The Halfling and Other Stories

by Leigh Brackett

  The pace of the men slowed, then halted altogether. They watched, caught in a stasis of awe and fear too deep for utterance. Fenn saw that there was a pallid eerie radiance somewhere behind the driving clouds. Arika’s hand crept into his and clung there. But Malech stood apart, his head lifted, his shining eyes fixed upon the sky.

  A rift, a great ragged valley sown with stars. It widened, and the clouds were swept away, and the sky crashed down upon the waiting men, children of eternal day who had never seen the night.

  They stared into the black depths of space, burning with a million points of icy fire. And the demoniac face of the Moon stared back at them, pocked with great shadows, immense and leering, with a look of death upon it.

  Someone voiced a thin, wavering scream. A man turned and began to run along the backtrail, floundering, falling, clawing his way back toward the light he had left forever.

  Panic took hold of the men. Some of them fell down and covered their heads. Some stood still, their hands plucking at sword and axe, all sense gone out of them. And Malech laughed. He leaped up on a hummock of ice, standing tall above them in the cold night so that his head seemed crowned with blazing stars, “What are you afraid of? You fools! It’s the moon and stars. Your fathers knew them and they were not afraid!”

  The scorn and the strength that were in him roused the anger of the men, giving their fear an outlet. They rushed toward him and Malech would have died there in the midst of his laughter if Fenn and Lannar together had not turned them back.

  “It’s true!” Fenn cried. “I have seen them. I have seen the night as it was before the Destruction. There is nothing to fear.”

  But he was as terrified as they.

  Fenn and Lannar and the bearded Malech who had shed every trace of humanity, beat the men into line again and got them moving, fifteen of the twenty who had started, alone in the Great Dark. Tiny motes of life, creeping painfully across the dead white desolation under the savage stars. The cold Moon watched them and something of its light of madness came into their eyes and did not go away.

  Fifteen—twelve of these lived to see the riven ice of the ocean, a glittering chaos flung out across the world. Malech looked toward the east, where the Moon was rising.

  Fenn heard him say, “From beyond the ocean, from the heartland of the Great Dark— that is where we came from, the New Men who conquered the earth!”

  Following the tattered map they turned northward along the coast. They were scarecrows now, half starved, half frozen, forgetting that they had ever lived another life under a warm Sun—almost forgetting why they had left that life behind them.

  Nine of them lived to see an island between two frozen rivers near the frozen sea and on that island the skeletal towers of a city buried in the ice.

  Nine of them lived to see New York.

  CHAPTER VIII The Citadel

  Fenn stood alone with Arika on the high cliff above the river. The others waited at a distance and their waiting was a cruel thing. Their faces made him feel afraid.

  Then he forgot them. He looked out across the white river, across white snow and reaches of gleaming ice to the island city lying silent under the stars and the black sky.

  There was no light in that city now but the cold shining of the moon. No voice spoke there but the voice of the wind. Yet even in death the grandeur was not gone from it. The shattered towers stood up proudly from the ice that shrouded them, the massive bulk and size were not lessened. New York was not a city. It was a dream of titans and the destruction of half a world had not effaced it.

  A feeling of pride and sorrow came over Fenn, mixed with a despair so deep that he could not bear it. Memories crowded in on him, fleeting pictures of another time, half seen but poignant with regret and longing.

  He whispered, “Once it lived!” And the tears ran down his cheeks and froze in glittering drops.

  Arika said, “Remember, Fenn. Remember those days when the city lived. Remember this-place and the building of the Citadel.”

  Her face came before him, pale in its dark frame of fur. Her eyes were huge, filled with the frosty moonlight, compelling, inescapable.

  “Here you can remember, Fenn-way. Here is your past. Look at the city. Remember!”

  Her eyes probed deep into his brain and her voice spoke, ringing down dark hidden corridors. Fenn looked past her at the city. His face changed slowly. He was no longer Fenn. He was another man, seeing another world.

