The Conquest of the Moon Pool/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
THE THREE SILENT ONES
I WAS in the heart of a rose petal, swinging, swinging; no, I was in a rosy dawn cloud, pendulous in space. Consciousness flooded me; in reality I was in the arms of one of the man frogs, carrying me as though I were a babe, and we were passing through some place suffused with glow enough like heart of pearl or dawn cloud to justify my awakening vagaries.
Just ahead walked Lakla in earnest talk with Rador, and content enough was I for a time to watch her. She had thrown off the metallic robes; her thick braids of golden brown with their flame glints of bronze were twined in a high coronal meshed in silken net of green; little clustering curls escaped from it, clinging to the nape of the proud white neck, shyly kissing it. From her shoulders fell a loose, sleeveless garment of shimmering green belted with a high golden girdle; skirt folds dropping barely below the knees.
She had cast aside her buskins, too, and the slender, high-arched feet were sandaled. She walked like one of Diana's nymphs, free, floating, delicately graceful, but with none of that serpent touch entwined in the least of Yolara's movements. Between the buckled edges of her kirtle I caught gleams of translucent ivory as exquisitely molded, as delectably rounded, as those revealed beneath the hem.
"Put me down," I demanded to my bearer.
He tightened his hold; round eyes upon the Golden Girl. She turned and spoke—in sonorous, reverberating monosyllables—and I was set upon my feet. I leaped to the side of the Irishman. He lay limp, with a disquieting, abnormal sequacity, as though every bone and muscle were utterly flaccid. The flesh was stone cold; the pulse barely perceptible, long intervaled; the respiration undiscoverable. There were no nervous reflexes or reactions; the pupils of the eyes were enormously dilated; it was as though life had been drawn from every nerve.
"What did this?" I asked.
Lakla shook her head, looking at Rador, the trouble in her eyes deepening.
"At first I thought it was the Keth that was cast, but—" The green dwarf hesitated.
"A light flashed from the road. It struck his face and seemed to sink in," I said.
"I saw," answered Rador; "but what it was I know not; and I thought I knew all the weapons of our rulers." He glanced at me curiously. "Some talk there has been that the stranger who came with you, Double Tongue, was making new death tools for Lugur," he ended.
Von Hetzdorp! The German at work already in this storehouse of devastating energies, fashioning the weapons for his plots! The Apocalyptic vision swept back upon me, and I resolved that this quick blossoming of dread possibilities I had foreseen should be destroyed before it fruited—aye, and Von Hetzdorp with it.
"He is not dead." Lakla's voice was poignant. "He is not dead; and the Three have wondrous healing. They can restore him if they will—and they will, they will!" For a moment she was silent. "Now their gods help Lugur and Yolara," she whispered; "for come what may, whether the Silent Ones be strong or weak, if he dies surely will I fall upon them with my Akka and I will slay those two with the Yekta death—with my own hands— yea, though I too, perish!"
"Yolara and Lugur shall both die," Olaf's eyes were burning. "But Lugur is mine to slay."
That pity I had seen before in Lakla's eyes when she looked upon the Norseman banished the white wrath from them. She turned, half hurriedly, as though to escape his gaze, fastened upon her with hope—poised yearning.
He sighed, dropping behind.
"The white maiden knows," he murmured. "Not yet does she will to speak, and until she speaks. I will not despair—no!"
Lakla glanced behind.
"Walk with us," she said to me, "unless you are still weak."
I shook my head, gave a last look at O'Keefe; there was nothing I could do; I stepped beside her. She thrust a white arm into mine protectingly, the wonderfully chiseled hand with it long, tapering fingers catching about my wrist; my heart glowed toward her.
"Soon we walk no more," she said. "When the Portal called, we sped back, my Akka and I, leaving the bearers behind. They wait for us, not far ahead. Are you strong enough?" she asked anxiously. "Or shall I call upon Ork to carry you again?"
I shook my head vigorously.
"Your medicine is potent, handmaiden," I answered. "And the touch of your hand would give me strength enough, even had I not drunk it," I added in Larry's best manner.
Her eyes danced, trouble flying.
"Now, that was well spoken for such a man of wisdom as Rador tells me you are." She laughed, and a little pang shot through me. Could not a lover of science present a compliment without it always seeming to be as unusual as plucking a damask rose from a cabinet of fossils? Ah, well, as I have said, those who swear allegiance to Minerva must expect the suspicion of Aphrodite.
