Lorelei of the Red Mist - 3

Beudag stood like a bronze spear, her forearms crossed beneath her bare
sharp breasts. Two of Rann's palace guards stood behind her.
Starke began to walk toward Rann.
She watched him come. She let him get close enough to reach out and
touch her, and then she said slyly, "It's a good body, isn't it?"
* * * * *
Starke looked at her for a moment. Then he laughed. He threw back his
head and roared, and struck the great corded muscles of his belly with
his fist. Presently he looked straight into Rann's eyes and said:
"I know you."
She nodded. "We know each other. Sit down, Hugh Starke." She swung her
long legs over to make room, half erect now, looking at Beudag. Starke
sat down. He did not look at Beudag.
Rann said, "Will your people surrender now?"
Beudag did not move, not even her eyelids. "If Faolan is dead--yes."
"And if he's not?"
Beudag stiffened. Starke did too.
"Then," said Beudag quietly, "they'll wait."
"Until he is?"
"Or until they must surrender."
Rann nodded. To the guards she said, "See that this woman is well fed
and well treated."
Beudag and her escort had turned to go when Starke said, "Wait." The
guards looked at Rann, who nodded, and glanced quizzically at Starke.
Starke said:
"Is Faolan dead?"
Rann hesitated. Then she smiled. "No. You have the most damnably tough
mind, Starke. You struck deep, but not deep enough. He may still die,
but.... No, he's not dead." She turned to Beudag and said with easy
mockery, "You needn't hold anger against Starke. I'm the one who should
be angry." Her eyes came back to Starke. They didn't look angry.
Starke said, "There's something else. Conan--the Conan that used to
be, before Falga."
"Beudag's Conan."
"Yeah. Why did he betray his people?"
Rann studied him. Her strange pale lips curved, her sharp white teeth
glistening wickedly with barbed humor. Then she turned to Beudag.
Beudag was still standing like a carved image, but her smooth muscles
were ridged with tension, and her eyes were not the eyes of an image.
"Conan or Starke," said Rann, "she's still Beudag, isn't she? All
right, I'll tell you. Conan betrayed his people because I put it into
his mind to do it. He fought me. He made a good fight of it. But he
wasn't quite as tough as you are, Starke."
There was a silence. For the first time since entering the room, Hugh
Starke looked at Beudag. After a moment she sighed and lifted her chin
and smiled, a deep, faint smile. The guards walked out beside her, but
she was more erect and lighter of step than either of them.
"Well," said Rann, when they were gone, "and what about you,
Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan."
"Have I any choice?"
"I always keep my bargains."
"Then give me my dough and let me clear the hell out of here."
"Sure that's what you want?"
"That's what I want."
"You could stay a while, you know."
"With you."
Rann lifted her frosty-white shoulders. "I'm not promising half my
kingdom, or even part of it. But you might be amused."
"I got no sense of humor."
"Don't you even want to see what happens to Crom Dhu?"
Starke got up. He said savagely, "The hell with Crom Dhu."
"And Beudag."
"And Beudag." He stopped, then fixed Rann with uncompromising yellow
eyes. "No. Not Beudag. What are you going to do to her?"
"Nothing."
"Don't give me that."
"I say again, nothing. Whatever is done, her own people will do."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that little Dagger-in-the-Sheath will be rested, cared for, and
fattened, for a few days. Then I shall take her aboard my own ship and
join the fleet before Crom Dhu. Beudag will be made quite comfortable
at the masthead, where her people can see her plainly. She will stay
there until the Rock surrenders. It depends on her own people how long
she stays. She'll be given water. Not much, but enough."
Starke stared at her. He stared at her a long time. Then he spat
deliberately on the floor and said in a perfectly flat voice: "How soon
can I get out of here?"
Rann laughed, a small casual chuckle. "Humans," she said, "are so
damned queer. I don't think I'll ever understand them." She reached out
and struck a gong that stood in a carved frame beside the couch. The
soft deep shimmering note had a sad quality of nostalgia. Rann lay back
against the silken cushions and sighed.
"Goodbye, Hugh Starke."
