Time Travel Omnibus, page 85
Georgie sighed with relief. “All right. But they’re not like any dog I ever saw at home. They’re nearly as big as a horse. And there’s something else wrong about them—they’re too intelligent. You can see that just by looking at them walk.”
Presently they turned into the gateway of a hedge solid with white and scarlet blossoms.
“Fahn’s home,” Loto said. “We’ll go right in.”
Georgie went forward to walk with Loto. They passed through a garden, colorful with its mass of vivid flowers, and heavy with the languorous scent of magnolia and orange blossoms. The house stood well back from the road. It was a white house, low and broad. Georgie got an impression of smooth white columns that looked almost like marble, but were wood; a few steps; a low-hanging roof—not thatched, but seemingly of blue tiling.
Then they were on the veranda. The walls of the house sloped inward at the top. There was a window nearby—no glass—but with a blue-white silky curtain shrouding it. The doorway stood open. Georgie could see a hall, with another open door to the sunlight of a patio banked with flowers.
A girl came to the doorway. It was Azeela. Georgie knew her at once—a slight little creature of blue eyes, golden hair and milk-white skin; a pale blue silky sash wound wide about her hips and thighs, breastplates of metal, with the broad, circular collar above them, and her hair falling over her shoulders in plaits that ended with little tassels. Georgie thought her the most beautiful girl he had ever seen; Loto’s description did not half do her justice.
She stood hesitantly in the doorway; then, smiling, advanced to Loto and gave him her two hands with a pretty gesture of welcome.
Georgie’s impression that Azeela was the prettiest girl he had ever seen was short lived, for behind Azeela now came another girl—her younger sister, Dianne. Azeela might have been eighteen or nineteen; Dianne obviously was no more than sixteen—a black-haired, dark-eyed girl, dressed like Azeela, except that her sash was a deep red.
Georgie’s heart was beating furiously as he acknowledged the introductions.
“And this is Dianne,” Loto said. “We call her Dee.”
“So will I,” said Georgie promptly. He met the girl’s eyes—snapping, laughing eyes with the spirit of deviltry in them.
“Loto told me about you,” she said demurely. Her intonation was that of a foreigner, but she spoke the Ancient English with perfect ease and fluency. “Loto said he thought I would like you a lot.”
“He didn’t tell me about you,” Georgie responded. “Not till ten minutes ago. But anyway, he was right. No, what I mean is—”
The rest of Georgie’s speech was lost, for they were inside the house and Fahn was advancing to meet them. The leader of the scientists was a man of nearly seventy—a quiet, grave, dominating figure, tall and spare, but perfectly erect. His face was smooth-shaven; his iron gray hair he wore long to the base of the neck.
He was dressed in a paneled robe of black, with white ruching at his wrists and throat.
“I am glad, indeed, to have you with us,” he said cordially to Rogers. He spoke precisely, slowly and carefully, as one speaks a language newly mastered. “I feel very close to you, now that my daughter Azeela is to marry Loto. It makes me—”
Rogers stared blankly. “Loto engaged? Why, Loto—”
“There was so much else to tell you, father.” Loto was covered with confusion. “Besides, I wanted to have you meet Azeela first.”
Azeela was trying to escape from the room, but Dee captured her and pushed her back.
Georgie was vigorously congratulating Loto, and Rogers, rising to the occasion, kissed Azeela heartily.
IT WAS an ominous crisis into which the visitors from a time world twenty-eight years previous, had fallen. They discussed it with Fahn and his daughters during the remainder of that morning, and at the light noon meal, served in a shaded corner of the patio formed by the inclosing wings of the house. Banks of vivid flowers surrounded them; the quiet, warm air was redolent with perfume. A small fountain splashed musically. The world was calm, languorous.
Fahn had little to add to what they already knew. Toroh and the Noths had not been expected to attack for a month or two at least, and the Anglese scientists were going forward with their own preparations for the war with the utmost haste.
