Lin Carter - The City Outside the World

by Lin Carter

  But he couldn’t help wondering what Doc was cogitating about. He gave it up and turned in to sleep. Doc would tell him when he was ready to, and not one moment before.

  The night was so balmy he couldn’t endure the notion of wrapping himself up in the fleece-lined sleeping cloak of orthavva fur, so he simply stretched out on the cool, dewy moss and slept in the raw.

  In the morning the assault on Zhiam would begin, he knew.

  Despite his thirst for revenge, he wasn’t looking forward to it.

  Zarouk was up before dawn, rousting his men from their hot, untidy slumbers—for they had slept in the furs, as they were accustomed to sleeping—and preparing for the assault.

  The advance unit marched across the causeway to the closed gate, without being attacked from above. Neither spear nor dart was let fall upon them from above. And the walls indeed seemed unattended.

  They marched back, feeling foolish.

  Two squads were sent back into the forest to cut down the trees so that Xinga’s team could construct rams and scaling ladders. And all the time the City lay dreaming beneath the radiance of dawn, serene and untroubled, scarcely deigning to notice them.

  Before noon, they attacked the walls. The ladders went up and the ram team assaulted the gates of the City. They were of bronze, and rang beneath the beaten blows like a mighty gong.

  Strange figures appeared atop the walls, and, at first, Zarouk grinned at the sight of them. It was a relief to be no longer ignored; it had been as if their force was so neglible that the men of the City were indifferent to it. Now, at last, the defenders of Zhiam had come forth.

  But they were strange defenders.

  Darts glanced off them, tinkling to fragments, without causing them any discomfort. Their bodies were curiously thick and sheathed in some odd crystalline white substance which hid even their faces.

  They carried no weapons at all.

  Ignoring the rain of darts—ignoring the heavy, metal-shod spears—they confined their activities to throwing the ladders back off the walls, one by one. Men fell, squalling, from the toppling ladders, and the ones who were lucky landed in the moatlike lake before the gate. The unlucky ones fell in the bushes or on the mossy ground, to their considerable detriment. There were broken legs aplenty, and more than a few men fell on their heads.

  The ladders were raised again—and again—and again —by the dozens. But the strange armored men threw them down every time. They seemed utterly impervious to the darts, even to the darts tipped with the nerve poison the Martians distill from venom, and the heavy spears

  ricochetted from their breasts or heads or shoulders without even staggering them.

  Zarouk was baffled, and getting angry. He sent a team out armed with lassos made of leather thongs, to capture one of the warriors on the wall.

  It was a man-shaped statue of living stone.

  The desert men shrank back from the uncanny thing, hissing in superstitious terror. Even Zarouk blanched and recoiled from it, shuddering.

  It was rather roughly hewn from some strange, sparkling white stone, hard and crystalline, resembling quartz. Its hands were shaped like crude mittens, and its face was devoid of any features whatsoever, not even eyes.

  And it really was entirely made of solid stone.

  Yet it lived, and moved.

  Ryker stared with fascination as the stone giant writhed slowly, straining against its bonds until they snapped and broke. The places where elbows or knees would have been on something human, the stone seemed to suddenly soften—the joints became viscous—when the limb was about to flex. As soon as the limb had moved, the stone hardened again.

  A head and a half taller than the tallest of the warriors, the stone colossus got clumsily to its feet and began ponderously to stride back towards the City.

  The men shrank from it fearfully, but it ignored them.

  Xinga turned questioning eyes on his master, and hefted a lasso tentatively.

  “No, let it go,” muttered Zarouk. “How do you kill a thing that isn’t really alive? Let it go.”

  The walking statue crossed the causeway, approaching the gate. Then it began to climb, using the ornate carvings around the gate for stepping-stones. It fell twice and

  climbed back each time unhurt before it gained the top of the walls again.

  Zarouk watched with hating eyes, while the City dreamed on, indifferent to anything he might bring against it.

