“Very long.” He felt good now. He hadn’t let them get him down. The hellfire had worked its way up into his head, where it was buzzing gently, and Leila’s attention was even more pleasantly intoxicating.
“What will you do now with this knowledge?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, “as you know, so many of the ancient skills have been lost, and your people are looking for ways to expand their economy, so the Bureau is hoping to start a program to reeducate metal-workers in places like Jekkara and Valkis…”
Altman said in a remote and very quiet voice, “Oh good God Albloodymighty.”
Selden said, “I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing,” Altman said. “Nothing.”
Bentham turned to Firsa Mak. “By the way, Selden and I had a difference of opinion on the way here. He’s probably right, but I said I’d ask you…”
Selden said hastily, “Oh, let’s forget it, Bentham.” But Bentham was obtuse and insistent.
“The Mad Moon, Firsa Mak. I say Vashna, he says Denderon.”
“Denderon, of course,” said Firsa Mak, and looked at Selden. “So you know all about that, too.”
“Oh,” said Selden, embarrassed and annoyed with Bentham for bringing it up, “please, we thoroughly understand that that was all a mistake.”
Altman leaned forward. “Mistake?”
“Certainly. The early accounts…” He looked at Firsa Mak and his sister and Leila and they all seemed to be waiting for him to go on, so he did, uncomfortably. “I mean, they resulted from distortions of folklore, misinterpretation of local customs, pure ignorance… in some cases, they were downright lies.” He waved his hand deprecatingly. “We don’t believe in the Rites of the Purple Priestess and all that nonsense. That is to say, we don’t believe they ever occurred, really.”
He hoped that would close the subject, but Bentham was determined to hang to it. “I’ve read eye-witness accounts, Selden.”
“Fabrications. Traveller’s tales. After all, the Earthmen who first came to Mars were strictly the piratical exploiter type and were hardly either qualified or reliable observers…”
“They don’t need us any more,” said Altman softly, staring at Selden but not seeming to see him. “They don’t need us at all.” And he muttered something about winged pigs and the gods of the marketplace. Selden had a sudden horrid certainty that Altman was himself one those early piratical exploiters and that he had irreparably insulted him. And then Firsa Mak said with honest curiosity:
“Why is it that all you young Earthmen are so ready to cry down the things your own people have done?”
Selden felt Altman’s eyes upon him, but he was into this now and there was no backing down. He said with quiet dignity, “Because we feel that if our people have made mistakes we should be honest enough to admit them.”
“A truly noble attitude,” said Firsa Mak. “But about the Purple Priestess…”
“I assure you,” said Selden hastily, “that old canard is long forgotten. The men who did the serious research, the anthropologists and sociologists who came after the… uh… the adventurers, were far better qualified to evaluate the data. They completely demolished the idea that the rites involved human sacrifice, and of course the monstrous Dark Lord the priestess was supposed to serve was merely the memory of an extremely ancient earth-god… mars-god, I should say, but you know what I mean, a primitive nature thing, like the sky or the wind.”
Firsa Mak said gently, “But there was a rite…”
“Well, yes,” said Selden, “undoubtedly. But the experts proved that it was purely vestigial, like… well, like our own children dancing around the Maypole.”
“The Low-Canallers,” said Altman, “never danced around any Maypoles.” He rose slowly and Selden watched him stretch higher and higher above him. He must have stood a good six inches over six feet, and even from that height his eyes pierced Selden. “How many of your qualified observers went into the hills above Jekkara?”
Selden began to bristle a bit. The feeling that for some reason he was being baited grew stronger. “You must know that until very recently the Low-Canal towns were closed to Earthman…”
“Except for a few adventurers.”
“Who left highly dubious memoirs! And even yet you have to have a diplomatic passport involving miles of red tape, and you’re allowed very little freedom of movement when you get there. But it is a beginning, and, we hope, we hope very greatly, that we can persuade the Low-Canallers to accept our friendship and assistance. It’s a pity that their own secretiveness fostered such a bad image. For decades the only ideas we had of the Low-Canal towns came from the lurid accounts of the early travellers, and the extremely biased… as we learned later… attitude of the City-States. We used to think of Jekkara and Valkis as, well, perfect sinks of iniquity…”
Altman was smiling at him. “But my dear boy,” he said. “They are. They are.”