But now these emissaries Toroh had smuggled to the island injected a new and alarming factor into the situation. They had appeared only in Orleen. But the Bas were listening to them; and all over the island the news was spreading among the Bas that Toroh was a friend—not an enemy. The Bas might be incited to open revolt.
“Mogruud is alarmed,” Fahn said to Loto. He explained to the others that Mogruud was one of the most intelligent of the Bas in Anglese City—a leader of them. Mogruud was not fooled by Toroh’s emissaries. But he feared now that he could not control his people.
“And the most terrible part is the Bas are right,” Fahn added. “I do not mean in regard to Toroh—he is a scoundrel, of course. But the Bas must have some relief.
Their children—ten mothers and infants were ordered exiled yesterday.”
“Why don’t you fix it?” Georgie exclaimed.
The scientist leader shrugged slightly. “I do not make the laws, I obey them. I have remonstrated with the king and the council many times.” He paused, then added thoughtfully:
“The time may come when we of the league may be forced to act against the laws of our king. He is wrong, and we scientists all know it. But to take the law into our own hands—it is a very drastic thing—”
During the meal, Georgie was far more interested in the two sisters than in the men’s talk. He had opportunity now to study the girls, compare them. In feature they were much alike—in expression and demeanor, totally different. Azeela was calm, thoughtful, and femininely sweet. Dee was impulsive, vivacious—alternately demure and devilish, as Georgie phrased it to himself. Yet, in spite of the difference in temperament, there seemed a strange bond between the sisters. Their regard for each other—the love between them—was obvious. But it was more than that—a bond of the mind and spirit. Georgie puzzled over it. Often when Azeela was about to speak, Dee would impulsively speak for her—as though interpreting her sister’s thoughts.
The afternoon was one of Inactivity. A Toroh emissary appeared in Anglese City, but he was arrested before he had time to harangue the people.
“I had thought him one of Toroh’s brothers,” Fahn remarked. “But it is not so. I think now they would not dare come back to the island.”
He went on to explain that Toroh had two younger brothers, also banished.
“They might come—Toroh himself might come,” Loto declared. “He will dare anything that seems worth the risk.”
“If we take any one of them, he will die,” Fahn commented.
It was at this juncture, in the late afternoon when the whole world was bathed in the glorious colors of a sunset sky, that Azeela returned in from a short trip across the city.
“The Aran Festival of the Flowers is tonight,” she exclaimed excitedly. “It has not been postponed. The Arans say it is clever to hold it now, in spite of the news from Orleen. It will show the Bas how little they care—how secure is the Aran power!”
It seemed a presage of evil events—the holding of this festival wherein all the wanton luxury of the Arans could be flaunted in the face of those whom they ruled; and with foreboding in their hearts, Fahn, his daughters and their friends, prepared that evening to go and witness it. Midnight was at hand when they started. Dee and Azeela were swathed to the eyes in soft white robes; and the men carried in their hands tiny black masks.
The city streets, even at midnight, bore a holiday aspect. The moon had risen; but in addition to its light, there was above every street crossing a brazier hanging on wires, which cast a soft blue light downward.
Arans were hurrying along, alone and in groups—the women all shrouded in white; the men, in clothes of gaudy colors, wearing masks or dangling them In their hands. Little phaetons drawn by dogs rolled by, filled with gay figures in fancy dress—women leaning from them with a flash of white arms and neck and face, waving at the pedestrians and tossing out flowers as they swept past.
Loto and Azeela, with Georgie and Dee close behind them, led the way swiftly in the direction that every one else was moving. Fahn and Rogers followed them.
It was a fairylike city of unreality. Gaudy shapes of men and of white-robed women hastening forward under the blue street lights; silent white houses back from the street, with somnolent gardens drowsing in the moonlight, pale and wan and yet flushed a little with the reddish tinge of the moon; warm, moist air, almost without a breath, heavy with sensuous perfume.
And in the shadows of the streets, the brown-skinned, half-naked figure of a Bas, skulking here and there!
Azeela had for some time been walking In silence. She looked up at the moon and with a touch upon Loto’s arm, she indicated it.
