Swordsmen in the Sky

by Donald A. Wollheim

Broca cried out suddenly, “A ship!”

  Heath nodded. “It was there before. It will be there when the next man finds his way here.”

  Two long arms of the island reached out to form a ragged bay. The Ethne entered it. They passed the derelict, floating patiently, untouched here by wind or tide or ocean rot. Her blue sail was furled, her rigging all neat and ready. She waited to begin the voyage home. She would wait a long, long time.

  As they neared the land they sighted other ships. They had not moved nor changed since Heath had seen them last, three years ago.

  A scant few they were, that had lived to find the Dragon’s Throat and pass it, that had survived the Upper Seas and the island maze of the Moonfire and had found their goal at last. Some of them floated still where their crews had left them, their sad sails drooping from the yards.

  Others lay on their sides on the beach, as though in sleep. There were strange old keels that had not been seen on the seas of Venus for a thousand years. The golden mist preserved them and they waited like a pack of faithful dogs for their masters to return.

  Heath brought the Ethne in to shore at the same spot where he had beached her before. She grounded gently and he led the way over the side. He remembered the queer crumbling texture of the dark earth under his feet. He was shaken with the force that throbbed in his flesh. As before it hovered now on the edge of pain.

  He led the way inland and no one spoke.

  The mist thickened around them, filled with dancing sparks of light. The bay was lost behind its wreathing curtain. They walked forward and the ground began to rise under their feet slowly. They moved as in a dream and the light and the silence crushed them with a great awe.

  They came upon a dead man.

  He lay upon his face, his arms stretched out toward the mystery that lay beyond, his hands still yearning toward the glory he had never reached. They did not disturb him.

  Mist, heavier, the glow brightening, the golden motes whirling and nickering in a madder dance. Heath listened to the voice of pain that spoke within him, rising with every step he took toward a soundless scream.

  I remember, I remember! The bones, the flesh, the brain, each atom of them a separate flame, bursting, tearing to be free. I cannot go on, I cannot bear it! Soon I shall waken, safe in the mud behind Kalruna’s.

  But he did not wake and the ground rose steadily under his feet and there was a madness on him, a passion and a suffering that were beyond man’s strength to endure. Yet he endured.

  The swirling motes began to shape themselves into vague figures, formless giants that towered and strode around them. Heath heard Alor’s moan of terror and forced himself to say, “They’re nothing. Shadows out of our own minds. The beginning of the power.”

  Farther they went and farther still, and then at last Heath stopped and flung up his arm to point, looking at Broca.

  “Your godhead lies there. Go and take it!”

  The eyes of the barbarian were dazed and wild, fixed on the dark dim line of the crater that showed in the distance, fixed on the incredible glory that shone there.

  “It beats,” he whispered, “like the beating of a heart.”

  Alor drew back, away from him, staring at the light. “I am afraid,” she said. “I will not go.” Heath saw that her face was agonized, her body shaken like his own. Her voice rose in a wail. “I can’t go! I can’t stand it. I’m dying!” Suddenly she caught Heath’s hands. “David, take me back. Take me back!”

  Before he could think or speak Broca had torn Alor away from him and struck him a great swinging blow. Heath fell to the ground and the last thing he heard was Alor’s voice crying his name.

  VI

  END OF THE DREAM

  HEATH was not unconscious long, for when he lifted his head again he could still see the others in the distance. Broca was running like a madman up the slope of the crater, carrying Alor in his arms. Ghostly and indistinct, he stood for an instant on the edge. Then he leaped over and was gone.

  Heath was alone.

  He lay still, fighting to keep his mind steady, struggling against the torture of his flesh,

  “Ethne, Ethne,” he whispered. “This is the end of the dream.”

  He began to crawl, inch by bitter inch, toward the heart of the Moonfire.

