The Halfling and Other Stories

by Leigh Brackett

  He said it very quietly and Harrah heard truth in his voice like the tolling of a bell—the passing-bell for the mastery of human kind.

  “Will you help us, Earthman, or will you die?”

  Harrah did not answer and Marith said, “Let him rest.”

  Kehlin nodded. He left and Harrah was hardly aware of his going. The girl spoke to him gently and he rose and stumbled after her, out of the ship.

  She led him to a space apart from the main sheds, an unfinished lean-to where only a dim light filtered from the work lamps. It was dark under the trees and hot. Terribly hot. Harrah sat down on the moist ground and put his head between his hands and there was still no answer in him, only a great blankness.

  Marith waited and did not speak.

  After a while Harrah lifted his head and looked at her. “Why did you save me from Kehlin’s knife?”

  She answered slowly, “I’m not like Kehlin. I was made only for beauty, a dancer. My mind won’t reach so high. It asks questions but they’re little ones, of small account.”

  “What questions, Marith?”

  “I have been alive for nineteen years. My owner was very proud of me and I made him a great deal of money. And everywhere I went, in every city, on every world, I watched men and women. I saw the way they looked at each other, the way they smiled. Many of the women were not beautiful or talented. But men loved them and they were happy.”

  Harrah remembered her words—I hate all men and women also. Especially women.

  “When I was through working,” she said, “my owner put me away like a dancing doll until it was time to work again. I had nothing to do but sit alone and think and wonder.”

  She was close to Harrah. Her face was indistinct in the gloom, a shadowy thing of dreams.

  “When you thought that I was human you said you loved me. I think that is why I saved you from tire knife.”

  There was a long silence and then Harrah said the words she was waiting for, wanting to hear, and they were the truth.

  “I love you now.”

  She said, very softly, “But not as you would love a woman.”

  He remembered her dancing in the bazaar, the ancient sensual dance that became in her a thing of sheer loveliness.

  “No,” he said. “But that’s because you’re more than human, not less.”

  He took her into his arms and he knew now what he held there. Not child nor woman nor any wicked thing but a creature innocent and beautiful as the moonlight and as far beyond him.

  He held her close and it was as though for a moment he held his own youth again, the short bright days before he had learned the things Kehlin had named—lust and fear and greed and sorrow. He held her close and there was no passion in him, only an immense tenderness, a longing and regret so deep that his heart was near to breaking.

  He had his answer.

  Marith drew away from him and rose, turning her face into the darkness so that he could not see her eyes. She said, “I should have let you die in Komar. It would have been easier then for both of us.”

  An eerie chill ran over Harrah. “You can read my mind now.” He got up, very slowly.

  She nodded. “Kehlin more than I because he shared it fully. That was what I meant when I reminded him that there were ways to prevent betrayal. If I were human I would tell you to run quickly and hide yourself from Kehlin and I would hope. But I am not human and I know there is no hope.”

  She turned toward him then, clear in the barred moonlight.

  “Like to like,” she whispered. “You have your burden and your pride and you would not be free of either. Kehlin was right. And yet I wish—oh, I wish…”

  Quite suddenly she was gone and Harrah was reaching out his hand to emptiness.

  For a long moment he did not move. He heard the sound of movement in the camp and knew that the telepathic warning had gone out and that within a few seconds he would be dead but he could only think that Marith was gone and he had lost her.

  Then from the dark jungle, swift with love and terror, Tok came crying out to his lord.

  Harrah had forgotten Tok, who had followed him down from the safety of Komar. He had forgotten a number of things. Now he remembered. He remembered Kehlin’s words and the three men who had died in Komar and why they had died.

  He remembered that he was human and could hope where there was no hope. “Come, Lord! Run!”

  Harrah ran. And it was already too late.

  The androids came, the fleet lithe creatures heading him off. Tok stood not thirty feet away, but he knew that he could never make it.

  He stopped running. He saw Kehlin among those who came to trap him and he saw the gun the android carried now in place of the knife.

  With acid and with fire they destroyed us…

  With fire.

  It was Harrah’s turn to cry out to Tok, to the unseen watchers in the trees. He shouted with all his strength in the split second before he fell and his words carried over even the sound of the shot.

  He thought that Tok was gone. He thought that there was an answer from the jungle but he was not sure. He was not sure of anything but pain.

  He lay where he had fallen and he knew that he would continue to lie there because his leg was broken above the knee. He looked incuriously at the dark blood seeping around the wound, and then up into the face of Kehlin, wondering why the android had aimed so low.

  Reading his thought Kehlin answered, “You had already spoken. And—I preferred you should die with us.”

  For a long time after that he did not speak and there was a great silence on the clearing. The androids stood, the thirty-four tall splendid beings who were the last of their kind, and they made no sound.

  The jungle also was very still. But the aboriginals had done their work well and already there was a taint of smoke on the air and the wind blew hot. The naked bones of the ship mocked them with the shelter they might have had. There was no refuge,’ no escape, and they knew it.

