Collected Fiction, page 709
He heard Evaya’s voice ring with sudden defiance. But before its echoes ceased to sound, he fell into a cloudy sleep that was almost as deep as death, drowning all other thoughts.
Uneven lightning-jabs of pain roused him presently, and he knew he was being carried with difficulty on the shoulders of—of whom?—Evaya’s people? It didn’t matter. Between sleeping and waking, he saw the bubble domes of Carcasilla sliding by.
And now they were moving down a far-flung curve of crystal stairs toward a vast basin of onyx and rose marble which stretched across the widest space he had yet seen in Carcasilla. Its edges were curved and carved into breakers of marble foam. Light brimmed the basin like water, violet, dimly translucent, rippling with constant motion.
They carried him out into the basin, toward a vast, towering, wavering column out of which seemed to pulse all the violet light that illuminated Carcasilla. It was a column of flame, a fountain of up-rushing light . . . Now he could feel the brimming pool lap up about him, cool, infinitely refreshing.
He could see the smooth floor underfoot, dimly beneath the blue-violet surface. He could see a pedestal of white marble, distorted by refraction, out of which the great flame sprang. It must, he thought vaguely, rush up from some source underground, straight through the marble as if it were not there . . .
They carried him into that light—laid him on the marble pedestal—and he could breathe more easily here in the blue-violet flame than he had in the air outside—breathe against the white-hot pain of his ribs . . .
The soft, rushing coolness all around him was washing the pain away. He was weightless, his body scarcely touching the marble. Even his hair strained at the roots, and currents swung him this way and that, gently, easily. The flame washed up through his very flesh, streaming coolly, sending bubbles of sensation through his body. Then violet sleep soothed all the pain out of his consciousness. He gave himself up to it, swaying with the uprush of light that possessed every atom of his body.
WHEN he again became conscious of his surroundings, he lay upon cushions in a globe-shaped room through whose aquamarine walls seeped a light that was the very color of sleep itself.
Time passed vaguely as in a dream. The silvery-haired people of Carcasilla tiptoed in to whisper over him, and though he could not remember having seen them before, they were familiar to his unquestioning mind. Evaya sat beside him on the cushions oftenest of all. And later, she walked beside him on tours of Carcasilla when his steps were slow but no longer unsteady, and no memory of pain attended any motion.
He had no memories at all. The roaring, ruinous world he had left milleniums ago, the dead world where he had wakened, were alike forgotten in this strange dreamlike state. He did not miss the companions who had vanished on the steps to Flande’s house; he did not wonder where the barbarians had gone or whence they had come. Whatever was, was good.
Alan came to understand many of the words in the Carcasillians’ liquid speech, that through sheer repetition. grew familiar. And into this drugged mind knowledge crept slowly, as the soft voice of the fragile folk grew more understandable.
They told him of the fountain’s magic. It gave immortality. All who bathed in its pulsing light were immortal, as long as they renewed the bathing at intervals. Even Flande came to the fountain at intervals—the voices said.
“Beware of Flande,” they dinned into his dulled mind. “His spells strike without warning. You must be strong—and awake!—to battle him, if battle must come.”
And other things the soft voices of Carcasilla whispered to Alan. He felt neither hunger nor thirst; the fountain breathed out all he needed to live. When the Carcasillians bathed in it, all ills were soothed, all wants healed. And when they wearied of life, the fountain gave them—sleep.
For they grew weary, here in their perfect, sterile world. When they had explored all of Carcasilla, and knew every bridge and building, and every face, and boredom began to trouble them—then they went below the fountain and took the Sleep. Memories were washed away—when they woke again, Carcasilla was new, and everyone in it, and life began afresh.
Thus is had been since the beginning. Lost in the Lethe of a thousand Great Sleeps were the origins of Carcasilla. Yet there were legends. The Light-Wearers had made it, and peopled it. The Light-Wearers had gone long since, but Carcasilla remained, a monument to their unearthly dreams. And the dwellers in Carcasilla were part of the dream that had reared the city.