  He was closer to it now than he had been before. The strange rough earth cut his hands and his bare knees. The blood ran but the pain of it was less than a pinprick against the cosmic agony of the Moonfire. Broca must have suffered too, yet he had gone running to his fate. Perhaps his nervous system was duller, more resistant to shock. Or perhaps it was simply that his lust for power carried him on.

  Heath had no wish for power. He did not wish to be a god. He wished only to die and he knew that he was going to very soon. But before he died he would do what he had failed to do before. He would bring Ethne back. He would hear her voice again and look into her eyes and they would wait together for the final dark.

  Her image would vanish with his death, for then mind and memory would be gone. But he would not see the life go out of her as he had all those years ago by the Sea of Morning Opals. She would be with him until the end, sweet and loving and merry, as she had always been.

  He said her name over and over again as he crawled. He tried to think of nothing else, so that he might forget the terrible unhuman things that were happening within him.

  “Ethne, Ethne,” he whispered. His hands clawed the earth and his knees scraped it and the brilliance of the Moonfire wrapped him in golden banners of mist. Yet he would not stop, though the soul was shaken out of him.

  He reached the edge of the crater and looked down upon the heart of the Moonfire.

  The whole vast crater was a sea of glowing vapor, so dense that it moved in little rippling waves, tipped with a sparkling froth. There was an island in that sea, a shape like a fallen mountain that burned with a blinding intensity, so great that only the eyes of a god could bear to look at it.

  It rode in the clouds like a disc of fire.

  Heath knew that his guess was right. It did not matter. Body of a sleeping god or scrap of a fallen moon—it would bring Ethne back to him and for that was all he cared.

  He dragged himself over the edge and let himself go, down the farther slope. He screamed once when the vapor closed over him.

  After that there was a period of utter strangeness.

  It seemed that some force separated the atoms that composed the organism called David Heath and reshuffled them into a different pattern. There was a wrench, an agony beyond anything he had known before and then, abruptly, the pain was gone. His body felt well and whole, his mind was awake, alert and clear with a dawning awareness of new power.

  He looked down at himself, ran his hands over his face. He had not changed. And yet he knew that he was different. He had taken the full force of the radiation this time and apparently it had completed the change begun three years ago. He was not the same David Heath, perhaps, but he was no longer trapped in the no-man’s-land between the old and the new.

  He no longer felt that he was going to die and he no longer wished to. He was filled with a great strength and a great joy. He could bring his Ethne back now and they could live on together here in the golden garden of the Moonfire.

  It would have to be here. He was sure of that. He had only been into the fringe of the Moonfire before, but he did not believe that that was the whole reason why he could create nothing but shadows. There was not a sufficient concentration of the raw energy upon which the mind’s telekinetic power worked.

  Probably, even in the outer mists of the Moonfire, there were not enough free electrons. But here, close to the source, the air was raging with them. Raw stuff of matter, to be shaped and formed.

  David Heath rose to his feet. He lifted his head and his arms reached out longingly. Straight and shining and strong he stood in the living light and his dark face was the face of a happy god.

  “Ethne,” he whispered. “Ethne. This is not th
e end of the dream, but the beginning!”

  And she came.

  By the power, the exultant strength that was in him, Heath brought her out of the Moonfire. Ethne, slim and smiling, indistinct at first, a shadow in the mist, but growing clearer, coming toward him. He could see her white limbs, the pale flame of her hair, her red mouth bold and sweet, her wistful eyes.

  Heath recoiled with a cry. It was not Ethne who stood before him. It was Alor.

  For a time he could not move but stared at what he had created. The apparition smiled at him and her face was the face of a woman who has found love and with it the whole world.

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t you I want. It’s Ethne!” He struck the thought of Alor from his mind and the image faded and once again he called Ethne to him.

  And when she came it was not Ethne but Alor.

  He destroyed the vision. Rage and disappointment almost too great to bear drove him to wander in the fog. Alor, Alor! Why did that wench of the temple gardens haunt him now?

