The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy (29 page)

I wandered the streets myself for a time, easing my way through little knots of arguing people. It was strange to see rooftops of bare tile and slate, without the thousand eyes of Tokos-Dien painted on them. Everywhere I went the shops and houses were closed and shuttered. It would not be long, everyone said, before the Heron King’s forces attacked. His scouts had already been sighted.

I came upon Savil. He was hobbling on crutches toward the southern gate, a pack on his shoulder, a look of weary hopelessness on his face. When I saw him, I abruptly remembered the horse trampling him three years before. He had not been able to join the army, even though he’d wanted to. But at the same time I also remembered the proud day he’d enlisted, though it seemed more like a dream. He had come back and showed me his uniform, his sword, his shield with the thousand eyes of Tokos-Dien painted on it.

The anger of a god is a fearsome thing.

I embraced him, said, “I’m sorry,” and ran away before he could reply.

I found myself near the temple of Tokos-Dien. I ran up the wide steps and into the huge altar chamber, where prayers were held and sacrifices made. Only everything was different now; it had become a temple to Condja-Dien, I saw. Plants grew in wild abundance; it was more a garden than a building, but that only made sense, for Condja-Dien was god-patron of harvests and growing things.

I heard a scuffle and a scream from one of the side rooms, then a grim looking captain from the Emperor’s private guard came out, followed by a handful of his men. Their swords were bloody. I stared, shocked, bewildered.

“It was the Emperor’s orders,” the captain said at last, in a strangled voice, as if that excused him. “The priests foretold the Emperor’s death this morning.”

“Oh,” I said. Then: “I came to pray.”

“Go ahead, for all the good it will do.” He headed for the door, followed by his men, and they marched down the steps to the street, armor jingling.

I realized then that I had come to pray—to Tokos-Dien. I’d never meant for all this to happen, never meant for Adjaphon to fall or the Emperor to die or Savil to be crippled. I thought of my mother weeping and my brothers and sisters huddled in their beds, waiting for the Heron King’s soldiers to break down the doors to our home.

The anger of a god is a fearsome thing. I shuddered. It seemed mad that Tokos-Dien had done all this because I had refused his calling. I hated him for that pettiness, but I feared him more now and did not dare to speak my hatred. Had I been offered the choice again, I would have gone, and willingly, into the whirlpool to answer my calling and serve him.

This temple, though, had one of the highest towers in the city. I climbed it, carefully avoiding the corpses of priests on the steps. From the top of the tower I could see clearly over Adjaphon’s walls.

On the horizon an army was assembling, columns of troops lining up, the leaders on their horses, others holding aloft the proud banners of Tokos-Dien—I could just make them out—so they fluttered overhead. The mass of soldiers stretched right and left for what seemed like miles. I did not doubt that the Heron King had thirty thousand men or more at his command.

“Stop it,” I whispered. “Stop it and I’ll serve you.”

There was no answer. Somehow, I had expected none.

Throughout the day I stood there and watched the Heron King’s forces gather. The smoke from their campfires darkened the sky. That night, the lights in their camp seemed to wink like a million stars fallen to land.

Then I wept and I prayed and I pleaded with the Tokos-Dien, the god-patron I knew, to spare Adjaphon. And when he did not answer I no longer cursed him. I grew silent and thought about all that had happened. If the Emperor had known I was the cause Adjaphon’s downfall, he would have killed me rather than the priests. It was almost a funny thought. I did not laugh.

* * * *

With dawn came the attack. As men with ladders rushed the walls, as battering-rams attacked all six gates, balls of fire came hurtling into the city from the Heron King’s catapults. Soon flames were leaping everywhere throughout the city.

I could not bear to watch. I turned away, buried my head in my hands, and tried to shut out the sounds of fighting.

Ages passed. The buildings burned and I could hear the crackle of flames and smell the acrid smoke. Bands of the Heron King’s soldiers roved the streets, looting, raping, destroying everything of beauty. Finally the temple itself was on fire. I felt the heat and looked up.

There was a man in a hooded cloak standing before me, leaning on his staff. I could not see his face.

“What do you want of me?” I cried. “What more is there?”

He shook his head. “Adjaphon’s time had come. If you had answered your calling and served Tokos-Dien, it would not have mattered. The god-patron would have found another to deny him, and this city would still be dying, only you would not remember the past or the glory Adjaphon once had.”

I made no answer; there could be no answer. I was just a tool, a pawn in Tokos-Dien’s game. I realized that now. It made me ache inside with a hurt that no amount of time could ever heal.

The god-patron’s servant said, “He calls you now. Will you go with him?”

