I. The Door to Infinity
Matt Carse knew he was being followed almost as soon as he left Madam Kan’s. The laughter of the little dark women was still in his ears and the fumes of thil lay like a hot sweet haze across his vision—but they did not obscure from him the whisper of sandaled feet close behind him in the chill Martian night.
Carse quietly loosened his proton-gun in its holster but he did not attempt to lose his pursuer. He did not slow nor quicken his pace as he went through Jekkara.
“The Old Town,” he thought. “That will be the best place. Too many people about here.”
Jekkara was not sleeping despite the lateness of the hour. The Low Canal towns never sleep, for they lie outside the law and time means nothing to them. In Jekkara and Valkis and Barrakesh night is only a darker day.
Carse walked beside the still black waters in their ancient channel, cut in the dead sea-bottom. He watched the dry wind shake the torches that never went out and listened to the broken music of the harps that were never stilled. Lean lithe men and women passed him in the shadowy streets, silent as cats except for the chime and the whisper of the tiny bells the women wear, a sound as delicate as rain, distillate of all the sweet wickedness of the world.
They paid no attention to Carse, though despite his Martian dress he was obviously an Earthman and though an Earthman’s life is usually less than the light of a snuffed candle along the Low Canals, Carse was one of them. The men of Jekkara and Valkis and Barrakesh are the aristocracy of thieves and they admire skill and respect knowledge and know a gentleman when they meet one.
That was why Matthew Carse, ex-fellow of the Interplanetary Society of Archaeologists, ex-assistant of the chair of Martian Antiquities at Kahora, dweller on Mars for thirty of his thirty-five years, had been admitted to their far more exclusive society of thieves and had sworn with them the oath of friendship that may not be broken.
Yet now, through the streets of Jekkara, one of Carse’s “friends” was stalking him with all the cunning of a sand-cat. He wondered momentarily whether the Earth Police Control might have sent an agent here looking for him and immediately discarded that possibility. Agents of anybody’s police did not live in Jekkara. No, it was some Low-Canaller on business of his own.
Carse left the canal, turning his back on the dead sea-bottom and facing what had once been inland. The ground rose sharply to the upper cliffs, much gnawed and worn by time and the eternal wind. The old city brooded there, the ancient stronghold of the Sea Kings of Jekkara, its glory long stripped from it by the dropping of the sea.
The New Town of Jekkara, the living town down by the canal, had been old when Ur of the Chaldees was a raw young village. Old Jekkara, with its docks of stone and marble still standing in the dry and dust-choked harbor, was old beyond any Earth conception of the word. Even Carse, who knew as much about it as any living man, was always awed by it.
He chose now to go this way because it was utterly dead and deserted and a man might be alone to talk to his friend.
The empty houses lay open to the night. Time and the scouring wind had worn away their corners and the angles of their doorways, smoothed them into the blurred and weary land. The little low moons made a tangle of conflicting shadows among them. With no effort at all the tall Earthman in his long dark cloak blended into the shadows and disappeared.
Crouched in the shelter of a wall he listened to the footsteps of the man who followed him. They grew louder, quickened, slowed indecisively, then quickened again. They drew abreast, passed and suddenly Carse had moved in a great catlike spring out into the street and a small wiry body was writhing in his grasp, mewing with fright as it shrank from the icy jabbing of the proton-gun in its side.
“No!” it squealed. “Don’t! I have no weapon. I mean no harm. I want only to talk to you.” Even through the fear a note of cunning crept into the voice. “I have a gift.”
Carse assured himself that the man was unarmed and then relaxed his grip. He could see the Martian quite clearly in the moonlight—a ratlike small thief and an unsuccessful one from the worn kilt and harness and the lack of ornaments.
The dregs and sweepings of the Low Canals produced such men as this and they were brothers to the stinging worms that kill furtively out of the dust. Carse did not put his gun away.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Talk.”
“First,” said the Martian, “I am Penkawr of Barrakesh. You may have heard of me.” He strutted at the sound of his own name like a shabby bantam rooster.
“No,” said Carse. “I haven’t.”
His tone was like a slap in the face. Penkawr gave a snarling grin.
“No matter. I have heard of you, Carse. As I said, I have a gift for you. A most rare and valuable gift.”
“Something so rare and valuable that you had to follow me in the darkness to tell me about it, even in Jekkara.” Carse frowned at Penkawr, trying to fathom his duplicity. “Well, what is it?”
“Come and I’ll show you.”
“Where is it?”
“Hidden. Well hidden up near the palace quays.”
Carse nodded. “Something too rare and valuable to be carried or shown even in a thieves’ market. You intrigue me, Penkawr. We will go and look at your gift.”
Pankawr showed his pointed teeth in the moonlight and led off. Carse followed. He moved lightly, poised for instant action. His gun hand swung loose and ready at his side. He was wondering what sort of price Penkawr of Barrakesh planned to ask for his “gift.”
As they climbed upward toward the palace, scrambling over worn reefs and along cliff-faces that still showed the erosion of the sea, Carse had as always the feeling that he was climbing a sort of ladder into the past. It turned him cold with a queer shivering thrill to see the great docks still standing, marked with the mooring of ships. In the eerie moonlight one could almost imagine…
“In here,” said Penkawr.
