Collected fiction, p.327
Collected Fiction, page 327
The room was empty. The wall that faced him was not a wall. It was, he thought, a curtain of black cobwebs that hung from ceiling to floor. Or it was a tapestry of darkness, intangible, shifting—more of Morgan’s magic.
Damn Morgan, anyway!
Woodley marched forward. Out of the dark curtain two armored knights came pacing, visors concealing their faces. They lifted their swords in grim silence.
Woodley grinned. He had held his own against Sir Bohart—this would be no pigsticking, anyway. He’d give Morgan some trouble before she destroyed him.
He did not wait for the attack; he ran in, lightly as a cat, feinting at one of the knights. A reasonless confidence seemed to distill in him from the feel of the sword against his hand. Arthur must have felt like this, long ago, when he held Excalibur—As the knight’s brand swept down Woodley, unencumbered by heavy armor, sprang aside, and his sword point slipped through the bars of the knight’s visor. It stuck there, trapped by bone.
The other attacker cut at Woodley. There was no time to recover a sword; his own was stuck beyond retrieving and the other man’s had shattered to flinders against the stone floor. Woodley felt pain bite into his arm. He hurled himself forward, grappling with the cold, unyielding steel of the body before him, fumbling for the dagger at his belt. Almost of its own volition his heel hooked behind the other’s ankle. They crashed down together, armor thundering.
Woodley’s dagger grated across steel and found that vulnerable spot beneath the arm where the cuirass always fails its wearer. The sharp blade sank and rose and sank again.
Woodley tore the sword from the dying knight’s hand and leaped up. Out of the dark curtain of cobweb a serpent came sliding, coil upon shining coil. A point of light danced above its head. Morgan’s emblem—Morgan’s familiar.
Woodley did not wait for the great coils to loop him—and they were not proof against the sword he wielded. The snake’s thick blood poured through its gashed side as it threw itself about him, bruising, tremendous. Woodley hacked blindly.
The flags were slippery with blood when he rose from the loosening folds of the serpent above whose head the star no longer trembled.
On unsteady legs Woodley went forward to meet a laughing, crimson thing that was hideously anthropomorphic. He left it more crimson still, but no longer laughing. And this time nothing else emerged from the veil.
Beyond there was only a faint crimson glow through which shapeless shadows loomed. Dimly in the red dark he saw Morgan at the end of the room rising from a table. Bleys sat across from her, lifting a pale, incredulous face as he saw Woodley. He was apparently unharmed as yet, but Bleys did not speak.
Morgan turned her terrible gaze upon the newcomer. As always, Woodley’s eyes slipped away. He could not meet it. But he saw that her strange, lovely face was expressionless. She was not afraid. Of course not. Nothing could harm her—
He moved forward in the gloom, lifting his sword. Morgan’s hand rose, and the blade crumbled in his grasp. Woodley stared down stupidly, a dull anger brightening in his mind behind the pain and the despair. He tore out his dagger and lurched forward.
Morgan’s hand rose again, and the dagger fell to dust.
Now he stood unarmed, facing Morgan across the gulf of crimson shadows. But the confidence that had distilled from the feel of the sword in his hand remained. He was not afraid. His courage and strength had not lain in the blade alone.
He took a long step forward into the dimness. Morgan burned white a dozen yards away, blotting out everything else. The glimmer of her pale throat made his fingers twitch unconsciously. He stumbled another step forward.
At his knee in the gloom something bulky touched him. He looked down. It was a stone anvil, and a sword stood embedded deep in the stone.
A weapon! A weapon against Morgan. He though of no more than that as his fingers curled lovingly about the jeweled hilt. There was a moment of hesitation before the blade slid free, and the hilt quivered in his palm as if it were alive.
But when he swung the sword up shoulder high it was as if he lifted a suddenly flaming torch.
The man who held Excalibur stood motionless, squinting against the brilliance of his own weapon, feeling the power that had once gone coursing through Arthur Pendragon’s veins flooding his own. The white blaze of Cut-Steel routed the shadows of the room. Bleys slipped down from his stool and knelt, head bowed to that strong pale fire.
