The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (26 page)

Even a scientist would not be ignorant of the wiles of a jealous woman; but King was not certain that Foma actually would help him outwit Jurth, so he said, guardedly, “I am an explorer, seeking the beginning and the end of time. I seek nothing but wisdom.”

“Nothing but wisdom?” Her arms slipped about him, and her question ended in the ardent pressure of her lips. “The slave girl told us of your coming out of the future. You could go back into the future, you and I. Take me with you and I’ll help you get to your time machine.”

Apparently Ania had not spoken of his mission to end war. Perhaps she had feigned ignorance, and Jurth had guessed the nature of the machine.

“Nothing but wisdom,” King repeated, though his heart was pounding so that he could hardly speak, and the dark woman’s insistent lips were dizzying his judgment and resolution. “And when I return—”

Foma’s eager embrace made the contact clip slip from King’s wrist, and he could not understand her words; but there was no need of speech.

Later, Foma left the cell; the door opened when she tapped, and King saw the guards posted in the hall. Presently she returned with a tray heaped with roasted meat and ripe fruit that was not quite like any King had ever seen; a golden flagon and golden goblets gleamed from the tray.

She poured an amber-colored wine whose fragrance was as rich as her own perfume, and as he ate, she pillowed her lustrous head against his shoulder. “You don’t trust me,” Foma reproached. “You are afraid of Jurth, because he and his men handled you roughly, thinking you were a foreigner who had tempted one of his slaves to run away. But he is not really such a violent person. He’s keeping you prisoner simply to learn more of the future from which you come.”

Straight thinking was difficult, with Foma’s curves pressed so close to him, but King resisted the urge to kiss her upturned lips. “For a discarded favorite, you’re making a good case for him!”

“You could pretend to tell him the truth, pretend to demonstrate and explain. Otherwise, I don’t know how you’ll ever get out of here. How can you get to your time machine?”

“You can find a way,” King said, evading her tightening embrace. “Tell Jurth I’m still suspicious of you and everyone.”

Her eyes gleamed wrathfully when he thrust her away. He was glad, for that one betraying flash of anger told him how narrowly he had missed taking her into his confidence. Then she shrugged, and went to the door; the guards let her out, and bolts slid into place.

King had little time to plan any escape from a cell whose window was so far above the courtyard that only a bird could have left. The clang of iron startled him, and that angry ring shocked him more than the face of the man who entered: Jurth had returned.

Iron:
a rarity, used only by Jurth’s guard; everything else was of gold, but the Golden Age was fading, and the Iron Age was starting. The ancient myths had been more than lovely legends; they were history dimmed by years.

A squad of guards was at Jurth’s back. At his gesture, they swooped around on both sides, seizing King before he could begin to resist. By sheer weight and strength, they subdued his struggles, and stretched him flat on the hard stones. Jurth knelt and clipped the telepathic speech transmitter to King’s wrist. That done, he drew from his belt a small cylinder with a long, fine needle at one end. With the plunger at the other, it seemed very much like a surgeon’s hypodermic. But Jurth’s smile made it a fearsome weapon.

“Man of the Future, you are subtle and hard-willed! Foma has kissed the truth out of many men, and seeing you and Ania, I was sure Foma would not fail. But since you are tough as iron, the sacred metal, I will give you something that melts iron unless you tell me why you came back from the future. How do you operate the machine? Tell me, or—”

“Try and make me tell!” To be marooned in the fading years of the Golden Age would be pleasant, but King shuddered at the thought of a savage like Jurth going into the future to make it worse than it actually was. “Kill me if you want, but I won’t tell you. Not until I am ready!”

The descending needle stopped an inch from King’s chest. Jurth said, “Not until you are ready… well… this may hasten you.”

King flinched when the needle sank deep into his flesh; but when Jurth pressed the plunger, sharp agony spread from the puncture and raced through his nerves. His groans made the vault echo; the guards could hardly hold him flat. Jurth snarled, “Steady, you fools! If he drives this in too deep, it’ll kill him and you’ll wish it had killed you!”