Carse followed him into a dark huddle of crumbling stone. He took a little krypton-lamp from his belt pouch and touched it to a glow. Penkawr knelt and scrambled among the broken stones of the floor until he brought forth a long thin bundle wrapped in rags.
With a strange reverence, almost with fear, he began to unwrap it. Carse knelt beside him. He realized that he was holding his breath, watching the Martian’s lean dark hands, waiting. Something in the man’s attitude had caught him into the same taut mood.
The lamplight struck a spark of deep fire from a half-covered jewel, and then a clean brilliance of metal. Carse leaned forward. Penkawr’s eyes, slanted wolf-eyes yellow as topaz, glanced up and caught the Earthman’s hard blue gaze, held it for a moment, then shifted away. Swiftly he drew the last covering from the object on the floor.
Carse did not move. The thing lay bright and burning between them and neither man stirred nor seemed even to breathe. The red glow of the lamp painted their faces, lean bone above iron shadows, and the eyes of Matthew Carse were the eyes of a man who looks upon a miracle.
After a long while he reached out and took the thing into his hands. The beautiful and deadly slimness of it, the length and perfect balance, the black hilt and guard that fitted perfectly his large hand, the single smoky jewel that seemed to watch him with a living wisdom, the name etched in most rare and most ancient symbols upon the blade. He spoke, and his voice was no more than a whisper.
“The sword of Rhiannon!”
Penkawr let out his breath in a sharp sigh. “I found it,” he said. “I found it.”
Carse said, “Where?”
“It does not matter where. I found it. It is yours—for a small price.”
“A small price.” Carse smiled. “A small price for the sword of a god.”
“An evil god,” muttered Penkawr. “For more than a million years, Mars has called him the Cursed One.”
“I know,” Carse nodded. “Rhiannon, the Cursed One, the Fallen One, the rebel one of the gods of long ago. I know the legend, yes. The legend of how the old gods conquered Rhiannon and thrust him into a hidden tomb.”
Penkawr looked away. He said, “I know nothing of any tomb.”
“You lie,” Carse told him softly. “You found the Tomb of Rhiannon or you could not have found his sword. You found, somehow, the key to the oldest sacred legend on Mars. The very stones of that place are worth their weight in gold to the right people.”
“I found no tomb,” Penkawr insisted sullenly. He went on quickly. “But the sword itself is worth a fortune. I daren’t try to sell it—these Jekkarans would snatch it away from me like wolves, if they saw it.
“But you can sell it, Carse.” The little thief was shivering in the urgency of his greed. “You can smuggle it to Kahora and sell it to some Earthman for a fortune.”
“And I will,” Carse nodded. “But first we will get the other things in that tomb.”
Penkawr had a sweat of agony on his face. After a long time he whispered, “Leave it at the sword, Carse. That’s enough.”
It came to Carse that Penkawr’s agony was blended of greed and fear. And it was not fear of the Jekkarans but of something else, something that would have to be awesome indeed to daunt the greed of Penkawr.
Carse swore contemptuously. “Are you afraid of ‘the Cursed One? Afraid of a mere legend that time has woven around some old king who’s been a ghost for a million years?”
He laughed and made the sword flash in the lamplight, “Don’t worry, little one. I’ll keep the ghosts away. Think of the money. You can have your own palace with a hundred lovely slaves to keep you happy.”
He watched fear struggle again with greed in the Martian’s face.
“I saw something there, Carse. Something that scared me, I don’t know why.”
Greed won out. Penkawr licked dry lips. “But perhaps, as you say, it is all only legend. And there are treasures there—even my half share of them would make me wealthy beyond dreams.”
“Half?” Carse repeated blandly. “You’re mistaken, Penkawr. Your share will be one-third.”
Penkawr’s face distorted with fury, and he leaped up. “But I found the Tomb! It’s my discovery!”
Carse shrugged. “If you’d rather not share that way, then keep your secret to yourself. Keep it—till your ‘brothers’ of Jekkara tear it from you with hot pincers when I tell them what you’ve found.”
“You’d do that?” choked Penkawr. “You’d tell them and get me killed?”
The little thief stared in impotent rage at Carse, standing tall in the lamp glow with the sword in his hands, his cloak falling back from his naked shoulders, his collar and belt of jewels looted from a dead king flaring. There was no softness in Carse, no relenting. The deserts and the suns of Mars, the cold and the heat and the hunger of them, had flayed away all but the bone and the iron sinew.
Penkawr shivered. “Very well, Carse. I’ll take you there—for one-third share.”
Carse nodded and smiled. “I thought you would.”
Two hours later, they were riding up into the dark time-worn hills that loomed behind Jekkara and the dead sea-bottom.
It was very late now, an hour that Carse loved because it seemed then that Mars was most perfectly itself. It reminded him of a very old warrior, wrapped in a black cloak and holding a broken sword, dreaming the dreams of age which are so close to reality, remembering the sound of trumpets and the laughter and the strength.
The dust of the ancient hills whispered under the eternal wind Phobos had set, and the stars were coldly brilliant. The lights of Jekkara and the great black blankness of the dead sea-bottom lay far behind and below them now. Penkawr led the way up the ascending gorges, their ungainly mounts picking their way with astonishing agility over the treacherous ground.