Slowly, I nodded. Perhaps that would help end the suffering. Perhaps it would spare my parents and my brothers and sisters and my friends some little measure of pain. Perhaps. But I did not think so. Tokos-Dien is not merciful.

* * * *

I am floating down a dark river, and around me are the bodies of the Emperor’s soldiers newly-dead in the battle. The Heron King has won, and perhaps for a time his city will flourish. But Tokos-Dien is quick to bore, and soon he will favor another, and then the Heron King’s lands will fall to a different conqueror and the cycle will start anew.

I weep not for proud Adjaphon, which died a sorrowful death; I weep for Tokos-Dien. Or perhaps I weep for those who now serve him. A god-patron without mercy is a terrible curse.

Perhaps I shall say that to him. I have nothing left to lose. When the whirlpool drags me under, I shall be reborn. Adjaphon will never die so long as I remember her. Perhaps this is not an end, but a beginning. Perhaps the dreamtime will end and all will be reborn.

I doubt it. But we shall see. We shall see.

THE BLACK ABBOT OF PUTHUUM, by Clark Ashton Smith

Let the grape yield for us its purple flame,

And rosy love put off its maidenhood:

By blackening moons, in lands without a name,

We slew the Incubus and all his brood.

— Song of King Hoaraph’s Bowmen

* * * *

Zobal the archer and Cushara the pikebearer had poured many a libation to their friendship in the sanguine liquors of Yoros and the blood of the kingdom’s enemies. In that long and lusty amity, broken only by such passing quarrels as concerned the division of a wine-skin or the apportioning of a wench, they had served amid the soldiery of King Hoaraph for a strenuous decade. Savage warfare and wild, fantastic hazard had been their lot. The renown of their valor had drawn upon them, ultimately, the honor of Hoaraph’s attention, and he had assigned them for duty among the picked warriors that guarded his palace in Faraad. And sometimes the twain were sent together on such missions as required no common hardihood and no disputable fealty to the king.

Now, in company with the eunuch Simban, chief purveyor to Hoaraph’s well-replenished harem, Zobal and Cushara had gone on a tedious journey through the tract known as Izdrel, which clove the western part of Yoros asunder with its rusty-colored wedge of desolation. The king had sent them to learn if haply there abode any verity in certain travelers’ tales, which concerned a young maiden of celestial beauty who had been seen among the pastoral peoples beyond Izdrel. Simban bore at his girdle a bag of gold coins with which, if the girl’s pulchritude should be in any wise commensurate with the renown thereof, he was empowered to bargain for her purchase. The king had deemed that Zobal and Cushara should form an escort equal to all contingencies: for Izdrel was a land reputedly free of robbers, or, indeed, of any human inhabitants. Men said, however, that malign goblins, tall as giants and humped like camels, had oftentimes beset the wayfarers through Izdrel, that fair but ill-meaning lamiae had lured them to an eldritch death. Simban, quaking corpulently in his saddle, rode with small willingness on that outward journey; but the archer and the pike bearer, full of wholesome skepticism, divided their bawdy jests between the timid eunuch and the elusive demons.

Without other mishap than the rupturing of a wine-skin from the force of the new vintage it contained, they came to the verdurous pasture-lands beyond that dreary desert. Here, in low valleys that held the middle meanderings of the river Vos, cattle and dromedaries were kept by a tribe of herders who sent biannual tribute to Hoaraph from their teeming droves. Simban and his companions found the girl, who dwelt with her grandmother in a village beside the Vos; and even the eunuch acknowledged that their journey was well rewarded.

Cushara and Zobal, on their part, were instantly smitten by the charms of the maiden, whose name was Rubalsa. She was slender and of queenly height, and her skin was pale as the petals of white poppies; and the undulant blackness of her heavy hair was full of sullen copper gleamings beneath the sun. While Simban haggled shrilly with the cronelike grandmother, the warriors eyed Rubalsa with circumspect ardor and addressed to her such gallantries as they deemed discreet within hearing of the eunuch.

At last the bargain was driven and the price paid, to the sore depletion of Simban’s moneybag. Simban was now eager to return to Faraad with his prize, and he seemed to have forgotten his fear of the haunted desert. Zobal and Cushara were routed from their dreams by the impatient eunuch before dawn; and the three departed with the still drowsy Rubalsa ere the village could awaken about them.

Noon, with its sun of candent copper in a blackish-blue zenith, found them far amid the rusty sands and iron-toothed ridges of Izdrel. The route they followed was little more than a footpath: for, though Izdrel was but thirty miles in width at that point, few travelers would dare those fiend-infested leagues; and most preferred an immensely circuitous road, used by the herders, that ran to the southward of that evil desolation, following the Vos nearly to its debouchment in the Indaskian Sea.