Mustering my philosophy, I smiled back at her. Again I noted that broad, classic brow, with the little tendrils of shining bronze caressing it, the tilted, delicate, nut-brown brows that gave a curious touch of innocent diablerie to the lovely face—flowerlike, pure, high-bred. A touch of roguishness, subtly alluring, sparkling over the maiden Madonna-ness that lay ever like a delicate, luminous suggestion beneath it.
"What is wisdom, O maiden, but clear seeing and understanding?" I replied. "And never has my wisdom, such as it is, seen clearer than when I look upon your countenance."
A little flush sped over her face. Rador laughed.
"I have always liked you," she murmured naïvely, enchantingly embarrassed "since first I saw you in that place where the Shining One goes forth into your world. And I am glad you like—you like my medicine as well as that you carry in the black box that you left behind," she added.
"How know you of that, Lakla?" I gasped.
"Oft and oft I came to him there, and to you, while you lay sleeping. How call you him?" She paused.
"Larry!" I said.
"Larry!" She repeated it excellently, "And you?"
"Goodwin," said Rador.
I bowed quite as though I were being introduced to some charming young lady met in that old world life now seemingly eons removed.
"Yes, Goodwin," she said. "Oft and oft I came. Sometimes I thought you saw me. And he—did he not dream of me sometimes?" she asked wistfully.
"He did," I said, "and watched for you." The amazement grew vocal. "But how came you?" I asked.
"By a strange road," she answered, "to see that all was well with him, and to look into his heart; for I feared Yolara and her beauty. But I saw that she was not in his heart." A blush burned over her. "It is a strange road?" she went on hurriedly. "Many times have I followed it and watched the Shining One bear back its prey to the blue pool; seen the woman he seeks"—she made a quick gesture toward Olaf—"and a babe cast from her arms in the last pang of her mother love; seen another woman throw herself into the Shining One's embrace to save a man she loved; and I could not help!" Her voice grew deep, thrilled. "The friend, it comes to me, who drew you here, Goodwin!"
Unable to speak, I stared at her in stark astonishment.
"Well," she said, "you must pass upon that road, too, Goodwin; and he, if he live, to see what you must—the Silent Ones are speaking to me, and by that I know he shall live." Her face was rapt, with that expression that Delphi's pythoness must have borne, listening to the whispers of Apollo. "But not he—not the great one you call Olaf; "he may not pass upon it," she murmured, and again the pity welled up in the eyes of gold.
She was silent, walking as one who sees visions and listens to voices unheard by others. Rador made a warning gesture; I crowded back my questions, glanced about me. We were passing over a smooth strand, hard packed as some beach of long- thrust- back ocean. It was like crushed garnets, each grain stained deep red, faintly sparkling. On each side were distances, the floor stretching away into them bare of vegetation—stretching on and on into infinitudes of rosy mist, even as did the space above.
Flanking and behind us marched the giant batracians, fivescore of them at least, black scale and crimson scale lustrous and gleaming in the rosaceous radiance; saucer eyes, shining circles of phosphorescence, green, purple, red; spurs clicking as they crouched along with a gait at once grotesque and formidable.
A HEAD the mist deepened into a ruddier glow; through it a long, dark line began to appear—the mouth, I thought, of the caverned space through which we were going; it was just before us; over us—we stood bathed in a flood of rubescence!
A sea stretched before us—a crimson sea, gleaming like that lost lacquer of royal coral and the Flame Dragon's blood which Fu S'cze set upon the bower he built for the sun maiden he had stolen—that going toward it she might think it the sun itself rising over the summer seas. Unmoved by wave or ripple, it was placid as some deep woodland pool when night rushes up over the world.
About it was no hint of stagnancy, no unpleasant suggestion of tide of blood. Rather it seemed molten, or as though some hand great enough to rock earth had distilled here from conflagrations of autumn sunsets their flaming essences.
A fish broke through, large as a shark, blunt-headed, flashing bronze, ridged and mailed as though with serrated plates of armor. It leaped high, shaking from it a sparkling spray of rubies; dropped and shot up a geyser of fiery gems.
Across my line of vision, moving stately over the sea, floated a half globe, luminous, diaphanous, its iridescence melting into turquoise, thence to amethyst, to orange, to scarlet shot with rose, to vermilion, a translucent green, thence back into the iridescence. Behind it were four others, and the least of them ten feet in diameter, and the largest no less than thirty. They drifted past like bubbles blown from froth of rainbows by pipes in mouths of Titans' young. Then from the base of one arose a tangle of shimmering strands. Long, slender, whiplashes that played about and sank slowly again beneath the crimson surface.
