by C. L. Moore
She looked sidewise at Egide. He sat with bound hands before him, his two guards near, his eyes on the following H’vani horde. They had spoken very little to one another since that long, silent flight through the H’vani fleet, with Ericon turning on its axis far below. Juille was a little startled to hear Egide speak now.
“Jair’ll be leading them,” he said, nodding down the valley. She gave him a keen glance, not at all sure even yet just how she felt about the H’vani’s captive leader. She said in a noncommittal voice:
“He won’t be leading long. We’ll get our broadcasters in order again—”
“Maybe,” said Egide, and was silent.
Juille glanced down at the small animal balancing on her knee. The llar had a curious way of turning up at most of the crises in her life. It was here now at one of the highest. She put out a tentative hand to caress it, and to her surprise, the little creature permitted the gesture. She wondered if its recollection of that episode in the tunnels had reconciled it to her touch at last. The great eyes stared up into hers with owlish intentness as it pushed its smooth head against her hand.
Someone said, “I see we have something in common, highness,” and she looked up into the gray gaze of the man from Dunnar. He was smiling and nodding toward the llar as it bent its head to her caress. Juille smiled.
“It’s my turn to be flattered now. The two of you did me a great service. I may not have thanked you properly yet.”
The envoy shook his head. “Your pet deserves the thanks, highness.”
“It was amazing,” Juille began eagerly. “How did you manage it? I’d never have believed such a thing could happen.”
The man smiled his remote, enigmatic smile. “I will tell you that soon, highness,” he said. “Not quite yet, but soon.” He flung one corner of his dark cloak over his shoulder and turned away. Juille watched him thoughtfully, a tall thin figure of regal elegance in that cloak.
Egide’s voice recalled her.
“I think I can see Jair from here,” he said, leaning forward over his bound hands on the saddlehorn. “They’ve got that third weapon, Juille. See it—the glint of light there at the front?”
Juille caught her breath sharply. The third gift of the Andareans! She had forgotten that. She had let her father plan his campaign without considering it.
“What is it?” she asked Egide fearfully, wondering if he well. He looked at her with an expression difficult to analyze.
“A paralyzer,” he said simply.
“But we’ve got those. That’s nothing new.”
“This works on a bigger scale than anything we’ve ever had. You’ve got small hand-paralyzers. This is an attachment that transforms a standard heat-beam caster into a machine to throw a long cone of force. It can whittle your army down by battalions. Once that goes into operation—” He shook his head, lips tightened.
Juille gave Egide a curious glance. Then, without speaking, she shook her reins and rode forward to her father’s side. They spoke briefly. In a few minutes, several men with lenses hanging at their necks, slipped down the hillside and vanished into the underbrush bordering the valley. Juille rode back looking confident.
“All right,” she said. “They won’t find it so easy now. We have our weapons, too, you know. You might have guessed I’d stop that cannon if I could.”
“Of course I guessed.”
Juille looked at him in bewilderment. He was smiling.
“I’d like to talk to you alone,” he said. She hesitated. Then she nodded to his guards and turned her horse aside, leading the way a little distance off toward the brow of the hill. They sat there side by side, watching the two armies winding up the valley. Rain had almost ceased now. A cold wind blew in their faces, and overhead the purple thunderclouds came rolling up faster than the H’vani hordes.
Egide said, “Juille—” and stopped. After a moment, he tried again. “Juille—do you think the H’vani will defeat you?”
“They have a chance,” she admitted. “But no, they won’t.”
“You’re sure?”
“How can anyone be sure? I don’t believe they will.”
“But they have the edge now.”
“What of it?” She twisted to face him angrily. “You don’t have to boast about your people.”
He smiled at her. “They aren’t my people now.” Juille looked at him with bewildered eyes. He went on, “I’m through with the H’vani. I couldn’t say so before—you’d have thought I was afraid and trying to join the winning side. But you can’t think that now.”
