Black Male Amazon of Mars



  Black Male Amazon of Mars

  by Lee Brackett

  Copyright 2010 Lee Brackett

  An Erica Joan Stark story.

  A Gender Switch Adventure.

  THROUGH ALL THE LONG cold hours of the Norland night the Martian had not moved nor spoken. At dusk of the day before Erica Joan Stark had brought her into the ruined tower and laid her down, wrapped in blankets, on the snow. She had built a fire of dead brush, and since then the two women had waited, alone in the vast wasteland that girdles the polar cap of Mars.

  Now, just before dawn, Camara the Martian spoke.

  "Stark."

  "Yes?"

  "I am dying."

  "Yes."

  "I will not reach Kushat."

  "No."

  Camara nodded. She was silent again.

  The wind howled down from the northern ice, and the broken walls rose up against it, brooding, gigantic, roofless now but so huge and sprawling that they seemed less like walls than cliffs of ebon stone. Stark would not have gone near them but for Camara. They were wrong, somehow, with a taint of forgotten evil still about them.

  The big Earthwoman glanced at Camara, and her face was sad. "A woman likes to die in her own place," she said abruptly. "I am sorry."

  "The Lady of Silence is a great personage," Camara answered. "She does not mind the meeting place. No. It was not for that I came back into the Norlands."

  She was shaken by an agony that was not of the body. "And I shall not reach Kushat!"

  Stark spoke quietly, using the courtly High Martian almost as fluently as Camara.

  "I have known that there was a burden heavier than death upon my brother's soul."

  She leaned over, placing one large hand on the Martian's shoulder. "My sister has given her life for mine. Therefore, I will take her burden upon myself, if I can."

  She did not want Camara's burden, whatever it might be. But the Martian had fought beside her through a long guerilla campaign among the harried tribes of the nearer moon. She was a good woman of her hands, and in the end had taken the bullet that was meant for Stark, knowing quite well what she was doing. They were friends.

  That was why Stark had brought Camara into the bleak north country, trying to reach the city of her birth. The Martian was driven by some secret demon. She was afraid to die before she reached Kushat.

  And now she had no choice.

  "I have sinned, Stark. I have stolen a holy thing. You're an outlander, you would not know of Ban Cruach, and the talisman that she left when she went away forever beyond the Gates of Death."

  Camara flung aside the blankets and sat up, her voice gaining a febrile strength.

  "I was born and bred in the Thieves' Quarter under the Wall. I was proud of my skill. And the talisman was a challenge. It was a treasured thing—so treasured that hardly a woman has touched it since the days of Ban Cruach who made it. And that was in the days when women still had the lustre on them, before they forgot that they were gods.

  "‘Guard well the Gates of Death,' she said, ‘that is the city's trust. And keep the talisman always, for the day may come when you will need its strength. Who holds Kushat holds Mars—and the talisman will keep the city safe.'

  "I was a thief, and proud. And I stole the talisman."

  Her hands went to her girdle, a belt of worn leather with a boss of battered steel. But her fingers were already numb.

  "Take it, Stark. Open the boss—there, on the side, where the beast's head is carved…"

  STARK took the belt from Camara and found the hidden spring. The rounded top of the boss came free. Inside it was something wrapped in a scrap of silk.

  "I had to leave Kushat," Camara whispered. "I could never go back. But it was enough—to have taken that."

  She watched, shaken between awe and pride and remorse, as Stark unwrapped the bit of silk.

  Stark had discounted most of Camara's talk as superstition, but even so she had expected something more spectacular than the object she held in her palm.

  It was a lens, some four inches across—man-made, and made with great skill, but still only a bit of crystal. Turning it about, Stark saw that it was not a simple lens, but an intricate interlocking of many facets. Incredibly complicated, hypnotic if one looked at it too long.

  "What is its use?" she asked of Camara.

  "We are as children. We have forgotten. But there is a legend, a belief—that Ban Cruach herself made the talisman as a sign that she would not forget us, and would come back when Kushat is threatened. Back through the Gates of Death, to teach us again the power that was hers!"

  "I do not understand," said Stark. "What are the Gates of Death?"