A pause. Then, regretfully:
"Goodbye--Conan!"
* * * * *
They had made good time along the rim of the Red Sea. One of Rann's
galleys had taken them to the edge of the Southern Ocean and left them
on a narrow shingle beach under the cliffs. From there they had climbed
to the rimrock and gone on foot--Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan and four of
Rann's arrogant shining men. They were supposed to be guide and escort.
They were courteous, and they kept pace uncomplainingly though Starke
marched as though the devil were pricking his heels. But they were
armed, and Starke was not.
Sometimes, very faintly. Starke was aware of Rann's mind touching his
with the velvet delicacy of a cat's paw. Sometimes he started out of
his sleep with her image sharp in his mind, her lips touched with the
mocking, secret smile. He didn't like that. He didn't like it at all.
But he liked even less the picture that stayed with him waking or
sleeping. The picture he wouldn't look at. The picture of a tall woman
with hair like loose fire on her neck, walking on light proud feet
between her guards.
She'll be given water, Rann said. Not much, but enough.
Starke gripped the solid squareness of the box that held his million
credits and set the miles reeling backward from under his sandals.
On the fifth night one of Rann's men spoke quietly across the campfire.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we'll reach the pass."
Starke got up and went away by himself, to the edge of the rimrock that
fell sheer to the burning sea. He sat down. The red fog wrapped him
like a mist of blood. He thought of the blood on Beudag's breast the
first time he saw her. He thought of the blood on his knife, crusted
and dried. He thought of the blood poured rank and smoking into the
gutters of Crom Dhu. The fog has to be red, he thought. Of all the
goddam colors in the universe, it has to be red. Red like Beudag's hair.
He held out his hands and looked at them, because he could still feel
the silken warmth of that hair against his skin. There was nothing
there now but the old white scars of another man's battles.
He set his fists against his temples and wished for his old body back
again--the little stunted abortion that had clawed and scratched its
way to survival through sheer force of mind. A most damnably tough
mind, Rann had said. Yeah. It had had to be tough. But a mind was a
mind. It didn't have emotions. It just figured out something coldly
and then went ahead and never questioned, and it controlled the body
utterly, because the body was only the worthless machinery that carried
the mind around. Worthless. Yeah. The few women he'd ever looked at
had told him that--and he hadn't even minded much. The old body hadn't
given him any trouble.
He was having trouble now.
Starke got up and walked.
Tomorrow we reach the pass.
Tomorrow we go away from the Red Sea. There are nine planets and the
whole damn Belt. There are women on all of them. All shapes, colors,
and sizes, human, semi-human, and God knows what. With a million
credits a guy could buy half of them, and with Conan's body he could
buy the rest. What's a woman, anyway? Only a....
_Water. She'll be given water. Not much, but enough._
Conan reached out and took hold of a spire of rock, and his muscles
stood out like knotted ropes. "Oh God," he whispered, "what's the
matter with me?"
"_Love._"
It wasn't God who answered. It was Rann. He saw her plainly in his
mind, heard her voice like a silver bell.
"Conan was a man, Hugh Starke. He was whole, body and heart and brain.
He knew how to love, and with him it wasn't women, but one woman--and
her name was Beudag. I broke him, but it wasn't easy. I can't break
you."
Starke stood for a long, long time. He did not move, except that he
trembled. Then he took from his belt the box containing his million
credits and threw it out as far as he could over the cliff edge. The
red mist swallowed it up. He did not hear it strike the surface of the
sea. Perhaps in that sea there was no splashing. He did not wait to
find out.
He turned back along the rimrock, toward a place where he remembered
a cleft, or chimney, leading down. And the four shining men who wore
Rann's harness came silently out of the heavy luminous night and ringed
him in. Their sword-points caught sharp red glimmers from the sky.
Starke had nothing on him but a kilt and sandals, and a cloak of
tight-woven spider-silk that shed the rain.
"Rann sent you?" he said.
The men nodded.
"To kill me?"
Again they nodded. The blood drained out of Starke's face, leaving it
grey and stony under the bronze. His hand went to his throat, over the
gold fastening of his cloak.
