by C. L. Moore
She glared at him with hot, yellow eyes, indiscretion hovering on her lips. Almost she blurted it out, but not quite. In a choke of anger she turned her face away, going prickly and hot at the deep laughter behind her.
“Have you had your fill of seeking weapons against me?” he went on, still in that voice of mingling condescension and arrogance.
She hesitated a moment. Somehow she must get them both back into the hall of the image. In a voice that trembled she said at last,
“Yes.”
“Shall we go back then, to my palace, and prepare for the ceremony which will make you queen?”
The deep voice was still shuddering along her nerves as the mountain behind them and the great dark world below melted together in a mirage through which, as through a veil, a flame began to glow; the flame about an image’s head—an image gigantic in a great black hall whose unroofed walls closed round them in magical swiftness. Jirel stared, realizing bewilderedly that without stirring a step she had somehow come again into the black hall where she had first opened her eyes.
A qualm of remembrance came over her as she recalled how fervently she had sworn to herself to die somehow, rather than return here into Pav’s power. But now she was armed. She need have no fear now. She looked about her.
Black and enormous, the great image loomed up above them both. She lifted a gaze of new respect to that leaping diadem of flame which crowned the face that was Pav’s. She did not understand what it was she must do now, or clearly how to do it, but the resolve was hot in her to take any way out that might lie open rather than submit to the dark power that dwelt in the big, black man at her side.
Hands fell upon her shoulders then, heavily. She whirled in a swirl of velvet skirts into Pav’s arms, tight against his broad breast. His breath was hot in her face, and upon her life the beating of savage suns burned the intolerable blackness of his eyes. She could no more meet their heat than she could have stared into a sun. A sob of pure rage choked up in her throat as she thrust hard with both hands against the broad black chest to which she was crushed. He loosed her without a struggle. She staggered with the suddenness of it, and then he had seized her wrist in an iron grip, twisting savagely. Jirel gasped in a wrench of pain and dropped helplessly to one knee. Above her the heavy and ominous voice of Romne’s king said in its deepest, most velvety burr, so that she shook to the very depths in that drum-beat of savage power,
“Resist me again and—things can happen here too dreadful for your brain to grasp even if I told you. Beware of me, Jirel, for Pav’s anger is a terrible thing. You have found no weapon to conquer me, and now you must submit to the bargain you yourself proposed. Are you ready, Jirel of Joiry?”
She bent her head so that her face was hidden, and her mouth curved into a twist of fiercely smiling anticipation.
“Yes,” she said softly.
Then abruptly, amazingly, upon her face a cold wind blew, heavy with the odor of chill hollowness underground, and in her ears was the thin and tiny coldness of a voice she knew, echoing from reverberant vaults over gulfs unthinkable,
“Ask him to clothe you in bridal dress. Ask him! Ask him now!”
Across the screen of her memory flashed a face like a white-fleshed skull to whose eye-sockets cobwebby shadows clung, whose pale mouth curled in a smile of bitter scorn, maliciously urging her on. But she dared not disobey, for she had staked everything now on the accomplishment of the witch’s bargain. Dangerous it might be, but there was worse danger waiting here and now, in Pav’s space-black eyes. The thin shrill ceased and the tomb-smelling wind faded, and she heard her own voice saying,
“Let me up, then. Let me up—I am ready. Only am I to have no bridal dress for my wedding? For black ill becomes a bride.”
He could not have heard that thin, far-calling echo of a voice, for his dark face did not change and there was no suspicion in his eyes. The iron clutch of his fingers loosened. Jirel swung to her feet lithely and faced him with downcast eyes, not daring to unveil the yellow triumph that blazed behind her lashes.
“My wedding gown,” she reminded him, still in that voice of strangled gentleness.
He laughed, and his eyes sought in empty air. It was the most imperiously regal thing conceivable, that assured glance into emptiness for what, by sheer knowledge of his own power, must materialize in answer to the king of Romne’s questing. And all about her, glowing into existence under the sun-hot blackness of Pav’s eyes, the soft blue flames were suddenly licking.