  He hated her, yet her name sang in his heart and would not be silenced. He could not forget how she had kissed him and how her eyes had looked then and how her last desperate cry had been for him.

  He could not forget that his own heart had shaped her image while only his mind, his conscious mind, had said the name of Ethne.

  He sat down and bent his head over his knees and wept, because he knew now that this was the end of the dream. He had lost the old love forever without knowing it. It was a cruel thing, but it was true. He had to make his peace with it.

  And already Alor might be dead.

  That thought cut short his grieving for what was gone. He leaped up, filled with dread. He stood for a moment, looking wildly about, and the vapor was like golden water so that he could see only a few feet away. Then he began to run, shouting her name.

  For what might have been centuries in that timeless place he ran, searching for her. There was no answer to his cries. Sometimes he would see a dim figure crouching in the mist, and he would think that he had found her but each time it was the body of a man, dead for God knew how long. They were all alike. They were emaciated, as though they had died of starvation and they were all smiling. There seemed to be lost visions still in their open eyes.

  These were the gods of the Moonfire—the handful of men through all the ages who had fought their way through to the ultimate goal.

  Heath saw the cruelty of the jest. A man could find godhead in the golden lake. He could create his own world within it. But he could never leave it unless he were willing to leave also the world in which he was king. They would have learned that, these men, as they started back toward the harbor, away from the source.

  Or perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps they never tried to leave.

  Heath went on through the beautiful unchanging mist, calling Alor’s name, and there was no answer. He realized that it was becoming more difficult for him to keep his mind on his quest. Half-formed images flickered vaguely around him. He grew excited and there was an urgency in him to stop and bring the visions clear, to build and create.

  He fought off the temptation but there came a time when he had to stop because he was too tired to go on. He sank down and the hopelessness of his search came over him. Alor was gone and he could never find her. In utter dejection he crouched there, his face buried in his hands, thinking of her, and all at once he heard her voice speaking his name. He started up and she was there, holding out her hands to him.

  He caught her to him and stroked her hair and kissed her, half sobbing with joy at having found her. Then a sudden thought came to him. He drew back and said, “Are you really Alor or only the shadow of my mind?”

  She did not answer but only held up her mouth to be kissed again.

  Heath turned away, too weary and hopeless even to destroy the vision. And then he thought, “Why should I destroy it? If the woman is lost to me why shouldn’t I keep the dream?”

  He looked at her again and she was Alor, clothed in warm flesh, eager-eyed.

  The temptation swept over him again and this time he did not fight it. He was a god, whether he wished it or not. He would create.

  He threw the whole force of his mind against the golden mist, and the intoxication of sheer power made him drunk and mad with joy.

  The glowing cloud drew back to become a horizon and a sky. Under Heath’s feet an island grew, warm sweet earth, rich with grass and rioting with flowers, a paradise lost in a dreaming sea. Wavelets whispered on the wide beaches, the drooping fronds of the liha-trees stirred lazily in the wind and bright birds darted, singing. Snug in the little cove a ship floated, a lovely thing that angels might have built.

  Perfection, the unattainable wish of the soul. And Alor was with him to share it.

  He knew now why no one had ever come out of the Moonfire.

  He took the vision of Alor by the hand. He wandered with it along the beaches and presently he was aware of something missing. He smiled, and once again the little dragon rode his shoulder and he stroked it and there was no least flaw in this Elysium. David Heath had found his godhead.

  But some stubborn corner of his heart betrayed him. It said, This is all a lie and Alor waits for you. If you tarry you and she will be as those others, who are dead and smiling in the Moonfire.

  He did not want to listen. He was happy. But something made him listen and he knew that as long as the real Alor lived he could not really be content with a dream. He knew that he must destroy this paradise before it destroyed him. He knew that the Moonfire was a deadly thing and that men could not be given the power of gods and continue sane.

  And yet he could not destroy the island. He could not!