The four men closed in like dancers.
* * * * *
Starke loosed his cloak and swung it like a whip across their faces. It
confused them for a second, for a heartbeat--no more, but long enough.
Starke left two of them to tangle their blades in the heavy fabric and
leaped aside. A sharp edge slipped and turned along his ribs, and then
he had reached in low and caught a man around the ankles, and used the
thrashing body for a flail.
The body was strangely light, as though the bones in it were no more
than rigid membrane, like a fish.
If he had stayed to fight, they would have finished him in seconds.
They were fighting men, and quick. But Starke didn't stay. He gained
his moment's grace and used it. They were hard on his heels, their
points all but pricking his back as he ran, but he made it. Along the
rimrock, out along a narrow tongue that jutted over the sea, and then
outward, far outward, into red fog and dim fire that rolled around his
plummeting body.
Oh God, he thought, if I guessed wrong and there _is_ a beach....
The breath tore out of his lungs. His ears cracked, went dead. He held
his arms out beyond his head, the thumbs locked together, his neck
braced forward against the terrific upward push. He struck the surface
of the sea.
There was no splash.
Dim coiling fire that drifted with infinite laziness around him,
caressing his body with slow, tingling sparks. A feeling of lightness,
as though his flesh had become one with the drifting fire. A sense
of suffocation that had no basis in fact and gave way gradually to
a strange exhilaration. There was no shock of impact, no crushing
pressure. Merely a cushioning softness, like dropping into a bed of
compressed air. Starke felt himself turning end over end, pinwheel
fashion, and then that stopped, so that he sank quietly and without
haste to the bottom.
Or rather, into the crystalline upper reaches of what seemed to be a
forest.
He could see it spreading away along the downward-sloping floor of the
ocean, into the vague red shadows of distance. Slender fantastic trunks
upholding a maze of delicate shining branches, without leaves or fruit.
They were like trees exquisitely molded from ice, transparent, holding
the lambent shifting fire of the strange sea. Starke didn't think they
were, or ever had been, alive. More like coral, he thought, or some
vagary of mineral deposit. Beautiful, though. Like something you'd see
in a dream. Beautiful, silent, and somehow deadly.
He couldn't explain that feeling of deadliness. Nothing moved in
the red drifts between the trunks. It was nothing about the trees
themselves. It was just something he sensed.
He began to move among the upper branches, following the downward drop
of the slope.
He found that he could swim quite easily. Or perhaps it was more like
flying. The dense gas buoyed him up, almost balancing the weight of
his body, so that it was easy to swoop along, catching a crystal branch
and using it as a lever to throw himself forward to the next one.
He went deeper and deeper into the heart of the forbidden Southern
Ocean. Nothing stirred. The fairy forest stretched limitless ahead. And
Starke was afraid.
Rann came into his mind abruptly. Her face, clearly outlined, was full
of mockery.
"I'm going to watch you die, Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan. But before you
die, I'll show you something. Look."
Her face dimmed, and in its place was Crom Dhu rising bleak into the
red fog, the longships broken and sunk in the harbor, and Rann's fleet
around it in a shining circle.
One ship in particular. The flagship. The vision in Starke's mind
rushed toward it, narrowed down to the masthead platform. To the woman
who stood there, naked, erect, her body lashed tight with thin cruel
cords.
A woman with red hair blowing in the slow wind, and blue eyes that
looked straight ahead like a falcon's, at Crom Dhu.
Beudag.
Rann's laughter ran across the picture and blurred it like a ripple of
ice-cold water.
"You'd have done better," she said, "to take the clean steel when I
offered it to you."
She was gone, and Starke's mind was as empty and cold as the mind of a
corpse. He found that he was standing still, clinging to a branch, his
face upturned as though by some blind instinct, his sight blurred.
He had never cried before in all his life, nor prayed.
There was no such thing as time, down there in the smoky shadows of the
sea bottom. It might have been minutes or hours later that Hugh Starke
discovered he was being hunted.
* * * * *
There were three of them, slipping easily among the shining branches.
