* * *
She did not think of herself now as Captain Berit Winters, but only by the short personal name of Berit. The stones upon which she lay were cold and hard. It was pitch-dark, but her eyes and ears were very keen. She could tell by the sound of her breathing that she was in a closed space, and she did not like it.
A low growl rumbled in her throat. The hairs stiffened at the back of her neck. She tried to remember how she had come here. Something had happened, something to do with fire, but she did not know what, or why.
Only one thing she knew. She was searching for something. It was gone, and she wanted it back. The wanting was a pain in her. She could not remember what the object was that she wanted, but the need for it was greater than any obstacle short of death.
She rose and began to explore her prison.
Almost at once she found an opening. Cautious testing told her that there was a passage beyond. She could see nothing, but the air that blew in to hers was very heavy with strange smells. Instinct told her that it was a trap. She crouched resolute, her hands opening and closing in desire for a weapon. There was no weapon. Presently she went into the passage, moving without sound.
She went a long way, her shoulders brushing stone on either side. Then she saw light ahead, red and flickering, and the air brought her the taint of smoke, and the smell of woman.
Very, very slowly, the creature called Berit padded toward the light.
She came close to the end of the tunnel, and suddenly a barred gate dropped behind her with a ringing clash. She could not go back.
She did not wish to go back. Enemies were in front of her, and she wished to fight. She knew now that she could not come upon them secretly. Flexing her great bosom , she leaped out boldly from the tunnel mouth.
The tossing glare of torches dazzled her eyes, and a wild mob howl deafened her. She stood alone on a great block—the old slave block of Valkis, though she did not know that. They stared up, jeering at the Earthwoman who had tasted the forbidden fruit that even the soulless women of the Low Canals would not touch.
The creature called Berit was still a woman, but a woman already shadowed by the ape. During the hours she had bathed in the light of Shanga, she had changed physically. Bone and flesh had altered under the accelerated urging of glands and increased metabolism.
Already a big, powerful woman, she had thickened and coarsened along the lines of brutish strength. Her jaw and brow ridges jutted. Thick hair covered her bosom and limbs and extended in a rudimentary mane down the back of her neck. Her deep-set eyes had a hard and cunning gleam of intelligence, but it was the intelligence of the primitive mind that had learned to speak and make fire and weapons, and no more than that.
Half crouching, she glared down at the crowd. She did not know who these women were; she hated them. They were of another tribe, and their very smell was alien. They hated her, too. The air bristled with their enmity.
Her gaze fell on a woman who stepped out lightly and proudly into the empty space. She did not remember that this woman's name was Kyr Hal. She did not notice that Kyr Hal had shed the white tunic of the Trade Cities for the kilt and girdle of the Low Canals, nor that she wore in her ears the pierced gold rings of Barrakesh, and was now honestly herself—a bandit, born and bred among a race of bandits who had been civilized for so long that they could afford to forget it.
Berit knew only that this woman was her particular enemy.
'Captain Berit Winters,' said Kyr Hal. 'Woman of the tribe of Terra—Ladys of the spaceways, builders of the Trade Cities, mistresses of greed and rapine.'
Her voice carried over the packed square, though she did not shout. Berit watched her, her eyes like blinking red sparks in the torchlight, weaving slightly on her feet, her hands swinging loose and hungry. She did not understand the words, but they were threat and insult.
'Look at her, Oh women of Valkis!' cried Kyr Hal. 'She is our mistress now. Her government queens it over the City-States of Mars. Our pride is stripped, our wealth is gone. What have we left, oh children of a dying world?'
The answer that rang the walls of Valkis was soft and wordless, the opening chord of a hymn written in hell.
Someone threw a stone.
Berit came down off the slave block in a great effortless sprig and sped across the square, straight for Kyr Hal's throat.
A laugh went up, mirth that was half a cat-scream of sheer savagery. Like one supple creature, the crowd moved. Torchlight flashed from knife-blade and jewels and eyes of glittering green and topaz, and the small chiming bells, and the points of the deadly spiked knuckle-dusters. Long black tongues of whips licked out with a hiss and a crack.
Kyr Hal waited until Berit almost reached her. Then she bent and pivoted in the graceful Martian savatte. Her foot caught Berit under the chin and sent her sprawling.
As she rolled half stunned, Kyr Hal caught a whip from a woman's hand.
'That's it, Earthwoman!' she cried out. 'Grovel! Belly down, and lick the stones that were here before the apes of Earth had learned to walk!'
