Swordsmen in the Sky

by Donald A. Wollheim

  There would be little rest for Heath and Broca and the woman.

  They swayed at the sculling oar all the stifling afternoon and all the breathless night, falling into the dull, half-hypnotized rhythm of beasts who walk forever around a water-wheel. Two of them working always, while the third slept, and Broca never took his eyes from Alor. With his tremendous vitality it seemed that he never slept and during the periods when Heath and Alor were alone at the oar together they exchanged neither words nor glances.

  At dawn they saw that the Lahal was closer.

  Broca crouched on the deck. He lifted his head and looked at the green sail. Heath saw that his eyes were very bright and that he shivered in spite of the brooding heat.

  Heath’s heart sank. The Upper Seas were rank with fever, and it looked as though the big barbarian was in for a bad go of it. Heath himself was pretty well immune to it but Broca was used to the clean air of the High Plateaus and the poison was working in his blood.

  He measured the speed of the two ships and said, “It’s no use. We must stand and fight.”

  Heath said savagely, “I thought you wanted to find the Moonfire. I thought you were the strong man who could win through it where everybody else has failed. I thought you were going to be a god.”

  Broca got to his feet. “With fever or without it I’m a better man than you.”

  “Then work! If we can just keep ahead of them until we clear the weed—”

  Broca said, “The Moonfire?”

  “Yes.”

  “We will keep ahead.”

  He bent his back to the scull and the Ethne crept forward through the weed. Her golden sail hung from the yard with a terrible stillness. The heat pressed down upon the Upper Seas as though the sun itself were falling through the haze. Astern the Lahal moved steadily on.

  Broca’s fever mounted. He turned from time to time to curse Vakor, shouting at the emerald sail.

  “You’ll never catch us, priest!” he would cry. “I am Broca of the tribe of Sarn and I will beat you—and I will beat the Moonfire. You will lie on your belly, priest, and lick my sandals before you die.”

  Then he would turn to Alor, his eyes shining. “You know the legends, Alor! The man who can bathe in the heart of the Moonfire has the power of the High Ones. He can build a world to suit himself, he can be king and lord and master. He can give his woman-god a palace of diamonds with a floor of gold. That is true, Alor. You have heard the priests say it in the temple.”

  Alor answered, “It is true.”

  “A new world, Alor. A world of our own.”

  He made the great sweep swing in a frenzy of strength and once again the mystery of the Moonfire swept over Heath. Why, since the priests knew the way there, did they not themselves become gods. Why had no man ever come out of it with godhead—only a few, a handful like himself, who had not had the valor to go all the way in.

  And yet there was godhead there. He knew because within himself there was the shadow of it.

  The endless day wore on. The emerald sail came closer.

  Toward mid-afternoon there was a sudden clattering flight of the little dragons and all life stopped still in the weed. The reptilian creatures lay motionless with dragon’s eggs unbroken in their jaws. No head broke the surface to feed. The dragons flew away in a hissing cloud. There was utter silence.

  Heath flung himself against the sweep and stopped it.

  “Be quiet,” he said. “Look. Out there.”

  They followed his gesture. Far away over the port bow, flowing toward them, was a ripple in the weed. A ripple as though the very bed of the Upper Seas was in motion.

  “What is it?” whispered Alor, and saw Heath’s face, and was silent.

  Sluggishly, yet with frightening speed, the ripple came toward them. Heath got a harpoon out of the stern locker. He watched the motion of the weed, saw it gradually slow and stop in a puzzled way. Then he threw the harpoon as far away from the ship as he could with all his strength and more.

  The ripple began again. It swerved and sped toward where the harpoon had fallen.

  “They’ll attack anything that moves,” said Heath. “It lost us because we stopped. Watch.”

  The weed heaved and burst open, its meshes snapping across a scaled and titanic back. There seemed to be no shape to the creature, no distinguishable head. It was simply a vast and hungry blackness that spread upward and outward and the luckless brutes that cowered near it hissed and thrashed in their efforts to escape, and were engulfed and vanished.