They were pale golden, almost phosphorescent, about the size of large
hounds. Their eyes were huge, jewel-like in their slim sharp faces.
They possessed four members that might have been legs and arms,
retracted now against their arrowing bodies. Golden membranes spread
wing-like from head to flank, and they moved like wings, balancing
expertly the thrust of the flat, powerful tails.
They could have closed in on him easily, but they didn't seem to be
in any hurry. Starke had sense enough not to wear himself out trying
to get away. He kept on going, watching them. He discovered that the
crystal branches could be broken, and he selected himself one with
a sharp forked tip, shoving it swordwise under his belt. He didn't
suppose it would do much good, but it made him feel better.
He wondered why the things didn't jump him and get it over with. They
looked hungry enough, the way they were showing him their teeth.
But they kept about the same distance away, in a sort of crescent
formation, and every so often the ones on the outside would make a
tentative dart at him, then fall back as he swerved away. It wasn't
like being hunted so much as....
Starke's eyes narrowed. He began suddenly to feel much more afraid than
he had before, and he wouldn't have believed that possible.
The things weren't hunting him at all. They were herding him.
There was nothing he could do about it. He tried stopping, and they
swooped in and snapped at him, working expertly together so that while
he was trying to stab one of them with his clumsy weapon, the others
were worrying his heels like sheepdogs at a recalcitrant wether.
Starke, like the wether, bowed to the inevitable and went where he was
driven. The golden hounds showed their teeth in animal laughter and
sniffed hungrily at the thread of blood he left behind him in the slow
red coils of fire.
After a while he heard the music.
It seemed to be some sort of a harp, with a strange quality of
vibration in the notes. It wasn't like anything he'd ever heard before.
Perhaps the gas of which the sea was composed was an extraordinarily
good conductor of sound, with a property of diffusion that made the
music seem to come from everywhere at once--softly at first, like
something touched upon in a dream, and then, as he drew closer to the
source, swelling into a racing, rippling flood of melody that wrapped
itself around his nerves with a demoniac shiver of ecstasy.
The golden hounds began to fret with excitement, spreading their
shining wings, driving him impatiently faster through the crystal
branches.
Starke could feel the vibration growing in him--the very fibres of his
muscles shuddering in sympathy with the unearthly harp. He guessed
there was a lot of the music he couldn't hear. Too high, too low for
his ears to register. But he could feel it.
He began to go faster, not because of the hounds, but because he wanted
to. The deep quivering in his flesh excited him. He began to breathe
harder, partly because of increased exertion, and some chemical quality
of the mixture he breathed made him slightly drunk.
The thrumming harp-song stroked and stung him, waking a deeper, darker
music, and suddenly he saw Beudag clearly--half-veiled and mystic in
the candle light at Faolan's dun; smooth curving bronze, her hair loose
fire about her throat. A great stab of agony went through him. He
called her name, once, and the harp-song swept it up and away, and then
suddenly there was no music any more, and no forest, and nothing but
cold embers in Starke's heart.
He could see everything quite clearly in the time it took him to float
from the top of the last tree to the floor of the plain. He had no idea
how long a time that was. It didn't matter. It was one of those moments
when time doesn't have any meaning.
The rim of the forest fell away in a long curve that melted glistening
into the spark-shot sea. From it the plain stretched out, a level
glassy floor of black obsidian, the spew of some long-dead volcano. Or
was it dead? It seemed to Starke that the light here was redder, more
vital, as though he were close to the source from which it sprang.
As he looked farther over the plain, the light seemed to coalesce
into a shimmering curtain that wavered like the heat veils that
dance along the Mercurian Twilight Belt at high noon. For one brief
instant he glimpsed a picture on the curtain--a city, black, shining,
fantastically turreted, the gigantic reflection of a Titan's dream.
Then it was gone, and the immediate menace of the foreground took all
of Starke's attention.
* * * * *
He saw the flock, herded by more of the golden hounds. And he saw the
shepherd, with the harp held silent between his hands.
The flock moved sluggishly, phosphorescently.