“This is how I stumbled on the place,” Penkawr said. “On a ledge my beast broke its leg in a hole—and the sand widened the hole as it flowed inward, and there was the tomb, cut right into the rock of the cliff. But the entrance was choked when I found it.”
He turned and fixed Carse with a sulky yellow stare. “ I found it,” he repeated. “I still don’t see why I should give you the lion’s share.”
“Because I’m the lion,” said Carse cheerfully.
He made passes with the sword, feeling it blend with his flexing wrist, watching the starlight slide down the blade. His heart was beating high with excitement and it was the excitement of the archaeologist as well as of the looter.
He knew better than Penkawr the importance of this find. Martian history is so vastly long that it fades back into a dimness from which only vague legends have come down—legends of human and half-human races, of forgotten wars, of vanished gods.
Greatest of those gods had been the Quiru, hero-gods who were human yet superhuman, who had had all wisdom and power. But there had been a rebel among them—dark Rhiannon, the Cursed One, whose sinful pride had caused some mysterious catastrophe.
The Quiru, said the myths, had for that sin crushed Rhiannon and locked him into a hidden tomb. And for more than a million years men had hunted the Tomb of Rhiannon because they believed it held the secrets of Rhiannon’s power.
Carse knew too much archaeology to take old legends too seriously. But he did believe that there was an incredibly ancient tomb that had engendered all these myths. And as the oldest relic on Mars it and the things in it would make Matthew Carse the richest man on three worlds—if he lived.
“This way,” said Penkawr abruptly. He had ridden in silence for a long time, brooding.
They were far up in the highest hills behind Jekkara. Carse followed the little thief along a narrow ledge on the face of a steep cliff.
Penkawr dismounted and rolled aside a large stone, disclosing a hole in the cliff that was big enough for a man to wriggle through.
“You first,” said Carse. “Take the lamp.”
Reluctantly Penkawr obeyed, and Carse followed him into the foxhole.
At first there was only an utter darkness beyond the glow of the krypton-lamp. Penkawr slunk, cringing now like a frightened jackal.
Carse snatched the lamp away from him and held it high. They had scrambled through the narrow foxhole into a corridor that led straight back into the cliff. It was square and without ornament, the stone beautifully polished. He started off along it, Penkawr following.
The corridor ended in a vast chamber. It too was square and magnificently plain from what Carse could see of it. There was a dais at one end with an altar of marble, upon which was carved the same symbol that appeared on the hilt of the sword—the ouroboros in the shape of a winged serpent. But the circle was broken, the head of the serpent lifted as though looking into some new infinity.
Penkawr’s voice came in a reedy whisper from behind his shoulder. “It was here that I found the sword. There are other things around the room but I did not touch them.”
Carse had already glimpsed objects ranged around the walls of the great chamber, glittering vaguely through the gloom. He hooked the lamp to his belt and started to examine them.
Here was treasure, indeed! There were suits of mail of the finest workmanship, blazoned with patterns of unfamiliar jewels. There were strangely shaped helmets of unfamiliar glistening metals. A heavy thronelike chair of gold, subtly inlaid in dark metal, and had a big tawny gem burning in each armpost.
All these things, Carse knew, were incredibly ancient. They must come from the farthest part of Mars.
“Let us hurry!” Penkawr pleaded.
Carse relaxed and grinned at his own forgetfulness. The scholar in him had for the moment superseded the looter.
“We’ll take all we can carry of the smaller jeweled things,” he said. “This first haul alone will make us rich.”
“But you’ll be twice as rich as I,” Penkawr said sourly. “I could have got an Earthman in Barrakesh to sell these things for me for a half share only.”
Carse laughed. “You should have done so, Penkawr. When you ask for help from a noted specialist you have to pay high fees.”
His circuit of the chamber had brought him back to the altar. Now he saw that behind the altar lay a door. He went through it, Penkawr following reluctantly at his heels.
Beyond the doorway was a short passage and at the end of it a door of metal, small and heavily barred. The bars had been lifted, and the door stood open an inch or two. Above it was an inscription in the ancient changeless High Martian characters, which Carse read with practiced ease.
The doom of Rhiannon, dealt unto him forever by the Quiru who are lords of space and time!
Carse pushed the metal door aside and stepped through. And then he stood quite still, looking.
Beyond the door was a great stone chamber as large as the one behind him.
But in this room there was only one thing.
It was a great bubble of darkness. A big, brooding sphere of quivering blackness, through which shot little coruscating particles of brilliance like falling stars seen from another world. And from this weird bubble of throbbing darkness the lamplight recoiled, afraid.
Something—awe, superstition or some purely physical force—sent a cold tingling shock racing through Carse’s body. He felt his hair rising and his flesh seemed to draw away from his bones. He tried to speak and could not, his throat knotted with anxiety and tension.
“This is the thing I told you of,” whispered Penkawr. “This is the thing I told you I saw.”
Carse hardly heard him. A conjecture so vast that he could not grasp it shook his brain. The scholar’s ecstasy was upon him, the ecstasy of discovery that is akin to madness.