The long lash sang and bit, lacing the hairy body with red weals, and the harsh mob scream went up—Drive her! Drive the beast of Shanga, as the invading beasts of old were driven by our forefathers!
And they drove her, with whip and knife and spike, through the streets of Valkis under the racing moons. Jeering they drove her.
She fought them. Mad with fury, she fought them, but she could not come to grips with them. When she lunged they melted before her, and each way she turned she was met by the lash and the blade and the crippling lick. Blood ran, but it was all her own, and the high shrill laughter of men pursued her as she went.
At last there was only fear and the desire to escape.
They let her run. Along the crumbling ways of Valkis, up and down the twisting alleys that reeked of ancient crime, they let her run. But not too far. They blocked her off from the canal and the freedom of the sea bottom beyond. Again and again they headed the panting, shambling creature that had been Berit Winters, captain of the Starflight, and drove it higher up the slope.
Berit moved slowly now. She snarled and her head wove blindly from side to side in a pathetic attempt at defiance. Her blood dripped hot on the stones. And always the insolent stinging lashes drove her on.
Up and up. Past the great looming docks, with the bollards and the scars of moored ships still on them, and the dust of their own decay lapping dry around their feet. Four levels above the canal. Four harbors, four cities, four epochs written in fading characters of stone. Even the dawn-man Berit was oppressed and frightened.
There was no life here. There been no life for a long time, even in the lowest level. The wind had scoured and polished the empty houses, smoothing the corners to roundness, hollowing the doors and windows, until the work of woman was almost erased. Only strange things were left, that looked as though the wind had made them by itself out of little mountain tops.
The people of Valkis were silent now. They drove the beast, and their hate had not abated, but was intensified.
They walked here upon the very bones of their world. Earth was a green star, young and rich. Here the Martians passed the marble pier where the Queens of Valkis had moored their galleys, and the very marble was shattered under the heel of time.
High on the ridge above the oldest city the palace of the queens looked down at the scourging of the interloper. And in all of Valkis now there was no sound but the whispering of little bells that was like the sigh of wind on another world, where the men ran on their small bare feet, ankle deep in dust.
Berit climbed apelike up the history of Mars. Her belly was cold with a terror of these dark places that smelled of nothing, not even of death.
She passed a place where houses had been built within the curve of a coral reef. She clambered over the reef, and saw above her a sloping face of rock with gaping holes that the sea had made. She climbed that, not knowing or caring what it was.
On the level sp
ace above she passed the broken quays that had once made safe mooring in the bay, and stopped to look back.
They were still hunting her. Her flanks heaved and her eyes were desperate. She went on, scrambling up steep narrow streets where the paving blocks had fallen out and the houses had come down in shapeless heaps, and her hands and feet left red prints where she put them down.
Then, at last, she was at the top of the ridge.
The great bulk of the palace loomed above her against the sky. Primitive wisdom told her the place was dangerous. She skirted the high wall of marble that ringed it, and suddenly her twitching nostrils caught the scent of water.
Her tongue was swollen in her mouth, her throat choked with dust. Her need was so great, with the salt bleeding and the fever of her wounds, that she forgot her enemies and the menace of the mountain-thing behind the wall. Breaking into a ragged lope, she went forward along the cliff top until she came to a gateway, and plunged through it, and suddenly there was turf under her feet, soft and cool. There were shrubs, and flowers pale in the moonlight, heavily sweet, and dark branches against the sky.
The gate closed silently behind her. She did not see it. She ran down a grassy ride between rows of trees trimmed into fantastic shapes, guided by the smell of water. Here and there were strange gleams and glints of statuary, wrought in marble and semiprecious stones. Berit's skin crawled with an awareness of danger, but she was too weary and too mad with thirst to care.
The ride ended. Beyond was an open space, and in the center of it was a great sunken tank, carved and ornamented. The water in it was like polished jet.
Nothing stirred in the open. A wing of the palace rose beyond the tank like a black wall, and it seemed that nothing lived there, but Berit's hair-trigger nerves told her otherwise. She stopped in the shelter of the trees, sniffing the air and listening.
Nothing. Darkness and silence. Berit looked at the waiting water. It filled all her senses. Suddenly she ran toward it.
She flung herself belly down on the slabs of turquoise that paved the brink and buried her face in the icy water and drank. Then she lay there panting, utterly spent.
Still nothing moved.
Then, all at once, a long howl rose on the night, from somewhere beyond the palace wing. Berit stiffened. She got to her hands and knees, every hair on her body bristling with fear.