One hundred, two hundred silent, limply floating warriors drifting down
the red dimness. In pairs, singly, or in pallid clusters they came. The
golden hounds winged silently, leisurely around them, channeling them
in tides that sluiced toward the fantastic ebon city.
The shepherd stood, a crop of obsidian, turning his shark-pale face.
His sharp, aquamarine eyes found Starke. His silvery hand leapt
beckoning over hard-threads, striking them a blow. Reverberations ran
out, seized Starke, shook him. He dropped his crystal dagger.
Hot screens of fire exploded in his eyes, bubbles whirled and danced in
his eardrums. He lost all muscular control. His dark head fell forward
against the thick blackness of hair on his chest; his golden eyes
dissolved into weak, inane yellow, and his mouth loosened. He wanted to
fight, but it was useless. This shepherd was one of the sea-people he
had come to see, and one way or another he would see him.
Dark blood filled his aching eyes. He felt himself led, nudged, forced
first this way, then that. A golden hound slipped by, gave him a
pressure which roiled him over into a current of sea-blood. It ran down
past where the shepherd stood with only a harp for a weapon.
Starke wondered dimly whether these other warriors in the flock,
drifting, were dead or alive like himself. He had another surprise
coming.
They were all Rann's men. Men of Falga. Silver men with burning green
hair. Rann's men. One of them, a huge warrior colored like powdered
salt, wandered aimlessly by on another tide, his green eyes dull. He
looked dead.
What business had the sea-people with the dead warriors of Falga? Why
the hounds and the shepherd's harp? Questions eddied like lifted silt
in Starke's tired, hanging head. Eddied and settled flat.
Starke joined the pilgrimage.
The hounds with deft flickerings of wings, ushered him into the midst
of the flock. Bodies brushed against him. _Cold_ bodies. He wanted to
cry out. The cords of his neck constricted. In his mind the cry went
forward:
"Are you alive, men of Falga?"
No answer; but the drift of scarred, pale bodies. The eyes in them knew
nothing. They had forgotten Falga. They had forgotten Rann for whom
they had lifted blade. Their tongues lolling in mouths asked nothing
but sleep. They were getting it.
A hundred, two hundred strong they made a strange human river slipping
toward the gigantic city wall. Starke-called-Conan and his bitter
enemies going together. From the corners of his eyes, Starke saw the
shepherd move. The shepherd was like Rann and her people who had years
ago abandoned the sea to live on land. The shepherd seemed colder, more
fish-like, though. There were small translucent webs between the thin
fingers and spanning the long-toed feet. Thin, scar-like gills in the
shadow of his tapered chin, lifted and sealed in the current, eating,
taking sustenance from the blood-colored sea.
The harp spoke and the golden hounds obeyed. The harp spoke and the
bodies twisted uneasily, as in a troubled sleep. A triple chord of it
came straight at Starke. His fingers clenched.
"--and the dead shall walk again--"
Another ironic ripple of music.
"--and Rann's men will rise again, this time against her--"
Starke had time to feel a brief, bewildered shivering, before the
current hurled him forward. Clamoring drunkenly, witlessly, all about
him, the dead, muscleless warriors of Falga, tried to crush past him,
all of them at once....
Long ago some vast sea Titan had dreamed of avenues struck from black
stone. Each stone the size of three men tall. There had been a dream
of walls going up and up until they dissolved into scarlet mist. There
had been another dream of sea-gardens in which fish hung like erotic
flowers, on tendrils of sensitive film-tissue. Whole beds of fish clung
to garden base, like colonies of flowers aglow with sunlight. And on
occasion a black amoebic presence filtered by, playing the gardener,
weeding out an amber flower here, an amythystine bloom there.
And the sea Titan had dreamed of endless balustrades and battlements,
of windowless turrets where creatures swayed like radium-skinned
phantoms, carrying their green plumes of hair in their lifted palms
and looked down with curious, insolent eyes from on high. Women with
shimmering bodies like some incredible coral harvested and kept high
over these black stone streets, each in its archway.