The agony radiated; it was as if King’s body were filled with a searing network of electric wires, torturing every nerve. Fire and acid poured through his veins; he could taste the metallic venom in his mouth, he could smell it in his nostrils. His eyes stared through a haze of changing colors. Guards came running from the hall to help those who could hardly restrain the writhing madman.

Finally, King would have spoken. He knew that he was beaten, but he could not speak. His outraged nerves collapsed, and his body with them. The telepathic disc had been displaced during his last struggle, and thus Jurth did not suspect how close he had been to victory. He rose, gestured to his retainers, and stalked toward the door.

King, partially regaining consciousness, understood the derisive gesture. It meant, “There is more. I can give more than you can take.”

The sun was setting when the door opened again, and Foma returned. In the ruddy light he saw the dark bruises on her shoulders, the welts that criss-crossed her legs, and showed dimly through the frail cloth of her gown. She ran toward him, without any studied gait or gesture; she was in his arms before he could sit up or inquire, and as she pressed her lips to his, she snapped the clip on his wrist.

“Look—he beat me for failing. I was going to trick you—you were right—but he has beaten me once too often—we’ll kill him—and we’ll escape into the future—”

She poured it out in a gasp. This could be part of a trick, but the passionate intensity of her voice, the tremor of her body, the insistence of her grasp, these all convinced King. Where before he had sensed a studied cunning, now he felt that a primitive creature revealed herself without reservation.

Her fury for a moment terrified him. Unalloyed, primal rage, a slaying lust: the same ferocity that Ania had described, a new mood and one foreign to that idyllic world until Jurth had delved too deeply into wisdom, and his pride had made him greedy and grasping.

This woman, tainted by Jurth’s contagious wrath, would doom the man who was the root of discord. King was more and more pleased by the need of killing Jurth. He knew that he also was succumbing to the murderous vibration with which Jurth made raiders and slayers of his once kindly followers, but this no longer shocked him.

Foma read his thought, and curled up in his arms.

“We’ll be happy in the future,” she sighed, languidly.…

In the days that followed, King saw Jurth’s army drilling in the court: fifty men, practicing parries and thrusts with a newly invented weapon that looked like a cross between a scythe and a pike. On other days they marched out, and King saw red against the sky, the flare of burning villages. Then, captives; the capital was growing from these new additions, and Jhaggar’s outskirts reached further beyond the original walls.

At first the natives were bewildered. Some tried to share the burdens that the newcomers carried; others hospitably offered the newly captured prisoners cups of wine, but soon they learned to avoid such unpatriotic gestures. Before King had been a captive for many weeks, the natives of Jhaggar were hurling rocks, shaking fists, jeering at the prisoners.

Down in the streets, King saw a modification of the telepathic disc. There was no longer any interlinking cord, and only the slaves wore them. This was a great improvement, for with hordes of foreigners dragged into town by Jurth’s ever increasing army, the taskmasters could not possibly have used the old system of communication.

King, kept from torture because Jurth was too busy with war, was biding his time. Foma’s visits convinced him that she did have a bitter grudge against Jurth, who had discarded her in favor of a lovely captive. From her, he learned the language, and he questioned the guards about Ania, but with no result. Once, however, he caught a glimpse of her in the corridor, and he was certain that she had seen him.

Late one night the hall door opened, and Foma hurried in, with a faint tinkling of anklets and rustling of silk. Her hand trembled as she caught his shoulder. “John-king, I have found out—it is in the main laboratory—under lock—Jurth has the key—”

King drew her closer, felt her violent heart beat, and the warmth of her mouth as she returned his kiss; but she broke away, saying, “It is different, this time. I told him how stubborn you are. So you will be tortured to the extreme. You must escape. Tonight—when he returns from operating the vibration-thing that makes people eager to fight.”

“Get that key—I’ll take you with me!” He meant it, for though he was hungry for the sight of Ania, he could not abandon Foma to Jurth’s fury. “But the guards?”

“We have another new custom,” she explained. “Giving-gifts-to-turn-away-from-duty.”

“We have a shorter word for that,” King said.

