The Man Who Loved Mars Anthology, page 25
edge of a Sinus; you know, caused by cracks in the crust of Mars when she began drying up. Down there in the gorges is where the predators live, because that’s where the small critters live that they make their meals off of. Besides, Chastar has a ‘buzzer field’ set up around the outside of the camp. A subsonic field, to scare away anything that just might be out and huntin’ … we can’t feel it ’cause we’re inside it. But anything that just might be out there, wandering around and up to no good, will feel it in its bones—and in its teeth, too, just like a king-sized tooth ache….”
His voice died away; suddenly he felt uncomfortable and even self-conscious. It was quite a speech for a man generally as closemouthed as M’Cord was, and he realized it and shut up.
But the girl had sensed it, too, and looked over at him with a queer expression. The softness of the starlight blurred the lines of strain and weariness and tension that marred her beauty by day; suddenly he was very conscious of her warmth and nearness. Her face was a pale oval by starlight, her calm blue eyes curiously tender, and starlight glimmered in her golden hair, striking little witch-lights among the tendrils of that gold.
She smiled at him. “My, you’re an odd person, Cn. M’Cord … days go by on end and you hardly speak more than three words …”
He grunted, and flushed beneath his deep space-ray tan, and was suddenly grateful for the dimness of the un-moonlit night, which hid his blush from the eyes of the Swedish girl. His volubility surprised even himself. But there is something in a man, even a man of few words, like M’Cord, that enjoys opening up on a subject with which he is familiar when his attentive audience is a slim young girl with tender blue eyes and blond curls spilling about her shoulders.
He suddenly felt as shy and awkward as a schoolboy— 114
and hated himself for feeling that way! He lurched to his feet.
“Umm. Well; guess it’s time for some shut-eye, anyway. ’Night!” he mumbled, and limped back to his sleeping place, feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed. The girl looked after him with a small, quiet smile of amusement.
It had been a long time since anything had amused her. All at once she felt young and free and clean and pure again. She enjoyed the feeling, while it lasted.
XIV. The Broken Land
Up until this point in their journey, the way had stretched smooth and unencumbered before them. Due to his innate racial sense of direction and positioning, Chastar had unerringly led them across the smooth tableland of ancient rock. The worn disc of silver which bore the Road marked out like a map was consulted only when they had to work their way around a crater or an occasional deep crevasse.
But with dawn on the third day of the adventure, they rode into rough country. The going became hazardous and difficult and rather complicated; and it got worse the further they went. For here, at some unknown period in the remote past, meteorites had rained down upon the Sinus with unprecedented force and in considerable numbers. The way they followed was riven asunder by crater upon crater, large and small, and the ground underfoot was covered with a loose, treacherous layer of crumbling and powdery rock.
To further complicate the situation, they had by now reached that portion of the Road where Zerild’s silver map was blank and smooth and unmarked. From this point forward on the journey, only Thaklar could guide them.
And not one of them but wondered, deep in his heart, if the Hawk princeling could be trusted to guide them correctly to their goal and safely around whatever dangerous places there might be, or what hidden man traps the ancient Martians might have set.
M’Cord rode in the forefront of the expedition, a little ahead of Inga. Here the path wound through a narrow passage between the ringwalls of two major craters which were positioned close to one another. So he rode forward all alone.
He was sweating inside the thermalsuit, was M’Cord; and he was very conscious of the pressure of their eyes against his back. The others waited to see whether the ground would open up beneath the pads of his loper and hurl him to a quick death at the bottom of a steep and unseen precipice; or whether he would fall victim to some uncanny enchantment or spell cast ages ago upon this narrow defile that wound between two steep walls of rock.
He was wondering about it, himself.
Just how far was Thaklar to be trusted with their lives —with his life? Just how fanatical was the Hawk princeling, and to what extremities would he go to protect the hereditary secret of his House, and to shield The Holy from defilement at the hands of renegades and Outworlders?
It had been damned shrewd of the outlaw chieftain to order M’Cord forward alone, the Earthman thought grimly. The lives of the two Scandinavians were of no particular value to Thaklar—he neither liked them nor hated them, but remained stolidly indifferent to their fate. But the life of his brother was another matter….
Or was it?
M’Cord sweated and cursed to himself, and urged the reluctant slidar forward. Here the walls of ragged rock nearly closed together, and the passage was so narrow that there was only an inch or so of space on either side. If ever there was a perfect place for an ambush or a trap, thought M’Cord, this was it.
Once through the throat of the passage, the Road widened out a bit and M’Cord relaxed and started breathing once again. He began thinking about just how much Thaklar prized his life as opposed to how much he prized the unbroken secrecy of the sacred Valley of Ophar.
The water-sharing ritual—actually, too simple to be called a ritual—had been performed between an unconscious man dying of fever and one who pitied him and would not stand idly by and watch him die without striving to aid him. Was it then, M’Cord wondered, a true rite of brotherhood that existed between him and the Hawk prince? He wasn’t sure; the People, he knew, were great experts in their canon law. They argued the finer points and the knottier questions of law and ritual for the sheer fun of it: to them it was an intellectual game, a mental exercise, like chess or mathematics or Bach fugues to Earthmen. And he had no doubt that ample precedents could be quoted by Thaklar to invalidate the rite between himself and M’Cord.