Starke was alone. Falga's warriors had gone off along a dim
subterranean vent, vanished. Now the faint beckoning of harp and the
golden hounds behind him, turned him down a passage that opened out
into a large circular stone room, one end of which opened out into a
hall. Around the ebon ceiling, slender schools of fish swam. It was
their bright effulgence that gave light to the room. They had been
there, breeding, eating, dying, a thousand years, giving light to the
place, and they would be there, breeding and dying, a thousand more.
The harp faded until it was only a murmur.
Starke found his feet. Strength returned to him. He was able to see the
man in the center of the room well. Too well.
The man hung in the fire tide. Chains of wrought bronze held his thin
fleshless ankles so he couldn't escape. His body desired it. It floated
up.
It had been dead a long time. It was gaseous with decomposition and
it wanted to rise to the surface of the Red Sea. The chains prevented
this. Its arms weaved like white scarves before a sunken white face.
Black hair trembled on end.
* * * * *
He was one of Faolan's men. One of the Rovers. One of those who had
gone down at Falga because of Conan.
His name was Geil.
Starke remembered.
The part of him that was Conan remembered the name.
The dead lips moved.
"Conan. What luck is this! Conan. I make you welcome."
The words were cruel, the lips around them loose and dead. It seemed to
Starke an anger and embittered wrath lay deep in those hollow eyes. The
lips twitched again.
"I went down at Falga for you and Rann, Conan. Remember?"
Part of Starke remembered and twisted in agony.
"We're all here, Conan. All of us. Clev and Mannt and Bron and Aesur.
Remember Aesur, who could shape metal over his spine, prying it with
his fingers? Aesur is here, big as a sea-monster, waiting in a niche,
cold and loose as string. The sea-shepherds collected us. Collected us
for a purpose of irony. Look!"
The boneless fingers hung out, as in a wind, pointing.
Starke turned slowly, and his heart pounded an uneven, shattering drum
beat. His jaw clinched and his eyes blurred. That part of him that
was Conan cried out. Conan was so much of him and he so much of Conan
it was impossible for a cleavage. They'd grown together like pearl
material around sand-specule, layer on layer. Starke cried out.
In the hall which this circular room overlooked, stood a thousand men.
In lines of fifty across, shoulder to shoulder, the men of Crom Dhu
stared unseeingly up at Starke. Here and there a face became shockingly
familiar. Old memory cried their names.
"Bron! Clev! Mannt! Aesur!"
The collected decomposition of their bodily fluids raised them, drifted
them above the flaggings. Each of them was chained, like Geil.
Geil whispered. "We have made a union with the men of Falga!"
Starke pulled back.
"Falga!"
"In death, all men are equals." He took his time with it. He was in no
hurry. Dead bodies under-sea are never in a hurry. They sort of bump
and drift and bide their time. "The dead serve those who give them a
semblance of life. Tomorrow we march against Crom Dhu."
"You're crazy! Crom Dhu is _your_ home! It's the place of Beudag and
Faolan--"
"And--" interrupted the hanging corpse, quietly, "Conan? Eh?" He
laughed. A crystal dribble of bubbles ran up from the slack mouth.
"Especially Conan. Conan who sank us at Falga...."
Starke moved swiftly. Nobody stopped him. He had the corpse's short
blade in an instant. Geil's chest made a cold, silent sheathe for it.
The blade went like a fork through butter.
Coldly, without noticing this, Geil's voice spoke out:
"Stab me, cut me. You can't kill me any deader. Make sections of me.
Play butcher. A flank, a hand, a heart! And while you're at it, I'll
tell you the plan."
Snarling, Starke seized the blade out again. With blind violence he
gave sharp blow after blow at the body, cursing bitterly, and the body
took each blow, rocking in the red tide a little, and said with a
matter-of-fact tone:
"We'll march out of the sea to Crom Dhu's gates. Romna and the others,
looking down, recognizing us, will have the gates thrown wide to
welcome us." The head tilted lazily, the lips peeled wide and folded
down languidly over the words. "Think of the elation, Conan! The moment
when Bron and Mannt and Aesur and I and yourself, yes, even yourself,
Conan, return to Crom Dhu!"
* * * * *
Starke saw it, vividly. Saw it like a tapestry woven for him. He stood