During his captivity, King had felt the operation of the war-vibration machine. The faint, hateful humming was bad enough, after an hour; but there was apparently some ultra-sonic pulsation that aroused fighting fury. His only hope was in the fact that Jurth seemed to need this vibrational irritant to get his people aroused to the right degree of patriotism. So there was hope: destroy the machine whose damnable impulses had poisoned the whole race; had started a cycle of slaying, of destroying the peaceful, until the breed of the twentieth century could by a few newspaper headlines be whipped to insane fury.

Even as he pondered on it, the baleful humming began. He got up and paced the floor, his jaw set, his eyes narrowed; and for lack of anything more definite, he cursed Foma for taking so long about her arrangements. He pounded the door, and shouted at the guards. They answered him with like contempt. One said, “I’m sick of watching that fellow, I’ve notion to spear him and settle this business.”

The other said, “I’ve been thinking of that—but we better wait—”

“Wait, my eye!”

King taunted them so they would come in to try to kill him. He seized the metal-framed couch, and carried it across the cell, ready to heave against their shins when they came in. The hate-machine was whipping up a vortex of rage. Down below, the city began to mutter; riots were breaking out, and zealous watchmen were clubbing or spearing citizens into order.

Some master raid must be in the making. King began to think of Jurth, but just for the general purpose of killing him. In his fine fury, he had no purpose or aim. And he hated Ania. Damn her spineless soul, all honey and kisses, and had she ever tried to help him?

Then, behind him, King heard the mellow ring of gold. The goblet he had set on the sill was now rolling across the floor. Tiny feet and shapely calves were silhouetted against the moonlight; a woman was sliding down a rope that apparently came from a window still higher in the turret. Curiosity, and the woman’s breathtaking peril made King forget his fury.

The skirt hitched up, up, up as she descended, swung in and missed, swung in again, and then got her bare feet on the deeply recessed sill. But before she arched her supple body enough to back from the sill into the cell, King knew that Ania had finally found her way to him.

Breathless, she clung to him, and it was more her gesture than her words that made him understand when she took a key from her bosom. “All these weeks—the time machine—now we can escape—before that awful woman comes back—”

“So you know—?”

“I don’t care, she forced herself on you!”

Ania turned to the sill. “I can’t climb up, it was bad enough sliding down. But you’re strong, John-king, and I’ll wait for you to get around to the door and let me out. There are new guards, the old ones go out to war.”

King was so glad that not even the hammering waves of hatred could make him warlike.

Then the climb. In the interests of science, he had kept fit, with road work and gymnasium, in that dim future which none of those about him could even picture. Now he needed his training, every bit of it, as he went up, hand over hand. The hard twisted cord cut his palms. He should have removed his boots, but in his excitement, he had overlooked that handicap.

Ania had slipped through the upper window easily enough; for all her shapeliness, she was slender. It had never occurred to her that King’s worst struggle would be at the narrow slot that pierced the masonry. His arms were wooden, his palms were drenched with sweat, his legs had no resiliency left. The terror of that deep gulf had tightened him, exhausted him, made it as if he had climbed twice as far. For minutes he lay there, wedged in that narrow slot, not in any danger of sliding back, but certain that if he had to retreat, his strength would not permit him to slip down the cord and back to his prison.

He was close to the hate-vibration. The masonry shivered in resonance with its pulse. Again King felt the whip of wrath. He lurched, bruised and cut himself, wedged tight; but now reckless, he snarled with an insane anger against even himself, and somehow, he tore loose, and dropped in a heap on the floor of the uppermost hall.

Then King heard Jurth’s bull-roar, and a woman’s scream. A whip cracked. As King dashed down the hall, Jurth snarled and cursed Foma, threatened her with all known tortures if she did not return the key she had stolen.

The laboratory was in the cross passage at King’s right. He rounded the corner and saw Jurth and Foma in front of the locked door. Her tawny body gleamed in the light of the torches whose cold flame lined the hall. Jurth’s whip had peeled most of the gown from her back. When she flung herself at him, screaming and clawing, he slapped her with the flat of his hand. She stumbled and fell in a heap against the wall.

“Where’s that key?” Jurth roared, flicking the whip.