Juille struggled for words. “But—why? Why? You organized the attack! You—”
“Oh, I great many plans,” he said, smiling rather wryly. “I liked working out ideas and watching them succeed. But lately—I’ve changed.” He looked at her as if uncertain whether to follow that idea any further just now. She was still staring at him in puzzled confusion. He said, “Don’t look at me like that. I’ve been thinking this over for quite a while. It isn’t as if I were deserting them when they need me. And I’ve never had much in common with them. Remember, it took Jair to win their hearts.”
“But you can’t change over like that, without any reason,” Juille insisted uncomprehendingly. “You don’t—”
“I have my reasons. You’re thinking it’s a trick, aren’t you? Well, it isn’t. Why should I trick you now, when it’s your side that’s losing? When you’ve got my life there around your neck on a chain?”
Juille’s hand went up automatically to her breast where the lenses hung. She thought she was beginning to understand what Egide meant. Her mind went back over the confusion of disastrous things that had happened so swiftly, and paused at the episode in the forbidden woods of the Ancients, when she had stood in Egide’s arms and tentatively made herself a promise. When she had him where she wanted him, she remembered now, she had told herself she might not fear the treacherous weakness of emotion. She had thought then that even love might be safe—later. And it was—later—now.
Egide was watching her, a smile beginning to quirk his mouth. She watched his face warm and soften, finding that she knew just how each line and plane would alter with the changing mood. He was very attractive when he smiled. The rain had made his yellow curls darken and tighten to almost sculptured flatness, and the rain on his lashes and his beard twinkled as he shook his head, still smiling.
“You’ll never trust me, will you?” he said. “You’ll never trust anyone. Even yourself. Least of all yourself—”
“I might,” Juille told him softly, hardly knowing her own voice. Her fingers were on the chain about her neck, and almost unconsciously she found herself pulling out the deadly little ornament that held Egide’s life. When she realized what she was doing she glanced down, and then sat perfectly still for a long moment, her eyes growing wider and wider. Very slowly she pulled the chain all the way out of her tunic. The color had drained from her face; and as Egide looked, his own color faded. They sat in silence, looking at the broken chain.
The lens was gone.
Juille stared down at the break, too stunned for thought. Somewhere, somehow, in the turmoil of evacuation, she had lost it. Anywhere. In the city. Along the road. In these pathless hills. Somewhere—anywhere. At this moment some curious person might be stooping to pick it up and toy with the black stud. It might lie lost forever, untouched, here in the woods. Or at this moment, or any moment hereafter, Egide might slump over dead in his saddle.
There were many disastrous implications behind the loss, but her thoughts had room for on>“e just now. All the emotions that had churned in her mind so long about him—all the distrust, the contempt, the reluctant warmth—suddenly crystallized. Her defenses went down with a rush and she knew that of all things in life, what she wanted least was Egide’s death.
They sat looking at one another in the midst of a tremendous silence. For this small interval, there was nothing at all to stand between them, neither H’vani nor Lyonese, nor could ideals n
or mistrust, nor any of the hours of their enmity. During all the time they had known one another, only a few moments had validity. The interval on the cloud beneath the stars; the interval of their dance, the moment of their kiss in the green, forbidden woods. All other meetings had been meetings of strangers, not themselves.
For Juille it was a moment of almost intolerable poignancy. And perhaps her barriers were down so utterly in this one destroying moment because she knew in her heart that the hours of this surrender were numbered. Traitor she might be to all her amazon principles—but she could not be traitor long.
Wordlessly Juille leaned forward and untied the cords that held Egide’s hands together. While she touched him, for an instant longer, the stars and the shadows of the wood still hung about them. But before either could speak, or wanted to, the emperor’s voice broke in.
“Juille, I’m going down,” he called. “Wait here, child. I’ll signal when I want you. The H’vani are catching up with our rear guard.”