Weakness crawled over her as the blueness seethed about her body, brushing, caressing, light as fire-tongues upon her, murmurous with the soft flickering sounds of quiet flame. A weariness like death was settling into her very bones, as if life itself were draining away into the caressing ministrations of those blue and heatless flames. She exulted in her very weakness, knowing how much of her strength must be incarnate, then, in the flames which were to quench Pav’s flame. And they would need strength—all she had.
Then again the cold wind blew from hollow tombs, as if through an opened door, and upon the intangible breath of it that did not stir one red curl upon her cheek, though she felt its keenness clearly, the thin, small echo of the corpse-witch’s voice cried, tiny and far over spaces beyond measurement,
“Focus them on the Flame—now, now! Quickly! Ah—fool!”
And the ghost of a thin, cool laugh, stinging with scorn, drifting through the measureless voids. Reeling with weakness, Jirel obeyed. The derision in that tiny, far-away voice was like a spur to drive her, though ready anger surged up in her throat against that strange scorn for which she could find no reason. As strongly as before she felt the breath of danger when the corpse-witch spoke, but she ignored it now, knowing in her heart that Pav must die if she were ever to know peace again, let his dying cost her what it might.
She set her teeth in her red underlip and in the pain of it drove all her strength into a strong focusing upon the flame that burned around the great imaged Pav’s head. What would happen she did not know, but in the fog of her weakness, stabbed by her bitten lip’s pain, she fought with all the force she had to drive those flames curling like caresses about her body straight toward the flame-crown on the image’s majestic brow.
And presently, in little tentative thrusts, the blue tongues that licked her so softly began to turn away from the velvety curves of her own body and reach out toward the image. Sick with weakness as the strength drained out of her into the pulling flames, she fought on, and in an arc that lengthened and stretched away the flames began to forsake her and reach flickeringly out toward the great black statue that loomed overhead.
From far away she heard Pav’s deep voice shouting on a note of sudden panic,
“Jirel, Jirel! Don’t! Oh, little fool, don’t do it!”
It seemed to her that his voice was not that of a man afraid for his own life, but rather as if it was peril to herself he would avert. But she could pay him no heed at all now. Nothing was real but the sharp necessity to quench the image’s flame, and she poured all the strength that was left to her into the rainbow of flickering blueness that was arching up toward the image.
“Jirel, Jirel!” the deep voice of Pav was storming from somewhere in the fog of her weakness. “Stop! You don’t know—”
A blast of cold wind drowned the rest of his words, and:
“S-s-s! Go on!” hissed the corpse-witch’s voice tinily in her ear. “Don’t listen to him! Don’t let him stop you! He can’t touch you while the blue flames burn! Go on! Go on!”
And she went on. Half fainting, wholly blind now to everything but that stretching arc of blue, she fought. And it lengthened as she poured more and more of her strength into it, reached up and out and grew by leaping degrees until the blue flames were mingling with the red, and over that blazing crown a dimness began to fall. From somewhere in the blind mist of her exhaustion Pav’s voice shouted with a note of despair in its shudderingly vibrant depths,
“Oh, Jirel, Jirel! W
hat have you done?”
Exultation surged up in her. The hot reserves of her anger against him flooded over and strength like wine boiled up through her body. In one tremendous burst of fierce energy she hurled every ounce of her newly-won power against the flame. Triumphantly she saw it flicker. There was a moment of guttering twilight; then abruptly the light went out and red flame and blue vanished in a breath. A crashing darkness like the weight of falling skies dropped thunderously about her.
Sick to the very soul with reactionary weakness as the tremendous effort relaxed at last, she heard from reeling distances Pav’s voice call wordlessly. All about her the dark was heavy, with a crushing weight that somehow made her whole body ache as if with the pressure of deep seas. In the heaviness of it she scarcely realized that the voice was shouting at all; but even through the dimness of her failing senses she knew that there was something tremendously wrong with it. In a mighty effort she rallied herself, listening.
Yes—he was trying to speak, trying to tell her something that she knew intuitively was of infinite importance. But his voice was ceasing to be a human voice, becoming less and less articulate and more and more a mighty roaring like the voice of incalculable power. In such a voice a typhoon might speak, or a dynamo more tremendous than any man ever made.