  Again Alor whispered, “What is it?”

  “One of the Guardians,” Heath answered. “The Guardians of the Upper Seas. They will crush a moving ship to splinters and eat the crew.”

  He glanced back at the Lahal. She, too, had come to a dead stop. The canny Vakor had scented the danger also.

  “We’ll have to wait,” said Heath, “until it goes away.”

  They waited. The huge shape of darkness sucked and floundered in the weed and was in no hurry to go.

  Broca sat staring at Heath. He was deep in fever and his eyes were not sane. He began to mutter to himself, incoherent ramblings in which only the name Alor and the word Moonfire were distinguishable.

  Suddenly, with startling clarity, he said, “The Moonfire is nothing without Alor.”

  He repeated “Nothing!” several times, beating his huge fists on his knees each time he said it. Then he turned his head blindly from side to side as though looking for something. “She’s gone. Alor’s gone. She’s gone to the Earthman.”

  Alor spoke to him, touched him, but he shook her off. In his fever-mad brain there was only one truth. He rose and went toward David Heath.

  Heath got up. “Broca!” he said. “Alor is there beside you. She hasn’t gone!”

  Broca did not hear. He did not stop.

  Alor cried out, “Broca!”

  “No,” said Broca. “You love him. You’re not mine anymore. When you look at me I am nothing. Your lips have no warmth in them.” He reached out toward David Heath and he was blind and deaf to everything but the life that was in him to be torn out and trampled upon and destroyed.

  In the cramped space of the afterdeck there was not much room to move. Heath did not want to fight. He tried to dodge the sick giant but Broca pinned him against the rail. Fever or no fever, Heath had to fight him and it was not much use. Broca was beyond feeling pain.

  His sheer weight crushed Heath against the rail, bent his spine almost to breaking and his hands found Heath’s throat. Heath struck and struck again and wondered if he had come all this way to die in a senseless quarrel over a woman.

  Abruptly he realized that Broca was letting go, was sliding down against him to the deck. Through a swimming haze he saw Alor standing there with a belaying pin in her hand. He began to tremble, partly with reaction but mostly with fury that he should have needed a woman’s help to save his life. Broca lay still, breathing heavily.

  “Thanks,” said Heath curtly. “Too bad you had to hit him. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  Alor said levelly, “Didn’t he?”

  Heath did not answer. He started to turn away and she caught him, forcing him to look at her.

  “Very likely I will die in the Moonfire,” she said. “I haven’t the faith in my strength that Broca has. So I’m going to say this now—I love you, David Heath. I don’t care what you think or what you do about it but I love you.”

  Her eyes searched his face, as though she wanted to remember every line and plane of it. Then she kissed him and her mouth was tender and very sweet.

  She stepped back and said quietly, “I think the Guardian has gone. The Lahal is under way again.”

  Heath followed her without a word to the sweep. Her kiss burned in him like sweet fire. He was shaken and utterly confused.

  They toiled together while Broca slept. They dared not pause. Heath could distinguish the men now aboard the Lahal, little bent figures sculling, sculling, and there were always fresh on
es. He could see the black tunics of the Children of the Moon who stood upon the foredeck and waited.

  The Ethne moved more and more slowly as the hours passed and the gap between the two ships grew steadily smaller. Night came and through the darkness they could hear the voice of Vakor howling after them.

  Toward midnight Broca roused. The fever had left him but he was morose and silent. He thrust Alor roughly aside and took the sweep and the Ethne gathered speed.

  “How much farther?” he asked. And Heath panted, “Not far now.”

  Dawn came and still they were not clear of the weed. The Lahal was so near them now that Heath could see the jeweled fillet on Vakor’s brow. He stood alone, high on the upper brace of the weed-knife, and he watched them, laughing.

