Northwest of Earth (45 page)

What wouldn’t he give just now, to be free to go home again? Home without a price on his head, freedom to rove the blue seas of Earth, the warm garden continents of the sun’s loveliest planet? He hummed very softly to himself,

—and count the losses worth
To see across the darkness
The green hills of Earth…

and then let the words die on his lips unnoticed as he narrowed steel-colored eyes at the polished wall in which a moment before his dim reflection had faced him. It was darkening now, a shadow quivering across the bright surfaces, thickening, clouding his mirrored face. And the wall—was it metal, or—or stone? The shadow was too thick to tell, and unconsciously he rose to his feet, bending across the table, one hand hovering back toward the heat-gun on his thigh. A door creaked open in the dimness—a heavy door, half seen, opening upon darkness beyond too black to gaze on—darkness, and a face.

“Are your services for hire, stranger?” quavered a cracked voice speaking in a tongue that despite himself sent Smith’s pulse quickening in recognition. French, Earth’s French, archaic and scarcely intelligible, but unquestionably a voice from home.

“For a price,” he admitted, his fingers closing definitely on his gun. “Who are you and why do you ask? And how in the name of—”

“It will reward you to ask no questions,” said the cracked quaver. “I seek a fighting-man of a temper strong enough for my purpose, and I think you are he. Look, does this tempt you?”

A claw-like hand extended itself out of the shadow, dangling a double rope of such blue-white pearls as Smith had never dreamed of. “Worth a king’s ransom,” croaked the voice. “And all for the taking. Will you come with me?”

“Come where?”

“To the planet Earth—to the land of France—to the year of 1500.”

Smith gripped the table-edge with one frantic hand, wondering if the
segir
he had drunk could somehow have sent him into paroxysms of dream. By no stretch of imagination could he really be standing here, in this drinking-booth in a Martian tavern, while out of a door that opened upon darkness a cracked voice beckoned him into the past. He was dreaming, of course, and in a dream it could do no harm to push back his chair, skirt the table, step closer to that incredible door thick-hung with shadows, take the outstretched hand over whose wrist the luminous pearls hung gleaming…

The room staggered and whirled into darkness. From somewhere far away he heard Yarol’s voice shouting frantically, “N. W.! Wait! N. W., where’re you going—” And then night too black to gaze on blinded his dark-dazzled eyes and cold unthinkable flamed through his brain, and—and—

He stood on a green hilltop whose gentle slope rolled downward to a meadow where a brook wound with a sound of rippling water. Beyond, on a high upthrust of craggy rock, a great gray castle loomed. The sky was blessedly blue, the air fresh in his nostrils with the sweetness of green growing things. And all about him rolled grassy uplands. He took a deep, deep breath. “The Green Hills of Earth!”

“N. W., what in—by Pharol, I—hell’s blazes, man, what’s happened?” Yarol’s spluttering amazement jolted him out of his delight.

Smith turned. The little Venusian stood on the soft grass beside him, two small glasses full of pale green liquid in his hands and a look of almost idiotic bewilderment on his good-looking, cherubic face. “I come back into the booth with the
pani
-juice” he was muttering dazedly, “and there you are stepping through a door that—damn it!—that wasn’t there when I left! And when I try to pull you back I—I—well, what
did
happen?”

“You stumbled through the Gateway—uninvited,” said a cracked voice ominously behind them.

Both men whirled, hands dropping to their guns. For a dazed moment Smith had forgotten the voice that had lured him into the past. Now for the first time he saw his host—a small man, wizened, dark, stooping under his robe of rich black velvet as if the evil reflected on his seamed face were too heavy to bear upright. Dark wisdom glinted in the eyes that stared malevolently at Yarol.

“What’s he saying, N. W.?” demanded the little Venusian.

“French—he’s speaking French,” muttered Smith distractedly, his gaze on the lined and evil face of their host. And then to the warlock,
“Qui êtes-vous, m’sieur? Pourquoi—”

“I am Franga,” interrupted the old man impatiently. “Franga, the warlock. And I am displeased with this blundering stranger who followed us through the door. His speech is as uncouth as his manners. Were it not for my magic I could not guess his meaning. Has he never learned a civilized tongue? Well, no matter—no matter.

