The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (9 page)

She crossed a brook that talked to itself in the darkness with that
queer murmuring which came so near to speech, and a few strides
beyond it she paused suddenly, feeling the ground tremble with the
rolling thunder of hoofbeats approaching. She stood still, searching
the dark anxiously, and presently the earth-shaking beat grew louder
and she saw a white blur flung wide across the dimness to her left, and
the sound of hoofs deepened and grew. Then out of the night swept
a herd of snow-white horses. Magnificently they ran, manes tossing,
tails streaming, feet pounding a rhythmic, heart-stirring roll along
the ground. She caught her breath at the beauty of their motion.
They swept by a little distance away, tossing their heads, spurning the
ground with scornful feet.

But as they came abreast of her she saw one blunder a little and
stumble against the next, and that one shook his head bewilderedly;
and suddenly she realized that they were blind—all running so
splendidly in a deeper dark than she groped through. And she saw too
their coats were roughened with sweat, and foam dripped from their
lips, and their nostrils were flaring pools of scarlet. Now and again
one stumbled from pure exhaustion. Yet they ran, frantically, blindly
through the dark, driven by something outside their comprehension.

As the last one of all swept by her, sweat-crusted and staggering,
she saw him toss his head high, spattering foam, and whinny shrilly to
the stars. And it seemed to her that the sound was strangely articulate.
Almost she heard the echoes of a name—“Julienne! Julienne!”—in
that high, despairing sound. And the incongruity of it, the bitter
despair, clutched at her heart so sharply that for the third time that
night she knew the sting of tears.

The dreadful humanity of that cry echoed in her ears as the
thunder died away. She went on, blinking back the tears for that
beautiful blind creature, staggering with exhaustion, calling a girl’s
name hopelessly from a beast’s throat into the blank darkness wherein
it was for ever lost.

Then another star fell across the sky, and she hurried ahead,
closing her mind to the strange, incomprehensible pathos that made
an undernote of tears to the starry dark of this land. And the thought
was growing in her mind that, though she had come into no brimstone
pit where horned devils pranced over flames, yet perhaps it was after
all a sort of hell through which she ran.

Presently in the distance she caught a glimmer of something
bright. The ground dipped after that and she lost it, and skimmed
through a hollow where pale things wavered away from her into the
deeper dark. She never knew what they were, and was glad. When
she came up onto higher ground again she saw it more clearly, an
expanse of dim brilliance ahead. She hoped it was a lake, and ran
more swiftly.

It
was
a lake—a lake that could never have existed outside some
obscure hell like this. She stood on the brink doubtfully, wondering
if this could be the place the light-devil had meant. Black, shining
water stretched out before her, heaving gently with a motion unlike
that of any water she had ever seen before. And in the depths of it,
like fireflies caught in ice, gleamed myriad small lights. They were
fixed there immovably, not stirring with the motion of the water. As
she watched, something hissed above her and a streak of light split
the dark air. She looked up in time to see something bright curving
across the sky to fall without a splash into the water, and small ripples
of phosphorescence spread sluggishly toward the shore, where they
broke at her feet with the queerest whispering sound, as if each
succeeding ripple spoke the syllable of a word.

She looked up, trying to locate the origin of the falling lights, but
the strange stars looked down upon her blankly. She bent and stared
down into the center of the spreading ripples, and where the thing
had fallen she thought a new light twinkled through the water. She
could not determine what it was, and after a curious moment she
gave the question up and began to cast about for the temple the light-
devil had spoken of.

After a moment she thought she saw something dark in the center
of the lake, and when she had stared for a few minutes it gradually
became clearer, an arch of darkness against the starry background of
the water. It might be a temple. She strolled slowly along the brim of
the lake, trying to get a closer view of it, for the thing was no more
than a darkness against the spangles of light, like some void in the sky
where no stars shine. And presently she stumbled over something in
the grass.

She looked down with startled yellow eyes, and saw a strange,
indistinguishable darkness. It had solidity to the feel but scarcely to
the eye, for she could not quite focus upon it. It was like trying to see
something that did not exist save as a void, a darkness in the grass. It
had the shape of a step, and when she followed with her eyes she saw
that it was the beginning of a dim bridge stretching out over the lake,
narrow and curved and made out of nothingness. It seemed to have
no surface, and its edges were difficult to distinguish from the lesser
gloom surrounding it. But the thing was tangible—an arch carved
out of the solid dark—and it led out in the direction she wished to
go. For she was naïvely sure now that the dim blot in the center of
the lake was the temple she was searching for. The falling stars had
guided her, and she could not have gone astray.

So she set her teeth and gripped her sword and put her foot upon
the bridge. It was rock-firm under her, but scarcely more than a foot
or so wide, and without rails. When she had gone a step or two she
began to feel dizzy; for under her the water heaved with a motion that
made her head swim, and the stars twinkled eerily in its depths. She
dared not look away for fear of missing her footing on the narrow arch
of darkness. It was like walking a bridge flung across the void, with
stars underfoot and nothing but an unstable strip of nothingness to
bear her up. Halfway across, the heaving of the water and the illusion
of vast, constellated spaces beneath and the look her bridge had of
being no more than empty space ahead, combined to send her head
reeling; and as she stumbled on, the bridge seemed to be wavering
with her, swinging in gigantic arcs across the starry void below.