“Jirel—Jirel—why did you…” So much she made out before the words rushed together and melted into that thunderous roar which was the very voice of infinity itself. The darkness was full of it—one with it—intolerable violence upon her ears, intolerable pressure of the black dark upon her body.
Through the roaring void a keen wind blew hollow with the smell of tombs. Jirel, trying to whirl to face it, found herself incapable of motion, a finite and agonized thing in the midst of crashing black thunder whose sound was torment in her brain, whose weight was crushing her very atoms in upon themselves until consciousness nickered within her like a guttering candle flame.
But there was no need to turn. Directions had ceased to be. The wind smote her turned cheek, but before her, as if through an opened door from which coldness streamed, she was aware of a white-shrouded figure floating upon the blackness; an unshadowed figure, staringly white, not touched by anything the blackness could muster against it. Even through the terrible roaring of pure power the corpse-witch’s voice struck low and cool in its echo from reverberant caverns; even through the blinding dark her skull-face gleamed, the cobwebbed eyes lurid in the depths of their clinging shadows with a light that glowed from deep within the leprosy-white skull. The witch was laughing.
“O fool!” she lilted in a hollow ripple of scorn as cool as caverns underground. “Poor, presumptuous fool! Did you really think to bargain with us of the outer worlds? Did you really believe that Pav—Pav!—could die? No—in your little human brain how could you have known that all the Romne you saw was illusion, that Pav’s human body was no real thing? Blind, hot, earthly woman, with your little hates and vengeances, how could you have reigned queen over a Romne that is Darkness itself—as you see it now? For this roaring night which engulfs you, without dimensions, without form, lightless, inchoate—this is Romne! And Romne is Pav. The land that you walked through, the mountains and plains you saw—all these were no less Pav than the human body he assumed. Nor was his height and black-bearded arrogance any more Pav himself than were the rocks and trees and black waters of Romne. Pav is Romne, and Romne is Pav—one terrible whole out of which all you saw was wrought.
“Yes, shudder, and presently, when I am through with you—die. For no human thing could live in the Romne that is real. When in your foolish vengeance you quenched the flame that burned on the image’s head, you sealed your own doom. Only in the power of that flame could the illusion of the land of Romne hold itself steady about you. Only that flame in its tangible light held Romne and Pav in the semblance of reality to you, or kept the weight of the Dark from crushing your puny soul in the soft white flesh you call a body. Only the sound of my voice does it now. When I cease to speak, when the breath of my tomb-breeze ceases to blow around you—then you die.”
The cool voice broke into soft and scornful laughter while darkness reeled about Jirel and the roaring was a tumult unbearable in her very brain. Was it indeed the voice of what had been Pav? Then the low, chill voice echoed on,
“But before you die I would have you look upon what you sought to slay. I would have you see the Darkness that is Pav and Romne, clearly and visibly, so that you might understand what manner of lover I had. And you thought to rival me! Do you think, in your pride of human endurance, you could so much as gaze for one instant upon the inferno that is—Pav!”
In that one ringing word the chill wind ceased, the voice echoed into silence from its heights of scorn, and in the darkness, black upon the black, with no sense that human flesh possesses—neither sight nor hearing nor touch—yet with hideous clarity, she saw.
She saw the Darkness. It was tremendous beyond the power of any human perceptions to endure save in the brief flash she had of it. A thunderous Darkness whose roar was vaster than anything like mere sound. The inferno of it was too hot to bear. The human Pav’s eyes had blazed like black suns, intolerably, but that had been only a reflection of this infinite might. This Darkness was the incarnate blaze, and all her consciousness reeled and was in agony before it.
She thought she could not endure to look—even to exist so near to that terrible heat of darkness, but no closing of eyes could shut it out. In the fleeting instant while she saw—through closed eyes and numbed senses, conscious in every fiber of the blaze so close—a vibration from the great Thing that was beyond shape and size and matter shivered through her in a scorch of heat too hot to touch her flesh, though her soul shuddered fainting away. It was not anything like a voice, but there was intelligence in it. And in her brain she received dimly what it said.