  18. The Winged Serpents

  Zarouk was in a furious rage, and Houm carefully avoided his company in so far as he was able. Even Xinga thought it most prudent to busy himself with certain tasks which precluded his personal attendance on his prince.

  Zhiam seemed quite adequately defended by the Stone Giants, and any further attempts to storm the walls by ladder appeared hopeless of success. Nevertheless two more such forays were launched during the night, under the cover of darkness.

  At four widely separated points about the walls of the City, assault squadrons, muffled in dark robes and careful to avoid excessive noise, stole in secret to the foot of the ramparts and sought to scale the battlements without being discovered.

  The night was heavily overcast with clouds, and was probably as dark as ever nights were on this strange world. However, despite the furtive and stealthy nature of the attack, it was a dismal failure.

  The Stone Giants, as they had done before, simply threw the ladders down from the walls, and the men who were ascending them fell squalling lustily. Then, gathering up their dead and injured, and retrieving the ladders, they limped away and returned to camp to report to their scowling master.

  Evidently, the Stone Giants had senses that could perceive the approach of dangerous enemies even in the moonless, starless gloom. Also, they seemingly patrolled

  the ramparts by day and by night, which was, thought Ryker, only to be expected. Men fashioned of lifeless stone, who were invulnerable to injury, also should be impervious to weariness or fatigue, and—not actually being living creatures, save in a technical sense—did not ever require sleep.

  None of this did anything to improve the ferocious temper of the Desert Hawk.

  The following day, Zarouk made a tour of the outer works of the Dreaming City, and rode the circuit of the walls, looking for weaknesses. He was forced to ford the streams and canals, and to ride about the small lake, but otherwise he examined every yard of the perimeter, finding no loopholes in the defenses of Zhiam.

  There was only one gate, and it was of solid metal. While it might prove possible to break in through this portal by the employment of rams, that would take considerable time. The City had no other gates, not even a small postern gate.

  The stone ramparts completely encircled the metropolis of the Lost Nation, and were of equal height at every point. And during his tour of the defenses, Zarouk counted no fewer than sixty of the Stone Giants maintaining their constant and imperturbable vigilance.

  Unless he could manage it so that his warriors attacked the wall at more than sixty points, it did not seem possible for them to successfully assault the barricades. And such was the length of the wall and the size of the City itself, that even were he to mount such an attack, the Stone Giants would still be near enough to the unprotected portions to reach them in time to prevent any of the desert raiders from reaching the crest of the walls.

  And, besides, to attempt to attack the ramparts simultaneously in more than sixty places was numerically impossible. Zarouk did not have enough men with him to mount such an attack effectively.

  Even it it was possible for him to get a few men atop the wall, they would be useless against the unkillable defenders. None of their weapons could inflict upon the Giants an injury sufficient to disable them.

  For that he would need power guns. And Zarouk had no power guns.

  It looked like stalemate.

  Later that day, Zarouk sent his warriors against the gate in full strength. The trees in the forest did not make the best rams imaginable, but they w
ere all Zarouk had to work with and would have to do. Back on Mars, his raiders would have used stone pillars slung by chains from heavy braces for this purpose. Here it was still probably possible to find such resources in a quarry or outcropping, but he lacked the tools to chip or cut lengths of stone into the proper proportions.

  For an hour or two his men toiled away against that portal of solid metal, finding it unyielding. The Stone Giants, or some of them at any rate, gathered atop the wall at the gate to observe the attack, but made no effort to injure the men who toiled below.

  This was in itself curious. Surely, they could have striven to discourage the ram teams with spears or darts. Lacking these, they could have emptied cauldrons of boiling water or burning oil upon the men below. But none of these actions were undertaken by the stone colossi, who seemed content merely to observe the labor of the invaders.

  It was as if, for some reason, they were forbidden to kill, and could only repulse an attack, not initiate one.

  Ryker thought this was very queer.

  After an hour or two of this, a few human observers appeared atop the battlements to watch the rams. One of these was a frail old man with a silver furcap, his lean body wrapped in gorgeous brocades. Ryker recognized him as Melandron.

