was worth the seeing. But the priests of Helios slew her three days ago.” He cocked his horned head and grinned at me.

  “You don’t seem to care very much,” I said. “Helios—what’s that?”

  “Apollo’s fortress, the golden city, where they worship the Ram with fire and blood. There’s an old war between Hecate and Apollo. Legend said it could never have been lost or won until the Argo brought Jason back—which is why you’re here, I suppose. Wars between gods are not for me, but I hear the rumors.”

  “You talk as if Circe had remembered Jason for a long while,” I said slowly, trying to sort out a modicum of sense from his rambling. “The truth is that she’ll never rest until she reaches him again through—through me? Then that summons you speak of must have been unanswered for a long time.”

  “A very long time. The lives of many priestesses who wore the Mask and called in Circe’s name. While the memories of the dead Jason slept, perhaps, deep in the minds of many generations in your own world. Until somehow, something awoke in you.”

  “But what do they want of me?”

  “Hecate had a plan. I think it meant marching on Helios. But the plan hinged on Jason, and she was not sure. She knew the old Jason, and she must have seen him running sometime in the past!”

  “You know Hecate’s plans so well,” I said bluntly. “Are you a priest of hers?”

  HE LAUGHED and slapped a furry thigh half in derision. “A priest—Panyr? I lived here before the first Circe came. I remember Circe herself, and Odysseus and all his swine. I’ve met Hermes walking over this very grass, not touching it, you understand, just skimming over the tips of the blades.” His yellow eyes half closed and he sighed. “Well, those were great days. That was before the mists came and the gods went, and all things changed.”

  “Tell me what they want of me—do you know?” I asked without much hope of information. It was difficult enough getting the basic matters straight, without following up every lead he offered me, grinning in his curly beard. His mind seemed to leap from subject to subject with goatlike agility.

  But when he wanted to be clear, he could be. This time he chose to answer.

  “Jason swore an oath before Hecate’s altar, long ago,” he said obliquely. “He broke the oath. Do you remember that? He went to Circe afterward, to ask a favor of her. That was the real Circe, of course, when she still lived. Something strange happened between them. No one understands that, except perhaps yourself. What was it that set Circe on fire for you? What was it made her hate you as hotly as she loved you? Hecate’s curse and Circe’s love and hate have not died to this day. I think your coming will round the circle out and you may have difficult deeds to do before you’re free again. There’s one thing to remember—unless you find the young Circe, you’ll know no peace.”

  “The young Circe? But—”

  “Oh, yes, the priests of Helios slew her.

  I told you that.” He grinned again and then sprang suddenly to his feet, hoofs clicking briskly together. His eyes glanced across my shoulder toward the trees.

  “You have an urgent engagement just now,” he told me, looking down into my eyes with an expression I could not read. “If you’re Jason and a hero, you have my heartiest blessing. If you’re not—well, I’d like, you better, but your chances are worse. Let me give, you two more words of wisdom before I go.”

  He bent down, and his yellow gaze caught mine with a compelling stare. “Without the young Circe,” he said, “you’ll never know peace. Remember that. As for the other thing—” He sprang suddenly away from me with a goatish bound, his tail twitching. Over one bare brown shoulder he gave me a parting grin. “As for the other thing,” he called, “—never trust a goat-man!”

  It was too late. He meant it to be too late. Even as a shock of tardy alarm shot through me and I tried in vain to turn and rise in one motion on the slippery grass. I caught the flash of golden armor directly; at my side, a blade poised overhead betwee
n me and the misty sky.

  Panyr had done his work well. His laughter, his rambling talk had very efficiently covered any sounds that might have come to me in warning from behind. I had time for one dazzling glimpse of a man above me and of others crowding in at his back.

  Then the sword fell.

  A long period of darkness followed, and then I became aware of voices speaking nearby.

  “—turned the flat of your blade? You should have killed him!”

  “Kill Jason? You fool, what would the high priest say?”

  “If he’s Jason, all Apollo asks is his quick death.”

  “Not yet. Not until the young Circe—”

  “The young Circe died on Apollo’s altar three days ago.”

  “Did you see it? Do you believe all you hear, young fool?”

  “Everyone knows she died—”

  “Does Jason know? Phrontis wants him alive, because of her. We’re to let him escape, do you understand that? He must be let free and unharmed when we get ashore. I know my orders.”

  “All the same, if—”

  “Hold your tongue and do as you’re told. That’s all you’re fit for.”

  “What I say is, we shouldn’t trust that faun. If he betrayed Jason, won’t he betray us too? Everyone knows you can’t trust a faun.”

  “Believe me, my lad, the faun knew what he was doing. In the long run I think he works for Hecate. Perhaps Hecate herself wills us to capture this Jason. That’s not our affair. The ways of the gods are outside human understanding. Be silent now. I think this Jason is stirring.”

  “Shall I give him another thwack to keep him quiet?”

  “Put your sword away! Is that the only use of heads? Be silent or I’ll crack yours.”

  I rolled over blindly on a hard surface that rose and fell gently. For one nostalgic moment I had a feeling of terrible longing, a hopeless yearning for the ghostly ship of Thessaly that had sunk beneath me in these strange waters. Jason, mourning for his lost Argo.