Only Flande had never taken the Sleep. Only Flande—and the gods, perhaps—remembered all that had happened since the first days. He was afraid of forgetting something—his power, or a secret he held.
Awaken, A-lahn!
Strong the summons shrilled in his brain. For minutes or hours or days, he thought dimly, he had been hearing it. And now—suddenly enough—the curtain slipped away, and was gone from his half-sleeping mind.
It came without warning. He was sitting with Evaya in the mouth of the aquamarine globe, with a great sweep of the city spread out below them. One moment the fantastic vista beneath was a familiar, scarcely noticed thing—the next, a cloud seemed to withdraw, and colors and shapes and distances sprang into focus so sharp that for an instant it almost blinded him.
Alan leaped to his feet, and Evaya rose lightly beside him.
She smiled at him anxiously. And Alan, without an instant’s hesitation or thought, leaned forward and took her into his arms. In a moment the spinning world and his spinning brain slowed and steadied, and nothing had any significance at all except the vibrant responding aliveness of the girl in his embrace.
Alan thought he had never known what it was to kiss a girl before. This strong, lithe body was not afraid of the full pressure his arms could bring to bear. She was not, after all, so fragile as she looked. It was like embracing a figure of tempered steel that answered the pressure with a singing resilience, quivering and alive with more than human aliveness.
Evaya stepped back.
“Now you are awake!” she said breathlessly, with a little dazzled smile. “But we have no time to talk of anything but Flande now. I called you so long, day after day. But you were not yet healed. The fountain still kept you in its sleep.”
Alan caught his breath, remembrance coming back with an overwhelming rush. “That was all real? Not delirium?”
“Real enough. Your sleep was deep—and Flande still stays his hand. I think—I am afraid—perhaps he waits only until you awake . . .”
CHAPTER III
THE WAY OF THE GODS
FLANDE! Flande and the tower of rain, and the battle on the waterfalling steps. It all came back to Alan in an avalanche of vivid memories. Questions crowded upon questions until his tongue tripped. He stammered over them for a moment, then said simply, “What happened?” and waited almost dizzily for the answer. Evaya smiled again. But she sobered quickly.
“They took away your friends,” she told him. “The Terasi, I mean. There was a great fight there on the steps. The evil young man fought terribly, but they took him at last. They struck the red girl on the head and carried her off senseless.” Evaya looked a little pleased, in spite of herself. She had made no secret of her aversion toward Karen. “The old man went quite peacefully when he saw there was no hope. He seemed almost interested. I saw him trying to talk to the Terasi leader as they went down the steps.”
Alan grinned. In the sudden strangeness of this alien city, it was good to hear one familiar thing about someone he knew. That would be Sir Colin—coolly examining the headsman’s axe as it fell toward his own neck. He said quickly:
“Where did they go?”
Evaya shook her head, the silvery hair clouding out around her. “Nobody knows. The Terasi live somewhere outside Carcasilla, in the wilderness underground. Flande put a magic on them and brought them here. And afterward, when you were crushed by the barbarian’s blow, he refused to let me bathe you in the fountain to heal your hurts.”
Alan nodded, remembering dimly. “You—you changed his mind, didn’t you?” Evaya’s face lighted. “I defied him. But—but shivering inside, for fear he might destroy me. I don’t know how I found the courage to do it, unless—sometimes I have thought I was once the priestess who opened the doors of Carcasilla to the gods when the gods still lived. Long ago. But I am immortal, of course. Like you.”
Alan looked at her silently. After a while he said, “I was wondering if I’d dreamed that.”
She shook her head.
“No. It’s quite true. All who bathe in the fountain live forever, so long as they renew the baths. You did not dream it. The gods made us so.”
“The gods?”
She pointed. Far off through the city Alan could see a disc of blackness set against the cavern wall, tiny in the distance. Before it stood something so bright that its outlines blurred before his eyes.