  He had come to see the Citadel. Everyone came. It was the ninth wonder, the greatest work of mankind. It drew them with an ugly fascination. It was the symbol of death but a death that would not come in their time and so they could find in it excitement and a gratifying pride.

  There were lights on the Palisades. There were crowds, children shouting in the summer night, vendors, music. Across the Hudson loomed the immense and blazing bulk of New York, thrusting giant shoulders against the sky.

  He began to walk. And as he walked he thought he saw also a phantom landscape, a place of ice and desolation, with the wreck of a city lifting broken girders through the snow.

  He had come to see the Citadel. Floodlights, many people, many voices, guards in uniform, a man talking through a loudspeaker.

  “Sunk a half mile deep in solid rock—area larger than the Empire State Building—lined and reinforced with steel—earthquake-proof, floodproof—heat and air supplied by sealed atomic generators with an efficiency period of five thousand years…”

  There wasn’t much to see on the surface. Only the great uplifted valve of the door, a core of rustproof alloy many feet thick that fitted into a seat of similar metal sunk into the rock.

  The voice of the loudspeaker talked on, explaining that valve, the compressed-air mechanism that would outwear time, the system of levers that would open the door again after it was sealed—after the Destruction.

  A system that needed no tool but the human hand and the intelligence to use it. An intelligence capable of operating that door would be on a level high enough to profit by the things that were behind it.

  The crowd moved on toward the entrance to go down into the Citadel. He moved with them. The doorway was before him. But he could not reach it. There was a barrier between him and the door, something cold and hard and shining.

  He thought he must have fainted then. It was all very strange. He heard the sound of axes and sometimes there were glimpses of things flowing like smoke across his vision. He was frightened. He thought he must be very ill.

  Voices—shouting, laughing, sobbing, praying. The voices of crazy men. The axes and the chopping sounds had stopped.

  Another voice, saying clearly. “Fenn-way, open the door!” He could see it, then. It was closed. It had never been closed before. The round metal gleamed at the bottom of a ragged pit, hacked out of ice.

  Ice? But it was summer!

  He slid down into the pit. The levers were countersunk, sealed against freezing. But they were frozen. He put all his strength into it and one by one they moved, stiff, protesting. He heard the shrill hissing of compressed air…

  The great valve swung slowly upward.

  He saw light in the opening below it. Warm air touched his face. And then the world blanked out.

  When his mind cleared again he found himself lying on a metal floor. Someone had taken off his furs. It was warm, blessedly warm—almost hot, after the gelid cold. Above him he could see a web of girders mighty enough to hold a mountain. There was light.

  Arika bent over him. Her eyes shone with a feral joy. “You’ve done it, Fenn,” she whispered. “We’re in the Citadel!”

  His heart began to pound. He sat up, remembering that he had dreamed. Lannar was standing near him. He had been weeping, the hard man of the desert.

  “I would have killed you,” he said. “If you had failed I would have broken you in my hands.”

  He reached out to Fenn and Fenn nodded. “I knew that.” He took Lannar’s hand and rose and the men crowded around him. They blazed no
w. They knew what they had done and it was a great thing. They were proud. But they looked at Fenn with an awe that was close to veneration.

  Lannar said, “I have set guards at the door. The stair that leads down is narrow, and if the Numi come, they must do it one at a time.” He frowned uneasily. “Is there no other entrance?”

  “None.”

  “I don’t like a place with only one door,” said Lannar.

  Fenn laughed. “We have the Citadel. Let us not worry about doors!” He caught Arika to him. He was wild with elation. He looked at the long still corridors that rayed away from the central place where they stood. He thought of the many levels below this one, and of all the knowledge and the strength that waited there, to build the world again. Tears stung his own eyes, and there was no room in him now for fear.

  He started to walk, and the others came with him. Like men in a dream they went through the silent halls of the Citadel that had waited twelve hundred years for their coming.