  Horror overcame him that he had so far succumbed, that he could no longer control his own will. And he destroyed the island and the sea and the lovely ship and it was harder than if he had torn his own flesh from the bones.

  And he destroyed the vision of Alor.

  He knew that if he wished to escape the madness and the death of the Moonfire he must not again create so much as a blade of grass. Nothing. Because he would never again have the strength to resist the unholy joy of creation.

  VII

  TO WALK DIVINE

  ONCE MORE he ran shouting through the golden fog. And it might have been a year or only a moment later that he heard Alor’s voice very faintly in the distance, calling his name.

  He followed the sound, crying out more loudly, but he did not hear her again. Then, looming in shadowy grandeur through the mist, he saw a castle. It was a typical Upland stronghold but it was larger than the castle of any barbarian king and it was built out of one huge crimson jewel of the sort called Dragon’s Blood.

  Heath knew that he was seeing part of Broca’s dream.

  Steps of beaten gold led up to a greater door. Two tall warriors, harness blazing with gems, stood guard. Heath went between them and they caught and held him fast. Broca’s hatred for the Earthman was implicit in the beings his mind created.

  Heath tried to tear himself free but their strength was more than human. They took him down fantastic corridors, over floors of pearl and crystal and precious metals. The walls were lined with open chests, full of every sort of treasure the barbarian mind could conceive. Slaves went silent footed on their errands and the air was heavy with perfume and spices. Heath thought how strange it was to walk through the halls of another man’s dream.

  He was brought into a vast room where many people feasted. There were harpists and singers and dancing girls and throngs of slaves, men who wrestled and men who fought and danced with swords. The men and women at the long tables looked like chieftains and their wives but they wore plain leather and tunics without decoration, so that Broca’s guardsmen and even his slaves were more resplendent than they.

  Above the shouting and the revelry Broca sat, high on a throne-chair that was made like a silver dragon with its jeweled wings spread wide. He wore magnificent harness and a carved diamond that only
a high king may wear hung between his eyebrows. He drank wine out of a golden cup and watched the feasting with eyes that had in them no smallest flicker of humanity. God or demon, Broca was no longer a man.

  Alor sat beside him. She wore the robes of a queen but her face was hidden in her hands and her body was still as death.

  Heath’s cry carried across all the noise of the feast. Broca leaped to his feet and an abrupt silence fell. Everyone, guards, chieftains and slaves, turned to watch as Heath was led toward the throne—and they all hated him as Broca hated.

  Alor raised her head and looked into his eyes. And she asked, in his own words, “Are you really David or only the shadow of my mind?”

  “I am David,” he told her and was glad he had destroyed his paradise.

  Broca’s mad gaze fixed on Heath. “I didn’t think you had the strength,” he said, and then he laughed. “But you’re not a god! You stand there captive and you have no power.”

  Heath knew that he could fight Broca on his own grounds but he did not dare. One taste of that ecstasy had almost destroyed him. If he tried it again he knew that he and the barbarian would hurl their shadow-armies against each other as long as they lived and he would be as mad as Broca.

  He looked about him at the hostile creatures who were solid and real enough to kill him at Broca’s word. Then he said to Alor, “Do you wish to stay here now?”

  “I wish to go out of the Moonfire with you, David, if I can. If not I wish to die.”

  The poison had not touched her yet. She had come without desire. Though she had bathed in the Moonfire she was still sane.

  Heath turned to Broca. “You see, she isn’t worthy of you.”

  Broca’s face was dark with fury. He took Alor between his great hands and said, “You will stay with me. You’re part of me. Listen, Alor. There’s nothing I can’t give you. I’ll build other castles, other tribes, and I’ll subdue them and put them in your lap. God and goddess together, Alor! We’ll reign in glory.”

  “I’m no goddess,” Alor said. “Let me go.”

  And Broca said, “I’ll kill you, first.” His gaze lowered on Heath. “I’ll kill you both.”