Then again, just how important was it to Thaklar to preserve the secret of the Valley Beyond Time? Surely he put the value of the secret above his own life. Would he not put it above M’Cord’s, even though he accounted the Earthman his brother?
M’Cord shrugged, consigned all such nagging questions to hell, and put the matter out of his mind.
There was no point in trying to figure out what Thaklar thought.
And he had enough to worry about, as things were.
The country was rising now; they were winding up an unmarked trail that led to the crest of a slope. This steep rise must have been the ringwall thrown up by a gigantic meteor ages before. Hurtling out of the depths of space a billion years ago or more the meteor had struck in the exact mathematical center of the Sinus. The atmosphere had been many times richer in oxygen then, and the heat of the meteor, hurtling down through the envelope of air at thirty-five thousand miles per hour, had ignited the air. The surface of the peninsula had turned to molten slag; the impact crater could well be many miles across. M’Cord knew enough about elementary physics to know that a meteorite only ten feet in diameter can strike the planetary surface with the force and fury of the hell bombs that vaporized both Nagasaki and Hiroshima long before his grandfather had been born.
The meteor that made the Ophar crater might have been no bigger than that.
They had traversed the length of the Sabaeus Sinus by now, and had reached the exact center of the Meridiani, a great, squarish mesa that grew like a knob at the end of the peninsula. They were just a couple of degrees south of the Martian equator now, and exactly on the prime meridian.
What they might find here, no one knew; no one could even predict. Only the Timeless Ones, as the Martians termed their ancient gods, could say.
Climbing the slope of the outer wall of the crater grew increasingly more difficult as it grew ever steeper. They had been forced to leave the pack-beasts below, but remained in the saddle, since slidars trained for riding can climb as well as a man and are as sure-footed as any mountain goat. And it would have been grueling and perhaps impossible for them to have attempted to scale to the summit afoot. Especially for M’Cord; not that Chastar cared about M’Cord, of course.
The pack-beasts had been unburdened and turned loose to wander where they wished. Chastar grumbled at the necessity, but there was really nothing else to be done.
The footing became dreadfully insecure. For here, on the sides of the vast cone of the crater, meteorites of smaller size had peppered the crater walls with pockmarks. Craterlet was superimposed upon craterlet, and, beneath the cosmic bombardment, the naked rock had been reduced to gravel, which the ages had pulverized still more. The powdery stone grit, intermixed with pebbles, made the worst conceivable footing for the lopers.
Eventually, finding themselves sliding back three yards for every yard they gained, they dismounted on Chastar’s order and went forward one by one on foot, leading the slidars by their reins. They inched their way up by walking sideways, gaining a better purchase in this manner, since the human foot is longer than it is wide.
Thaklar guided them with minute care. Many times he bid them pause while he pondered his memory for landmarks. Leg-weary and tight with tension of unseen dangers he sensed but could not see, M’Cord wondered how any landmark could survive a couple of million years unaltered. Evidently they had, for although Thaklar had to stop and cudgel his memory and search with his eyes, he nonetheless guided them forward without error or turning back to trace another path. Either the landmarks had not eroded out of all recognition in all these aeons on a weatherless planet, or maybe it was the work of the gods that had somehow preserved them intact. M’Cord neither knew nor cared. He wished it were over, and that he could rest his leg.
The crater wall continued to rise beneath them. They were far above the surface of the Sinus now, and could look back for scores of miles in the clear, dry air. The crater must have been as high as Fujiyama, M’Cord thought wearily; and he wondered as to its breadth. He wondered if it were not wider even than the monster the Earth scientists had marveled at in the days before Christoffsen had made the first landing—the incredible supercrater the old NASA scientists had named Nix Olympica.
On a broad shelf of rock they rested and broke the midday fast. They were bone-weary and gasping for breath, even Chastar and Zerild. The atmosphere of Mars is thin enough on the dead sea bottoms; on the mountainous heights it is virtually nonexistent.
Zerild was examining the worn disc of ancient silver.
“We are almost beyond that place the inscription calls ‘the Broken Land,’ ” she decided. Chastar grunted around a jawful of dried lizard meat.
“Broken indeed is this land,” he grumbled. “Half a hundred times I thought my boots would slip and that I would lose my footing and roll all the way back down again. A man could die here from a slip of his foot.”
He squinted up_ at Thaklar, who sat a little apart from the rest of them, munching his meat and staring up the slope. The eyes of the Hawk prince were wide and thoughtful, but his features were inscrutable.
“Hai, Hawk! I misjudged you—I, Chastar, admit it! Jehu, but I dreamed you would betray us all to our deaths in the Broken Land, once you were become our only guide. Why did you not, eh? Speak! Would you join with us in the treasure? Is that it?”
Thaklar eyed him with cold eyes, aloof and disdainful, his expression somber.
“There was no need for me to betray you,” he said at last, “for you will betray yourselves in the end, aye, all of you.”