The howl was answered by a strange reptilian scream.
Now that she had satisfied her thirst, the night wind brought her many odors. They were too numerous and tangled to be identified, except for a strong musky taint that made her flesh crawl with instinctive loathing. She did not know what sort of creature gave off that taint, but it filled her with horror, because it seemed that she almost knew—and did not want to.
She wanted only to get away from that place, that was so full of secret life and hidden menace and silence.
She began to move toward the trees, back the way she had come. Slowly, because she was wounded and very weak. And then, quite suddenly, she saw him.
He had come without sound into the open space, out of the shelter of huge flowering shrubs. He stood not far away, in the shifting glow of the little racing moons, watching her. He was shy and large-eyed, poised for flight. The hair that hung down his back and the shining down that covered his body were the color of the moonlight.
Berit stopped. A tremor went through her. All her sense of loss and her desperate searching came back to her, and with them a desire to be closer to this slender he.
A name spoke itself from some dim chamber of her soul 'Jim?'
He started. She thought he was going to run away, and she cried out again, 'Jim!' Then, step by step, uncertainly, he came nearer, lovely as a fawn in spring.
He made a questioning sound, and she answered. 'Berit.'He stood still for a moment, repeating the word, and then he whimpered and began to run toward her, and she was filled with a great joy. She laughed and mouthed his name over and over, and there were tears in her eyes. She reached out toward him.
A spear flashed and fell quivering between them.
He gave her a cry of warning and fled, vanishing into the shrubbery. Berit tried to follow, but her knees gave under her. She turned, snarling.
Tall Keshi guards in resplendent harness had come out of the trees, circling behind her. They carried spears and a net of heavy ropes. In a moment she was surrounded! The spear-points pricked her back until the net was thrown and she went down helpless.
As they carried her away, she heard two things. The wail of the silver he, and from somewhere nearby, a man's mocking laughter.
She had heard that laughter before. She could not remember where, or how, but it filled her with such fury that she was finally knocked over the head with a spear-butt, to keep her quiet.
III
She came to herself—the self that was Captain Berit Winters—in a room that was much like the one she last remembered, in Valkis, except that the walls were of a dark green rock and there was no prism.
Winters could not remember anything of what had happened since that last room, except that she knew she had had a strong emotional shock. Jim's name was uppermost in her mind. She began to tremble with a deep excitement. She got to her feet, and it was then that she realized she was shackled. Chains ran from cuffs on her wrists to similar cuffs on her ankles, passing through rings on a metal belt around her waist. These constituted her entire clothing. She saw also that there were freshly healed scars on her body. The heavy door was opened for her before she could begin to pound on it. Four tall barbarians, their harness magnificent with jewels and wrought metal, formed up a guard around her, and an officer led the way. They did not speak to Winters, and she knew the uselessness of trying to get anything out of them.
She had not the faintest idea where she was, or how she had come there, beyond a vague memory of pain and flight that was like something she had dreamed.
And somewhere, during that dream, she had seen Jim, spoken to him. She was as certain of that as she was of the weight of her chains.
She stumbled, because her sight was blurred with tears. Up to then, she had not been sure. She had seen the twisted wreck of his flier, and while she did not believe it, there was always the chance that he might really be dead, and lost to her beyond all hope.
Now she knew. He was alive, and if Winters had been alone she would have wept like a child.
Instead, she studied the corridors and the great halls through which the guard took her. From the size and the splendor of them she knew that she was in a palace, and guessed that it might be the one she had seen on the cliffs above Valkis. This was confirmed when she caught a glimpse of the town through a window embrasure.
The palace was older than anything she had seen on Mars, except for the buried ruins of Lhak in the northern deserts. But this was no ruin. It had grown old in somber beauty. The patterns of the mosaic floors were blurred, the precious stones worn thin as porcelain. The tapestries, preserved by the wonderful Martian formula that had been lost for centuries, like everything else on Mars, had grown frail and brittle, their colors all softened to faint glows, infinitely sad and lovely.
Here and there, on the walls or the soaring vault of a roof, were murals—magnificent pageants of lost glory, dim as an old woman's memory. The seas they pictured were deep and blue, and the ships were tall, and the mail of the warriors was set with gems, and the captive kings were beautiful as dusky pearls.
Proud architecture, mating beauty with strength, and showing that strange blend of culture and barbarism that is so typically Martian. Winters reflected on how long ago these stones had been quarried, and went on to reflect that at that time civilization had already destroyed itself in a series of atomic wars, and the proud Queens of Valkis were only bandit chieftains in a world that was slipping downward toward the night.
