The Valley Where Time Stood Still

by Lin Carter

  M’Cord digested this slowly. He grunted: “You already know my name. How did you—”

  Nordgren cleared his throat again; it was a habit with him.

  “We’ve been here two weeks. Came here from Syrtis across the Aeria dustlands as part of a motorized caravan bound for Sigeus Portus. The caravan was sent out by the Administration as part of a geological survey of the Sinus. As you probably know, preliminary surveys have indicated that the Sabaeus Sinus Plateau is possibly the oldest, continually-exposed land-surface on Mars. It was above water even when there were oceans here, millions of years ago. It has probably been surface land as far back as there was surface land—since the planet was formed, in other words. Well, not to digress further: we parted company with the geologists at Sigeus and came here by slidar with native bearers. I—we—wished to check firsthand the rumors that laid the site of the legendary ‘first city,’ Ygnarh, somewhere in this region.” His lips twisted ironically, and he wet them with the tip of his tongue.

  “And what happened?”

  Nordgren shrugged. “As soon as our bearers got wind of what we were looking for, they deserted en masse. We were lucky to get here at all; they did leave us two slidars and some of the supplies. We found Ygnarh, all right; or a very ancient city, at any rate. One not previously known. But then the—the outlaws came. And since then we have been prisoners, as you and your friends are.”

  “So it wasn’t a dream then? Chastar and the girl and the other man—?”

  “The renegade priest? No; they’re very real, I’m afraid.”

  The girl, who had knelt by his cot all this while, with her eyes lowered while her brother spoke in his high-pitched, nervous voice, now stirred fretfully.

  “He should rest, Karl.”

  Nordgren blinked. “Of course—stupid of me. There will be time to talk later, I am sure.” He faded into the background; M’Cord never saw him go. Things were getting hazy. He felt sleep welling up about him, like warm, soft waters.

  “Did I… lose the leg?” he asked again, drowsily.

  She shook her head, cornsilk curls tousling. “We saved it. One of the things the bearers left behind when they deserted us was a new Atwood M-400. I had a store of power cells in my kit, which they didn’t bother with—you probably know how they fear our devil-magic… “Atwood?” he murmured sleepily.

  She nodded. “One of those new ‘marvels of electronic medicine,’ as the newscasters call it. Accelerates the regrowth and repair of bone and tissue by direct electronic stimulation of the cellular …”

  But her voice faded out as darkness closed around him. And he slept. But this time it was a deep, restful, healing sleep, unshadowed by memories of pain. And when he woke he felt fit again.

  Over the next couple of days—M’Cord was never too certain of the lapse of time spent in Ygnarh—he had many opportunities to talk with the Swedish girl and her brother. They were an odd pair, he thought. He sensed something peculiar between them, without ever quite knowing what it was. He had too many other things to worry about to bother puzzling his head over their secret, whatever it was.

  Among the other things he learned by listening to the Nordgrens talk was the reason why he and Thaklar still lived. For Chastar would have slain them long ago, even without Zerild’s insistence, had it not been for the recalcitrance of the Dragon Hawk.

  Thaklar, it seemed, refused to divulge the secret of the missing empty place on the map unless he was permitted to accompany the outlaws on the road to the mysterious Valley.

  And he would not go without M’Cord.

  The snake-eyed little renegade priest whispered of ways to make even the strongest and bravest of men talk freely, whether he wanted to or not. Chastar was probably tempted—he hated Thaklar, if only because he suspected there was more between the warrior prince and the dancing girl than either of them would admit. But even the red wolf knew that torture would not do the trick. The Hawk warriors never yielded under torment; they would die, however slowly, with closed mouths. And there was another reason: they could not trust Thaklar not to take his final, secret revenge. That is, whatever they pried from his stubborn lips under the persuasion of red-hot knives—might not be correct. If there were man traps along the way, as was probably the case, Thaklar might well tell them wrong, dying with the comforting knowledge that his tormentors would not long outlive him.