“Listen, now. I have brought you here to avenge my defeat at the hands of the lady of Joiry whose castle you see on yonder hilltop. She stole my magical jewel, the Starstone, and I have vowed to find a man who could tame her if I had to search outside my own world and time to do it. I am too old myself, too feeble now. Once when I was as young and lusty as you I won the jewel from a rival as it must be won, bloodily in battle, or its magic is void to the possessor. Too, it may be given freely and maintain its power. But by neither method can I take it from Joiry, and so you must go up to the castle and in your own way win the stone.

“I can help you—a little. This much I can do—I can put you beyond the reach of the pikes and swords of Joiry’s men.”

Smith lifted an eyebrow and laid his hand lightly on his heat-gun, a blast of whose deadly violence could have mowed down a charging army like wheat ripe for the scythe.

“I’m armed,” he said shortly.

Franga frowned. “Your arms would not avail you against a dagger in the back. No, you must do as I say. I have my reasons. You must go—beyond the Gateway.”

Cold, pale eyes met the wizard’s veiled stare for a moment. Then Smith nodded.

“It doesn’t matter—my gun burns as straight in any land. What’s your plan?”

“You must get the lady of Joiry through the Gateway—that same Gateway by which you came hither. But it will take you into another land, where—where”—he hesitated—“where there are—powers—favorable to me, and therefore to you. Make no mistake; it will not be easy to wrest the Starstone from Joiry. She has learned much of the dark lore.”

“How shall we open the Gateway?”

Franga’s left hand rose in a swift, strangely archaic gesture. “By this sign—learn it well—thus, and thus.”

Smith’s gun-callused brown hand imitated the queer motion. “Thus?”

“Yes—and the spell must be learned as well.” Franga mouthed something queer and garbled, Smith echoing him with twisted tongue, for the words were as strange as he had ever spoken.

“Good.” The warlock nodded, and again the strange syllables came incoherently from his lips, again his hand moved, giving the gestures an oddly cadenced rhythm. “When you voice the spell again the Gateway will open for you—as it opens now for me!”

Silently a shadow swept down upon them, dimming the sunlit hill. In its midst a blacker oblong darkened, the creak of a door sounded faintly as if from enormous distances.

“Bring Joiry through the Gateway,” the wizard whispered, vicious lights crawling in his cold eyes, “and follow. Then you may seize the Starstone, for the powers in this—this other land will fight with you. But not here, not in Joiry. You must follow me … As for this little man who blundered through my door of darkness—”

“He is my friend,” said Smith hastily. “He will help me.”

“Eh—well, let his life be hostage then to your success. Win me the stone, and I stay my wrath at his stupid interference. But remember—the sword of my magic hovers at your throat…”

A shadow quivered over the wizard’s black-robed form. His image quivered with it as a reflection in troubled water shakes, and abruptly shadow and man were gone.

“By great Pharol,” articulated Yarol in measured syllables, “will you tell me what this is all about? Drink this—you look as though you need it. As for me”—he thrust a small glass into Smith’s hand, and drained his own drink at a gulp—“if all this is a dream, I hope there’s liquor in it. Will you kindly explain—”

Smith threw back his head and tossed the
pani
-spirits down his grateful throat. In crisp sentences he outlined the situation, but though his words were brisk his eyes lingered like a caress over the warm, sweet-scented hills of home.

“Um-m,” said Yarol, when he had finished. “Well, why are we waiting? Who knows, there may be a wine-cellar in that cozy-looking castle over there.” He licked his lips reflectively, tasting the last of the green liquor. “Let’s get going. The sooner we meet the woman the sooner she’ll offer us a drink.”

So they went down the long hill, Earth’s green grass springing under their spaceman’s boots, Earth’s warm June breezes caressing their Mars-burned faces.

The gray heights of Joiry loomed above the two before life stirred anywhere in the sunny midday silences of this lost century. Then high in the buttresses a man shouted, and presently, with a rattling of hooves and a jangle of accouterments, two horsemen came thundering across the lowered drawbridge. Yarol’s hand went to his heat-gun, and a smile of ineffable innocence hovered on his face. The Venusian never looked so much like a Raphael cherub as when death was trembling on his trigger finger. But Smith laid a restraining hand on his arm.

