The Sword of Rhiannon

VI. On the Martian Sea

The galley raised a fair breeze at last and the slaves were allowed to rest. Again Carse slept. When he awoke for the second time it was dawn.

Through the oar port he watched the sea change color with the sunrise. He had never seen anything so ironically beautiful. The water caught the pale tints of the first light and warmed them with its own phosphorescent fire—amethyst and pearl and rose and saffron. Then, as the sun rose higher, the sea changed to one sheet of burning gold.

Carse watched until the last color had faded, leaving the water white again. He was sorry when it was all gone. It was all unreal and he could pretend that he was still asleep, in Madam Kan’s on the Low Canal, dreaming the dreams that come with too much thil.

Boghaz snored untroubled by his side. The drummer slept beside his drum. The slaves dropped over the oars, resting.

Carse looked at them. They were a vicious, hard-bitten lot—mostly convicted criminals, he supposed. He thought he could recognize Jekkaran, Valkisian and Keshi types.

But a few of them, like the third man at his own oar, were of a different breed. Khonds, he supposed, and he could see why he had been mistaken for one of them. They were big raw-boned men with light eyes and fair or ruddy hair and a barbarian look that Carse liked.

His gaze dropped to the catwalk and he saw clearly now the two creatures who lay shackled there. The same breed as those who had cheered him in the square last night, from the wharfside ships.

They were not human. Not quite. They were kin to the seal and the dolphin, to the strong perfect loveliness of a cresting wave. Their bodies were covered with short dark fur, thinning to a fine down on the face. Their features were delicately cut, handsome. They rested but did not sleep and their eyes were open, large and dark and full of intelligence.

These, he guessed, were what Jekkarans had referred to as Swimmers. He wondered what their function was, aboard ship. One was a man, the other a woman. He could not, somehow, think of them as merely male and female like beasts.

He realized that they were studying him with fixed curiosity. A small shiver ran over him. There was something uncanny about their eyes, as though they could see beyond ordinary horizons.

The woman spoke in a soft voice. “Welcome to the brotherhood of the lash.”

Her tone was friendly. Yet he sensed in it a certain reserve, a note of puzzlement.

Carse smiled at her. “Thanks.”

Again, he was conscious that he spoke the old High Martian with an accent. It was going to be a problem to explain his race, for he knew that the Khonds themselves would not make the same mistake the Jekkarans had.

The next words of the Swimmer convinced him of that. “You are not of Khondor,” she said, “though you resemble its people. What is your country?”

A man’s rough voice joined in. “Yes, what is it, stranger?”

Carse turned to see that the big Khond slave, who was third man on his oar, was eyeing him with hostile suspicion.

The man went on. “Word went round that you were a captured Khond spy but that’s a lie. More likely you’re a Jekkaran masquerading as a Khond, set here among us by the Sarks.”

A low growl ran through the oar bank.

Carse had known he would have to account for himself somehow and had been thinking quickly. Now he spoke up.

“I’m no Jekkaran but a tribesman from far beyond Shun. From so far that all this is like a new world to me.”

“You might be,” the big Khond conceded grudgingly. “You’ve got a queer look and way of talking. What brought you and this hog of Valkis aboard?”

Boghaz was awake now and the fat Valkisian answered hastily. “My friend and I were wrongfully accused of theft by the Sarks! The shame of it—I, Boghaz of Valkis, convicted of pilfering! An outrage on justice!”

The Khond spat disgustedly and turned away. “I thought so.”

Presently Boghaz found an opportunity to whisper to Carse. “They think now we’re a pair of condemned thieves. Best let them think so, my friend.”

“What are you but that?” Carse retorted brutally.

Boghaz studied him with shrewd little eyes. “What are you, friend?”

“You heard me—I come from far beyond Shun.”

From beyond Shun and from beyond this whole world, Carse thought grimly. But he couldn’t tell these people the incredible truth about himself.