“Sorry—would have had you—could have loved you—but go now—go instantly, before you die…”
And somehow, in a way that left her mind blank with the tremendous power of it, that infinite force was commanding obedience even out of the stunning Dark. For the Darkness was Romne, and Romne was Pav, and the command ran like a shudder of dark lightning from edge to edge, expelling her from its heart in an explosion of black inferno.
Instantly, blindingly, in the numbing shock of that thunderous power, the darkness ceased to engulf her. Light in a dazzle that stunned her very brain burst all around. She was spun by forces so mighty that their very tremendousness saved her from destruction, as an insect might pass unharmed through a tornado. Infinity was a whirlpool around her, and—
Flagstones pressed cool and smooth against her bare feet. She blinked dizzily. Joiry’s chapel walls were rising grayly about her, familiar and dun in the dim light of dawn. She stood here in her doeskin tunic upon the flagstones and breathed in deep gusts, staring about her with dazed eyes that dwelt like lingering caresses upon the familiar things of home.
HELLSGARDE
Jirel of Joiry drew rein at the edge of the hill and sat awhile in silence, looking out and down. So this was Hellsgarde. She had seen it many times in her mind’s eye as she saw it now from the high hill in the yellow light of sunset that turned every pool of the marshes to shining glass. The long causeway to the castle stretched out narrowly between swamps and reeds up to the gate of that grim and eery fortress set alone among the quicksands. This same castle in the marshes, seen at evening from the high hilltop, had haunted her dreams for many nights now.
“You’ll find it by sunset only, my lady,” Guy of Garlot had told her with a sidelong grin marring his comely dark face. “Mists and wilderness ring it round, and there’s magic in the swamps about Hellsgarde. Magic—and worse, if legends speak truth. You’ll never come upon it save at evening.”
Sitting her horse now on the hilltop, she remembered the grin in his black eyes and cursed him in a whisper. There was such a silence over the whole evening world that by instinct she dared not speak aloud. Dared not? It w
as no normal silence. Bird-song did not break it, and no leaves rustled. She huddled her shoulders together a little under the tunic of link-mail she wore and prodded her horse forward down the hill.
Guy of Garlot—Guy of Garlot! The hoofbeats thumped out the refrain all the way downhill. Black Guy with his thinly smiling lips and his slanted dark eyes and his unnatural comeliness—unnatural because Guy, within, was ugly as sin itself. It seemed no design of the good God that such sinfulness should wear Guy’s dark beauty for a fleshly garment.
The horse hesitated at the head of the causeway which stretched between the marsh pools toward Hellsgarde. Jirel shook the reins impatiently and smiled a one-sided smile downward at his twitching ears.
“I go as loath as you,” she told him. “I go wincing under spurs too, my pretty. But go I must, and you too.” And she cursed Guy again in a lingering whisper as the slow hoofbeats reverberated upon the stone arches of the causeway.
Beyond it loomed Hellsgarde, tall and dark against the sunset. All around her lay the yellow light of evening, above her in the sky, below her in the marshy pools beneath which quicksands quivered. She wondered who last had ridden this deserted causeway in the yellow glow of sunset, under what dreadful compulsion.
For no one sought Hellsgarde for pleasure. It was Guy of Garlot’s slanting grin that drove Jirel across the marshes this evening—Guy and the knowledge that a score of her best men-at-arms lay shivering tonight in his dripping dungeons with no hope of life save the hope that she might buy their safety. And no riches could tempt Black Guy, not even Jirel’s smoothly curving beauty and the promise of her full-lipped smile. And Garlot Castle, high on its rocky mountain peak, was impregnable against even Jirel’s masterfully planned attacks. Only one thing could tempt the dark lord of Garlot, and that a thing without a name.
“It lies in Hellsgarde, my lady,” he had told her with that hateful smooth civility which his sleek grin so belied. “And it is indeed Hell-guarded. Andred of Hellsgarde died defending it two hundred years ago, and I have coveted it all my life. But I love living, my lady! I would not venture into Hellsgarde for all the wealth in Christendom. If you want your men back alive, bring me the treasure that Andred died to save.”