“The statue of the Light-Wearer,” Evaya said, reverence in her voice. “They made Carcasilla and us, for their pleasure. They lighted the fountain, that we might live eternally. Very long ago, I think I was their priestess, as I say—I opened the doors when they called. For there were good Light-Wearers and some—not good. Some who might have destroyed us. So the two doors into Carcasilla can be opened only from within, at the summons of the gods. But the gods, of course, are dead . . .”
Evaya lifted a troubled gaze to his. “Has one of the gods come back?” she asked him.
Alan shook his head. “You tell me,” he said.
Evaya said presently, “I felt the call from far away, very weak. And I remembered from many sleeps ago . . . All memories are washed away in the fountain when we take the great sleep, but somehow, I knew the call. So I went up to the citadel where the gods once lived—and you were there, A-lahn. But I think—A-lahn, I think this god is npt one of the good Light-Wearers. If it is a god. I am not sure . . . I don’t wish to be sure. I shut my brain to it, A-lahn, when I hear the far-away echo of that call.”
“Have you heard it since I—came here?
She shook her head.
Alan sat down deliberately upon the cushioned, swaying floor. He beckoned, and Evaya sank beside him in a descending billow of her pale garments and silvery clouds of hair. He was trying to keep a tight grip upon the spinning in his brain. There was so much to be learned, and perhaps so little time to learn it, if Flande was watching—if the engimatic thing Evaya knew as a god were calling from its unthinkable citadel . . .
“You’ve got to tell me—well, everything,” he said. “From the beginning. Who are these gods of yours? Where did they come from?”
Evaya laughed on an exquisite ripple of ascending notes. “Not even Flande himself could answer all that! The gods? How should we mortals know? We have dim legends that tell of their conquering earth so long ago that we have no way to measure the time between. Great ships, dropping down out of the skies, bellowing thunder and flame. It may be they came from another—world—no one knows that now. They were beings from—outside. They wore light like a garment, and to them humans were—vermin. They cleansed the earth of them. And in the end, the legends say, they ruled earth from those citadels they had built, like the one above, keeping only those humans they had bred themselves, like us. To ornament their beautiful cities. I think Carcasilla is the only one left now.”
Alan looked out over the airy suburbs floating before him, not seeing anything. Things were beginning to fit themselves together in his mind—but what stunning things, what appalling catastrophes and immeasurable vistas of time for a man’s mind to encompass!
Earth conquered, ravaged, ruined—while he slept his timeless slumbers in the ship. The ship? A ship from space, like those the invaders must have come in? It was the inevitable answer. The being of the golden globe, the bodiless presence in the citadel, the questing thing at their heels in the mist, must somehow be one creature only—a Light-Wearer!
But what had gone wrong? Why had not the—the first of the alien beings—awakened when the armada that followed him came raging down from the skies? Why had this inhuman Columbus slept through the heyday of his race’s power and glory, and wakened with his human captives only in the desolation of a time-ruined world?
Perhaps the Alien, first of his kind in a world inconceivably new to him, had misjudged the depths of his ageless slumber. His awakening, in the twilight of a dying world, must have been very terrible. Alan, from the depths of his own nostalgia for all that had passed into dust, could almost feel pity for the Light-Wearer who had come to lead his race to conquest—and slept, forgotten, while the dark sands of time ran irrevocably away. How frantically he must have scoured the empty earth before realization dawned that he was the last of his kind upon this ruined world. The first—and the last.
“Tell me about Flande,” he said presently, in a controlled voice. It was not, he thought, wise to think very deeply on the subject of the Allen, and of Earth’s ruin.
EVAYA answered obediently, “Flande is very old and wise.” (She was a toy, he remembered bitterly. A toy created of human flesh, to amuse the gods of earth. Obedience was bred into her from unthinkable aeons ago.) “Flande has never taken the sleep. None but he remembers all that has happened since Carcasilla’s first days. He is afraid of forgetting, perhaps—something. He has many magics, and now he hates us both.”
“Is he—human?”