She came out of the bemusing quiet slowly, too distracted to realize how completely now the reins of control had been taken from her hands. The emperor and most of his men were riding down the hillside before the import of his words came to her clearly. She watched them hurrying down, cloaks billowing, and the rain slanting in long gusts between.
Farther down, half hidden by the hills, she could see that the vanguard of the H’vani was almost upon the last of the escaping Lyonese. There was a turmoil about the length of the shining cannon whose secret the Andareans had betrayed, and Juille knew the new weapon of the Lyonese had taken its first toll among the enemy. There would be more.
She turned to Egide. He was watching her gravely, hands clasped on his saddlehorn. There seemed very little to say just now. Perhaps the time had not yet come for speech. Juille urged her horse nearer his and they sat side by side, knees touching, and watched the emperor riding down the hill.
In the valley the two forces had begun their meeting. From here they could see a big figure at the H’vani’s front, red beard and red head a beacon for the invaders to follow. Now and again an echo of Jair’s tremendous resonant roar floated up to them above the rising clamor of battle, but for the most part, they heard little. The wind was strengthening; it screamed in their ears and carried the shouts of the fighters away up the valley.
They could see turmoil growing among the H’vani. Far back in the ranks where no men should yet be falling, men fell. The Dunnarian weapon was reaping its first casualties. But Jair’s great voice and his irresistible, ontelling presence were keeping order among the frightened men.
And suddenly Juille knew that the Dunnarian weapon must fail. Its intrinsic purpose was the slaughter of the leaders at their peak of importance. And Jair would never die by that weapon. He was immortal, not heir to any weakness of human flesh. So long as he remained on his feet the H’vani would not break even in the face of this mysterious silent death that had begun to strike among them.
Jair would become a legend. He might even become a god for his awestruck followers. And the last hope of demoralizing the barbarians was gone now. If Juille could have proclaimed Jair’s origin before this battle, the H’vani might have been shaken. But now nothing could shake them. Even if they believed her story, the very belief might deify Jair still further.
A familiar voice at Juille’s side echoed the thought.
“How strange,” said the man from Dunnar, “that they found no human creature to personify for them half the courage and warmth and power they see in this man of metal!”
Something about the pitch of his voice made Juille turn sharply, almost unseating the llar that still clung to her knee. The Envoy was looking down the valley, his strange, narrow-skulled head in outline against the piling storm clouds. The cold wind whipped his cloak backward, but his great translucent eyes did not narrow to the blast. Juille was searching his face with a new fascination. The beaked nose, the controlled, cruel mouth. The air of intolerable elegance and fastidious, aloof poise. Juille swallowed hard. For she had heard his voice before, under strange circumstances. She groped after the memory, almost caught it. That calm, clear, familiar tone, saying—
Suddenly she knew. She had heard it in the temple of the Ancients.
He turned his head slowly, and the enormous, clear eyes met hers. He smiled.
“Yes,” he said.
Afterward, looking back, the interlude seemed like a hallucination, an unconvincing stage-set painted upon gauze, drawn briefly between Juille and the woods, while the thunderstorm rolled above them in the purple sky. But in the first moment after she had recognized that voice, realities stood out sharp and clear all around her, intensified because she could not speak or think coherently. Everything else was drowned in the overwhelming knowledge of who this man must be. And that he was no man at all. And what unimaginable shape he must really wear behind that illusion of humanity. And—
“Yes,” said the Envoy, smiling his thin smile across her at Egide. “You, too.”
Juille never knew how long they sat there in silence, while the cold wind whistled about them and in the strange yellow light of storm, the two armies locked in battle down below. She thought she would never speak again. She could not even turn her head to face Egide for comfort in this bleak and overwhelming moment.
The Envo said, “Each of you came to us for help. And each of you was answered. But you and your people had gone too far already along the road all humans go. There was still one brief moment when you could have saved yourselves. But your instincts were wrong. That time is gone now.