  No, even the hasty-tempered and murderous wolf knew that the best way—the only way, really—was to take Thaklar with them, riding in front, so that if he meant to betray them to their deaths, he himself would be the first to die.

  But before he would accompany them, M’Cord must be healed and fit. Chastar swore and fumed, but there was nothing else to do but wait while the big Earthman mended slowly under the medicine of the blond girl.

  Actually, he mended more swiftly than seemed possible. This was due in a large measure to the highly sophisticated medical equipment the Nordgrens had brought on their expedition. And it was also due to the simple fact that on Mars an Earthman gets no infection from a wound. The two races, whether originally one in the dawn of time, as some theories hinted, had at least evolved in total isolation from each other over millions of years. Martian bacteria found it difficult to flourish in the different body chemistry of Earthmen. Not impossible, for there were some diseases which were virulent enough to be shared by the two branches of humanity: but difficult.

  In M’Cord’s case, it was not so much ordinary infection that had attacked the wound and driven him into the red madness of fever, as it was the venom of the sandcat. Unlike terrene predators, the few dangerous beasts who still dwell in the Martian wastelands carry their venom in sacs at the base of their claws, which are hollow, as are the fangs of vipers.

  Sandcat poison attacks the blood cells of both Earth-man and native Martian. It was that that had poisoned M’Cord, almost to the edge of death.

  But when nature hurts, she also heals. And in the very body of the sandcat she long ago hid the means of counteracting its venom. For a tiny parasite that infests the spinal scales of the predator contains a pharmaceutical that nullifies the poison in its claws. From the bodies of these parasites Earthside chemists had long ago learned to prepare an antitoxin that negated the effects of sandcat venom with magical swiftness. The serum was rare and expensive, which was why M’Cord had carried none with him.

  The other factor that hastened his return to health was his strength and toughness, endurance and vitality. M’Cord had lived in the dustlands, sometimes for a year at a time. A man may go into that dry hell soft and weak, but if he comes out of it alive, he comes out lean and sinewy and strong. The fat and softness are burned out of a man in the fierce, cold crucible of the desert. And M’Cord was all leather and steel wire inside; there was no weakness in him.

  And so he healed—slowly—and in time became whole again. There were drugs to control the pain and drugs to fight the infection and drugs to clear the mind and drugs to knit the tom flesh and frayed muscle. M’Cord wished, sourly, that there were drags in the pharmacopoeia to erase memories. And perhaps there were.

  Thaklar was stiff and formal and silent, keeping a closed face and hooded eyes before the others. Only M’Cord sensed the depth of. pain in the Dragon Hawk prince who had become his brother; and only M’Cord felt that he was planning something. Revenge? What else could it be but revenge—revenge against the woman who had wronged him so cruelly?

  They were hardly ever together, Thaklar and the big Earthman he had carried in his arms across the dustlands. Always they were watched, either by the cool, amused eyes of Zerild or by the flat, reptilian gaze of Phuun. So there was no chance for M’Cord to ask what his brother planned to do.

  Indeed, there wasn’t much they could do—unless the hawk-faced warrior had an ace up his sleeve, which M’Cord doubted. They had been thoroughly disarmed and their baggage searched for weapons. With M’Cord half crippled, they could not possibly hope to take the three by surprise and overcome them hand to
hand. And all three of the outlaws wore weapons night and day.

  And, to make things even more difficult, Chastar certainly suspected the Hawk of scheming something of the sort. He was tense and wary and nervous as a cat, and he never relaxed. At night they slept apart, M’Cord on his cot in the room next to the two Swedes, in a room with no windows, whose door could be barred from the outside. Thaklar bedded down in a small cubicle off the main rotunda, a strong-walled little room, equally windowless, and with a heavy door that could also be barred. To make things worse, the little renegade priestling curled up in his bedroll before the threshold so their break for freedom would not come by night.

  M’Cord began to wonder if it would come at all. He wished he could read his brother’s mind. He half expected Thaklar to slip him a note sometime when they ate together or worked together with the pressure-still, condensing the day’s ration of water from the blue, thick-leafed, rubbery plants. But never a note was passed in this way, and never came the opportunity to exchange even a few words together in private, for they were never left alone.