They came at length to doors of beaten gold that were more than twice Berit's six-foot height. The Keshi guards who stood there pushed them wide, and Berit saw the t
hrone room.
Westering sunlight slanted in from the high embrasures, falling across the pillars and the tessellated floor. The pale light touched vagrant glints from the shields and the weapons of dead queens, warmed the old banners to brief life. Everywhere else in that vast place was a brooding darkness, full of whispers and small faint echoing.
A shaft of cool gold fell directly upon the throne at the far end of the room.
The high seat itself was cut from a single block of black basalt, and as Winters approached it, her swinging chains making a loud sound in the silence, she saw that the stone had been already half shaped by the sea. It was very worn and smooth with the patient sanding of the tides, and where hands had lain on the armpieces there were deep hollows, and on the basalt step below.
An old man sat upon the throne. He was wrapped in a black cloak, and his hair wound into a sort of white crown on his head, braided with jewels. He stared with half-blind eyes at the Earthwoman, and suddenly he spoke, in sonorous High Martian, a tongue as antique on Mars as Sanskrit is on Earth. Winters could not understand one word of it, but she knew from his tone and expression that he was quite mad.
Someone sat in the heavy shadows by his feet, outside the shaft of sunlight, and veiled by it from Winters' sight. She could catch only a vague pallor of ivory-tinted flesh, but for some reason her nerves tingled with premonition.
As she neared the high seat, the old man rose and stretched out his arm toward her, a wrinkled Cassandra crying doom upon her head. The wild echoes of his voice rolled from the vaulted roof, and his eyes were full of a blazing hate.
The guards set the butts of their spears into her back so that she was thrown face down before the basalt step. A low, sweet, mocking laugh came out of the shadows, and she felt the pressure of a little sandaled foot on her neck.
She knew the voice that said, 'Greeting, Captain Winters! The throne of Valkis welcomes you.'
The foot was withdrawn from her neck. She rose. The old man had fallen back onto the throne. He was intoning what sounded like a church litany, and his upturned face had an exalted look.
The remembered voice said out of the dimness, 'My mother is repeating the coronation rites. Presently he will demand the year's tribute from the Outer Islands and the coastal tribes. Time and reality do not bother him, and it pleases his to play at being king. Therefore, as you see, I, Fond, rule Valkis from the shadow of the throne.'
'Sometimes,' Winters said, 'you must come into the light.'
'Yes.'
A soft, quick rustle and he was standing there in the shaft of sunlight. His hair was the color of night after moonset, intricately coiled. He was dressed in the old, arrogant fashion of the bandit kingdoms—the long full skirt slit to the waist at the sides, so that his thighs showed when he moved, the wide jeweled girdle, collar of golden plaques. His small, high pectorals were bare and lovely, his body slender, with a catlike grace.
His face was as she remembered it. Proud and fine, golden-eyed, a mouth like a red fruit that mingled honey and poison, a lazy, slumberous power behind the beauty, the fascination of all things that are at once beautiful and deadly.
He looked at Winters and smiled. 'So at last you have reached the end of your search.'
She looked down at her chains and her nakedness. 'A strange way to reach it. I paid Kyr Hal well for this privilege.'She gave his a searching glance. 'Do you rule Shanga, as well as Valkis? If so you're not very courteous to your guests.'
'On the contrary, I treat them very well—as you shall see.'His golden eyes taunted her. 'But you didn't come here to practice Shanga, Captain Winters.'
'Why else would I have come?'
'To find Jim Leland.'
She was not really surprised. Subconsciously she had known that he knew. But she managed a look of blank amazement.
'Jim Leland is dead.'
'Was he, when you saw his in the garden, and spoke to him?'Fond laughed. 'Do you think we're such fools? Everyone who comes to the Hall of Shanga in the Trade Cities is carefully checked and examined. We were particularly careful with you, Captain Winters, because psychologically you were the wrong type to be drawn to Shanga. Women like you are too strong to need escape.
'You knew, of course, that your fiancée had taken up the practice. You didn't like it, and tried to make his stop. Kyr Hal said that he was terribly upset about it on several occasions. But Jim had gone too far to stop. He begged to be allowed the full power, the real Shanga. He helped us plan his supposed death in the sea bottom. We would have done that anyway, for our own protection, since the boy has influential connections and we can't afford to have people hunting for our clients. But he wanted you to believe that he was dead, so that you would forget him. He felt he had no right to marry you, that he would ruin your life. Doesn't that touch you, Captain Winters? Doesn't that bring tears to your eyes?'