  “Work!” he shouted at them. “Toil and sweat! You, Alor—woman of the gardens! This is better than the Temple. Broca—thief and breaker of the Law—strain your muscles there! And you, Earthman. For the second time you defy the gods!” He leaned out over the weed as though he would reach ahead and grasp the Ethne in his bare hands and drag her back.

  “Sweat and strain, you dogs! You can’t escape!”

  And they did sweat and strain and fresh relays of men worked at the sweep of the Lahal, breaking their hearts to go faster and ever faster. Vakor laughed from his high perch and it seemed futile for the Ethne to go on any longer with this lost race.

  But Heath looked ahead with burning sunken eyes. He saw how the mists rose and gathered to the north, how the color of the weed changed, and he urged the others on. There was a fury in him now. It blazed brighter and harder than Broca’s, this iron fury that would not, by the gods themselves, be balked of the Moonfire.

  They kept ahead—so little ahead that the Lahal was almost within arrow-shot of them. Then the weed thinned and the Ethne began to gain a little and suddenly, before they realized it, they were in open water.

  Like mad creatures they worked the scull and Heath steered the Ethne where he remembered the northern current ran, drawn by the Ocean-That-Is-Not-Water. After the terrible labor of the weed it seemed that they were flying. But as the mists began to wreathe about them the Lahal too had freed herself and was racing toward them with every man on the rowing benches.

  The mists thickened around them. The black water began to have a rare occasional hint of gold, like shooting sparks beneath the surface. There began to be islands, low and small, rank with queer vegetation. The flying dragons did not come here nor the Guardians nor the little reptiles. It was very hot and very still.

  Through the stillness the voice of Vakor rose in a harsh wild screaming as he cursed the rowers on.

  The current grew more swift and the dancing flecks of gold brightened in the water. Heath’s face bore a strange unhuman look. The oars of the Lahal beat and churned and bowmen stood now on the foredeck, ready to shoot when they came within range.

  Then, incredibly, Vakor gave one long high scream and flung up his hand and the oars stopped. Vakor stretched both arms above his head, his fists clenched, and he hurled after them one terrible word of malediction.

  “I will wait, blasphemers! If so be you live I will be here—waiting!”

  The emerald sail dwindled in the Ethne’s wake, faded and was lost in the mist.

  Broca said, “They had us. Why did they stop?”

  Heath pointed. Up ahead the whole misty north was touched with a breath of burning gold.

  “The Moonfire!”

  V

  INTO THE MOONFIRE

  THIS WAS the dream that had driven Heath to madness, the nightmare that had haunted him, the memory that had drawn him back in spite of terror and the certainty of destruction. Now it was reality and he could not separate it from the dream.

  Once again he watched the sea change until the Ethne drifted not on water but on a golden liquid that lapped her hull with soft rippling fire. Once again the mist enwrapped him, shining, glowing.

  The first faint tingling thrill moved in his blood and he knew how it would be—the lying pleasure that mounted through ecstasy to unendurable pain. He saw the dim islands, low and black, a maze through which a ship might wander forever without finding the source that poured out this wonder of living light.

  He saw the bones of ships that had died searching. They lay on the island beaches and the mist made them a bright shroud. There were not many of them. Some were so old that the race that built them had vanished out of the memory of Venus.

  The hushed unearthly beauty wrenched Heath’s heart and he was afraid unto dying and yet filled with lust, with a terrible hunger.

  Broca drew the air deep into his lungs as though he would suck the power out of the Moonfire.

  “Can you find it again?” he asked. “The heart of it.”

  “I can find it.”

  Alor stood silent and unmoving. She was all silver in this light, dusted with golden motes.

  Heath said, “Are you afraid, breaking the taboo?”

  “Habit is hard to break.” She turned to him and asked, “What is the Moonfire?”

  “Haven’t the priests told you?”

  “They say that Venus once had a moon. It rode in the clouds like a disc of fire and the god who dwelt within it was supreme over all the other gods. He watched the surface of the planet and all that was done upon it. But the lesser gods were jealous, and one day they were able to destroy the palace of the Moon-god.