I gasped, for the fish had been a ganoid, that ancient, armored form that was perhaps the most intelligent of all life on our planet during the Devonian era. But these for age upon age had vanished, save for their fossils held in the embrace of the stone that once was their soft bottom bed. And the half-globes were Medusae, jellyfish of a size, luminosity, and color unheard of.
Now Lakla cupped her mouth with pink palms and sent a clarion note ringing out. The ledge on which we stood continued a few hundred feet before us, falling abruptly, though from no great height to the Crimson Sea. At right and left it extended in a long semicircle. Turning to the right whence she had sent her call, I saw rising a mile or more away, veiled lightly by the haze, a rainbow, a gigantic prismatic arch, flattened, I thought, by some quality of the strange atmosphere. It sprang from the ruddy strand, leaped the crimson tide, and dropped three miles away upon a precipitous, jagged upthrust of rock frowning black from the lacquered depths.
And surmounting a higher ledge beyond this upthrust a huge dome of dull gold, Cyclopean, striking eyes and mind with something unhumanly alien, baffling. Sending the mind groping, as though across the deserts of space, from some far-flung star, should fall upon us linked sounds, coherent certainly, meaningful surely, vaguely familiar. Yet never to be translated into any symbol or thought of our own particular planet.
This sea of crimson lacquer, with its floating moons of luminous color—this bow of prismed light leaping to the weird aisle crowned by the anamalous, aureate—excrescence—the half human batracians—the elf land through which we had passed with all its hidden wonders and terrors—I felt the foundations of my cherished knowledge shaking. Was this all a dream? Was this body of mine lying somewhere, fighting a fevered death, and all these but images floating through the breaking chambers of my brain? My knees shook; I groaned.
Lakla turned, looked at me anxiously, slipped a soft arm behind me, held me till the vertigo passed.
"Patience," she said. "The bearers come. Soon you shall rest."
I looked; down toward us from the bow's end were leaping swiftly another score of frog-men. Some bore litters, high, handled, not unlike palanquins—
"Asgard!" Olaf stood beside me, eyes burning, pointing to the arch. "Bifrost Bridge, sharp as sword edge, over which souls go to Valhalla. And she—she is a valkyr—a sword maiden, ja!"
I gripped the Norseman's hand. It was hot, and a pang of remorse shot through me. If this place had so shaken me, how must it have shaken Olaf, who had neither my armor of science nor Larry's protecting belief that outside of Ireland could occur only wholly natural phenomena. As soon as we reached wherever we were going, Olaf must be cared for—surely only his obsessing grief and his fixed idea of vengeance could have carried him so far!
And it was with relief that I watched him, at Lakla's gentle command, drop humbly into one of the litters and lie back, eyes closed, as two of the monsters raised its yoke to their scaled shoulders. Nor was it without further relief that I myself lay back on the soft velvety cushions of another.
The cavalcade began to move. Lakla had ordered O'Keefe placed beside her, and she sat, knees crossed Orient fashion, leaning over the pale head on her lap, the white, tapering fingers straying fondly through his hair.
Presently I saw her reach up, slowly unwind a coronal of her tresses, shake them loose, and let them fall like a veil over her and him.
Her head bent low; I heard a soft sobbing—I turned away my gaze, lorn enough in my own heart, God knew!
THE arch was closer, and in my awe as I looked upon it I forgot for the moment Larry and aught else. For this was no rainbow, no thing born of light and mist, no Bifrost Bridge of myth—no! It was a flying arch of stone, stained with flares of Tyrian purples, of royal scarlets, of blues dark as the Gulf Stream's ribbon, sapphires soft as midday May skies, splashes of chromes and greens. A palette of giantry, a bridge of wizardry; a hundred, nay, a thousand, times greater than that of Utah which the Navaho call Nonnegozche and worship, as well they may, as a god, and which is itself a rainbow in eternal rock.
It sprang from the ledge and winged its prodigious length in one low arc over the sea's crimson breast. As though in some ancient paroxysm of earth it had been hurled molten, crystallizing into that stupendous span and still flaming with the fires that had molded it.
Closer we came and closer, while I watched spellbound; now we were at its head, and the litter-bearers swept upon it. All of five hundred feet wide it was, surface smooth as a city road, sides low walled, curving inward as though in the jetting-out of its making the edges of the plastic rock had curled.
On and on we sped; the high thrusting precipices upon which the bridge's far end rested, frowned close; the enigmatic, dully shining dome loomed ever greater. Now we had reached that end; were passing over a smooth plaza whose level door was enclosed, save for a rift in front of us, by the fanged tops of the black cliffs.