“Not yet.”

The horsemen bore down on them, visors lowered. For a moment Smith thought they would trample them down, and his hand hovered ever so lightly over his gun, but the men reined to a halt beside the two and one of them, glaring down through his helmet bars, roared a threatening question.

“We’re strangers,” Smith told him haltingly at first, and then more easily as long-forgotten French flowed back into his memory. “From another land. We come in peace.”

“Few come in peace to Joiry,” snapped the man, fingering his sword-hilt, “and we do not love strangers here. Have you, perhaps”—a covetous gleam brightened the eyes half hidden by the vizor—“gold? Or gems?”

“Your lady can judge of that, fellow.” Smith’s voice was as cold as the steel-gray eyes that caught the man’s gaze in a stare of sudden savagery. “Take us to her.”

The man hesitated for an instant, uncertainty eloquent in the eyes behind the vizor. Here was a dusty stranger, afoot, swordless, unarmed, such a fellow Joiry’s men might ride down on the highway and never notice twice. But his eyes were the eyes of—of—he had never seen such eyes. And command spoke in his cold, clipped voice. The soldier shrugged inside his mail and spat through the bars of the helmet.

“There’s always room in Joiry’s dungeons for one more varlet, if our lady doesn’t fancy you,” he said philosophically. “Follow me, then.”

Yarol, plodding across the drawbridge, murmured, “Was he speaking a language, N. W.—or merely howling like a wolf?”

“Shut up,” muttered Smith. “I’m trying to think. We’ve got to have a good story ready for this—this amazon.”

“Some brawny wench with a face like a side of beef,” speculated Yarol.

So they entered Joiry, over the drawbridge, under the spiked portcullis, into the high-vaulted, smoke-blackened banquet hall where Jirel sat at midday table. Blinking in the dimness Smith looked up to the dais at the head of the great T-shaped board where the lady of Joiry sat. Her red mouth glistened with the grease of a mutton-bone she had been gnawing, and the bright hair fell flaming on her shoulders.

She looked into Smith’s eyes.

Clear and pale and cold as steel they were, and Joiry’s yellow gaze met them with a flash like the spark of meeting blades. For a long moment there was silence between them, and a curious violence flamed in the silent stare. A great mastiff loped to Smith’s knee, fangs bared, a growl rumbling in its furry throat. Without looking down, Smith’s hand found the beast’s head and the dog sniffed for a moment and let the man rough its shaggy fur. Then Jirel broke the silence.

“
Tigre—ici
!” Her voice was strong and suddenly deeper in timbre, as if emotions she would not acknowledge were stirring in her. The mastiff went to her chair and lay down, finding a well-gnawed bone to crack. But Jirel’s eyes were still fast on Smith’s, and a slow flush was mounting her face.

“Pierre—Voisin,” she said. “Who is he?”

“I bring you news of treasure,” said Smith before they could speak. “My name is Smith, and I come from a—a far land.”

“Smeet,” she murmured. “Smeet. … Well, what of this treasure?”

“I would speak to you alone of that,” he said guardedly. “There are jewels and gold, guarded by thieves but ripe for harvesting. And I think Joiry—harvests well.”

“
C’est vrai
. With the luck of the Starstone—” She hesitated, wiping her mouth on the back of a narrow hand. “Are you lying to me? You who come so curiously clad, who speak our language so strangely—always before I have seen the lie in the eyes of the man who tells it. But you—”

Suddenly, and so quickly that despite himself Smith blinked, she had flung herself across the table, leaning there on one knee while the slender blade of her dagger flickered in the air. She laid the point of it against Smith’s bare brown throat, just where a strong pulse stirred sunburnt flesh. He watched her without a quiver of expression, without a twitch of muscle.

“I cannot read your eyes—Smeet… Smeet… But if you are lying to me”—the point dented the full swell of his muscular throat—“if you are, I’ll strip the skin from your carcass in Joiry’s dungeons. Know that!”