  Finally M’Cord shrugged and gave up wondering. When it came, it would come—if it was ever to come!

  He settled down to the slow process of rebuilding his torn body and his drained, exhausted strength.

  IX. A City Like a Skull

  Just waiting to mend, he discovered, was worse than just waiting for something—anything—to happen. The tensions in the camp were like coiled springs, or a charge of ionite with a slow-trigger fuse. The explosion was bound to come sooner or later; and when it came, M’Cord wanted to be on his feet and ready to do his bit.

  But getting back on his feet was not all that easy, he found, even with the new wonders of electronic medicine. The claws of the sandcat had torn him viciously, and muscle tissue is the hardest of all to heal.

  He had lost an awful lot of blood in the dustlands before Thaklar had managed to close his wound. The blood loss had drained his vitality, weakened him dreadfully; and the fever and the infection or poisoning or whatever it was had not helped.

  Blood plasma, of course, was no longer used—had not been much in use for the better part of a century. Dexyrine-20 had taken its place: a pharmaceutical that worked directly on the body’s ability to generate new blood cells. It was a small, grim irony that M’Cord had packed no dexyrine-20 in his medikit when getting ready to leave

  Sun Lake City. But the Nordgrens had the stuff, and finally he began to mend.

  “Plenty of rest and sleep and good food,” Nordgren reiterated solemnly, “are better for you than all the medicines.” M’Cord grunted sourly, but submitted to the regimen. He had to admit that he was feeling better all the time.

  He saw little of Nordgren, save in the evenings, when they all huddled together in a large room of the ruined palace. It was there that the outlaws had installed their heat unit. Without the unit the Earthsiders might well have frozen to death, for nights were cold and bitter in the deep canyons of the plateau.

  By day, Nordgren insisted on continuing .with his work. Chastar, who had long ago summed up the tall, nervous, blond man and had dismissed him as a harmless weakling, let him go about the city to perform his devil-magic, which was incomprehensible to the Martians. So he mapped the dead husk of a city and photographed its monuments with an expensive depth camera never intended for desert use and took rubbings of a few shallow and time-worn reliefs.

  Chastar understood none of this, which deepened his contempt for the scientist, since the outlaw was the sort of man who tended to sneer at and feel disgust for anything he couldn’t understand—but which another man could. The Martians, as a race, had little interest in their own past, M’Cord knew. Just living, managing to stay alive from day to day and struggling to eke out a meager living from their dead dustball of a planet, was a matter which consumed their every waking moment—fussing over the glories of the past and preserving their ancient monuments was a luxury they could hardly afford.

  So, what with one thing and another, M’Cord spent most of his waking hours in the company of the girl, Inga. He hardly thought of her as a woman, although she was young and would have been beautiful were it not for the weariness and strain in her face and the strange shadow that haunted her eyes. They talked little.

  When he had regained his strength and began to feel well again, and able to hobble about stiffly for a little while each day, the girl led him out into the courtyard, where he could get some sun.

  The old palace in which they camped was rude and simple and small, by High Martian standards. There were no tessellated floors or wall murals or delicately carved architraves or capitals, such as he had seen in other native ruins. He could well believe the city was as old as the legends said it was.

  He basked in the sun, trying to ignore the stiffness in his lame leg, and let the girl talk. She had a nervous habit of expounding on any subject that made her sound like her brother. M’Cord wondered lazily if she had acquired the habit out of admiration for him, in an attempt to be more like him, or whether it was simply that when she talked she did not have to think about whatever it was that was eating at her. For something was eating at her, he knew; and something gnawed within Karl Nordgren, too. It was as if the two of them shared a guilty secret that bound them together.