“You said the moon was blushing, my Loto—the rose blush of maiden modesty to look down upon such a city. But I do not see it so. To me It is stained with blood.”
The sweeping gesture of her white arm from under the robe went to a garden beside them.
“Blood, beloved—staining everything!”
The street topped a rise of ground; ahead, down another short slope, lay the sea. And even there the silver path upon the water was tinged with red.
A CORDON of police stopped Fahn and his party at the edge of a grove of palms near the beach. A moment more and they were inside. It was dim under the palms—the white sand a lace pattern of shadow and moonlight. Gay figures were moving about, all the men masked now.
The grove was perhaps a quarter of a mile in extent. To the right lay the gleaming white beach with the surf rolling up upon it. A tremendous pile of scarlet and white blossoms stood near by under the palm trees. Figures rushed to it, gathered up armfuls and darted away, shouting and laughing.
“We must keep together,” said Fahn. “Come this way.”
Half a dozen men had whirled up, pelting Azeela and Dee with flower blossoms, and under cover of the laughing attack, trying to separate one of them from their escorts and carry her oft.
They moved slowly forward, Georgie gripping Dee’s arm tightly. They passed a huge, rectangular swimming pool, deserted as yet—glassy, moonlit water a foot or two below the surface of the ground, reflecting the dark outlines of the date palms that curved above it.
The whirling crowd constantly became denser. There must have been several thousand people within the grove; the white shrouded figure of a woman flinging flowers at a man; a woman retreating, with ammunition exhausted, to the flower pile to replenish, and being caught in a smothering embrace before she could reach It; a group of laughing girls with robes tom in the fray, pelting a defenseless man. flinging him finally into a huge pile of flower petals, burying him until some other quarry distracted their attention, or until a stronger force of men separated them.
And there were nooks behind hedges of flowers—stolen embraces of couples alone until marauding bands of men or girls found them out and drove them from their seculsion.
The white sand in places was thick with trampled flowers. Music came drifting through the warm night air—music near at hand, but blurred by the shouts of the whirling throng. The rich contralto voice of a woman singing—a snatch broken off into laughter.
A large white pavilion lay ahead, brilliant with flashing colored lights—a kaleidoscope of shifting color. It seemed crowded with people, and toward it Fahn now led his little party.
They did not enter the pavilion, but stood in a group on its white steps. The music came from within—music that welled and throbbed—unfamiliar in character, but with the age-old appeal to the senses—music sensuous, barbaric. And yet was it barbaric?
Rogers voiced the question in a whisper to Loto, who stood beside him. Was it not rather supermodern, with the centuries of decadence that had put into it that fire of the soul abandoned to the body?
The throng on the floor was battling with flowers, drinking wine from carved bowls of coconut shell, and dancing indiscriminately. The masked men, many of them, were robed in black; the women shrouded in white. But the swinging lights of vivid color stained everything and made the scene shift and blur into fantasy.
At one end of the room a huge circular table was loaded with food and drink, fruits and confections. The table was slowly revolving; half of Its circumference was behind a partition—a kitchen where it was constantly being replenished with other dainties.
The visitors found it difficult to keep their place on the pavilion steps; masked men showered the two girls with thrown flowers; a black robed figure in mock politeness and humility begged one or the other of them to dance. A trio of girls tore Georgie away, and then at his fierce resistance, left him abruptly.
“The king,” whispered Loto, with a gesture.
At one end of the pavilion on a small raised platform, the king sat smiling down upon the scene. He was robed in paneled cloth of rich, gaudy colors—a man of middle age whose long, dark hair was shot through with gray.
The scene, with its confusion of shifting incident, held too much for the visitors to see or to understand. Half an hour went by, with the merrymaking steadily increasing. Abruptly the music, which had been continuous, was stilled. The throng stopped in its tracks, waiting expectantly. The swinging colored lights died out; others took their place—pure blue-white, and motionless. A solemn bell tolled out over the silence; with almost one motion the masks and the robes were discarded. A woman’s laugh that carried in it the very essence of abandonment, rang out; then the music began; the throng sprang again into motion.