This brooding bubble of darkness—it was strangely like the darkness of those lank black spots far out in the galaxy which some scientists have dreamed are holes in the continuum itself, windows into the infinite outside our universe!
Incredible, surely, and yet that cryptic Quiru inscription—fascinated by the thing, despite its aura of danger, Carse took two steps toward it.
He heard the swift scrape of sandals on the stone floor behind him as Penkawr moved fast. Carse knew instantly that he had blundered in turning his back on the disgruntled little thief. He started to whirl and raise the sword.
Penkawr’s thrusting hands jabbed his back before he could complete the movement. Carse felt himself pitched into the brooding blackness.
He felt a terrible rending shock through each atom of his body, and then the world seemed to fall away from him.
“ Go share Rhiannon’s doom, Earthman! I told you I could get another partner!”
Penkawr’s snarling shout came to him from a great distance as he tumbled into a black, bottomless infinity.
II. Alien World
Carse seemed to plunge through a nighted abyss, buffeted by all the shrieking winds of space. An endless, endless fall with the timelessness and the choking horror of a nightmare.
He struggled with the fierce revulsion of an animal trapped by the unknown. His struggle was not physical, for in that blind and screaming nothingness his body was useless. It was a mental fight, the man’s inner core of courage reasserting itself, willing itself to stop this nightmare fall through darkness.
And then as he fell, a more terrifying sensation shook him. A feeling that he was not alone in this nightmare plunge through infinity, that a dark strong, pulsating presence was close beside him, grasping for him, groping with eager fingers for his brain.
Carse made a supreme desperate mental effort. His sensation of falling seemed to lessen and then he felt solid rock slipping under his hands and feet. He scrambled frantically forward, in physical effort this time.
He found himself quite suddenly outside the dark bubble again on the floor of the inner chamber of the Tomb.
“What in the Nine Hells…” he began shakily and then stopped because the oath seemed so pitifully inadequate for what had happened.
The little krypton-lamp hooked to his belt still cast its reddish glow, the sword of Rhiannon still glittered in his hand.
And the bubble of darkness still gloomed and brooded a foot away from him, flickering with its whirl of diamond motes.
Carse realized that all his nightmare plunging through space had been during the moment he was inside the bubble. What devil’s trick of ancient science was the thing anyway? Some queer perpetual vortex of force that the mysterious Quiru of long ago had set up, he supposed.
But why had he seemed to fall through infinities inside the thing? And whence had come that terrifying sensation of strong fingers groping eagerly at his brain as he fell?
“A trick of old Quiru science,” he muttered shakenly. “And Penkawr’s superstitions made him think he could kill me by pushing me into it.”
Penkawr? Carse leaped to his feet, the sword of Rhiannon glittering wickedly in his hand.
“Blast his thieving little soul!”
Penkawr was not here now. But he wouldn’t have had time to go far. The smile on Carse’s face was not pleasant as he went through the doorway.
In the outer chamber he suddenly stopped dead. There were things here now—big strange glittering objects—that had not been here before.
Where had they come from? Had he been longer in that bubble of darkness than he thought? Had Penkawr found these things in hidden crypts and arranged them here to await his return?
Carse’s wonder increased as he examined the objects that now loomed amid the mail and other relics he had seen before. These objects did not look like mere art-relics—they looked like carefully fashioned, complicated instruments of unguessable purpose.
The biggest of them was a crystal wheel, the size of a small table, mounted horizontally atop a dull metal sphere. The wheel’s rim glistened with jewels cut in precise polyhedrons. And there were other smaller devices of linked crystal prisms and tubes and things built of concentric metal rings and squat looped tubes of massive metal.
Could these glittering objects be the incomprehensible devices of an ancient alien Martian science? That supposition seemed incredible. The Mars of the far past, scholars knew, had been a world of only rudimentary science, a world of sword-fighting sea-warriors whose galleys and kingdoms had clashed on long-lost oceans.
Yet, perhaps, in the Mars of the even farther past, there had been a science whose techniques were unfamiliar and unrecognizable?
“But where could Penkawr have found them when we didn’t see them before? And why didn’t he take any of them with him?”
Memory of Penkawr reminded him that the little thief would be getting farther away every moment. Grimly gripping the sword, Carse turned and hurried down the square stone corridor toward the outer world.
As he strode on Carse became aware that the air in the tomb was now strangely damp. Moisture glistened on the walls. He had not noticed that most un-Martian dampness before and it startled him.
“Probably seepage from underground springs, like those that feed the canals,” he thought. “But it wasn’t there before.”
His glance fell on the floor of the corridor. The drifted dust lay over it thickly as when they had entered. But there were no footprints in it now. No prints at all except those he was now making.
A horrible doubt, a feeling of unreality, clawed at Carse. The un-Martian dampness, the vanishing of their footprints—what had happened to everything in the moment he’d been inside the dark bubble?
He came to the end of the square stone corridor. And it was closed. It was closed by a massive slab of monolithic stone.
Carse stopped, staring at the slab. He fought down his increasing sense of weird unreality and made explanation for himself.
“There must have been a stone door I didn’t see—and Penkawr has closed it to lock me in.”