Now she could see the temple more closely, though scarcely more
clearly than from the shore. It looked to be no more than an outlined
emptiness against the star-crowded brilliance behind it, etching its
arches and columns of blankness upon the twinkling waters. The
bridge came down in a long dim swoop to its doorway. Jirel took the
last few yards at a reckless run and stopped breathless under the arch
that made the temple’s vague doorway. She stood there panting and
staring about narrow-eyed, sword poised in her hand. For though the
place was empty and very still she felt a presence even as she set her
foot upon the floor of it.

She was staring about a little space of blankness in the starry
lake. It seemed to be no more than that. She could see the walls and
columns where they were outlined against the water and where they
made darknesses in the star-flecked sky, but where there was only
dark behind them she could see nothing. It was a tiny place, no more
than a few square yards of emptiness upon the face of the twinkling
waters. And in its center an image stood.

She stared at it in silence, feeling a curious compulsion growing within her, like a vague command from something outside herself. The image was of some substance of nameless black, unlike the material which composed the building, for even in the dark she could see it clearly. It was a semi-human figure, crouching forward with outthrust head, sexless and strange. Its one central eye was closed as if in rapture, and its mouth was pursed for a kiss. And though it was but an image and without even the semblance of life, she felt unmistakably the presence of something alive in the temple, something so alien and innominate that instinctively she drew away.

She stood there for a full minute, reluctant to enter the place where so alien a being dwelt, half conscious of that voiceless compulsion growing up within her. And slowly she became aware that all the lines and angles of the half-seen building were curved to make the image their center and focus. The very bridge swooped its long arc to complete the centering. As she watched, it seemed to her that through the arches of the columns even the stars in lake and sky were grouped in patterns which took the image for their focus. Every line and curve in the dim world seemed to sweep round toward the squatting thing before her with its closed eye and expectant mouth.

Gradually the universal focusing of lines began to exert its
influence upon her. She took a hesitant step forward without realizing
the motion. But that step was all the dormant urge within her needed.
With her one motion forward the compulsion closed down upon her
with whirlwind impetuosity. Helplessly she felt herself advancing,
helplessly with one small, sane portion of her mind she realized the
madness that was gripping her, the blind, irresistible urge to do what
every visible line in the temple’s construction was made to compel.
With stars swirling around her she advanced across the floor and laid
her hands upon the rounded shoulders of the image—the sword,
forgotten, making a sort of accolade against its hunched neck—and
lifted her red head and laid her mouth blindly against the pursed lips
of the image.

In a dream she took that kiss. In a dream of dizziness and confusion
she seemed to feel the iron-cold lips stirring under hers. And through
the union of that kiss—warm-blooded woman with image of nameless
stone—through the meeting of their mouths something entered into
her very soul; something cold and stunning; something alien beyond
any words. It lay upon her shuddering soul like some frigid weight
from the void, a bubble holding something unthinkably alien and
dreadful. She could feel the heaviness of it upon some intangible part
of her that shrank from the touch. It was like the weight of remorse or
despair, only far colder and stranger and—somehow—more ominous,
as if this weight were but the egg from which things might hatch too
dreadful to put even into thoughts.

The moment of the kiss could have been no longer than a breath’s
space, but to her it was timeless. In a dream she felt the compulsion
falling from her at last. In a dim dream she dropped her hands from its
shoulders, finding the sword heavy in her grasp and staring dully at it
for a while before clarity began its return to her cloudy mind. When
she became completely aware of herself once more she was standing
with slack body and dragging head before the blind, rapturous image,
that dead weight upon her heart as dreary as an old sorrow, and more
coldly ominous than anything she could find words for.

And with returning clarity the most staggering terror came over
her, swiftly and suddenly—terror of the image and the temple of
darkness, and the coldly spangled lake and of the whole, wide, dim,
dreadful world about her. Desperately she longed for home again,
even the red fury of hatred and the press of Guillaume’s mouth and
the hot arrogance of his eyes again. Anything but this. She found
herself running without knowing why. Her feet skimmed over the
narrow bridge lightly as a gull’s wings dipping the water. In a brief
instant the starry void of the lake flashed by beneath her and the
solid earth was underfoot. She saw the great column of light far away
across the dark meadows and beyond it a hilltop rising against the
stars. And she ran.

She ran with terror at her heels and devils howling in the wind
her own speed made. She ran from her own curiously alien body,
heavy with its weight of inexplicable doom. She passed through the
hollow where pale things wavered away, she fled over the uneven
meadows in a frenzy of terror. She ran and ran, in those long light
bounds the lesser gravity allowed her, fleeter than a deer, and her own
panic choked in her throat and that weight upon her soul dragged at
her too drearily for tears. She fled to escape it, and could not; and the
ominous certainty that she carried something too dreadful to think
of grew and grew.