Cushara, splendid in his plate-armor of bronze, on a huge piebald mare with a cataphract of leather scaled with copper, led the cavalcade. Rubalsa, who wore the red homespun of the herders’ women, followed on a black gelding with silk and silver harness, which Hoaraph had sent for her use. Close behind her came the watchful eunuch, gorgeous in particolored sendal, and mounted ponderously, with swollen saddlebags all about him, on the gray ass of uncertain age which, through his fear of horses and camels, he insisted on riding at all times. In his hand he held the leading-rope of another ass which was nearly crushed to the ground by the wine-skins, water-jugs and other provisions. Zobal guarded the rear, with unslung bow, slim and wiry in his suiting of light chain mail, on a nervous stallion that chafed incessantly at the rein. At his back he bore a quiver filled with arrows which the court sorcerer, Amdok, had prepared with singular spells and dippings in doubtful fluids, for his possible use against demons. Zobal had accepted the arrows courteously but had satisfied himself later that their iron barbs were in no wise impaired by Amdok’s treatment. A similarly ensorceled pike had been offered by Amdok to Cushara, who had refused it bluffly, saying that his own well-tried weapon was equal to the spitting of any number of devils.

Because of Simban and the two asses, the party could make little speed. However, they hoped to cross the wilder and more desolate portion of Izdrel ere night. Simban, though he still eyed the dismal waste dubiously, was plainly more concerned with his precious charge than with the imagined imps and lamiae. And Cushara and Zobal, both rapt in amorous reveries that centered about the luscious Rubalsa, gave only a perfunctory attention to their surroundings.

The girl had ridden all morning in demure silence. Now, suddenly, she cried out in a voice whose sweetness was made shrill by alarm. The others reined their mounts, and Simban babbled questions. To these Rubalsa replied by pointing toward the southern horizon, where, as her companions now saw, a peculiar pitch-black darkness had covered a great portion of the sky and hills, obliterating them wholly. This darkness, which seemed due neither to cloud nor sandstorm, extended itself in a crescent on either hand, and came swiftly toward the travelers. In the course of a minute or less, it had blotted the pathway before and behind them like a black mist; and the two arcs of shadow, racing northward, had flowed together, immuring the party in a circle. The darkness then became stationary, its walls no more than a hundred feet away on every side. Sheer, impenetrable, it surrounded the wayfarers, leaving above them a clear space from which the sun still glared down, remote and small and discolored, as if seen from the bottom of a deep pit.

“Ai! ai! ai!” howled Simban, cowering amid his saddlebags. “I knew well that some devilry would overtake us.”

At the same moment the two asses began to bray loudly, and the horses, with a frantic neighing and squealing, trembled beneath their riders. Only with much cruel spurring could Zobal force his stallion forward beside Cushara’s mare.

“Mayhap it is only some pestilential mist,” said Cushara.

“Never have I seen such mist,” replied Zobal doubtfully. “And there are no vapors to be met with in Izdrel. Methinks it is like the smoke of the seven hells that men fable beneath Zothique.”

“Shall we ride forward?” said Cushara. “I would learn whether or not a pike can penetrate that darkness.”

Calling out some words of reassurance to Rubalsa, the twain sought to spur their mounts toward the murky wall. But, after a few swerving paces, the mare and the stallion balked wildly, sweating and snorting, and would go no farther. Cushara and Zobal dismounted and continued their advance on foot.

Not knowing the source or nature of the phenomenon with which they had to deal, the two approached it warily. Zobal nocked an arrow to his string, and Cushara held the great bronze-headed pike before him as if charging an embattled foe. Both were more and more puzzled by the murkiness, which did not recede before them in the fashion of fog, but maintained its opacity when they were close upon it.

Cushara was about to thrust his weapon into the wall. Then, without the least prelude, there arose in the darkness, seemingly just before him, a horrible, multitudinous clamor as of drums, trumpets, cymbals, jangling armor, jarring voices, and mailed feet that tramped to and fro on the stony ground with a mighty clangor. As Cushara and Zobal drew back in amazement, the clamor swelled and spread, till it filled with a babel of warlike noises the whole circle of mysterious night that hemmed in the travelers.

“VeriIy, we are sore beset,” shouted Cushara to his comrade as they went back to their horses. “It would seem that some king of the north has sent his myrmidons into Yoros.”

“Yea,” said Zobal... “But it is strange that we saw them not ere the darkness came. And the darkness, surely, is no natural thing.”