He tried to move the slab. It would not budge nor was there any sign of key, knob or hinge.
Finally Carse stepped back and leveled his proton-pistol. Its hissing streak of atomic flame crackled in the rock slab, searing and splitting it.
The slab was thick. He kept the trigger of his gun depressed for minutes. Then, with a hollowly reverberating crash the fragments of the split slab fell back in toward him.
But beyond, instead of the open air, there lay a solid mass of dark red soil.
“The whole Tomb of Rhiannon—buried, now; Penkawr must have started a cave-in.”
Carse didn’t believe that. He didn’t believe it at all but he tried to make himself believe, for he was becoming more and more afraid. And the thing of which he was afraid was impossible.
With blind anger he used the flaming beam of the pistol to undercut the mass of soil that blocked his way. He worked outward until the beam suddenly died as the charge of the gun ran out. He flung away the useless pistol and attacked the hot smoking mass of soil with the sword.
Panting, dripping, his mind a whirl of confused speculations, he dug outward through the soft soil till a small hole of brilliant daylight opened in front of him.
Daylight? Then he’d been in the weird bubble of darkness longer than he had imagined.
The wind blew in through the little opening, upon his face. And it was warm wind. A warm wind and a damp wind, such as never blows on desert Mars.
Carse squeezed through and stood in the bright day looking outward.
There are times when a man has no emotion, no reaction. Times when all the centers are numbed and the eyes see and the ears hear but nothing communicates itself to the brain, which is protected in this way from madness.
He tried finally to laugh at what he saw though he heard his own laughter as a dry choking cry.
“Mirage, of course,” he whispered. “A big mirage. Big as all Mars.”
The warm breeze lifted Carse’s tawny hair, blew his cloak against him. A cloud drifted over the sun and somewhere a bird screamed harshly. He did not move.
He was looking at an ocean.
It stretched out to the horizon ahead, a vast restlessness of water, milky-white and pale with a shimmering phosphorescence even in daylight.
“Mirage,” he said again stubbornly, his reeling mind clinging with the desperation of fear to that one shred of explanation. “It has to be. Because this is still Mars.”
Still Mars, still the same planet. The same high hills up into which Penkawr had led him by night.
Or were they the same? Before, the foxhole entrance to the Tomb of Rhiannon had been in a steep cliff-face. Now he stood on the grassy slope of a great hill.
And there were rolling green hills and dark forest down there below him, where before had been only desert. Green hills, green wood and a bright river that ran down a gorge to what had been dead sea-bottom but was now—sea.
Carse’s numbed gaze swept along the great coast of the distant shoreline. And down on that far sunlight coast he saw the glitter of a white city and knew that it was Jekkara.
Jekkara, bright and strong between the verdant hills and the mighty ocean, that ocean that had not been seen upon Mars for nearly a million years.
Matthew Carse knew then that it was no mirage. He sat and hid his face in his hands. His body was shaken by deep tremors and his nails bit into his own flesh until blood trickled down his cheeks.
He knew now what had happened to him in that vortex of darkness, and it seemed to him that a cold voice repeated a certain warning inscription in tones of distant thunder.
“The Quiru are lords of space and time— of time— OF TIME!”
Carse, staring out over the green hills and the milky ocean, made a terrible effort to grapple with the incredible.
“ I have come into the past of Mars. All my life I have studied and dreamed of that past. Now I am in it. I, Matthew Carse, archaeologist, renegade, looter of tombs.
“ The Quiru for their own reasons built a way and I came through it. Time is to us the unknown dimension but the Quiru knew it!”
Carse had studied science. You had to know the elements of a half-dozen sciences to be a planetary archaeologist. He frantically ransacked memory now for an explanation.
Had his first guess about that bubble of darkness been right? Was it really a hole in the continuum of the universe? If that were so he could dimly understand what had happened to him.
For the space-time continuum of the universe was finite, limited. Einstein and Riemann had proved that long ago. And he had fallen clear out of that continuum and then back into it again—but into a different time-frame from his own.
What was it that Kaufman had once written? “The Past is the Present-that-exists-at-a-distance.” He had come back into that other distant Present, that was all. There was no reason to be afraid.
But he was afraid. The horror of that nightmare transition to this green and smiling Mars of long ago wrenched a gusty cry from his lips.
Blindly, still gripping the jewelled sword, he leaped up and turned to re-enter the buried Tomb of Rhiannon.
“I can go back the way I came, back through that hole in the continuum.”
He stopped a convulsive shudder running through his frame. He could not make himself face again that bubble of glittering gloom, that dreadful plunge through inter-dimensional infinity.
He dared not. He had not the Quiru’s wisdom. In that perilous plunge across time mere chance had flung him into his past age. He could not count on chance to return him to his own far-future age.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m here in the distant past of Mars and I’m here to stay.”
He turned back around and gazed out again upon that incredible vista. He stayed there a long time, unmoving. The sea birds came and looked at him and flashed away on their sharp white wings. The shadows lengthened.
His eyes swung again to the white towers of Jekkara down in the distance, queenly in the sunlight above the harbor. It was not the Jekkara he knew, the thieves’ city of the Low Canals, rotting away into dust, but it was a link to the familiar and Carse desperately needed such a link.