Chastar puzzled over this enigmatic prophecy and decided that he didn’t like the sound of it. Snarling an oath, he hitched his gunbelt around so that he could toy with the handle of his black leather whip.
“Who will betray Chastar?” he demanded. “Not the woman, for she is mine, or will be, and no woman betrays Chastar and lives! As for the aged one, he knows very well the name of his master, and has felt the weight of his hand ere this, eh, snake?” he said with a harsh, ugly laugh. He loved to bait the little renegade priest, who was deathly afraid of him.
Phuun veiled his eyes and bowed his head obsequiously. Chastar laughed again, this time boastfully.
“What mean you then by such foolish words?” he demanded.
Thaklar matched him glare for glare, his face impassive, his temper unruffled.
“That is for the future to tell,” he said calmly. “But remember this, red wolf! It was written of old of Ophar the Holy, that therein shall be given to each according to his deserving.”
The simple words were spoken in a calm, uninflected voice. M’Cord wondered, then, why they seemed pregnant with a terrible and overpowering sense of doom and menace.
III
THE SEARCH
FOR
THE SECRET
XV. Into The Valley of Mystery
The brief rest break was soon over. Chastar was eager to reach the top of the crater wall before nightfall. They were all very tired, for it had been a long day and already they had come about seventeen miles. But Chastar would hear no word of rest or delay.
So they began again. It was not as hard going as before, for here the slope was naked rock alone, with neither rock dust nor loose pebbles to make the footing insecure and dangerous. But it was an almost constant upward climb, and the way grew steeper and steeper with every yard.
In the brilliant dry clarity of the thin air, from his height, you could see the entirety of the Meridiani Mesa and a dim, blurred glimpse of the dustlands that ringed it on three sides. This must be one of the highest elevations on the planet, thought M’Cord. He was sweating again: whatever the mystery of Ophar was, they were about to get their first glimpse of it.
Thaklar led them by an almost invisible trail, from outcropping to outcropping. He warned them to place their hands and feet with great care in precisely the positions he
showed them, for the stony shelves were loose in places and one mistake could be fatal. It was a long way down.
There was no point in trying to lead the slidars up so steep a slope, and they no longer had need of them. Chastar fumed and cursed, but there was nothing else to do but unload the beasts and turn them loose to find their own way down to the base of the crater wall, to join the pack-beasts. From below, the rising ground level had been so gradual as to be imperceptible, and had he known that the terrain would change in so abrupt and perilous a manner, he would have abandoned all of the beasts below with supplies of food, to await their return. But he had not known, and Thaklar had not seen fit to apprise him; so the lopers were set loose to slide and clatter back down the slope to where their brethren wandered.
This meant that unless the beasts somehow lingered in the vicinity, they would have to walk back to Ygnarh when the time came to return. There was no help for it, but it enraged Chastar to the point of fury. The Hawk prince made not the slightest response to the storm of curses and imprecations that broke around his head; he merely waited until at last Chastar was silent, his temper spent, and they could continue on the last leg of their journey.
The climb continued. Now the slope was extremely steep indeed; the way led up an almost vertical wall of naked stone.
They took it easy, with frequent pauses to catch their breaths. It was even more difficult than it had seemed from below, the final ascent. It took them more than three hours to make it to the top.
Here they found a broad open space, as wide as a highway, but littered with enormous boulders as big as aircars. The rock-strata here ran in crazy fluid lines, like solidified molasses. This rock had been molten lava a billion years before; and the impress of the tremendous forces that had shaped it were still clearly visible on this desert world where there was nothing to erode the stone and erase or soften the curvatures into which the molten rock had cooled and hardened.
They made their way through the litter of boulders. The top of the wall was as smooth and flat as the crest of ancient battlements in some Cyclopean fortress built by prehistoric giants.
Chastar and Zerild were in the lead. They inched sideways between two huge boulders that stood close together, with only a narrow space between them. Beyond the narrow space they stopped suddenly, as if frozen with shock.
Zerild drew back with a startled gesture.
Chastar sucked in his breath sharply; it hissed between his clenched teeth.
They were standing on the very edge of a precipice. Only two inches beyond their feet the wall fell away in a sheer cliff that dropped hundreds of feet to the floor of the shallow valley below.
The others joined them; they stood, side by side, on the brink of the abyss and looked down on Ophar.
“What devil’s trickery is this?” Chastar rasped hoarsely. But no one answered him.
M’Cord, his bad leg hurting him abominably, was the last to join them at the brink of the valley. He looked down … and found it hard to believe the testimony of his eyes.
Below them, the floor of the valley lay at a distance of five or six hundred feet straight down. It was shallower by far than he had expected.
And it was nothing at all like what he had expected.
The valley floor was partly drowned in inky purple shadows by this hour of the afternoon. And the floor itself was difficult to see clearly; but it stretched away to the other side of the crater wall, a distance of about twenty miles, he estimated. So it was only half as big as Nix Olympica, after all.
Roughly in the center of the crater, about ten miles from where they stood, a conical center peak rose from the crater floor. It was the impact crater left by a giant meteorite, then, as he had guessed. Only impact craters have that pyramidal-shaped central peak.