There was utter silence.
Then Morgan said; “You have come again, my enemy. No magic of mine has power over you now. The lake is no longer a prison for you. Your star rises. The sword Excalibur is drawn again to save England, and it will not fail.” Her calm voice deepened a little, revengefully. “But you will not live to take joy in your triumph, Arthur, my enemy! The touch of Excalibur’s hilt is as deadly as the touch of its blade. When all is won, on some dark tomorrow, you shall die.”
The sword was a flame of living light. The man who held it did not answer for a moment. Then—“Yes,” he said, very softly. “But you shall die today.”
He moved forward.
THE END.
CLASH BY NIGHT
THE whole system of which he was a part was doomed, he knew—a mercenary army that fought other mercenary armies for cities that lay beneath the seas of Venus. Yet—there was a fascination and a reasonless loyalty to that futile system that held him.
INTRODUCTION
A half mile beneath the shallow Venusian Sea the black impervium dome that protects Montana Keep rests frowningly on the bottom. Within the Keep is carnival, for the Montanans celebrate the four-hundred-year anniversary of Earthman’s landing on Venus. Under the great dome that houses the city all is light and color and gaiety. Masked men and women, bright in celoflex and silks, wander through the broad streets, laughing, drinking the strong native wines of Venus. The sea bottom has been combed like the hydroponic tanks, for rare delicacies to grace the tables of the nobles.
Through the festival grim shadows stalk, men whose faces mark them unmistakably as members of a Free Company. Their finery cannot disguise that stamp, hard-won through years of battle. Under the domino masks their mouths are hard and harsh. Unlike the undersea dwellers, their skins are burned black with the ultraviolet rays that filter through the cloud layer of Venus. They are skeletons at the feast. They are respected but resented. They are Free Companions—
We are on Venus, nine hundred years ago, beneath the Sea of Shoals, not much north of the equator. But there is a wide range in time and space. All over the cloud planet the underwater Keeps are dotted, and life will not change for many centuries. Looking back, as we do now, from the civilized days of the Thirty-fourth Century, it is too easy to regard the men of the Keeps as savages, groping, stupid and brutal. The Free Companies have long since vanished. The islands and continents of Venus have been tamed, and there is no war.
But in periods of transition, of desperate rivalry, there is always war. The Keeps fought among themselves, each striving to draw the fangs of the others by depriving them of their reserves of korium, the power source of the day. Students of that era find pleasure in sifting the legends and winnowing out the basic social and geopolitical truths. It is fairly well known that only one factor saved the Keeps from annihilating one another—the gentlemen’s agreement that left war to the warriors, and allowed the undersea cities to develop their science and social cultures. That particular compromise was, perhaps, inevitable. And it caused the organization of the Free Companies, the roving bands of mercenaries, highly trained for their duties, who hired themselves out to fight for whatever Keeps were attacked or unshed to attack.
Ap Towrn, in his monumental “Cycle of Venus” tells the saga through symbolic legends. Many historians have recorded the sober truth, which, unfortunately, seems often Mars-dry. But it is not generally realized that the Free Companions were almost directly responsible for our present high culture. War, because of them, was not permitted to usurp the place of peace-time social and scientific work. Fighting was highly specialized, and, because of technical advances, manpower was no longer important. Each band of Free Companions numbered a few thousand, seldom more.
It was a strange, lonely life they must have led, shut out from the normal life of the Keeps. They were vestigian but necessary, like the fangs of the marsupians who eventually evolved into Homo sapiens. But without those warriors, the Keeps would have been plunged completely into total war, with fatally destructive results.
Harsh, gallant, indomitable, serving the god of battles so that it might be destroyed—working toward their own obliteration—the Free Companies roar down the pages of history, the banner of Mars streaming above them in the misty air of Venus. They were doomed as Tyrannosaur Rex was doomed, and they fought on as he did, serving, in their strange way, the shape of Minerva that stood behind Mars.
Now they are gone. We can learn much by studying the place they held in the Undersea Period. For, because of them, civilization rose again to the heights it had once reached on Earth, and far beyond.