Selden tried to disengage his hand from Leila’s. He found that he could not, and it was about then that he began to be just the least little bit frightened.
“I don’t understand,” he said plaintively. “Did you get me here just to bait me? If you did, I don’t think it’s very… Bentham?”
Bentham was at the door. The door now seemed to be much farther away than Selden remembered and there was a kind of mist between him and it so that Bentham’s figure was indistinct. Nevertheless he saw it raise a hand and heard it say, “Good by.” Then it was gone, and Selden, feeling infinitely forlorn, turned to look into Leila’s eyes. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t understand.” Her eyes were green and enormous and deep without limit. He felt himself topple and fall giddily into the abyss, and then of course it was far too late to be afraid.
Hearing returned to him first, with the steady roar of jets, and then there was the bodily sensation of being borne through air that was shaken occasionally by large turbulences. He opened his eyes, in wild alarm. It was several minutes before he could see anything but a thick fog. The fog cleared gradually and he found himself staring at Leila’s gold necklace and remembering with great clarity the information concerning it that he had rattled off so glibly and with such modest pride. A simple and obvious truth came to him.
“You’re from Jekkara,” he said, and only then did he realize that there was a gag in his mouth. Leila started and looked down at him.
“He’s awake.”
Firsa Mak rose and bent over Selden, examining the gag and a set of antique manacles that bound his wrists. Again Selden flinched from those fierce and brilliant eyes. Firsa Mak seemed to hesitate, on the verge of removing the gag, and Selden mustered his voice and courage to demand explanations. A buzzer sounded in the cabin, apparently a signal from the pilot, and at the same time the motion of the copter altered. Firsa Mak shook his head.
“Later, Selden. I have to leave you this way because I can’t trust you, and all our lives are in danger, not just yours… though yours most of all.” He leaned forward. “This is necessary, Selden. Believe me.”
“Not necessary,” Altman said, appearing stooped under the cabin ceiling. “Vital. You’ll understand that, later.”
Leila said harshly, “I wonder if he will.”
“If he doesn’t,” Altman said, “God help them all, because no one else can.”
Mrs. Altman came with a load of heavy cloaks. They had all changed their clothes since Selden had last seen them, except Leila, who had merely added an upper garment of native wool. Mrs. Altman now wore the Low-Canal garb, and Firsa Mak had a crimson tunic held with a wide belt around his hips. Altman looked somehow incredibly right in the leather of a desert tribesman; he was too tall, Selden guessed, to pass for a Jekkaran. He wore the desert harness easily, as though he had worn it many times. They made Selden stand while they wrapped a cloak around him, and he saw that he had been stripped of his own clothing and dressed in a tunic of ochre-yellow, and where his limbs showed they had been stained dark. Then they strapped hi
m into his seat again and waited while the copter slowed and dropped toward a landing.
Selden sat rigid, numb with fear and shock, going over and over in his mind the steps by which he had come here and trying to make sense out of them. He could not. One thing was certain, Bentham had deliberately led him into a trap. But why? Why? Where were they taking him, what did they mean to do with him? He tried to do positive therapy but it was difficult to remember all the wisdom that had sounded so infinitely wise when he had heard it, and his eyes kept straying to the faces of Altman and Firsa Mak.
There was a quality about them both, something strange that he had never seen before. He tried to analyze what it was. Their flesh appeared to be harder and drier and tougher than normal, their muscles more fibrous and prominent, and there was something about the way they used and carried themselves that reminded him of the large carnivores he had seen in the zoo parks. There was, even more striking, an expression about the eyes and mouth, and Selden realized that these were violent men, men who could strike and tear and perhaps even kill. He was afraid of them. And at the same time he felt superior. He at least was above all that.