  Twelve hundred years ago they had sealed this place, those men of the past who had known they were doomed. This was their gift—their last great offering to the future.

  Fenn’s mind wavered uncertainly between that time and this. Sometimes he was Fenn-way, going with a guided group through the myriad rooms. Sometimes he was Fenn, holding a half-Numi girl in the hollow of his arm, walking with the naked riders of the desert. Sometimes he understood fully all that he saw and again only native intelligence enabled him to guess at the nature and uses of the complex things about him.

  But whether he was Fenn or Fenn-way the sense of awe did not leave him. It grew and deepened with every step he took. And with the awe came pride—not for himself but for the blood that was in him, and Lannar and every son of man. He felt the heavy obligation they owed to those long-dead builders of the Citadel. He felt the challenge that was inherent in their gift.

  Knowledge is a two-edge sword, they seemed to say. We gave ourselves deep wounds. How will you use knowledge, you men of the future? To build or to destroy?

  They had done their work well, the builders of the Citadel. There were books, countless microfilm volumes stored in countless rooms. There were objects, from the first crude axe of stone to a tiny complex model of a cyclotron. There were a million working models of every conceivable type of machine. There were films.

  Whole levels had been devoted to chemistry and physics, to engineering and agriculture, to medicine, to every science man had learned to help him live. The art and the music and the thought of a world were stored there too and the records of man’s history and his hopes and dreams and follies. Only one thing had been left out.

  There were no weapons.

  Thinking of the Numi they searched for weapons, for strong implements of war to use against RhamSin and the conquerors they would have to fight after him. And there was nothing.

  Frowning, groping for memory, Fenn said slowly, “I think— they said that in all the Citadel there would be no instrument of death.”

  Lannar’s hand tightened on his bow. He laughed, a bitter sound. “That was noble. But they reckoned without the Numi!”

  A shadow of dread began to grow in all their minds. Fenn saw how carefully the incredible multitudes of books and models and diagrams had been arranged so that one could grasp the simple things first and use them as steps to climb on. Some knowledge still lived in the world. If nothing had survived but man’s own vigor and intelligence the treasures of the Citadel could still have been used, so magnificently had every step been planned.

  They did not see more than a hundredth part of that colossal monument to the faith and courage of man. Their own faith and courage had brought them half across a world to find it. They were tired and they had an enemy at their backs. Dazed, stricken with awe and wonder, they returned to the central hall.

  The guards at the stairway had seen nothing.

  “They will come,” said Malech. He walked over to a globe of the world as tall as two men that occupied the center of the hall. Idly he set it spinning, watching the play of light and shadow on the countries and the seas. He had shed his wrappings and Fenn saw that the light down on his body had grown thicker. It was as though the intense cold had brought out the last of the latent Numi characteristics in Malech.

  Fenn went to him. He asked a question he had asked before. “Malech—what are the Numi?”

  Malech’s large hand stopped the globe from spinning. His fingers rested on a land that had once been called Europe.

  “Here,” he said. “When the Earth’s spinning slowed, all this side of it turned its face forever away from the Sun and was trapped in the Great Dark. The air here did not freeze, for there was still warmth from Earth’s heart. But all else here froze and died.

  “All except a very few men and women—a few strong enough to survive. These few survivors gathered together and found ways to live. They adapted themselves to the dark and cold, even growing furred against it and their minds sharpened by necessity.”

  Malech smiled and spun the globe again. “They were the New Men—the Numi. But they were men still and they remembered the Sun! And they came at last to take their place under it!”

  Lannar had come soft-footed up behind them. “So they did,” he said. “And where is your place, Malech? With the Numi or with us?”

  Malech turned slowly. Fenn thought of another time they two had faced each other and now Malech towered over the smaller man, arrogant—and strong. The journey had not told on him too much.

  “I made my decision long ago,” he said to Lannar.

  “Tell me, Malech.”