He would go to Jekkara. And he would try not to think. He must not think at all or surely his mind would crack.
Carse gripped the haft of the jeweled sword and started down the grassy slope of the hill.
III. City of the Past
It was a long way to the city. Carse moved at a steady plodding pace. He did not try to find the easiest path but rammed his way through and over all obstacles, never deviating from the straight line that led to Jekkara. His cloak hampered him and he tore it off. His face was empty of all expression, but sweat ran down his cheeks and mingled with the salt of tears.
He walked between two worlds. He went through valleys drowsing in the heat of the summer day, where leafy branches of strange trees raked his face and the juice of crushed grasses stained his sandals. Life, winged and furred and soft of foot, fled from him with a stir and a rustle. And yet he knew that he walked in a desert, where even the wind had forgotten the names of the dead for whom he mourned.
He crossed high ridges, where the sea lay before him and he could hear the boom of the surf on the beaches. And yet he saw only a vast dead plain, where the dust ran in little wavelets among the dry reefs. The truths of thirty years’ living are not easily forgotten.
The sun sank slowly toward the horizon. As Carse topped the last ridge above the city and started down he walked under a vault of flame. The sea burned as the white phosphorescence took color from the clouds. With dazed wonder Carse saw the gold and crimson and purple splash down the long curve of the sky and run out over the water.
He could look down under the harbor. The docks of marble that he had known so well, worn and cracked by ages and whelmed by desert sand, lying lonely beneath the moons. The same docks, and yet now, mirage-like, the sea filled the basin of the harbor.
Round-hulled trading ships lay against the quays and the shouts of stevedores and sweating slaves rose up to him on the evening air. Shallops came and went amid the ships and out beyond the breakwater he saw the fishing fleet of Jekkara coming home with sails of cinnabar dark against the west.
By the palace quays, near the very spot where he had gone with Penkawr to see the sword of Rhiannon, a long lean dark war-galley with a brazen ram crouched like a sullen black panther. Beyond it were other galleys. And above them, tall and proud, the white towers of the palace rose.
“ I have come far back into the past of Mars indeed! For this is the Mars of a million years ago that archaeology has always pictured!”
A planet of conflicting civilizations which had developed little science yet which cherished a legend of the superscience of the great Quiru who had been before even this time.
“ A planet of the lost past that God’s law intended no man of my own time ever to see!”
Matthew Carse shivered as though it were very cold. Slowly, slowly, he went down into the streets of Jekkara and it seemed to him, in the sunset, that the whole city was stained with blood.
The walls closed him in. There was a mist before his eyes and a roaring in his ears but he was aware of people. Lean lithe men and women who passed him in the narrow ways, who jostled against him and went on, then stopped and turned to stare. The dark and catlike people of Jekkara, Jekkara of the Low Canals and of this other age.
He heard the music of the harps and the chiming whisper of the little bells the women wore. The wind touched his face but it was a moist wind and warm, heavy with the breath of the sea, and it was more than a man could bear.
Carse went on but he had no idea where he was going or what he had to do. He went on only because he was already moving and he had not the wit to stop.
One foot before the other, stolid, blind, like a man bewitched, he walked through the streets among the dark Jekkarans, a tall blond man trailing a naked sword.
The people of the city watched him. People of the harborside, of the wine shops and the twisting alleys. They drew away before and closed in behind, following and staring at him.
The gap of ages lay between them. His kilt was of a strange cloth, an unknown dye. His ornaments were of a time and country they would never see. And his face was alien.
This very alienage held them back for a time. Some breath of the incredible truth clung to him and made them afraid. Then someone said a name and someone else repeated it and in the space of a few seconds there was no more mystery, no more fear—only hate.
Carse heard the name. Dimly, from a great distance, he heard it as it grew from a whisper into a howling cry that ran wolf-like through the streets.
“Khond! Khond! A spy from Khondor!” And then another word. “ Slay!”
The name of “Khond” meant nothing to Carse, but he recognized it for what it was, an epithet and a curse. The voice of the mob carried to him the warning of death and he tried to rouse himself for the instinct of survival is strong. But his brain was numbed and would not wake.
A stone struck him on the cheek. The physical shock brought him to a little. Blood ran into his mouth. The salt-sweet taste of it told him the destruction already begun. He tried to shake the dark veils aside, far enough at least to see the enemy that threatened him.
He had come out into an open space by the docks. Now, in the twilight, the sea flamed with cold white fire. Masts of the moored ships stood black against it. Phobos was rising, and in the mingled light Carse saw that there were creatures climbing into the rigging of the ships and that they were furred and chained and not wholly human.
And he saw on the wharfside two slender white-skinned men with wings. They wore the loin cloth of the slave and their wings were broken.
The square was filled with people. More of them poured in from the narrow alley-mouths, drawn by the shout of Spy! It echoed from the buildings and the name of “Khondor” hammered at him.
From the wharfside, from the winged slaves and the chained creatures of the ships, a fervent cry reached him.
“Hail, Khondor! Fight, Man!”
Women screamed like harpies. Another stone whistled past his ear. The mob surged and jostled but those nearest Carse held back, wary of the great jeweled sword with its shining blade.