The riotous color had been of light; now with the light a blue-white, steady glare, it was the riotous color of costume. To Georgie it was Bagdad of the Ancients—manikins with turbaned headdresses, and flowing vivid draperies with the gleaming white of limbs beneath them. Or were these slave girls, with their wares held to the gaze of the bidders in the market? Circassian slaves, white of body. Or these others—desert women, dancing with a pagan abandon.
Georgie’s impressions were confused. Yet the thought came to him that it was not like any of those. It was modern beyond his time—decadence, not barbarism.
Again Rogers murmured something of the kind, but his words were lost. A score of figures came leaping from the pavilion, scattering the small group of onlookers on its steps.
Rogers recovered himself, turning to follow them with his gaze—white nymphs with flowing hair, and draperies of gauze that fell from them as they ran for the moonlit beach and the surf.
Loto, pulling at his father’s arm, brought his attention back to the pavilion. Through it, the palm-grove on the other side was visible.
The bathing pool was now a turmoil of splashing figures—slim white shapes dove into it from the palm-lined banks.
But Loto was indicating the pavilion’s interior. The crowd was standing motionless, gazing upward. A small dais was poised in mid-air above the floor in the center of the room. It floated there, seemingly with nothing to sustain it. Standing on tiptoe on the dais was the figure of a woman wrapped to the eyes in scarlet draperies. She was facing the king over a distance of some twenty feet. The music, which had been stilled for a moment, murmured softly, languorously, from its unseen niche.
Fahn whispered to Rogers, “Our workmen of the League equipped that dais for the king. He begged us—and I feel now it was a mistake. These Noth spies find out everything—”
Loto added, “It is made from our newly invented war equipment. The dais is covered with a fabric—electrically charged, and repulsive to the earth. It is radio controlled, father. A workman from the cavern is over there in the corner, behind that portiere. We have kept the fabric a secret—but the king wanted to use it for the dais.”
The woman was singing—a throbbing contralto—very soft at first, then gradually louder. As she sang, slowly she unwound the draperies, letting them drop from her like quivering flame to a smoldering pile at her feet. Beneath were other draperies, flame colored like the rest, but her arms milk-white—a heavy face with scarlet lips.
“Hellene,” Loto whispered. “The Bas call her what means ‘Mme. Voluptua.’ It is she who rules this king and this nation. Look at her!”
The king was standing up. The music grew louder, fiercer, with a thrilling minor cadence. The woman’s arms were extended;, she stood poised, smiling as she sang to the king. From her outflung arms the gauze drapery hung like quivering wings; the white of her body gleamed beneath it; the black hair piled on her head held two trembling spangles of gold at the end of golden wires. She stood, a great scarlet moth, hovering before flight, as the dais slowly raised and lowered her in the air.
Staring in fascination, the king had left his seat and descended to the floor. The crowd parted to make way for him as he slowly moved toward the dais which floated down to meet him. Every eye was on him and on the woman, who now was extending her arms down toward him.
The music and the song were at their height. The dais reached the floor; the king stepped upon it, and as the woman’s hand touched his shoulder, he dropped on one knee before her, his lips to the hem of her scarlet gauze.
A leer of triumph on the woman’s face; a murmur of applause from the watching throng. Then a black cloak fell from a figure close beside the dais; a man leaped upon it—the naked figure of a man in loincloth. A knife flashed—blue-white steel in the light from above. The song turned to a shuddering scream. The scarlet figure wilted and sank among its draperies in front of the kneeling king!
FOR an instant the colorful throng seemed frozen; then chaos—the struggling, aimless confusion of panic. The murderer had flung the king and the body of the woman from the dais. The little platform was rising into the air, carrying him with it. The movement was sidewise; in a moment it would have been outside the pavilion.
Rogers, standing beside Fahn, heard the Scientist leader mutter an oath. Fahn’s hand came up from his robe; a pencil-point of flame—a tiny shaft, yellow-red—shot from his weapon. The platform crashed to the floor of the pavilion; the murderer lay still, his body blackened and charred.