  But the tall man laughed and did not answer. He stood there looking down at Lannar and the globe spun round and round behind him. The hand of the desert man dropped to his sword.

  Fenn had gripped his own blade. And then there came the swift sharp twang of a bowstring, and a cry and a man pitched head first down the stairs.

  He was a Numi, wearing the black and silver of RhamSin.

  CHAPTER IX The Courage of Fenn

  Another soldier of the temple died on the stairway, and a third retreated with an arrow through his thigh. Then there was silence. Fenn sprang to the foot of the narrow well.

  “Come down!” he shouted. He cursed the Numi and bade them come and die. Above in the outer darkness, the voice of RhamSin spoke.

  “When it is time we’ll come!” He laughed. “What will you do with the Citadel now that you have it?”

  “Keep it for mankind!” cried Fenn defiantly, and again RhamSin laughed.

  “Mankind,” he said, “is a long way off.”

  He seemed to withdraw and Fenn heard the Numi making camp in a circle around the doorway.

  Lannar plucked with hard fingers at his bowstring, making it thrum like the string of a harp. He looked angrily around the great hall, including by inference the whole Citadel.

  “In all this place, not a weapon. Nothing!” He had counted on the strength of the Citadel. Fenn realized that they all had.

  Lannar continued bleakly, “They can’t get in, we can’t get out. They have food and snow to make water. We have a little food. They’re cold and we’re warm and the toughest hide will hold out the longest. I only hope the tribesmen don’t linger on the way.”

  “If,” said Fenn, “they had faith enough to come at all.”

  He turned from the mocking stair, desperately searching his mind and the fragments of memory for something, anything, that could be used to help them. And he saw something huddled on the floor near the great globe of the world.

  It was Arika.

  She stirred in his arms as he lifted her and whispered, “Ma-lech. I tried to stop him.” There was a reddening welt on her temple where an iron fist had struck her.

  Savagely angry, Fenn looked around at the knot of men by the stair, at the huge empty hall.

  Malech had disappeared.

  A twang and hiss from somewhere up above and the man next to Lannar fell with an arrow through his body. Fenn
thought that Lannar would have died then except that he was sheltered by the stair.

  Malech’s voice cried, “Clear the stair, you human dogs! Stand away!”

  The men scattered then, wildly, taking cover where they could behind the pillars that upheld the girders of the roof, and as they went a second shaft took one tribesman through the leg. A cat-squall of sheer animal rage came from Lannar and Fenn dragged the still-dazed Arika close under the bulge of the globe.

  He unslung his bow and set an arrow to the string and then he peered into the cold upper light of the hall, following the sound of Malech’s voice.

  Some distance from the narrow well of the stair, a steel ladder climbed the wall to a small blind gallery set high among the sockets of the girders. Fenn guessed that behind that gallery was the chamber of the valve mechanism. The gallery itself was little more than a platform but it was large enough for Malech.

  He glimpsed the dark bulk of Malech’s body, half hidden in the shadows of the niche. He raised his bow, then let it drop. He could not hope to hit him at that angle.

  He called to Lannar, and Lannar and his men answered with a flight of arrows that rattled against the corners and the railing of the gallery.

  Malech shouted, “Shoot away!”

  He sounded as though he were enjoying himself. He had everything on his side, the light, the angle, the elevation. He covered the whole area around the stairway. He could keep it clear so that the next time the Numi could come down without too much interference.

  He said as much, and Lannar cursed him for a traitor.

  Malech answered, “I was born to be one. The only choice I had was to betray—my mother or my father.” He laughed. “Arika decided for the mother’s blood and cast her lot with you humans. She told me on the trail and I knew it was because she loves Fenn.

  “So, since she had ruined our plans, I too made my choice on the trail. I knew which blood was strongest in me. I left a message, scrawled in charcoal on a strip of hide. RhamSin was sure to find it. Let the humans do the work, I told him. What matter? They are weak, and they will be weaker. I promised him the Citadel.”