Brackett, Leigh Eric John Stark 01 The Secret of Sinharat

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cornices of buildings far across the city.
Stark caught Fianna's arm. "What is it?"
"The voices of the Ramas."
He said roughly, "Make sense."
She shrugged. "So all Drylanders believe. That is why they hate to come
here. But others have said that it is only the wind that sings in the hollow
coral."
Stark understood. The massive coral pedestal on which the city stood
was indeed a vast honeycomb of tiny air-passages, and the wind forcing
up through them could create this eerie effect.
"No wonder your barbarians don't like it," he muttered. "I'm a
barbarian. I don't like it."
They went through streets that ran like topless tunnels between the
walls and the towers that reached impossibly thin and tall into the evening
sky. Some of them had lost their upper stories, and some had fallen
entirely, but in the main they were still beautiful, the colors of the marble
still lovely. And as the wind changed, the singing voices of Sinharat
changed with it. Sometimes those voices were soft and gentle, murmuring
about everlasting youth and its pleasures. And then they became strong
and fierce with pride, crying You die, but I do not! Sometimes they swelled
up, mad, laughing and hateful. But always their song was subtly evil.
In the outside world, even in Valkis, the Ramas had been only a legend,
a shadowy tradition that a clever barbarian was using to give glamor to
his leadership. But here in Sinharat, the Ramas seemed very real, and he
began to understand why all this world in the long ago had feared them,
and hated them, and envied them.
Fianna led him toward the western battlement of the high city, a point
a little distance away from the great stair. She took him into a building
that loomed in the gathering darkness like a white dream-castle, and
along a hallway where flaring torches in sockets threw a shaking light over
the caravan dancing-girls that seemed in that illumination to be moving
along the walls. She opened a door and stepped aside for Stark to enter.
The room was low and long, and the soft glow that lighted it came from
lamps with shades of alabaster as thin as paper. Berild came toward him,
but not the Berild of the desert. She wore a jewelled girdle, and a wide
collar of green jewels above her breasts, and a white cloak hanging from
her shoulders. "I hate that gloomy ruin where Kynon holds his councils,"
she said. "This is better. Do you think it was the apartment of a queen?"
"It is now," said Stark.
Her eyes softened. He took her by the shoulders, and her mocking smile
flashed and she said, "But if I am a queen, I am not for you, wild man."
Then, with a startling abruptness, the smile left her face and she put his
hands away. "There is no time for this," she said. "I sent for you to speak
of danger. You may not live out this night."
"If you wanted to take my mind off you," said Stark, "that statement is
just the thing to do it."
His grim humor awakened no answer in her sober face. She took his
hand and led him to an open window.
This westward face of the building rose sheer from the edge of the coral
cliff. Out beyond the window stretched the vastness of the deepening
Martian night, with no moons yet up but a great vault of stars tenting the
desert. A little to the left, down at the base of the cliff, were the torches of
the camp, winking and shaking in the wind.
Up from beneath them came the murmurous whistling, piping voices of
the wind in the hollow coral. But also there came the sounds of the camp,
of squealing beasts, of a voice bawling an order, of picket-pins being
driven deeper.
"Kynon is there," said Berild. "He waits to welcome Delgaun and the
others from Valkis, who arrive tonight."
The skin between Stark's shoulders tightened slightly. The crisis had
come sooner than he expected.
He shrugged. "Well, then, Delgaun is coming. I wasn't afraid of him in
Valkis, and I don't fear him here."
Berild looked at him steadily. "Fear him," she said. "I know Delgaun."
Their faces were only inches apart and there was something in hers
that he had glimpsed there once before.
"How can you know him so well?" he asked. "You're a Shunni woman,
and he is a Valkis."
"Do you think Kynon hasn't been plotting with Delgaun for months?"
she demanded impatiently. "Do you think I can watch a man all those
times and not know whether he is dangerous?"
"Your concern for me is moving, Berild," said Stark. "That is if it's
sincere."
He half-expected her to flare out at him for that, but she did not. She
looked at him levelly, and said, "You're strong. And it may be that I shall
need a strong man at my side."
"To protect you? But you have Kynon!"
Berild said impatiently, "I need no one to protect me. As for Kynon, I
come always second with him, and his ambitions first. He would put me
aside without a thought, if it helped to realize his plans of conquest."
"And you don't intend to be put aside," said Stark.
Her eyes flashed. "I do not."
"So, the wild man may be useful," said Stark. "I'll say this for you,
Berild you have a certain honesty that I admire."
She smiled wickedly. "It's only the least of my attractions."
Stark thought for a moment. "When Delgaun arrives, will the tribesmen
down there come up into Sinharat with him and Kynon?"
Berild nodded. "Yes, for this night Kynon is to raise his standard. For
that, they'll come even though they have a superstitious fear of this
place."
He looked at her curiously, and said, "You talk of tribesmen's
superstitions yet you yourself are a woman of the Shunni."
"Yes. But I do not believe what they believe. Kynon taught me
better he had education, in outland places, and I learned from him."
"You didn't learn ambition from him," said Stark.
"No," she said. "I'm tired of being just another woman. I too would like
to hold a world between my hands."
Looking at her, it came to Stark that Ashton might have more to fear
than he knew, that this woman might be as great a threat to the peace of
Mars as Kynon and Delgaun.
Of a sudden, the cold night wind brought through the open window a
sound of excited voices from the encampment underneath the cliff.
Stark and Berild went to the window. Far out in the darkness of the
desert there were little points of ruddy light that moved in a long line
toward Sinharat.
Drums suddenly boomed hoarsely down in the camp below, drowning
with their clamor the piping of the wind in the coral. Torches sprang to
light between the tents, and the drums grew louder.
"Delgaun has come," said Berild.
"And I must go," said Stark.
He turned and went out of the room. In the corridor of the carven
dancing-girls, he came face to face with Fianna.
"You were listening," he said.
She did not deny it. "I hate to see foolish beasts run their throats
toward the knife," she said. "So I have a word for you, Eric John Stark."
"Yes?"
"Don't trust Berild too far. She is not all she seems."
Fianna paused, and then in a whisper, she added, "Did you ever think
that all of the Ramas of old might not be dead?"
All the half-formed, vague suspicions that had haunted Stark since the
desert surged up in a cold tide within him. He grasped for her,
demanding, "What do you mean?"
But Fianna eluded him, and was gone like a shadow. After a moment,
he turned and went out into the dark, silent street.
The drums were echoing across dead Sinharat, but as Stark went
through the streets it seemed to him that above them he could hear,
louder than ever before, the mocking sounds, the pipings and fluting and
whisperings, that seemed to echo from the past.
XI
SHATTERING THE NIGHT, light and sound crashed up the grand
stairway of Sinharat. First came massed torch-bearers, holding their
flaring brands high. Then the thundering skin drums and shrilling pipes, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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