Before Cushara could make any rejoinder, the martial clashings and shoutings ceased abruptly. All about it seemed that there was a rattling of innumerable sistra, a hissing of countless huge serpents, a raucous hooting of ill-omened birds that had foregathered by thousands. To these indescribably hideous sounds, the horses now added a continual screaming, and the asses a more frenzied braying, above which the outcries of Rubalsa and Simban were scarce audible.

Cushara and Zobal sought vainly to pacify their mounts and comfort the madly frightened girl. It was plain that no army of mortal men had beleaguered them: for the noises still changed from instant to instant, and they heard a most evil howling, and a roaring as of hellborn beasts that deafened them with its volume.

Naught, however, was visible in the gloom, whose circle now began to move swiftly, without widening or contracting. To maintain their position in its center, the warriors and their charges were compelled to leave the path and to flee northwardly amid the harsh ridges and hollows. All around them the baleful noises continued, keeping, as it seemed, the same interval of distance.

The sun, slanting westward, no longer shone into that eerily moving pit, and a deep twilight enveloped the wanderers. Zobal and Cushara rode as closely beside Rubalsa as the rough ground permitted, straining their eyes constantly for any visible sign of the cohorts that seemed to encompass them. Both were filled with the darkest misgivings, for it had become all too manifest that supernatural powers were driving them astray in the untracked desert.

Moment by moment the gross darkness seemed to close in; and there was a palpable eddying and seething as of monstrous forms behind its curtain. The horses stumbled over boulders and outcroppings of ore-sharp stone, and the grievously burdened asses were compelled to put forth an unheard-of speed to keep pace with the ever-shifting circle that menaced them with its horrid clamor. Rubalsa had ceased her outcries, as if overcome by exhaustion or resignation to the horror of her plight; and the shrill screeches of the eunuch had subsided into fearful wheezing and gasping.

Ever and anon, it seemed that great fiery eyes glared out of the gloom, floating close to earth or moving aloft at a gigantic height. Zobal began to shoot his enchanted arrows at these appearance, and the speeding of each bolt was hailed by an appalling outburst of Satanic laughters and ululations.

In such wise they went on, losing all measure of time and sense of orientation. The animals were galled and footsore. Simban was nigh dead from fright and fatigue; Rubalsa drooped in her saddle; and the warriors, awed and baffled by the predicament in which their weapons appeared useless, began to flag with a dull weariness.

“Never again shall I doubt the legendry of Izdrel,” said Cushara gloomily.

“It is in my mind that we have not long either to doubt or believe,” rejoined Zobal.

To add to their distress, the terrain grew rougher and steeper, and they climbed acclivitous hillsides and went down endlessly into drear valleys. Anon they came to a flat, open, pebbly space. There, all at once, it seemed that the pandemonium of evil noises drew back on every hand, receding and fading into faint, dubious whispers that died at a vast remove. Simultaneously, the circling night thinned out, and a few stars shone in the welkin, and the sharp-spined hills of the desert loomed starkly against a vermilion afterglow. The travelers paused and peered wonderingly at one another in a gloom that was no more than that of natural twilight.

“What new devilry is this?” asked Cushara, hardly daring to believe that the hellish leaguers had vanished.

“I know not,” said the archer, who was staring into the dusk.”

“But here, mayhap, is one of the devils.”

The others now saw that a muffled figure was approaching them, bearing a lit lantern made of some kind of translucent horn. At some distance behind the figure, lights appeared suddenly in a square dark mass which none of the party had discerned before. This mass was evidently a large building with many windows.

The figure, drawing near, was revealed by the dim yellowish lantern as a black man of immense girth and tallness, garbed in a voluminous robe of saffron such as was worn by certain monkish orders, and crowned with the two-horned purple hat of an abbot. He was indeed a singular and unlooked-for apparition: for if any monasteries existed amid the barren reaches of Izdrel, they were hidden and unknown to the world. Zobal, however, searching his memory, recalled a vague tradition he had once heard concerning a chapter of negro monks that had flourished in Yoros many centuries ago. The chapter had long been extinct, and the very site of its monastery was forgotten. Nowadays there were few blacks anywhere in the kingdom, other than those who did duty as eunuchs guarding the seraglios of nobles and rich merchants.

The animals began to display a certain uneasiness at the stranger’s approach.

“Who art thou?” challenged Cushara, his fingers tightening on the haft of his weapon.

The black man grinned capaciously, showing rows of discolored teeth whose incisors were like those of a wild dog. His enormous unctuous jowls were creased by the grin into folds of amazing number and volume; and his eyes, deeply slanted and close together, seemed to wink perpetually in pouches that shook like ebon jellies. His nostrils flared prodigiously; his purple, rubbery lips drooled and quivered, and he licked them with a fat, red, salacious tongue before replying to Cushara’s question.