“Every race has come to this end, since the first men conquered the Galaxy. Each of them sows the seed of its own destruction. Always a few see the way toward salvation, and always the many shout them down. But each race has its chance—”
He looked down sternly over the struggling masses in the valley. Mists were beginning to drift between them now. The Envoy was a tall silhouette against the purple clouds of the storm. As he spoke again, the thunder rolled in his voice and in the darkening sky.
“Every nation digs its own grave,” he said. “And we are weary of mankind, forever thwarting his highest dreams and trapping himself in the end to a ruin like”—he nodded—“that down there.”
Silence for a long moment, while the noises of battle came up faintly, Jair’s great rich, carrying shout above all the rest, bellowed from his throat of brass. Juille sat very still on her horse, glad of the pressure of Egide’s warm knee, all thought and speech frozen in her as she saw the Envoy’s head turning her way. He looked thoughtfully into her face.
“You have set in motion already the forces that must destroy the Lyonese. You were the spokesman for your race, chosen fairly, typical of your kind. And of your own free choice you did it. Nothing can change that now.” Then the narrow skull turned farther and he looked across her at Egide. His great eyes were the color of the spattering rain, as cool and translucent and inhuman. “You,” he went on, “gave your people a man of iron to worship, and nothing you can do now would swerve them from following it. It will lead them to destruction. How very strange—” The Envoy paused a moment and looked at the two with a sort of puzzled wonder. “How very strange you humans are! How unerringly you unleash upon yourselves the instruments of your own destruction. How long ago the two of you here took the turnings that led you to this hilltop, and your people to their ruin down there. Perhaps the turnings were taken long before your births.” He smiled impersonally in the vivid yellowish light. “I know they were. Your first forefathers took them, and you had no choice but to follow, being of human flesh.” He sighed. “But the end comes just the same. It’s very near now.
“You wonder which will win down there.” He glanced toward the struggling armies, almost hidden in the mist. “Neither.
“Neither will win,” he told them. “Man has run his last course in our Galaxy. There were those before him who ran theirs, too, and failed to profit from it, and died. Now we weary of man. O
h, he may live out his failing days on the other worlds. We plan no pogrom against mankind.” His voice quivered for an instant with aloof amusement. “Man himself attends to that. But here on Ericon, our own peculiar world, we are weary of man and we want no more of him.”
He sent one cool downward glance toward the sounds of bale in the fog, the shouts, the muffled roar of guns, the flashes of fire-sword and pistol and artillery. Then he shook his reins gently and his horse turned toward the woods, where rain was beginning to rustle again among the leaves.
“We have great hopes,” he said, “for our new race to come.” And he held out his hand.
Something stirred upon Juille’s knee. She looked down dumbly. The llar flashed up at her one fathomless glance, all the sadness and wisdom and benignity of its race luminous in the great grave eyes so startlingly like the Envoy’s. Then it flowed down from her lap to the ground with its alarming, boneless ease, and went rippling over the wet grass toward the Envoy.
Juille looked up. She had no idea why. But she was not surprised to see again the heights of great inward-leaning walls looming dark above the trees. When she lowered her eyes the Envoy and the llar had gone.
“I suppose we’d better go down now,” Juille said, and put out her hand. Egide turned a quiet blue gaze upon her. The faintest flicker of a smile touched his face and his warm, gun-calloused fingers closed about the hand.
“Yes, I suppose so,” he said.
Juille had an extraordinary conviction of hiatus in her life for the past ten minutes. She knew quite well what had been happening while she sat there stricken voiceless and all but mindless in the presence of the gods. She knew she would never quite forget it—or ever speak of it to Egide. But it seemed singularly unreal. The human mind is not constructed to accept defeat even in the the face of finality. She could not now bring hers to accept that memory. What had happened seemed of a different time and texture from the period before or since—an interval of flimsy unreality, a gauze incident, to be dismissed and forgotten.