“These lords shall light the mystery
Of mastery or victory,
And these ride high in history,
But these shall not return.”
The Free Companions hold their place in interplanetary literature. They are a legend now, archaic and strange. For they were fighters, and war has gone with unification. But we can understand them a little more than could the people of the Keeps.
This story, built on legends and fact, is about a typical warrior of the period—Captain Brian Scott of Doone’s Free Companions. He may never have existed—
I.
O, it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’
“Tommy, go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mr. Atkins when the
band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band
begins to play—
O, it’s “Thank you, Mr. Atkins” when the
band begins to play.
—R. Kipling circa 1900
Scott drank stinging uisqueplus and glowered across the smoky tavern. He was a hard, stocky man, with thick gray-shot brown hair and the scar of an old wound crinkling his chin. He was thirty-odd, looking like the veteran he was, and he had sense enough to wear a plain suit of blue celoflex, rather than the garish silks and rainbow fabrics that were all around him.
Outside, through the transparent walls, a laughing throng was carried to and fro along the movable ways. But in the tavern it was silent, except for the low voice of a harpman as he chanted some old ballad, accompanying himself on his complicated instrument. The song came to an end. There was scattered applause, and from the hot-box overhead the blaring music of an orchestra burst out. Instantly the restraint was gone. In the booths and at the bar men and women began to laugh and talk with casual unrestraint. Couples were dancing now.
The girl beside Scott, a slim, tan-skinned figure with glossy black ringlets cascading to her shoulders, turned inquiring eyes to him.
“Want to, Brian?”
Scott’s mouth twisted in a wry grimace. “Suppose so, Jeana. Eh?” He rose, and she came gracefully into his arms. Brian did not dance too well, but what he lacked in practice he made up in integration. Jeana’s heart-shaped face, with its high cheekbones and vividly crimson lips, lifted to him.
“Forget Bienne. He’s just trying to ride you.”
Scott glanced toward a distant booth, where two girls sat with a man—Commander Fredric Bienne of the Doones. He was a gaunt, tall, bitter-faced man, his regular features twisted into a perpetual sneer, his eyes somber under heavy dark brows. He was pointing, now, toward the couple on the floor.
“I know,” Scott said. “He’s doing it, too. Well, the hell with him. So I’m a captain now and he’s still a commander. That’s tough. Next time he’ll obey orders and not send his ship out of the line, trying to ram.”
“That was it, eh?” Jeana asked. “I wasn’t sure. There’s plenty of talk.”
“There always is. Oh, Bienne’s hated me for years. I reciprocate. We simply don’t get on together. Never did. Every time I got a promotion, he chewed his nails. Figured he had a longer service record than I had, and deserved to move up faster. But he’s too much of an individualist—at the wrong times.”
“He’s drinking a lot,” Jeana said.
“Let him. Three months we’ve been in Montana Keep. The boys get tired of inaction—being treated like this.” Scott nodded toward the door, where a Free Companion was arguing with the keeper. “No noncoms allowed in here. Well, the devil with it.”
They could not hear the conversation above the hubbub, but its importance was evident. Presently the soldier shrugged, his mouth forming a curse, and departed. A fat man in scarlet silks shouted encouragement.
“—want any . . . Companions here!”
Scott saw Commander Bienne, his eyes half closed, get up and walk toward the fat man’s booth. His shoulder moved in an imperceptible shrug. The hell with civilians, anyhow. Serve the lug right if Bienne smashed his greasy face. And that seemed the probable outcome. For the fat man was accompanied by a girl, and obviously wasn’t going to back down, though Bienne, standing too close to him, was saying something insulting, apparently.
The auxiliary hot-box snapped some quick syllables, lost in the general tumult. But Scott’s trained ear caught the words. He nodded to Jeana, made a significant clicking noise with his tongue, and said, “This is it.”
She, too, had heard. She let Scott go. He headed toward the fat man’s booth just in time to see the beginning of a brawl. The civilian, red as a turkey cock, had struck out suddenly, landing purely by accident on Bienne’s gaunt cheek. The commander, grinning tightly, stepped back a pace, his fist clenching. Scott caught the other’s arm.