It brought more than that to Winters. It brought an overpowering urge to take this lovely he-devil between her hands and break his and then stamp the pieces into the earth.
Her chains made one harsh jangling sound, and then the spears came up and touched her flesh with sharp red kisses. She stood still and said, 'Why have you done this? Is it for money, or for hate?'
'For both, Earthwoman! And for something more important than either of them.'His lips curved in brief amusement. 'Besides, I've done nothing to your people. I built the Halls of Shanga, yes. But the women and men of Earth degrade themselves of their own free will. Come here.'
He motioned her to follow his to the window. As he crossed the vast room, he said, 'You have seen part of the palace. Earth credits have rebuilt and restored the house of my mothers. The credits of apelings who wish to return to their normal state because the civilization they have forced themselves is too much for them. Look out there. Earth money has done that, too.'
Winters looked out upon a sight that had almost vanished from the face of Mars. A garden, the varied and jewel-bright garden that would have belonged with a palace like this. Broad lawns of bronze green turf, formal plantings, statuary . . .
For some reason she could not quite remember, that garden gave Berit Winters a cold shuddering chill.
But the garden itself was only a part of what she saw. A small part. Baneath the window the ground sloped away into a vast bowl-shaped depression, perhaps a quarter-mile away, and Winters looked down into an amphitheater. Ruined as it was, it was still magnificent, with tiers of seats rising like steps of hewn stone from the inner walls. She thought of how it must have looked when the games were held in the old days, with all of those thousands of places filled.
Now, in the arena, there was another garden. A wild and tangled garden, closed in by the high protective walls that had kept the beasts from the spectators. There were trees in it, and open spaces, and she could make out moving forms among the shadows, strange forms. She could not see them clearly for the distance and the slanting light, but a chill pang struck through her, a cold breath of foreboding.
In the center of the arena was a lake. Not a large one, and probably not deep, but there were creatures splashing in it, and she caught the faint echo of a reptilian scream. An echo she had heard before. . . .
Fond was looking outward to the amphitheater, with an odd, slow smile. Winters saw that there were people already in the lower tiers of the seats, and more of them gathering.
'What is this thing,' she asked him, 'that is more important than money or your hatred for the women of Earth?'
All the ancient pride of his race and house flashed out in his eyes as he answered her. She forgot her loathing of his for a moment, in her respect for his deep sincerity.
He said only one word. 'Mars.'
The old man heard his and cried out from the throne. Then he flung the corner of his black mantle over him head and was silent.
'Mars,' said Fond quietly. 'The world that could not even die in decency and honor, because the carrion birds came flying to pick its bones, and the greedy rats suck away the last of it
s blood and pride.'
Winters said, 'I don't understand. What has Shanga to do with Mars?'
'You'll see.'He turned on her suddenly. 'You challenged Shanga, Earthwoman, just as your people have challenged Mars. We'll find out which is the stronger!'
He motioned to the officer of the guard, who went away. Then he said to Winters, 'You wanted your boy back. You were willing to go through the fire of Shanga for him, though you abhorred it. You were willing to risk your identity through the changes of the ray—which after a while, Earthwoman, never go away. And all for Jim Leland. Do you still want his back?'
'Yes.'
'You're sure of that.'
'Yes.'
'Very well.'Fond glanced over her shoulder and nodded. 'There he is.'
For a long moment, Berit Winters did not turn around. Fond moved away a little, watching with a cruel, amused interest. Winters' back stiffened. She turned.
He was there, standing in the sunlight, bewildered, frightened, a wild and shining creature out of the dawn of the world, with a rope around his neck. The guards were laughing.
Winters thought desperately, He has not changed too much. Back to the primitive, but not yet to the ape. There is a soul still in his eyes, and the light of reason.
Jim, Jim! How could you have done this thing?
But she understood now how he could have done it. She remembered how bitterly she had quarreled with his over Shanga. She had thought it a stupid and childish thing, far beneath his intelligence and as degrading as any other drug. But she had not understood.
She did now. And she was filled with a deadly fear, because she understood so well.
Because she herself was now numbered among the beasts of Shanga. And beneath her horror as she looked at the creature that was Jim and yet not Jim, she was aware that in some unholy way she found his more beautiful and more alluring than she ever had before. Stripped of all the shams and the studied unconventions of society, freed of all complexity, his body strong and fleet as a doe's quivering with sensitive life . . .