  Another was Valarda herself.

  She was dressed like an empress, her slim golden body blazing with gems and precious metals, draped in rich fabrics. The black silk of her hair was caught in a net studded with winking purple rubies, and atop her proud head she wore a construction of curving gold loops and arabesques like a crown. From a clip of strange amber gems fixed to the browpiece of this odd-shaped coronet, glossy plumes of pink and peach and pistachio green floated behind her. Her small, firm breasts were cupped in shallow coils of golden wire.

  He stared at her hungrily, his eyes slitted and hard and hating. She leaned over the parapet to observe the activity below, then turned her face to make some remark to a smooth-faced young princeling who stood beside her. Evidently, it was a jest, because he laughed and she smiled.

  Then she looked down again and across the length of the causeway, and her eyes met those of Ryker.

  She knew him in an instant, and her face went pale. Suddenly her great eyes became shadowed, her face drawn and somehow mournful. She said nothing, and made no sign, but looked at him for a long time with an expression on her perfect features that resembled sorrow.

  Fat Houm had spied her as well, and sidled up to where Zarouk stood overseeing the toiling of the men at the rams. The greedy merchant whispered in Zarouk’s ear and drew his attention to the slim, graceful golden girl on the ramparts.

  He barked an order, and his guards lifted to their lips the long black tubes they used with such deadly accuracy as blowguns.

  Ryker stepped forward uncertainly, his lips shaping a cry which he never spoke—

  The languid handsome youth beside Valarda saw all of this in the same instant. Languidly he raised to his own lips a long, slim-throated horn of glittering gold. A sharp liquid song pierced the air, shrilly calling. A beckoning sound, emphatic as a regal summons, rang forth.

  Suddenly the air was filled with winged serpents.

  Sleek, jewelled coils drifting and undulating on the air, upheld by the thrumming of those strange wings like fans of thick plumes, they darted about like hummingbirds.

  Ryker watched the first of Zarouk’s marksmen loose the first of the poisoned darts.

  A serpent plucked it from midair!

  Then a veritable shower of the slim, deadly needles flew from the mouths of the black tubes. Not so much as one of these reached its mark.

  The men lowered their tubes, grimacing lamely.

  The golden horn sang forth again, a keen, peremptory command composed of three liquid notes.

  The writhing cloud of airborne serpents who floated before Valarda to shield her from the darts, now flung themselves down upon the marksmen.

  The men wavered, broke, fled in all directions, pursued by agile and flickering wings.

  The serpents caught in their fanged mouths the slim black tubes and bore them away.

  Then the aerial swarm turned its attentions upon the ram teams, in instantaneous response to a trilling of the golden horn.

  Swarming in midair above the apprehensive warriors,

  they darted down to snap fanged jaws before the faces of the fearful warriors, who threw their hands before their eyes to protect them from the darting serpents.

  They darted hither and thither—hovered to beat their plumes in the faces of the warriors—arrowed in writhing flights to snatch at their cloaks—buffeting them about the head and neck with beating wings—virtually snapping at their heels like a pack of mongrels.

  The men blanched, threw down their rams, and ran for shelter.

  The aerial serpents pursued them back to their camp, then rose in a twisting stream of glittering pink-and-azure forms, and floated back to the parapets.

  While Ryker and the men near him stared in awe, Valarda laughed, caressing the graceful creatures as if to thank them. They fluttered away behind the walls, vanishing from view, but probably they did not go far and could be summoned again, swiftly and easily.

  Then the Stone Giants dropped lines over the lip of the parapet, snagged several of the makeshift rams in the sharp teeth of the hooked grapnels affixed to the ends of the lines, and dragged about half of the beams up to the top of the walls.

  The workers growled and grimaced and waved threatening fists, but none of them quite dared risk another attack by the flying snakes to return to the foot of the wall in order to retrieve the rams they had abandoned.