  Harrah saw how Kehlin looked up at the sky, at the distant suns that light the edges of the universe. The jungle sighed and flames stood up among the trees all around them like a ring of spears. Harrah thought that humans were not alone in their knowledge of sorrow. Kehlin turned abruptly and called, “Marith!”

  She came out from among the others and stood before him.

  “Are you happy, Marith? You have done a human thing. You have behaved like a woman, wrecking empires for love.”

  He flung her down beside Harrah and then he shook his head slowly and said, “No, the blame is mine. I was the leader. I should have killed the man.”

  He laughed suddenly. “And so this is the end—and it does not come to us from the hands of man but from the paws of apes who have learned no more than the making of fire!”

  Harrah nodded. “Apes,” he said. “Yes. That’s the gulf between us. That’s why we fear you. You were never an ape.”

  He watched the ring of fire brighten and draw in. The pain in his leg was very great and he was bleeding and his mind seemed distant from his body and full of profound thoughts.

  “We distrust anyone who is different,” he said. “We always destroy them, one way or another.”

  He looked up at Kehlin. “Apes. A restless, unruly bunch, driven by passions and hungers you could never understand. You would not have been able to rule us. No one ever has. We can’t even ourselves. So in the end you would have destroyed us.”

  Kehlin’s eyes met his, the black, deep eyes, brilliant now with some terrible emotion that Harrah could not read.

  “Perhaps,” he said softly. “Perhaps. And you’re proud, aren’t you? The weakling has pulled down his betters and it makes him feel strong. You’re proud to die because you think you’ve put an end to us. But you have not, Earthman! You have not!”

  Standing very tall beneath the banners of red light that shook from the flaring trees Kehlin cried out strongly, shouting to the stars, to all creation.

  “You made us once, you littl
e men who love to feel like gods! You will make us again. You can’t keep from it—and we will inherit the universe!”

  Harrah knew now what was in Kehlin’s mind. It was faith. He saw it in the faces of all those who stood with Kehlin, the beautiful creatures trapped and waiting under the crimson pall.

  A great curtain of flame and falling ash swept between them, hiding the androids from Harrah’s sight. A bitter pang struck through him, a wild regret, and he tried to call out, to say that he was sorry. But the words would not come and he felt ashamed and very small and full of a black and evil guilt. He bowed his head and wept.

  Marith’s voice spoke close beside him. “They are gone and soon we will be too and it is better so.”

  Harrah turned. He was amazed to see that there was a strange look of joy about her as though she had been released from some dark prison.

  “Do you love me, Marith? Do you love me still after what I’ve done?”

  She answered, “You have set me free.”

  He took her in his arms and held her and it came to him that only this way, only now, could they two have been joined. And he was happy.

  THE CITADEL OF LOST AGES

  CHAPTER I Strange Awakening

  Darkness—nothingness— a void and a voice that spoke to him across the muffled deeps. “Remember! Think, and remember! Who are you?”

  It was painful to be thus aroused. And yet he tried to answer and could not. He said, “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you know. You can remember if you will. Who are you?”

  The voice continued to torture him, calm and insistent, and in order to quiet it he tried desperately to remember. It seemed that he should know. He had known, once.

  I am…

  A pause, a groping and then, “I am—Fenway.”

  “Ah!” said the voice. “Good! You see, you do know—you can remember. Now—where are you, Fenway? Where?”

  Again he answered, “I don’t know.” The mists were thick and he was growing tired.

  But the voice went on. “You are walking, Fenway. There is a street, buildings, people. Where are you going?”

  Suddenly he knew. Of course he knew! He must have been asleep or dreaming not to know. He was walking down the Avenue of the Americas. He had just left his office in Rockefeller Center. It was dusk and a thin snow was falling. He could see the immense towers of the city leaping skyward, their ledges rimmed with white, their myriad windows blazing and above them in the smother the blinking lights of the airways.

  He said, answering the voice. “I am in New York. It is winter and I am going home.”

  “Good! Now the year. What year, Fenway?”

  “I’m tired,” he said. “I want to sleep.”

  “Tell me the year, Fenway. The year!”

  He said uncertainly, “The year I was born, the year I married, the year my son was born. The year, this year. I don’t…. Yes, nineteen hundred and eighty-seven.”

  He was tired. The voice was growing faint, the restful dark increasing.

  “Fenway!” It seemed to him that the voice quivered with a terrible excitement. “Fenway, the Citadel! Do you know of the Citadel?”

  “The Citadel?” Some chord within him stirred to the touch of that word, a chord of fear, of doom and desolation.

  “Perhaps it won’t happen,” he murmured. “Perhaps they’re wrong. The Citadel—I can’t think about the Citadel. Let me sleep!”

  He let himself drift into the enfolding darkness. From far off he heard the voice clamoring his name and another voice that cautioned, “Softly! Don’t force him! You know the danger of force.”

  For a brief instant, blurred and gigantic in the void above him, he thought he saw their faces, bearded, bright and hateful— the faces of torment. He thought he heard the voice say softly in triumph, “One more time. Once more and he will remember!”

  Then it was all gone—sight and sound and sense. There was only slumber, the deep deep night of silence and forgetting.