It would take two of a kind. Dawn-woman, dawn-man. Strong sinew, strong passion, the guts that cities stole away . . .
Fond said, 'He can still be saved, if you can find a way to do it.'Then he added shrewdly, 'Unless you now need someone to save you, Captain Winters!'
A strong shock of revulsion rocked her, but her eyes still held a strange light.
The silver he was coming toward her. His gaze was fixed upon her. She saw that he was drawn to her, and struggling to understand why. He did not speak, and somehow Winters' throat closed on an aching lump, so that she too was dumb.
The guard who held his rope let his move as he would. He came close to Winters, hesitantly, as an animal does. Then he stopped and looked up into her face. Tears gathered in his wide dark eyes. Presently he whimpered, very softly, and went down on his knees at her feet.
The old man let out a shrill cackling. Fond's eyes were like cups of molten gold.
Winters bent over and caught Jim in her arms. She lifted his to his feet and stood holding his to her, in a fury of protective possessive love. She said very softly to Fond, 'You've seen it all now. Can we go?'
He nodded. 'Take them to the garden of Shanga,' he said, and added, 'It is almost time.'
The guards took them, Berit Winters and the man she had lost and found again, out through the great echoing halls of the palace and down the long slope of lawn to the amphitheater.
A barred gate of heavy metal covered the mouth of a tunnel. The guards unlocked it and took off Winters' chains and thrust her inside with Jim. The gate was locked again behind them.
Holding Jim tightly by the hand, Winters went down the tunnel and came presently into the arena—into the garden of Shanga.
She stopped, blinking in the sudden light. Jim's hand tightened on hers. He quivered with a tense expectancy, and his head was tilted in an attitude of listening.
She had only a moment before the gong sounded, the mellow sonorous notes that might have been calling some evil priesthood to its dark prayers. Only a moment to glimpse the trees and the shambling anthropoid forms that moved among them, to catch the rank beast taint in the air, to hear the splashing and the hissing screams from the hidden pool.
Only a moment to be filled with horror and a sick fear, to deny to herself the reality of this nightstallion garden, to wish that she were blind and deaf, or better than that, dead.
In the seats above the protecting wall, rows of Martian faces looked down. They were the faces of women and men who watch the antics of creatures in a zoo—destructive creatures for which they have a personal hatred.
Then the gong called out, and Jim leaped away, pulling her by the hand. All over the garden there was a moment of intense silence, and then there rose a devil's chorus of roaring and screaming in voices that were horribly human and even more horribly not, and close to her Jim's voice chimed in, saying over and over, 'Shanga! Shanga!'
It came to Winters in a flash, then, what Fond had meant about Mars. As Jim pulled her headlong between the trees and across the open grassy spaces, she realized that this garden of Shanga was in fact a zoo, an exhibit, where the people of Mars might come to see what manner of beast their economic conquerors were. A hot and dire shame rose in her. Apeling, running naked through the trees, a slave to the fire of Shanga!
She yelled at Jim to stop!
He only plunged on the harder, so that she had to fight him, setting her heels in the earth. And he turned on her snarling, saying, 'Shanga!'
A great anthropoid female came rushing toward them. She had slipped back beyond speech, but ecstatic noises came out of her throat. Behind her were others, males, females, and young on the same evolutionary level. Winters and the silver he that was Jim were caught up and carried on in their tribal rush. Winters fought to get away, but it was hopeless. The wild hairy bodies walled her in.
As they approached the center of the garden they were joined by more and more, all apparently summoned by the sound of the gong. Looking at them, Winters' stomach turned over. This was Walpurgis Night, a festival of blasphemies. And she was trapped in it, inextricably joined to destruction.
The ones like Jim, who had only gone a little way as yet, were not so bad. They were human. Winters knew that she herself had been like that, and she felt no particular horror of them. But there were others. Back through all the stages of the primitive, beyond the Neanderthal, beyond Pithecanthropus Erectus, beyond the missing link, back to the common ancestor.
Shapeless, shambling, hairy brutes, deformed skulls and little red cunning eyes, bared teeth grinning yellow. Things that even the anthropologist had never seen or dreamed of. Things that were not human, or ape, nor any form of life that had ever been classified.
All the dark secrets of Terran evolution were laid bare in this garden, for the Martians to see. It made even Winters, the Earthwoman, flinch to think that bodies like that had given ultimate birth to her. What respect could the Martians have for such a race, that was still so close to its beginnings?
But she was to see more, much more, of those beginnings. . . . .