  Zarouk vanished into his tent, his brow thunderous.

  And it was still stalemate. In fact, now it was even more so.

  The human inhabitants of the City lingered for a little while atop the battlements as if waiting for more action to commence. Finally, they drifted off lazily, vanishing from sight.

  Valarda was the last to leave, and before she too turned to go she looked again at Ryker. Her face was sad and her eyes seemed eloquent and pleading. Then she sighed, and vanished from his view.

  That evening he lay a long time under the misty skies, staring at nothing. His thoughts were disordered, his emotions in turmoil. If Valarda had laughed at him, mocked him, spurned him, he would have been easier in his heart.

  But she had not. She had seemed to beg him wordlessly for forgiveness. And that he could not forget.

  He had assumed her his enemy, and had hated her, despising himself for the ache of desire he still felt in his loins for the golden girl.

  And he had accepted without quarrel or dispute the black and dire assessment of Zarouk upon the folk of Zhiam. The desert prince called them devil worshippers, and so Ryker had thought of them.

  But could men who worship evil have raised so lovely a dream city as this?

  Could such evil dwell in this Edenic garden world, among such exquisite loveliness?

  Could horror find a home here, where even the beasts did not eat of each others’ flesh, but fed from ripe fruits, side by side, the lion lying down with the lamb?

  Ryker was beginning, however reluctantly, to change his opinion of the Lost Nation. Despite what Zarouk and men like him said of this people, they appeared to be a serene and peaceful race, lovers of beauty, who lived in tranquility, and existed in harmony with this calm and lovely world they had found.

  It seemed beyond dispute that this was true. The tales he had been told of the despicable zhaggua and their evil ways perhaps were sullied and distorted by the blind

  fanaticism of men like the priest Dmu Dran, and by the cunning of such ambitious zealots as Zarouk, and by the greed of such as Houm. And those tales might not be true.

  Why had not Valarda unleashed against them the immensely strong Stone Giants, to slay and maim the warriors?

  Why had not the warriors of her own people manned the walls, to cut the desert raiders down with spear and dart and missile?

&
nbsp; Why had not the winged serpents so much as inflicted a single wound upon the men when they harried them from the gate?

  If this world was truly another Eden, then perchance its unknown and nameless god had issued forth a commandment which was to be obeyed by all of the living creatures of this world, including men—a commandment identical to another given voice by yet a different God from the cloud-wrapped heights of Sinai long ago—

  Thou shalt not kill.

  Ryker felt a cold horror growing in his guts. It was he alone had made it possible for these warriors to invade this gentle, idyllic Eden. He had given them the key to open those gates that should have been guarded by angels with flaming swords.

  Oh, God, what had he done?

  19. The Secret of Zhiam

  Ryker awoke shortly before dawn, disturbed by something entering the tent. He sat up swiftly, reaching about him for a weapon. Then he relaxed, leaning back. By the flickering green nightlight of the small bronze pan of liquid fire he saw that it was the old Israeli scientist.

  “You’re still awake, my boy?” asked the old man in his querulous voice. Ryker nodded, then looked closely at him. Herzog seemed like a man walking in his sleep-distracted, bemused, almost ecstatic.

  “Are you all right, Doc?” he asked.

  The old man looked at him with eyes filled with excitement.

  “What’s with me?” he chuckled. “Ah, my boy, you should ask it. I have the proof now, all I need. Wonderful—incredible! You wouldn’t believe it!”

  “What wouldn’t I believe?” grinned Ryker. The old man’s enthusiasm could be infectious at times. Ryker didn’t know very much about science, and cared little, but the way the scientist was carrying on was beginning to arouse his curiosity. He seemed to be repressing his emotions with difficulty, trembling with sheer delight.

  “I know where we are—that’s all!” Herzog burst out.

  Ryker blinked.

  “All right, where are we?” he asked, as it was obviously expected of him.

  Doc sat down, squatting tailor-fashion or a bit of rug one of the warriors had given them for their tent.