“Hold it, commander.”
Bienne swung around, glaring. “What business is it of yours? Let—”
The fat man, seeing his opponent’s attention distracted, acquired more courage and came in swinging. Scott reached past Bienne, planted his open hand in the civilian’s face, and pushed hard. The fat man almost fell backward on his table.
As he rebounded, he saw a gun in Scott’s hand. The captain said curtly, “ ’Tend to your knitting, mister.”
The civilian licked his lips, hesitated, and sat down. Under his breath he muttered something about too-damn-cocky Free Companions.
Bienne was trying to break free, ready to swing on the captain. Scott holstered his gun. “Orders,” he told the other, jerking his head toward the hot-box. “Get it?”
“—mobilization. Doonemen report to headquarters. Captain Scott to Administration. Immediate mobilization—”
“Oh,” Bienne said, though he still scowled. “O.K. I’ll take over. There was time for me to take a crack at that louse, though.”
“You know what instant mobilization means,” Scott grunted. “We may have to leave at an instant’s notice. Orders, commander.”
Bienne saluted halfheartedly and turned away. Scott went back to his own booth. Jeana had already gathered her purse and gloves and was applying lip juice.
She met his eyes calmly enough.
“I’ll be at the apartment, Brian. Luck.”
He kissed her briefly, conscious of a surging excitement at the prospect of a new venture. Jeana understood his emotion. She gave him a quick, wry smile, touched his hair lightly, and rose. They went out into the gay tumult of the ways.
Perfumed wind blew into Scott’s face. He wrinkled his nose disgustedly. During carnival seasons the Keeps were less pleasant to the Free Companions than otherwise; they felt more keenly the gulf that lay between them and the undersea dwellers. Scott pushed his way through the crowd and took Jeana across the ways to the center fast-speed strip. They found seats.
At a clover-leaf intersection Scott left the girl, heading toward Administration, the cluster of taller buildings in the city’s center. The technical and political headquarters were centered here, except for the laboratories’, which were in the suburbs near the base of the Dome. There were a few small test-domes a mile or so distant from the city, but these were used only for more precarious experiments. Glancing up, Scott was reminded of the catastrophe that had unified science into something like a freemasonry. Above him, hanging without gravity over a central plaza, was the globe of the Earth, half shrouded by the folds of a black plastic pall. In every Keep on Venus there was a similar ever-present reminder of the lost mother planet.
Scott’s gaze went up farther, to the Dome, as though he could penetrate the impervium and the mile-deep layer of water and the clouded atmosphere to the white star that hung in space, one quarter as brilliant as the Sun. A star—all that remained of Earth, since atomic power had been unleashed there two centuries ago. The scourge had spread like flame, melting continents and leveling mountains. In the libraries there were wire-tape pictorial records of the Holocaust. A religious cult—Men of the New Judgment-had sprung up, and advocated the complete destruction of science; followers of that dogma still existed here and there. But the cult’s teeth had been drawn when technicians unified, outlawing experiments with atomic power forever, making use of that force punishable by death, and permitting no one to join their society without taking the Minervan Oath.
“—to work for the ultimate good of mankind . . . taking all precaution against harming humanity and science . . . requiring permission from those in authority before undertaking any experiment involving peril to the race . . . remembering always the extent of the trust placed in us and remembering forever the death of the mother planet through misuse of knowledge—”
The Earth. A strange sort of world it must have been, Scott thought. Sunlight, for one thing, unfiltered by the cloud layer. In the old days, there had been few unexplored areas left on Earth. But here on Venus, where the continents had not yet been conquered—there was no need, of course, since everything necessary to life could be produced under the Domes—here on Venus, there was still a frontier. In the Keeps, a highly specialized social culture. Above the surface, a primeval world, where only the Free Companions had their fortresses and navies—the navies for fighting, the forts to house the technicians who provided the latter-day sinews of war, science instead of money. The Keeps tolerated visits from the Free Companions, but would not offer them headquarters, so violent the feeling, so sharp the schism, in the public mind, between war and cultural progress.