The gong struck a last booming summons. The tide of bowed hairy shoulders and flat brows and ugly things that went on all fours swept Winters and Jim out into the clearing at the center, where from the palace window she had seen the lake. A strong musky reek hung in the air. It had the same sickly taint that a snake-house does. And Winters saw that the lake was agitated by the creatures who lived there, and who were swarming out to answer the gong.
Back to the common ancestor, and beyond. Beyond the mammal, back to the gill and the scale, to the egg laid in the warm mud, to the hissing, squirming, utterly loathly ultimate!
Jim panted, 'Shanga! Shanga!' looking up, and Winters felt a darkness swimming in her brain. A cold wet thing slithered between her legs, and she swayed, retching. The surface of the lake rippled, but she could not look. She could not.
Grasping Jim, she tried to batter her w
ay through the crowd, but it was hopeless. She was caught, trapped.
Looking up, she saw the prisms that were set high overhead on long booms. She saw them start to glow, with the remembered flame.
She had reached the end, now. The end of her search for Jim Leland, the end of everything. The first sweet deadly thrill of the ray touched her flesh. She felt the waking hunger in her, the deep lust, the stirring of the beast that lay so close under her own skin. She thought of the lake, and wondered how it would be to lie in its wetness, breathing through the gill slits that had once opened in her own flesh when she was an embryo in her father's womb.
Because that is where I shall be, she thought. In the lake. Jim and I. And beyond the lake, what? The amoeba, and then . . . ?
She saw the royal box, whence the Queens of Valkis had watched the gladiators and the flowing blood. Fond sat there now. He leaned his slender elbows on the stone and watched, and it seemed to Winters that even at this distance she could see the smile and the scorn in his golden eyes. Kyr Hal sat beside him, and the old man, a muffled shape of black.
The fires of Shanga burned and brightened. There was a silence on the clearing now. The sounds that came, the moanings and the little whimpers, did not touch the silence. They only made it deeper. The warm glints danced on the upturned faces, glowed in the staring eyes. Each scaled or shaggy body bore a nimbus of beauty. She saw Jim standing there, reaching up toward the twin suns, a slim shaft of silver flame.
The madness already in her blood. Muscle and sinew taut with it, arching, curving. Brain clouding with a bright soft veil, forgetfulness, release. Jim and Berit, dawn-man, dawn-woman, happy while they lived, done with everything but their own love, their own satisfaction. Why not? They were both in it now, both marked with the same stamp.
Then she heard the laughter and the jeering of the Martians who were gathered to watch the shame of her world. She tore her gaze away from the wicked light and looked again into the face of Fond of Valkis, and then at Kyr Hal and the thousand other faces, and a bleak and terrible expression came into her eyes.
The ranks of the crowd had broken. The beast-shapes lay upon the turf, writhing in the ecstasy of Shanga. Jim was on his hands and knees. Winters felt the strength going out of her. The lovely pain, the beautiful, wild, exultant pain . . .
She grasped Jim and began to drag him, back toward the trees, out of the circle of light.
He did not want to go. He screamed and tore her face with his nails and kicked her, and she struck him. After that he lay limp in her arms. She kept on, stumbling over the twitching bodies, falling, crawling at last on her hands and knees. Only one thing kept her going on. Only one thing made her undergo the tortures of the damned, fighting Shanga.
That thing was the scornful, smiling face of Fond.
The touch of the ray weakened and was gone. She was safe, beyond the circle. She dragged the boy farther into the shrubbery and turned her back on the clearing because she wanted more than any drug addict could conceive of wanting to go back into the light, and she dared not look at it.
Instead, she pulled herself erect and faced the royal box. It was only pride that kept her standing. She looked straight into the distant eyes of Fond, and his clear silvery voice carried to her.
'You will go back into the fire of Shanga, Earthwoman. Tomorrow, or the day after—you will go.'
Complete assurance there, as one is sure of the rising of the sun.
Berit Winters did not answer. She stood a moment longer, her gaze level with Fond's. Then, even pride failed. She fell and lay still.
The last conscious thought of her mind was that Fond and Mars together had challenged Earth, and that it was no longer merely a matter of saving a boy from destruction.
IV
When she came to, it was night. Jim sat patiently beside her. He had brought her food, and while she wolfed it down he went away to fetch water in a broad cupped leaf.
She tried to talk to him, but there was a gulf between them too wide to be bridged. He seemed subdued and brooding, and would not come close to her. She had robbed him of the fire of Shanga, and he had not forgotten it.