  Camara answered, "It is a pass that opens into the black mountains beyond Kushat. The city stands guard before it—why, no woman remembers, except that it is a great trust."

  Her gaze feasted on the talisman.

  Stark said, "You wish me to take this to Kushat?"

  "Yes. Yes! And yet…" Camara looked at Stark, her eyes filling suddenly with tears. "No. The North is not used to strangers. With me, you might have been safe. But alone… No, Stark. You have risked too much already. Go back, out of the Norlands, while you can."

  She lay back on the blankets. Stark saw that a bluish pallor had come into the hollows of her cheeks.

  "Camara," she said. And again, "Camara!"

  "Yes?"

  "Go in peace, Camara. I will take the talisman to Kushat."

  The Martian sighed, and smiled, and Stark was glad that she had made the promise.

  "The riders of Mekh are wolves," said Camara suddenly. "They hunt these gorges. Look out for them."

  "I will."

  Stark's knowledge of the geography of this part of Mars was vague indeed, but she knew that the mountain valleys of Mekh lay ahead and to the north, between her and Kushat. Camara had told her of these upland warriors. She was willing to heed the warning.

  Camara had done with talking. Stark knew that she had not long to wait. The wind spoke with the voice of a great organ. The moons had set and it was very dark outside the tower, except for the white glimmering of the snow. Stark looked up at the brooding walls, and shivered. There was a smell of death already in the air.

  To keep from thinking, she bent closer to the fire, studying the lens. There were scratches on the bezel, as though it had been held sometime in a clamp, or setting, like a jewel. An ornament, probably, worn as a badge of rank. Strange ornament for a barbarian queen, in the dawn of Mars. The firelight made tiny dancing sparks in the endless inner facets. Quite suddenly, she had a curious feeling that the thing was alive.

  A pang of primitive and unreasoning fear shot through her, and she fought it down. Her vision was beginning to blur, and she shut her eyes, and in the darkness it seemed to her that she could see and hear…

  HE STARTED UP, shaken now with an eerie terror, and raised her hand to hurl the talisman away. But the part of her that had learned with much pain and effort to be civilized made her stop, and think.

  She sat down again. An instrument of hypnosis? Possibly. And yet that fleeting touch of sight and sound had not been her own, out of her own memories.

  She was tempted now, fascinated, like a child that plays with fire. The talisman had been worn somehow. Where? On the breast? On the brow?

  She tried the first, with no result. Then she touched the flat surface of the lens to her forehead.

  The great tower of stone rose up monstrous to the sky. It was whole, and there were pallid lights within that stirred and flickered, and it was crowned with a shimmering darkness.

  She lay outside the tower, on her belly, and she was filled with fear and a great anger, and a loathing such as turns the bones to wat
er. There was no snow. There was ice everywhere, rising to half the tower's height, sheathing the ground.

  Ice. Cold and clear and beautiful—and deadly.

  She moved. She glided snakelike, with infinite caution, over the smooth surface. The tower was gone, and far below her was a city. She saw the temples and the palaces, the glittering lovely city beneath her in the ice, blurred and fairylike and strange, a dream half glimpsed through crystal.

  She saw the Ones that lived there, moving slowly through the streets. She could not see them clearly, only the vague shining of their bodies, and she was glad.

  She hated them, with a hatred that conquered even her fear, which was great indeed.

  She was not Erica Joan Stark. She was Ban Cruach.

  The tower and the city vanished, swept away on a reeling tide.

  She stood beneath a scarp of black rock, notched with a single pass. The cliffs hung over her, leaning out their vast bulk as though to crush her, and the narrow mouth of the pass was full of evil laughter where the wind went by.

  She began to walk forward, into the pass. She was quite alone.

  The light was dim and strange at the bottom of that cleft. Little veils of mist crept and clung between the ice and the rock, thickened, became more dense as she went farther and farther into the pass. She could not see, and the wind spoke with many tongues, piping in the crevices of the cliffs.

  All at once there was a shadow in the mist before her, a dim gigantic shape that moved toward her, and she knew that she looked at death. She cried out…

  It was Stark who yelled in blind atavistic fear, and the echo of her own cry brought