From this rift stretched another span, half a mile long, perhaps, widening at its center into a broad platform. It continued straight to two massive gates set within the face of the second cliff wall like panels, and of the same dull gold as the dome rising high beyond. And this smaller arch passed over a pit, an abyss, of which the outer precipices were the rim holding back from the pit the red flood.
We were rapidly approaching; now upon the platform, my bearers were striding closely along the side. I leaned out—a giddiness seized me! I gazed down into depth upon vertiginous depth; an abyss indeed. An abyss dropping to world's base like that in which the Babylonians believed writhed Talaat, the serpent mother of Chaos; a pit that struck down into earth's heart itself. It was as though I were looking oyer the edge of a world into illimitable space.
Now, what was that, distance upon unfathomable distance below? A stupendous glowing like the green fire of life itself. What was it like? I had it! It was like the corona of the sun in eclipse—that other burgeoning of unknown elements that makes of our luminary when moon veils it an incredible blossoming of splendors in the black heavens.
And strangely, strangely, it was like the Dweller's beauty when with its dazzling spiralings and whirlings it raced amid its storm of crystal bell sounds!
The abyss was behind us; we had paused at the golden portals; they swung inward. A wide corridor filled with soft light was before us; and on its threshold stood—bizarre, yellow gems gleaming, huge muzzle wide in what was evidently meant for a smile of welcome—the woman frog of the Moon Pool wall. And from behind her leaped a frog-child, black and scarlet as were our guards, who with little croakings and boomings of joy jumped into the arms of the giant who had led us—he who had gone before Lakla at Yolara's interrupted feast, and whose beastly club had so narrowly missed scattering the brains of O'Keefe.
Lakla raised her head; swept back the silken tent of her hair and gazed at me with eyes misty from weeping. The frog-woman crept to her side; gazed down upon Larry; spoke—spoke—to the Golden Girl in a swift stream of the sonorous, reverberating monosyllables; and Lakla answered her in kind. The webbed digits swept over O'Keefe's face, felt at his heart; she shook her head and moved with extraordinary rapidity ahead of us up the passage. The golden gates closed.
STILL borne in the litters we went on, winding, ascending until at last they were set down in a great hall carpeted with soft fragrant rushes and into which from high narrow slits streamed the crimson light from without.
I jumped over to Larry; there had been no change in his condition; still the terrifying limpness, the slow, infrequent pulsation. Rador and Olaf—and the fever now seemed to be gone from him—came and stood beside me, silent.
"I go to the Three," said Lakla. "Wait you here." She passed through a curtaining; nor one word did we utter until she returned, standing there about the body of the man whom each of us, in his own fashion, loved well. Then as swiftly as she had gone she came through the hangings; tresses braided, a swathing of golden gauze about her.
"Rador," she said, "bear you Larry—for into your heart the Silent Ones would look. And fear nothing," she added at the green dwarf's disconcerted, almost fearful start.
Rador bowed, started to lift O'Keefe; was thrust aside by Olaf.
"No," said the Norseman; "I will carry him."
He lifted Larry like a child against his broad breast. The dwarf glanced quickly at Lakla; she nodded.
"Come!" she commanded, and held aside the folds.
Of that journey I have few memories. I only know that we went through corridor upon corridor; successions of vast halls and chambers, some carpeted with the rushes, others with rugs into which the feet sank as into deep, soft meadows. There were glimpses of things carved, things wrought and woven; brilliant screens of feathers; great tapestries and odd, unfamiliar, thronelike seats. Divans like giants' beds; spaces illuminated by the rubrous light, and spaces in which softer lights held sway.
We paused before a slab of the same crimson stone as that the green dwarf had called the Portal, and upon its polished surface, even as they had upon it, weaved the unnameable symbols. The Golden Girl pressed upon its side; it slipped softly back; a torrent of opalescence gushed out of the opening—and as one in a dream I entered.
We were, I knew, just under the dome; but for the moment, caught in the- flood of radiance, I could see nothing. It was like being held within a fire opal—so brilliant, so flashing, was it. I closed my eyes, opened them; the lambency cascaded from the vast curves of the globular walls. In front of me was a long, wide opening in them, through which, far away, I could see the end of the wizards' bridge, and the ledged opening of the cavern through which we had come. Against the light from within beat the crimson light from without—and was checked as though by a barrier.
I felt Lakla's touch; turned.
A hundred paces away was a daïs, its rim raised a yard above the floor. From the edge of this rim, streamed upward a steady, coruscating mist of the opalescence, veined even as was that of the Dweller's shining core and shot with milky shadows like curdled moonlight; up it stretched like a wall.