The fat Valkisian shrugged. “If you wish to stick to that it’s all right with me. I trust you implicitly. Are we not partners?”

Carse smiled sourly at that ingenious question. There was something about the impudence of this fat thief which he found amusing.

Boghaz detected his smile. “Ah, you are thinking of my unfortunate violence toward you last night. It was mere impulsiveness. We shall forget it. I, Boghaz, have already forgotten it,” he added magnanimously.

“The fact remains that you, my friend, possess the secret of”—he lowered his voice to a murmur—“of the Tomb of Rhiannon. It’s lucky that Scyld was too ignorant to recognize the sword! For that secret, rightly exploited, can make us the biggest men on Mars!”

Carse asked him, “Why is the Tomb of Rhiannon so important?”

The question took Boghaz off guard. He looked startled.

“Do you pretend you don’t even know that?”

Carse reminded, “I told you I come from so far that this is all a new world to me.”

Boghaz’ fat face showed mixed incredulity and puzzlement. Finally he said, “I can’t decide whether you’re really what you say or whether you’re pretending childish ignorance for your own reasons.”

He shrugged. “Whichever is the case you could soon get the story from the others. I might as well be truthful.”

He spoke in a rapid undertone, watching Carse shrewdly. “Even a remote barbarian will have heard of the superhuman Quiru, who long ago possessed all power and scientific wisdom. And of how the Cursed One among them, Rhiannon, sinned by teaching too much wisdom to the Dhuvians.

“Because of what that led to the Quiru left our world, going no man knows whither. But before they left they seized the sinner Rhiannon and locked him in a hidden tomb and locked in with him his instruments of awful power.

“Is it wonderful that all Mars has hunted that Tomb for an age? Is it strange that either the Empire of Sark or the Sea-Kings would do anything to possess the Cursed One’s lost powers? And now that you have found the Tomb, do I, Boghaz, blame you for being cautious with your secret?”

Carse ignored the last. He was remembering now—remembering those strange instruments of jewels and prisms and metal in Rhiannon’s Tomb.

Were those really the secrets of an ancient, great science—a science that had long been lost to the half-barbaric Mars of this age?

He asked, “Who are these Sea-Kings? I take it that they’re enemies of the Sarks?”

Boghaz nodded. “Sark rules the lands east, north and south of the White Sea. But in the west are small free kingdoms of hardy sea-rovers like the Khonds and their Sea-Kings defy the power of Sark.”

He added, “Aye and there are many even in my own subject land of Valkis and elsewhere who secretly hate Sark because of the Dhuvians.”

“The Dhuvians?” Carse repeated. “You mentioned them before. Who are they?”

Boghaz snorted. “Look, friend, it’s all very well to pretend ignorance but that’s carrying it too far! There’s no tribesman from so far away that he doesn’t know and fear the accursed Serpent!”

So the Serpent was a generic name from the mysterious Dhuvians? Why were they called so, Carse wondered?

Carse became suddenly aware that the woman Swimmer was looking at him fixedly. For a startled moment he had the eery sensation that she was looking into his thoughts.

“Shaikh is watching us—best be quiet now,” Boghaz whispered hastily. “Everyone knows that the Halflings can read the mind a little.”

If that was so, Carse thought grimly, Shallah the Swimmer must have found profoundly astonishing matter in his own thoughts.

He had been pitchforked into a wholly unfamiliar Mars, most of which was still a mystery to him.

But if Boghaz spoke truth, if those strange objects in the Tomb of Rhiannon were instruments of a great lost scientific power, then even though he was a slave he held the key to a secret coveted by all this world.

That secret could be his death. He must guard it jealously till he won free of this brutal bondage. For a resolve to regain his freedom and a grim growing hatred of the swaggering Sarks were all that he was sure of now.

The sun rose high, blazing down into the unprotected oar pit. The wind that hummed through the taut cordage aloft did nothing to relieve the heat down here. The men broiled like fish on a griddle, and so far neither food nor water had been forthcoming.