Carse shouted. He swung the sword in a humming arc around him and the Jekkarans, who had shorter blades, melted back.
Again from the wharfside he heard, “Hail, Khondor! Down with the Serpent, down with Sark! Fight, Khond!”
He knew that the slaves would have helped him if they could.
One part of his mind was beginning to function now—the part that had to do with a long experience in saving his own neck. He was only a few paces away from the buildings at his back. He whirled and leaped suddenly, the bright steel swinging.
It bit twice into flesh and then he had gained the doorway of a ship’s chandler, so that they could only come at him from the front. A small advantage but every second a man could stay alive was a second gained.
He made a flickering barrier of steel before him and then bellowed, in their own High Martian. “Wait! I am no Khond!”
The crowd broke into jeering laughter.
“He says he is not of Khondor!”
“Your own friends hail you, Khond! Hark to the Swimmers and the Skyfolk!”
Carse cried, “No! I am not of Khondor! I am not—” He stopped short. He had almost said he was not of Mars.
A green-eyed girl, hardly more than a child, darted almost into the circle of death he wove before him. Her teeth showed white as a rat’s.
“Coward!” she screamed. “Fool! Where but in Khondor do they breed men like you, with pale hair and sickly skin? Where else could you be from, oh clumsy thing with the barbarous speech?”
Something of the strange look returned to Carse’s face and he said, “I am from Jekkara.”
They laughed. They shrieked with laughter until the square rocked with it. Now they had lost all awe of him. His every word stamped him as what the girl had called him, a coward and a fool. Almost contemptuously, they attacked.
This was real enough to Carse, this mass of hate-filled faces and wicked short-swords coming at him. He struck out ragingly with the long sword of Rhiannon, his rage less against this murderous rabble than against the fate that had pitchforked him into their world.
Several of them died on the jeweled sword and the rest drew back. They stood glaring at him like jackals who have trapped a wolf. Then through their hissing came an exultant cry.
“The Sark soldiers are coming! They’ll cut down this Khond spy for us!”
Carse, backed against a locked door and panting, saw a little phalanx of black-mailed, black-helmeted warriors pushing through the rabble like a ship through waves.
They were coming straight toward him and the Jekkarans were already yelling in eager anticipation of the lull.
IV. Perilous Secret
The door against which Carse’s back was braced suddenly gave way, opening inward. He reeled backward into the black interior.
As he staggered for balance the door suddenly slammed shut again. He heard a bar fall and then a low, throaty chuckle from beside him.
“That will hold them for a while. But we’d better get out of here quickly, Khond. Those Sark soldiers will cut the door open.”
Carse swung around, his sword raised, but was blind in the darkness of the room. He could smell rope and tar and dust but could see nothing.
A frantic hammering began outside the door. Then Carse’s eyes, becoming accustomed to the obscurity, made out a ponderous corpulent figure close beside him.
The man was big, fleshy and soft looking, a Martian who wore a kilt that looked ridiculously scanty on his fat figure. His face was moonlike, creased and crinkled in a reassuring grin as his small eyes looked unfearingly at Carse’s raised sword.
“I’m no Jekkaran or Sark either,” he said reassuringly.
“I’m Boghaz Hoi of Valkis and I’ve my own reasons for helping any man of Khond. But we’ll have to go quickly.”
“Go where?”
Carse had to drag the words out, he was still breathing so painfully.
“To a place of safety.” The other paused as new louder hammering began upon the door. “That’s the Sarks. I’m leaving. Come or stay as you like, Khond.”
He turned toward the back of the dark room, moving with astonishing lightness and ease for one so corpulent. He did not look back to see if Carse was following.
But there was really no choice for Carse. Half-dazed as he still was he was of no mind to face the eruption of those mailed soldiers and the Jekkaran rabble. He followed Boghaz Hoi.
The Valkisian chuckled as he squeezed his bulk through a small open window at the rear of the room.
“I know every rathole in this harbor quarter. That’s why, when I saw you backed against old Taras Thur’s door, I simply went around through and let you in. Snatched you from under their noses.”
“But why?” Carse asked again.
“I told you—I have a sympathy for Khonds. They’re men enough to snap their fingers at Sark and the damned Serpent. I help one when I can.”
It didn’t make sense to Carse. But how could it? How could he know anything of the hates and passions of this Mars of the remote past?
He was trapped in this strange Mars of long ago and he had to grope his way in it like an ignorant child. It was certain that the mob out there had tried to kill him.
They had taken him for a Khond. Not the Jekkaran rabble alone but those strange slaves—the semi-humans with the broken wings, the furred sleek chained creatures who had cheered him from the galleys.
Carse shivered. Until now, he had been too dazed to think of the strangeness of those not-quite-human slaves.
And who were the Khonds?
“This way,” Boghaz Hoi interrupted his thoughts.
They had threaded a shadowy little labyrinth of stinking alleys and the fat Valkisian was squeezing through a narrow door into the dark interior of a little hut.
Carse followed him inside. He heard the whistle of the blow in the dark and tried to dodge but there was no time.
The concussion exploded a bomb of stars inside his head and he felt the rough floor grinding his face.
