Lin Carter - The City Outside the World (18 page)

Ryker blinked at him dazedly.

"You mean, when we stepped through the Door to Zhiam, we didn't travel through space at all, but through—
time?"

Herzog nodded affably.

Ryker looked at him, incredulously. But a dawning comprehension filled his mind. Suddenly, all sorts of curious facts and observations, scraps and bits and pieces, began to fall together. And they made a kind of sense.

The peculiar expression on the faces of Valarda and Melandron when they looked for the first time upon the Lost City—that expression of mingled sorrow and horror. The city had been fresh and new when last they had seen it—they or their ancestors, that is—now it was crumbling into ruin.

The unknown language in which they had at times conversed—an obsolete variant of the modern Tongue, elsewhere but in Zhiam forgotten for ages.

The golden eyes of the girl—strange color that has not been seen in the eyes of Martians for many ages.

The very name of the old man, Melandron, like something out of one of the ancient sagas.

It all fit together perfectly. Even the fact that they permitted him to go with them. It was as if they did not share the contemporary Martian prejudice against the Earthsider colonists who had raped, despoiled and seized their world.
To them he was only an interesting curiosity.
They had not lived through the grim horrors of CA occu-

pation, watching their land taken over by aliens, their men enslaved, their women ravished and cast aside—
they had perhaps never even seen an Earthling before.

"How—far—back?" he asked hoarsely.

Doc shrugged carelessly.

"A billion years, maybe. Maybe two billion. Hard to say. The movements of the stars into what we know as the present constellations is a very gradual thing. They all look deformed, out of shape, because they are here and now, I mean moving into the alignments familiar to us. I would say, however—"

But Ryker was no longer listening. His mind echoed and reechoed with that astounding, that enormous, that world-shaking fact.

Two—billion—years!

There was no point in wondering how the Lost Nation had accomplished the miracle. Time travel was an old idea. Back on Earth the science fiction writers had played with it for a couple of centuries. Science seemed to agree that it was an impossibility. Time is simply the measure of change, of entropic decay; any reversal of entropy rate would seem to be purely a contradiction in terms.

But science had to adapt to existing facts, or it was as unreliable as theology. This
was
ancient Mars, beyond all question. That fierce white sun was the old familiar sun, as it looked aeons earlier in time. Those curious feather trees were known from their fossilized remains. So, too, with the great cats; extinct for many ages, they were considered by some to be the evolutionary ancestor of the Martian natives. Those two moons, just barely visible in the night sky, were Deimos and Phobos, the moons of Mars. The blue moss that covered the soil, the blue vegetation, the strange flowers—blue vegetation still existed on the Mars

Ryker knew, but it was scarce and had evolved into simpler, hardier forms over ages of gradual dehydration which had reduced this warm and fertile planet into a dying world of naked rock and bleak dust desert.

It had long been known that the remote ancestors of the Martian people had possessed a highly advanced technology, about which little was known for only a few of their machines or instruments had survived the attrition of time.

Somehow
they had found a way to open a portal to the distant past, and into that forgotten age they had fled from the persecution of the fanatical priests, to seek a realm where they could live in peace and worship their strange new god according to their own ways.

No wonder that the Keystone was of such vital importance to them, for locked within its black crystal was the power to trigger the portal, to open or to seal the door. And when the unnamed renegade had fled from their ancient Eden, he had left the door . . . ajar.

And through it they had feared the descendants of their old persecutors might pour, to exterminate them as once of old they had been faced with extermination.

And the fear had not been groundless. For their enemies had come—and he, Ryker, had shown them the way!

And now Ryker began to understand why Valarda had left him to die atop the desolate plateau.

She had known that Zarouk's raiders were following at their very heels. And she had the thing she had come into the future to find—the all-important Keystone, which meant life or death for her people in the past.

The decision must have been an agonizing one. She had weighed in the balance the debt she owed the Outworlder for saving her from the mob and for assisting her in her journey home, against the very survival of her nation.

And she had decided that the fate of thousands outweighed one single life,

Ryker wondered if he would have decided it any differently, if he had been in her place, deciding to leave her in order to save his own people.

He hoped he would never have such a terrible decision to make, for he doubted if he could accept the burden of that awful responsibility.

But now he understood why she had done it. And he knew the meaning of that stricken, pleading expression in her eyes when she had stared down at him from the parapet yesterday.

He slept no more that night.

Zarouk was up with dawn with a new idea for assaulting the walls of Zhiam.,

He sent his men back to the grove to cut down some of the limber boughs of the willowlike trees they had seen when first they had entered this place outside the world.

And he began to construct a row of primitive-looking seige engines.

Ryker thought of them as catapults, until Doc corrected him on his terminology.

' 'No, no, my boy! Catapult is not the proper word at all. A catapult is like a gigantic bow and arrow. What the Prince seems to be building is the sort of thing the ancient Romans would have called a
ballista.
During the Middle Ages, they knew them as mangonels. See the cup-shaped basket at the other end? That's for hurling stones."

Ryker had to admire the Desert Hawk for his resourcefulness. Armed with these engines, the raiders could keep well back from the walls and hurl heavy boulders at the fortifications. The Stone Giants could not bother them, and here the aerial serpents would be out in the open,

exposed to darts and spears and blowguns. It was a clever tactic.