The sky had paled. Selden could see desert racing past below. They settled onto it with a great spuming of dust and sand. Altman and Firsa Mak between them half carried him out of the copter. Their strength was appalling. They moved away from the copter and the backwash of the rotors beat them as it took off. Selden was stricken by the thin air and bitter cold. His bones felt brittle and his lungs were full of knives. The others did not seem to mind. He pulled his cloak tight around him as well as he could with his bound hands, and felt his teeth chattering into the gag. Abruptly Leila reached out and pulled the hood completely down over his face. It had two eyeholes so that it could be used as a mask during sandstorms, but it stifled him and it smelled strangely. He had never felt so utterly miserable.
Dawn was turning the desert to a rusty red. A chain of time-eaten mountains, barren as the fossil vertebrae of some forgotten monster, curved across the northern horizon. Close at hand was a tumbled mass of rocky outcrops, carved to fantastic shapes by wind and sand. From among these rocks there came a caravan.
Selden heard the bells and the padding of broad splayed hoofs. The beasts were familiar to him from pictures. Seen in their actual scaly reality, moving across the red sand in that wild daybreak with their burdens and their hooded riders, they were apparitions from some older and uglier time. They came close and stopped, hissing and stamping and rolling their cold bright eyes at Selden, not liking the smell of him in spite of the Martian clothing he wore. They did not seem to mind Altman. Perhaps he had lived with the Martians so long that there was no difference now.
Firsa Mak spoke briefly with the leader of the caravan. The meeting had obviously been arranged, for led animals were brought. The women mounted easily. Selden’s stomach turned over at the idea of actually riding one of these creatures. Still, at the moment, he was even more afraid of being left behind, so he made no protest when Firsa Mak and Altman heaved him up onto the saddle pad. One of them rode on each side of him, holding a lead rein. The caravan moved on again, northward toward the mountains.
Within an hour Selden was suffering acutely from cold, thirst, and the unaccustomed exercise. By noon, when they halted to rest, he was almost unconscious. Altman and Firsa Mak helped him down and then carried him around into some rocks where they took the gag out and gave him water. The sun was high now, piercing the thin atmosphere like a burning lance. It scalded Selden’s cheeks but at least he was warm, or almost warm. He wanted to stay where he was and die. Altman was quite brutal about it.
“You wanted to go to Jekkara,” he said. “Well, you’re going… just a little bit earlier than you planned, that’s all. What the hell, boy, did you think it was all like Kahora?”
And he heaved Selden onto his mount again and they went on.
In midafternoon the wind got up. It never really seemed to stop blowing, but in a tired sort of way, wandering across the sand, picking up a bit of dust and dropping it again, chafing the upthrust rocks a little deeper, stroking the ripple-patterns into a different design. Now, it seemed impatient with everything it had done and determined to wipe it out and start fresh. It gathered itself and rushed screaming across the land, and it seemed to Selden that the whole desert took up and went flying in a red and strangling cloud. The sun went out. He lost sight of Altman and Firsa Mak at either end of his reins. He hung in abject terror to his saddle pad, watching for the small segment of rein he could see to go slack, when he would know that he was irretrievably lost. Then as abruptly as it had risen the wind dropped and the sand resumed its quiet, eternal rolling.
A little while after that, in the long red light from the west, they dipped down to a line of dark water strung glittering through the desolation, banded with strips of green along its sides. There was a smell of wetness and growing things, and an ancient bridge, and beyond the canal was a city, with the barren hills behind it.
Selden knew that he was looking at Jekkara. And he was struck with awe. Even at this late day few Earthmen had seen it. He stared through the eyeholes of his hood, seeing at first only the larger masses of rose-red rock, and then as the sun sank lower and the shadows shifted, making out the individual shapes of buildings that melted more and more gently into the parent rock the higher they were on the sloping cliffs. At one place he saw the ruins of a great walled castle that he knew had once housed those self-same Khalide Kings and lord knew how many dynasties before them in the days when this desert was the bottom of a blue sea, and there was a lighthouse still standing above the basin of a dry harbor half way up the cliffs. He shivered, feeling the enormous weight of a history in which he and his had had no part whatever, and it came to him that he had perhaps been just the tiniest bit presumptuous in his desire to teach these people.