Carse watched with sullen eyes the Sark soldiers lounging arrogantly on the deck above the sunken oar pit. On the after part of that deck rose the low main cabin, the door to which remained closed. Atop the flat roof stood the steersman, a husky Sark sailor who held the massive tiller and who took his orders from Scyld.

Scyld himself stood up there, his spade beard thrust up as he looked unseeingly over the misery in the oar pit toward the distant horizon. Occasionally he rapped out curt commands to the steersman.

Rations came at last—black bread and a pannikin of water, served out by one of the strange winged slaves Carse had glimpsed before in Jekkara. The Sky Folk, the mob had called them.

Carse studied this one with interest. He looked like a crippled angel, with his shining wings cruelly broken and his beautiful suffering face. He moved slowly along the catwalk at his task as though walking were a burden to him. He did not smile or speak and his eyes were veiled.

Shallah thanked him for her food. He did not look at her but went away, dragging his empty basket. She turned to Carse.

“Most of them,” she said, “die when their wings are broken.”

He knew she meant a death of the spirit. And sight of that broken-winged Halfling somehow gave Carse a bitterer hatred of the Sarks than his own enslavement had aroused. “Curse the brutes who would do a thing like that!” he muttered.

“Aye, cursed be they who foregather in evil with the Serpent!” growled Jaxart, the big Khond at their oar. “Cursed be their king and his she-devil daughter Ywain! Had I the chance I’d sink us all beneath the waves to thwart whatever deviltry she’s been hatching at Jekkara.”

“Why hasn’t she shown herself?” Carse asked. “Is she so delicate that she’ll keep her cabin all the way to Sark? ”

“That hellcat delicate?” Jaxart spat in loathing and said, “She’s wantoning with the lover hidden in her cabin. He crept aboard at Sark, all hooded and cloaked, and hasn’t come out since. But we saw him.”

Shallah looked aft with fixed gaze and murmured, “It is no lover she is hiding but accursed evil. I sensed it when it came aboard.”

She turned her disturbing luminous gaze on Carse. “I think there is a curse on you too, stranger. I can feel it but I cannot understand you.”

Carse again felt a little chill. These Halflings with their extra-sensory powers could just vaguely sense his incredible alienage. He was glad when Shallah and Naram, her mate, turned away from him.

Often in the hours that followed Carse found his gaze going up to the afterdeck. He had a grim desire to see this Ywain of Sark whose slave he now was.

In mid-afternoon, after blowing steadily for hours, the wind began to fail and dropped finally to a flat calm.

The drum thundered. The sweeps went out and once again Carse was sweating at the unfamiliar labor, snarling at the kiss of the lash on his back. Only Boghaz seemed happy.

“I am no seafaring man,” he said, shaking his beard. “For a Khond like you, Jaxart, sea-roving is natural. But I was delicate in my youth and forced to quieter pursuits. Ah blessed calm! Even the drudgery of the oars is preferable to bounding like a wild thing over the waves.”

Carse was touched by this pathetic speech until he discovered that Boghaz had good reason not to mind the rowing inasmuch as he was only bending back and forth while Carse and Jaxart pulled. Carse dealt him a blow that nearly knocked him off the bench and after that he pulled his weight, groaning.

The afternoon wore on, hot and endless, to the ceaseless beat of the oars.

The palms of Carse’s hand blistered, then broke and bled. He was a powerful man, but even so the strength ran out of him like water and his body felt as though it had been stretched on the rack. He envied Jaxart, who behaved as though he had been born in the oar banks.

Gradually sheer exhaustion dulled his agony somewhat. He fell into a sort of drugged stupor, wherein his body performed its task mechanically.

Then, in the last golden blaze of daylight, he lifted his head to gasp for breath and saw, through the wavering haze that obscured his vision, a woman standing on the deck above him, looking at the sea.