  “All the sky of Venus was lighted by that destruction. Mountains fell and seas poured out of their beds and whole nations died. The Moon-god was slain and his shining body fell like a meteor through the clouds.

  “But a god cannot really die. He only sleeps and waits. The golden mist is the cloud of his breathing, and the shining of his body is the Moonfire. A man may gain divinity from the heart of the sleeping god but all the gods of Venus will curse him if he tries because man has no right to steal their powers.”

  “And you don’t believe that story,” said Heath.

  Alor shrugged. “You have seen the Moonfire. The priests have not.”

  “I didn’t get to the heart of it,” Heath said. “I only saw the edge of the crater and the light that comes up out of it, the lovely hellish light.”

  He stopped, shuddering, and brooded as he had so many times before on the truth behind the mystery of the Moonfire. Presently he said slowly, “There was a moon, of course, or there could be no conception of one in folklore. I believe it was radioactive, some element that hasn’t been found yet or doesn’t exist at all on Earth or Mars.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Alor. “What is ‘radioactive’?” She used the Terran word, as Heath had, because there was no term for it in Venusian.

  “It’s a strange sort of fire that burns in certain elements. It eats them away, feeding on its own atoms, and the radiation from this fire is very powerful.” He was silent for a moment, his eyes half closed. “Can’t you feel it?” he asked. “The first little fire that burns in your own blood?”

  “Yes,” Alor whispered. “I feel it.”

  And Broca said, “It is like wine.”

  Heath went on, putting the old, old thoughts into words. “The moon was destroyed. Not by jealous gods but by collision with another body, perhaps an asteroid. Or maybe it was burst apart by its own blazing energy. I think that a fragment of it survived and fell here and that its radiation permeated and changed the sea and the air around it.

  “It changes men in the same way. It seems to alter the whole electrical set-up of the brain, to amplify its power far beyond anything human. It gives the mind a force of will strong enough to control the free electrons in the air—to create…”

  He paused, then finished quietly, “In my case, only shadows. And when that mutation occurs a man doesn’t need the gods of Venus to curse him. I got only a little of it but that was enough.”

  Broca said, “It is worth bearing pain to become a god. You had no strength.”

  Heath smiled crookedly. “How many gods have come out o
f the Moonfire?”

  Broca answered, “There will be one soon.” Then he caught Alor by the shoulders and pulled her to him, looking down into her face. “No,” he said. “Not one. Two.”

  “Perhaps,” said Heath, “there will be three.”

  Broca turned and gave him a chill and level look. “I do not think,” he said, “that your strength is any greater now.”

  After that, for a long while, they did not speak. The Ethne drifted on, gliding on the slow currents that moved between the islands. Sometimes they sculled, the great blade of the sweep hidden in a froth of flame. The golden glow brightened and grew and with it grew the singing fire in their blood.

  Heath stood erect and strong at the helm, the old Heath who had sailed the Straits of Lhiva in the teeth of a summer gale and laughed about it. All weariness, all pain, all weakness, were swept away. It was the same with the others. Alor’s head was high and Broca leaped up beside the figurehead and gave a great ringing shout, a challenge to all the gods there were to stop him.

  Heath found himself looking into Alor’s eyes. She smiled, an aching thing of tears and tenderness and farewell.

  “I think none of us will live,” she whispered. “May you find your shadow, David, before you die.”

  Then Broca had turned toward them once more and the moment was gone.

  Within the veil of the Moonfire there was no day nor night nor time. Heath had no idea how long the Ethne’s purple hull rode the golden current. The tingling force spread through his whole body and pulsed and strengthened until he was drunk with the pleasure of it and the islands slipped by, and there was no sound or movement but their own in all that solemn sea.

  And at last he saw ahead of him the supernal brightness that poured from the heart of the Moonfire, the living core of all the brightness of the mist. He saw the land, lifting dark and vague, drowned in the burning haze, and he steered toward it along the remembered way. There was no fear in him now. He was beyond fear.