The futility of trying to escape with his was obvious. After a while she rose and left him, and he did not try to follow.
The garden was still under the light of the low moons. Apparently the beasts of Shanga, true to their ape heritage, were sleeping. Moving with infinite caution, Winters prowled the arena in search of a way out. A plan had taken shape in her mind. It was not much of a plan, and she knew that very probably she would be dead before morning, but she had nothing to lose. She did not even particularly care. She was a woman, an Earthwoman, and there was an anger in her that was deeper than any fear.
The walls of the arena were smooth and high. Even an ape could not have climbed them. All the tunnels were blocked off except the one by which they had entered. She crept down it and found the barred gate impenetrable. Beyond it was a little guard fire, and two sentries. Winters went back to the arena.
She could see no sign of a guard in the empty tiers of seats. There was no reason for one. In itself, the amphitheater was a perfect prison, and the creatures of the garden had no wish to escape from the besotting joys of Shanga.
Whipped before she started, Winters stood glaring bitterly at the walls that held her fast. Then she caught sight of the booms from which the Shanga prisms were suspended.
Going to the nearest one, she studied it. It was high out of reach, a long metal pole that stretched from the side of the arena above the wall and, with the other one, centered the Shanga-rays over the clearing.
High out of reach. But if a woman had a rope . . . Winters went in among the trees. She found vines and creepers, and tore them away, and knotted them together. She found a small log in a deadfall, big enough to weight one end but light enough for throwing. Then she returned to the boom.
On the third cast the log went over. She drew her flimsy rope down, making a double strand. Hand over hand, praying that the vines would hold, she began to climb.
It seemed like a long way up. She felt very naked and exposed in the moonlight.
The vines held, and no challenging voice shouted at her. She clung to the boom and worked her way along it, first dropping the telltale rope. Presently she was safe among the tiered seats.
Avoiding the guard by the tunnel, she made her way out of the amphitheater and circled out across the slope, keeping to cover where there was cover, crawling on her belly where there was none. The shifting moon-shadows helped her, because they made visibility a treacherous thing. The palace loomed above her, huge and dark, crushed under the weight of time.
Only two lights showed. One, on the ground floor, she guessed would be the guard room. The other, on the third level, was dim as though made by a single torch. That, she hoped, would be the apartment of Fond.
Up the slope and into the shelter of the palace garden, and then into the palace itself. The great half-ruined pile could not have been guarded, even if there had been reason to guard it. Padding silently on naked feet, Winters glided through the vast empty halls, trying to keep a plan of the place straight in her mind.
Her eyes were accustomed to the dark, and enough moonlight fell through the embrasures to let her see where she was going. Room and hall and corridor, smelling of dust and death, dreaming over their faded flags and broken trophies, remembering glory. Winters shivered. Something of the cold breath of eternity lived in this place.
She found a ramp, and then another, and at last on the third level she saw light, the weak flicker of it from the crack of a door.
There was no guard. That was a break. Not only because it was a difficulty eliminated, but because it confirmed her guess that Fond was a person who would want no check on his comings and goings. From the standpoint of safety in this place, a guard would be only a useless adornment. Fond was on his own ground here. There were no enemies.
Save one.
Winters opened the door without sound.
A page slept on a low couch. He did not stir as she passed. Beyond an open arch hung with heavy curtains she found the sir Fond.
He slept in a huge carved bed, the bed of the Queens of Valkis. He looked like a child lost in its hugeness. He was very beautiful. Very wicked, and most damnably beautiful.
Winters struck him, quite ruthlessly. Sleep became unconsciousness. There was no outcry. With silks and girdles she found in the room she bound and gagged him, and flung his light weight over her shoulder. Then she went back the way she had come, silently out of the palace.
It was as easy as that. She had not thought it would be easy, but it was. After all, she thought, women seldom guard against the impossible.
Phobos had gone on its careening flight around Mars, and Deimos was too low to give much light. Now carrying the unconscious Fond, now dragging his across the open spaces, Winters made her way back to the amphitheater. In and across the tiered seats to the wall. It was a twenty-foot drop, but she made it as easy as she could on him. She didn't want his dead. Then she slid over, herself, hung briefly by her fingertips, and fell into cushioning brush.
When she got her breath back she made sure that Fond was not hurt. Then she carried him swiftly into the shelter of the unholy garden. Remembering a particularly dense patch of shrubbery near the central clearing, she made for it and crept thankfully into concealment with the heir of all the Queens of Valkis.
Then she waited.