He awoke with flickering light in his eyes. There was a small bronze lamp burning on a stool close to him. He was lying on the dirt floor of the hut. When he tried to move he found that his wrists and ankles were bound to pegs driven into the packed earth.
Sickening pain racked his head and he sank back. There was a rustle of movement and Boghaz Hoi crouched down beside him. The Valkisian’s moonface was expressive of sympathy as he held a clay cup of water to Carse’s lips.
“I struck too hard I’m afraid. But then, in the dark with an armed man, one has to be careful. Do you feel like talking now?”
Carse looked up at him and old habit made him control the rage that shook him. “About what?” he asked.
Boghaz said, “I am a frank and truthful man. When I saved you from the mob out there my only idea was to rob you.”
Carse saw that his jeweled belt and collar had been transferred to Boghaz, who wore them both around his neck. The Valkisian now raised a plump hand and fingered them lovingly.
“Then,” he continued, “I got a closer look—at that.” He nodded toward the jeweled sword that leaned against the stool, shimmering in the lamplight. “Now, many men would examine it and see only a handsome sword. But I, Boghaz, am a man of education. I recognized the symbols on that blade.”
He leaned forward. “Where did you get it?”
A warning instinct made Carse lie readily, “I bought it from a trader.”
Boghaz shook his head. “No you didn’t. There are spots of corrosion on the blade, scales of dust in the carvings. The hilt has not been polished. No trader would sell it in that condition.
“No, my friend, that sword has lain a long time in the dark, in the tomb of him who owned it—the tomb of Rhiannon.”
Carse lay without moving, looking at Boghaz. He did not like what he saw.
The Valkisian had a kind and merry face. He would be excellent company over a bottle of wine. He would love a man like a brother and regret exceedingly the necessity of cutting out his heart.
Carse schooled his expression into sullen blankness. “It may be Rhiannon’s sword for all I know. Nevertheless, I bought it from a trader.”
The mouth of Boghaz, which was small and pink, puckered and he shook his head. He reached out and patted Carse’s cheek.
“Please don’t lie to me, friend. It upsets me to be lied to.”
“I’m not lying,” Carse said. “Listen—you have the sword. You have my ornaments. You have all you can get out of me. Just be satisfied.”
Boghaz sighed. He looked down appealingly at Carse. “Have you no gratitude? Didn’t I save your life?”
Carse said sardonically, “It was a noble gesture.”
“It was. It was indeed. If I’m caught for it my life won’t be worth that.” He snapped his fingers. “I cheated the mob of a moment’s pleasure and it wouldn’t do a bit of good to tell them that you really aren’t a Khond at all.”
He let that fall very casually but he watched Carse shrewdly from under his fat eyelids.
Carse looked back at him, hard-eyed, and his face showed nothing.
“What gave you that idea?”
Boghaz laughed. “No Khond would be ass enough to show his face in Jekkara to begin with. And especially if he’d found the lost secret all Mars has hunted for an age—the secret of the Tomb of Rhiannon.”
Carse’s face moved no muscle but he was thinking swiftly. So the Tomb was a lost mystery in this time as in his own future time?
He shrugged. “I know nothing of Rhiannon or his Tomb.”
Boghaz squatted down on the floor beside Carse and smiled down at him like one humoring a child who wishes to play.
“My friend, you are not being honest with me. There’s no man on Mars who doesn’t know that the Quiru long, long ago left our world because of what Rhiannon, the Cursed One among them, had done. And all men know they built a secret tomb before they left, in which they locked Rhiannon and his powers.
“Is it wonderful that men should covet the powers of the gods? Is it strange that ever since men have hunted that lost Tomb? And now that you have found it, do I, Boghaz, blame you for wanting to keep the secret to yourself?”
He patted Carse’s shoulder and beamed.
“It is but natural on your part. But the secret of the Tomb is too big for you to handle. You need my brains to help you. Together, with that secret, we can take what we want of Mars.”
Carse said without emotion, “You’re crazy. I have no secret. I bought the sword from a trader.”
Boghaz stared at him for a long moment. He stared very sadly. Then he sighed heavily.
“Think, my friend. Wouldn’t it be better to tell me than to make me force it out of you?”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Carse said harshly.
He did not wish to be tortured. But that odd warning instinct had returned more strongly. Something deep within him warned him not to tell the secret of the Tomb!
And anyway, even if he told, the fat Valkisian was likely to kill him then to prevent him from telling anyone else the secret.
Boghaz sorrowfully shrugged fat shoulders. “You force me to extreme measures. And I hate that. I’m too chicken-hearted for this work. But if it’s necessary—”
He was reaching into his belt-pouch for something when suddenly both men heard a sound of voices in the alleyway outside and the tramp of heavily shod feet.
Outside, a voice cried, “ There! That is the sty of the Boghaz hog!”
A fist began to hammer on the door with such force that the small room rang like the inside of a drum.
“Open up, there, fat scum of Valkis!”
Heavy shoulders began to heave against the door.
“Gods of Mars!” groaned Boghaz. “That Sark press-gang has tracked us down!”
He grabbed up the sword of Rhiannon and was in the act of hiding it in his bed when the warped planks of the door gave under the tremendous beating, and a spate of armed men burst into the room.