By mid-afternoon the first stony missiles began to thump and bang against the gate, which rang like a huge gong when struck. The branches of the feather trees, when lashed together, had just enough "springiness'' to them to bend down over the crossbars, and to flip the heavy rocks when cut free.

Only the occasional stone actually hit the metal gates. Most of the big stones struck the walls, especially the narrow arch above the portal. Before long the marble would crack and begin to crumble. A couple of days under this sort of bombardment, and the desert raiders would be through the walls and into the City.

A ragged cheer went up lustily from half a hundred throats. One of the great stones had struck a bit high, catching the nearest of the Stone Giants squarely in the chest. The white crystalline stuff of the weirdly animated statue had shattered under the impact, spraying fragments everywhere.

One of the Stone Giants was down, at least, and would never rise again. Zarouk showed his sharp white teeth in a grin like a wolfish leer. It was pleasant to discover that the walking stone men could, after all, be destroyed!

Thump—thump—clang—crack!
—went the flying boulders as Zarouk kept the wall above the gate under steady bombardment.

It was only a matter of time, Ryker grimly knew.

20. The Underground Road

That evening, after
sunset, the encampment of the desert raiders was hit by a surprise attack.

Zarouk planned to keep his men pounding away at the wall with their ballistae throughout the hours of darkness, so as to discourage the dwellers of the City from attempting to effect repairs on the wall.

The folk of the City, however, retaliated in an unsuspected manner.

Suddenly—out of nowhere, it seemed—a large number of the slow, lumbering Stone Giants entered the camp. Impervious to the darts and spears and swords used against them by the startled sentries, they ignored the human warriors and headed straight for the long row of makeshift ballistae.

These they overturned, and began to hammer them apart with balled fists as heavy as stone mauls or hammers.

Zarouk came out of his tent in a fury, thundering commands. He knew very well that it was difficult if not impossible for his warriors to inflict any damage on the animated statues, but they
could
be immobilized, for a time at least, by lassoes.

The sky was clear and the stars twinkled down, and the larger of the twin moons was faintly visible as a ghostly crescent low on the horizon. Lighting the gloom with torches, he sent his lassomen out to rope the ponderous, slow-moving giants.

Before long they managed to snag two of them and pull them off balance, toppling them to the ground. Then, with five or six men pulling at the other end of the rope, they dragged their captives away from the scene and attempted to tie their arms to their bodies with further ropes or thongs. Some of the men were armed with axes or war hammers, and these strove to smash the Stone Giants as the one atop the walls had been broken asunder when hit by the missile.

The other Stone Giants paid no attention to their captive comrades and patiently continued breaking the ballistae apart into fragments.

Like everyone else in the camp, Ryker and the old Israeli had been aroused from their slumbers by the uproar, and came out of their tent to see what was happening.

But unlike the others, who were too busily engaged in trying to immobilize and break up the stone men to have time for curiosity, Ryker wondered just where the Giants had come from, and how they had gotten out of the City. He knew that Zarouk had posted sentries to keep an eye on the gates of the City, so that his camp would
not
be taken by surprise in a foray such as this.

The fact that it
had
been surprised, suggested to Ryker that the Giants had come through the walls by some other entry not as yet discovered.

He imparted this intelligence to the old scientist, who eagerly agreed that it was indeed mysterious. On impulse, the two of them circled the commotion and headed out toward the City, hoping to find out how the Giants had gotten there.

They found the answer to the question with surprising ease, when a portion of the riverbank opened beneath them, quite suddenly, and they fell into a dark, cavernous space.

• • •

Ryker staggered to his feet, limping on a lame leg, blood trickling down into his eyes from a cut on his scalp. The leg did not feel like it was broken, and the rest of him, although bruised and shaken up a bit, was not seriously harmed.

Rubbing the blood out of his eyes, he peered around him in the utter blackness, calling Doc's name in a hoarse voice.

Then he stumbled into something soft and yielding. Dropping to his knees he felt around him with groping hands, encountering the old man's body.

He lay limp and unmoving, but Ryker could hear him breathing and his searching hands found the flutter of a pulse. He ran his hands gently over the old man's limbs, finding that when he touched Herzog's left leg the old man groaned.

A hurt, perhaps broken leg was bad enough. A broken head was worse. And his questing fingers found a lump on the scientist's head the size of a hen's egg. But, anyway, Doc was still alive, and that was something to be thankful for.

His eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness by now, and some faint starlight was filtering through the hole far above his head. By this dim illumination, he searched the pit into which they had fallen, finding a flight of crude stone steps along one wall leading up to the opening above. By this stair, obviously, the Stone Giants had ascended to the mouth of the pit.

Peering up, he could just make out the details. A sort of double trapdoor made of wooden planks and covered with a natural camouflage of soil and moss had protected the secret entry from discovery. He guessed that the trap had been shut but not barred, left sufficiently ajar so that the

Giants could pry it open and make their escape by this same route, when their work was accomplished. If it had been barred, the chances were that he and Doc could have walked across it without noticing that it was covering a hollowness in the ground, because from the residue of soil and moss which still clung to the trap, he could see that the camouflage had been nearly two feet thick.

Ryker knelt to gather the old man up in his arms, thinking to ascend by the stair and get his companion back to camp, when he was forced to alter his plans.

The point
of
a slim rapier was just barely touching the back of Ryker's neck.

Moving slow and careful, he turned his head to see the smiling features of the slim, languid young lordling who had stood next to Valarda on the parapet, and who had laughed in answer to her jest.