  One day in particular she talked about the city itself. The sun hung low in the west and the purple shadows of evening were thickening in deep pools of gloom beneath the broken walls. As the light dimmed it became more difficult to see the marks of age and decay. In the dimming light it was almost as if the old city still lived and was not just a worn and hollowed skull of a city. You could ignore the desert dust wind-drifted into every corner. You could overlook the columns that lay fallen and shattered on the uneven and broken pave. The rich, soft light made glowing and glamorous the carved stone and made it seem young again, as a heavy coating of cosmetic restores the illusion of vanished youthfulness to the withered cheeks of an aged queen.

  The girl stood staring dreamily across the central plaza, where the fronts of ancient palaces stood, seemingly whole again. Something of her wistful mood was communicated to M’Cord: one could almost have thought that in the next moment the lordly princes of Old Mars would come striding grandly out of the shadows to stroll and intrigue and converse in the twilight. If ever a dead city had ghosts, thought M’Cord, it was Ygnarh dreaming of her lost empire in the golden twilight….

  The girl shivered suddenly, as if touched by his thought.

  “Cold? Maybe we should go in.”

  She shook her head. “In a moment. I was just thinking … how beautiful it all is.”

  “It is that,” he grunted, shifting weight from his game leg, which stiffened and ached sometimes in the cold of nightfall. “Is it really so old as the legends tell?”

  She shrugged. “Older, probably. It was already old before the first of our ancestors learned to walk upright and to clench a sharp stone in his fist for a weapon. It was empty and abandoned before even the Martian history began, much less our own.”

  “It really is Ygnarh, then?” he asked. M’Cord had been on Mars long enough to know how easily legends grow, and how little there is to most of them. The girl shrugged again.

  “Ygnarh simply means ‘the old city.’ The oldest, or the earliest, which the Martians themselves remembered or had any record of. The legends barely whisper of it; it was here in Ygnarh that Zoram became Prince of the Children of Yhoom … the first clan, you know … the first king … long before Thomra welded the ten nations into one and set himself over all of the People as their first Jamad Tengru.”

  “But is this Ygnarh itself, the actual place?” he persisted.

  “Karl says it’s hard to be certain there was ever just one city that was known as Ygnarh. We haven’t found the name of this city in any of the inscriptions, so we can’t know for sure what the folk who lived here called it.” “There are inscriptions, then? I haven’t seen any.” “There are a few; mostly on the ancestral
tablets in the round citadel by the ruined aqueduct. Karl says that it is either a temple per se or an early House of Ancestors. Actually, we haven’t found anything that looks like a regular temple yet. Karl says he thinks the people who lived here were too familiar with their gods to be in awe of them yet, or to worship them … any more than Adam, fresh-come from Eden, bothered with the building of churches. The inscriptions are very difficult to make any sense of, being in the earliest known form of the pictographs; we have only an imperfect knowledge of them, even now.”

  She shivered again.

  “You sure you aren’t getting cold?” he asked.

  “No . .. it’s not that.”

  “Well, what is it then? Ghosts of the past?”

  She smiled faintly. “Something like that, I guess. It’s the … how very old it is! Look at this stone.”

  She indicated the plinth of a column. It was of the pale-golden, clear marble the High Martians had used in their architecture. It wasn’t the same stone, geologically, that they called marble back on Earth, but it resembled it in its sleek, glistening polish, and in the way veins of some glinting, quartz-like mineral threaded through it, and in its density and hardness. But, unlike marble as it was known back on Earth, this stone had the clear lucency of alabaster. But it endured the weathering and wear of ages like no form of alabaster could; once buffed to a high gloss, it held its slick polish for ages.

  “See how worn the stone is, how it crumbles?” she murmured, running her palm over the plinth. He touched it curiously: the surface of the golden marble was powdery, scored with a million tiny cracks and flaws. No vandal’s ax had hacked it into wreckage; the slow erosion of immeasurable time had worn away the stone, grain by grain. He nodded.

  “Imagine how long it would take the stone to wear to this condition,” she said softly. “You know how durable this marble is … imagine the aeons it took to wear the stone away like this … on a planet where there has been neither rain nor frost nor snow nor hurricane for a million years or more.”