  Daylight—a narrow shaft of it, red and rusty on the stone floor. He lay for a long time looking at the light, not understanding it, not understanding anything. His head was heavy, as though weighted with iron bands.

  He was enclosed in a small chamber of stone. It was very still. He could not remember having seen this place before. He looked at the light, and wondered, and his wondering was slow and vague.

  He wondered who he was and where he was and why.

  Once he had known. Once he had had a name and a place and a reason.

  They were gone beyond remembering. He felt that this should have frightened him but it did not. He was puzzled and worried but not afraid. Not very much afraid.

  He stood up suddenly, trembling, bathed in a chill sweat. Dim broken images whirled across his mind, too formless for grasping, and he cried out, “I can’t remember!”

  The cry was only a groan. It echoed dully from the stones with a sound like heavy laughter.

  He looked down at himself. He saw his feet, shod in rawhide sandals. His legs, brown and long-thighed and muscular, were marked here and there with old scars. A strip of white cloth was wound tight around narrow loins, above that was a flat brown midriff.

  He studied his hands. They were strong but they had no meaning for him. He lifted them and felt his face, the hard high ridges of bone, the hollow planes of flesh. He ran his fingers through short-cropped hair and did not know the color of it nor the color of his eyes—nor his name.

  It was an evil thing, to be shut in a place of stone without a name. He stood still until the spasm passed.

  The narrow shaft of light drew him, three slow unsteady steps. He leaned his face to the slit in the wall and looked out—out and down and far away. And again there came the chill sweat and the trembling, the poignant sense of memory hiding just beyond the threshold of his mind.

  A copper Sun hung in the sky and the sky was coppery and thick, streaked with clouds of reddish dust that deepened into crimson where they touched the far-off hills.

  He looked at the sky and something said within him, The sky is wrong. It did not tell him how.

  Below him, at the foot of granite cliffs that seemed to fall forever down from where he stood, there was a city.

  It was a great city. There were many buildings, some huge and built of stone, some built of wood, some of clay brick and endless crowding masses of little huts that seemed like lumps of earth itself. It was a bright city, blazing with sullen color under the copper sky.

  It was a rich city. He could see the market places, the patterns of the streets and lanes and huddled alleys thronged with men and beasts, the pens and paddocks and the roads that led in and out. The sound of it rose up to him, soft with distance—the speaking of many voices and of much motion.

  A large rich busy city—but again the inner something told

  him, It is wrong. And he visioned white towers rearing godlike, thundering with light and sound, roaring with a great voice of wheels and motors and swift wings in the sunset sky.

  He visioned them as a man sees a wisp of smoke erased by the wind. And they were gone, without form or meaning, as though they had never been.

  He stood where he was, gazing dully at the city and the wide land that spread beyond it, patched with forest and cleared meadows and die roofs of villages. There were streams and three broad roads that led away toward the hills. The roads were hung with dust where men and horses moved.

  The shadows did not change. The Sun hung unmoving in the sky. He did not know how long he stood. There was no time. And that too was somehow wrong, that red unstirring Sun in a dusty sky.

  From somewhere above him, as though on the roof of whatever place this was, there came the brazen thunder of a gong.

  The stone walls shuddered with it. He could hear the echoes rolling out across the land, solemn and fierce, and he thought it must be a great gong indeed, fashioned by giants. When the ringing strokes were ended the world seemed filled with silence.

  Below him th
e city quieted. The voices were stilled, the streets and the marketplaces grew empty. Out on the plain the caravans left the roadways and lay down under the shelter of the trees. The villages were silent. The world slept.

  And still the sun had not shifted in its place.

  He began to be afraid again. The city and the plain seemed deathly, too quiet in the unchanging sunlight. He turned from the narrow window-place. There was an iron door in one wall, a low thing heavily made. He hammered on it with his fists and shouted. He did this again and again until he was hoarse and his hands were bruised. There was no answer, not the slightest sound from beyond.

  He went back to the couch where he had wakened. He saw a water jug on a ledge beside it and an earthen plate with meat and black bread. He was not hungry. He drank from the jug and then sat down and put his head between his hands and set himself to remember, to know. And that was as useless as the pounding.

  His eyes fell again on the food and water. They glittered with a sudden realization.

  “Someone will come,” he whispered. “Sooner or later, someone will come with food. They will know. They will tell me who I am!”

  He would make them tell him—who he was, where he was and why. He shivered again but now it was not with fear but with hope. He waited, his brown hands curved and sinewy and cruel.

  He waited.

  The wall and the iron door must have been very thick for he heard nothing until there came to him the sound of a bolt drawn softly. He lay back on the couch as though in heavy sleep. A second bolt, a third. The door swung in.

  Light footsteps crossed the stones. Peering through his lashes in the half dark he could see only a blurred small shape that came and bent over him.

  He reached up and caught it.

  CHAPTER II Arlka

  Whatever it was he had hold of, it behaved like a small panther. He clamped one hand over its face to keep it from crying out and then he rose and dragged it, struggling, into the red shaft of daylight.