That feeling lasted him half way across the bridge. By that time the western light had gone and the torches were flaring in the streets of Jekkara, shaken by the dry wind from the desert. His focus of interest shifted from the then to the now, and once more he shivered, but for a different reason. The Upper town was dead. The lower town was not, and there was a quality to the sight and sound and smell of it that petrified him. Because it was exactly as the early adventurers in their dubious memoirs had described it.
The caravan reached the broad square that fronted the canal, the beasts picking their way protestingly over the sunken, tilted paving stones. People came to meet them. Without his noticing it, Altman and Firsa Mak had maneuvered Selden to the end of the line, and now he found himself being detached and quietly led away up a narrow street between low stone buildings with deep doorways and small window-places, all their corners worn round and smooth as stream-bed rocks by time and the rubbing of countless hands and shoulders. There was something going on in the town, he thought, because he could hear the voices of many people from somewhere beyond, as though they were gathering in a central place. The air smelled of cold and dust, and unfamiliar spices, and less identifiable things.
Altman and Firsa Mak lifted Selden down and held him until his legs regained some feeling. Firsa Mak kept glancing at the sky. Altman leaned close to Selden and whispered, “Do exactly as we tell you, or you won’t last the night.”
“Nor will we,” muttered Firsa Mak, and he tested Selden’s gag and made sure his cowl was pulled down to hide his face. “It’s almost time.”
They led Selden quickly along another winding street. This one was busy and populous. There were sounds and sweet pungent odors and strange-colored lights, and there were glimpses into wickednesses of such fantastic array and imaginative genius that Selden’s eyes bulged behind his cowl and he remembered his Seminars in Martian Culture with a species of hysteria. Then they came out into a broad square.
It was full of people, cloaked against the night wind and standing quietly, their dark faces still in the shaking light of the torches. They seemed to be watching the sky. Altman and Firsa
Mak, with Selden held firmly between them, melted into the edges of the crowd. They waited. From time to time more people came from the surrounding streets, making no sound except for the soft slurring of sandalled feet and the faint elfin chiming of tiny bells beneath the cloaks of the women. Selden found himself watching the sky, though he did not understand why. The crowd seemed to grow more silent, to hold all breath and stirring, and then suddenly over the eastern roofs came the swift moon Denderon, low and red.
The crowd said, “Ah-h-h!”, a long musical cry of pure despair that shook Selden’s heart, and in the same moment harpers who had been concealed in the shadow of a time-worn portico struck their double-banked harps and the cry became a chant, half a lament and half a proud statement of undying hate. The crowd began to move, with the harpers leading and other men carrying torches to light the way. And Selden went with them, up into the hills behind Jekkara.
It was a long cold way under the fleeting light of Denderon. Selden felt the dust of millennia grate and crunch beneath his sandals and the ghosts of cities passed him to the right and left, ruined walls and empty marketplaces and the broken quays where the ships of the Sea-Kings docked. The wild fierce music of the harps sustained and finally dazed him. The long chanting line of people strung out, moving steadily, and there was something odd about the measured rhythm of their pace. It was like a march to the gallows.
The remnants of the works of man were left behind. The barren hills bulked against the stars, splashed with the feeble moonlight that now seemed to Selden to be inexpressibly evil. He wondered why he was no longer frightened. He thought perhaps he had reached the point of complete emotional exhaustion. At any rate he saw things clearly but with no personal involvement.
Even when he saw that the harpers and the torch-bearers were passing into the mouth of a cavern he was not afraid.
The cavern was broad enough for the people to continue marching ten abreast. The harps were muffled now and the chanting took on a deep and hollow tone. Selden felt that he was going downward. A strange and rather terrible eagerness began to stir in him, and this he could not explain at all. The marchers seemed to feel it too, for the pace quickened just a little to the underlying of the harpstrings. And suddenly the rock walls vanished out of sight and they were in a vast cold space that was completely black beyond the pinprick glaring of the torches.
The Coming of the Terrans Page 12