Over it, from it, down upon me, gazed three faces—two clearly male, one a woman's. At the first I thought them statues, and then the eyes of them gave the lie to me; for the eyes were alive, terribly, and if I could admit the word—supernaturally—alive.
They were thrice the size of the human eye and triangular, the apex of the angle upward; black as jet, pupiless, filled with tiny, leaping red flames. And they were the eyes of that little cloud I had seen hovering aboout Lakla in what I had then thought to be surely a singularly vivid dream.
Over them were foreheads, not as ours—high and broad and vizored. Their sides drawn upward into a vertical ridge; a prominence, an upright wedge, somewhat like the vizored heads of some of the great lizards. And the heads, long, narrowing at the back, were fully twice the size of mankind's!
Upon the brows were caps, and with a fearful certainty, I knew that they were not caps. Long, thick strands of gleaming, yellow, feathered scales, thin as sequins! Sharp, curving noses like the beaks of the giant condors; mouths thin, austere; long, powerful, pointed chins. The—flesh—of the faces white, as whitest marble; and wreathing up to them, covering all their bodies, the shimmering, curdled, misty fires of opalescence!
Olaf stood rigid; my own heart leaped wildly. What—what were these strange beings?
I forced myself to look again—and from their gaze streamed a current of reassurance, of will—nay, of intense spiritual strength. I saw that they were not fierce, not ruthless, not inhuman, despite their strangeness. No, they were kindly, in some unmistakable way, benign and sorrowful. So sorrowful! I straightened, gazed back at them fearlessly Olaf drew a deep breath, gazed steadily, too, the hardness, the despair wiped from his face.
NOW Lakla drew closer to the daïs; the three pairs of eyes searched hers, the woman's with an ineffable tenderness; some message seemed to pass between the three and the Golden Girl. She bowed low, turned to the Norseman.
"Place Larry there," she said softly—"there, right at the feet of the Silent Ones."
She pointed into the radiant mist; Olaf started, hesitated, stared from Lakla to the Three, searched for a moment their eyes—and something like a smile drifted through them. He stepped forward, lifted O'Keefe, set him squarely within the covering light. It wavered, roiled upward, swirled about the body, steadied again—and within it there was no sign at all of Larry!
Again the mist wavered, shook, and seemed to climb higher, hiding the chins, the beaked noses, the brows of that incredible Trinity. But before it ceased to climb, I thought I saw the yellow, feathered heads bend; sensed a movement as though they lifted something.
The mist fell; the eyes gleamed out again, inscrutable.
And groping out of the radiance, pausing at the verge of the daïs, leaping down from it, came Larry, laughing, filled with life, blinking as one who draws from dark- ness into sunshine.
He saw Lakla, sprang to her, gripped her in his arms.
"Lakla!" he cried. "Mavourneen!"
Swiftly she slipped from his embrace, blushing, glancing at the Three shyly, half-fearfully. And again I saw the tenderness creep into the inky, flame-shot orbs of the woman being; and a tenderness in the others, too—as though they regarded some well-beloved child
"Doc," shouted Larry, catching me by the hand, "what hit me? Say, I've had some dream. Where are we?"
Lakla touched his arm and proceeded to answer his question.
"You lay in the arms of Death, Larry," she said. "And the Silent Ones drew you from him. Do homage to the Silent Ones, Larry, for they are good and they are mighty!"
She turned his head with one of the long, white hands—and he looked into the faces of the Three; looked long, was shaken even as had been Olaf and myself. And he stiffened under that same wave of power and of—of—what can I call it?—holiness that streamed from them.
Then for the first time I saw real awe mount into his face Another moment he stared, and dropped upon one knee and bowed his head before them as would a worshiper before the shrine of his saint. And—I am not ashamed to tell it—I joined him; and with us knelt Lakla and Olaf and Hador.
We bent there, my heart as full of thanksgiving and of confidence as a child who has passed through nightmare land into safe fireside haven. I looked up; the eyes of the Trinity were soft, the leaping flames within them quiet, the black depths filled with tenderness.
Then the mist of fiery opal swirled up, covering them.
And with a long, deep, joyous sigh Lakla took Larry's hand, drew him to his feet, and silently we followed them out of that hall of wonder.
But why, in going, did the thought come to me that from where the Three sat throned they ever watched the cavern mouth that was the door into their abode; and looked down ever into the unfathomable depth in which glowed and pulsed that mystic flower, colossal, awesome, of green flame that had seemed to me fire of life itself?