“Flande is—” She paused, closing her eyes softly. And she sat perfectly still, the drifting hair settling about her shoulders. “You see—” she murmured, and lifted heavy lids with infinite slowness. “A-lahn!” she cried, with a curious, sleepy fright, looking at him under drowsy lashes. And she crumpled toward him, yawning with a flowerlike delicacy.
He caught her in his arms, and again he was vividly aware of her blown-glass strength and fragility.
“What is it?” he asked frantically. “Flande—” she told him in a slow, drugged voice. “Flande—must be—watching. Listening to—our talk. He will not let me—tell you—about him . . . I’m afraid, A-lahn—A-lahn dearest—the Light-Wearer . . .”
She relaxed in his arms with the utter limpness of death itself, though he could still feel breath stirring her ribs gently against his arm.
So—Flande had struck.
Well, it had been as good a way as any, he supposed, to summon him into Flande’s presence. This—this strange little whisper far back in his mind was not really necessary. He would have gone anyhow. But it was not Flande who called. Another voice—an alien voice—was summoning in the deepest depths of his brain. And beside him, Evaya stirred. “Yes, lord, yes,” he heard her murmuring softly, in a voice entirely without inflection. “Yes, lord—it shall be done.”
And she sat up stiffly. Her eyes were enormous, staring straight ahead, their pupils blackening the violet iris. Alan said sharply, “Evaya! Evaya!” and tried to shake her out of that mirror-eyed stare. She was as rigid as ivory under his hands. Even her face was ivory, not flesh, its delicacy frozen as if by some inward congealing of the mind. And she rose to her feet.
She went forward with deliberate steps. And Alan, bemused by Flande’s power, could do nothing but follow, knowing with a dreadful certainty what was happening because of the stir deep in his own brain . . .
So long as she remained awake and mistress of herself, Evaya had kept her mind closed to that distant call. But when Flande pot his sleep upon her to stop her revealing words, he had opened the gateway of her priestess mind . . .
Alan was scarcely aware of their passage through Carcasilla. That stirring in the roots of his brain blinded and deafened him to everything but the slim, cloudy figure moving stiffly on ahead, over the fantastic bridges, the spiraled streets, toward a distant spot which they both knew well . . . too well.
Before the great black circle where the light-veiled statue stood, Evaya paused. Alan paused behind her, a dozen paces, away. The calling in his mind was very powerful now. A ravenous call, bellowing soundlessly from somewhere dangerously near.
Evaya touched something at the feet of the blinding statue, and quite suddenly a great flare of brilliance shot out all around the figure. It was like the blare of a struck gong, shivering out in a great wave over Carcasilla. If there could be such a thing as sound made visible, this was it.
Behind him, he heard the rising murmur of many soft voices, drawing near. All Carcasilla whispering its surprise, whispering perhaps with the awakening of memories buried deep behind the forgetfulness of many sleeps. Alan turned slowly and with infinite effort, for some inhibitory power was. drugging his nerve-centers now and spreading through his body from that summoning in the brain.
The people of Carcasilla were answering the call. By tens, by scores, by hundreds they came. Alan had not guessed before how many dwellers the city had. And when the last gossamer-robed citizen joined the crowd, and the wondering murmurs rose in a susurus all around them—exactly then, without turning, Evaya lifted her arms. Perhaps she touched some switch. Alan could not tell what.
She was facing the great circle of darkness upon the wall. Her arms were lifted, and her face. Her voice, clear and toneless as a bell, rang out over the assembly.
“Enter to your people, Light-Wearer and Lord.”
A shiver seemed to run over the surface of the black disc on the wan. It was less disc than opening now. The opening to a long, dark tunnel . . . Far down It something moved—brightly shimmering . . .
Alan knew that it was infinitely far away. But it was rushing nearer with breathtaking speed. Each stride of Its long legs—if these were legs—carried it shockingly nearer, as if it covered leagues with every step. The light-robes swirled around its devouring strides . . .
It was near—it was almost upon them. It hovered, monstrous and glowing in the mouth of the tunnel, filling the high black circle of its disc . . .
And then, with one great swoop, it burst into the violet daylight of Carcasilla.
