Queen of the Martian Catacombs Engraved Page 8

letting in all the winds of hell.

  It struck swiftly. One moment the air was clear and motionless. The next, it was blind with dust and screaming as it fled, tearing with demoniac fury at everything in its path.

  Stark spurred toward the men, who were only a few feet away but already hidden by the veil of mingled dust and sand. Someone blundered into her in the murk. Long hair whipped across her face and she reached out, crying 'Fian! Fian!' A man's hand caught hers, and a voice answered, but she could not hear the words.

  Then, suddenly, her beast was crowded by other scaly bodies. The man's grip had broken. Hard feminine hands clawed at her. She could make out, dimly, the features of two women, close to hers.

  Luhara, and Freka.

  Her beast gave a great lurch, and sprang forward. Stark was dragged from the saddle, to fall backward into the raging sand.

  7

  She lay half-stunned for a moment, her breath knocked out of her. There was a terrible reptilian screaming sounding thin through the roar of the wind. Vague shapes bolted past her, and twice she was nearly crushed by their trampling hooves.

  Luhara and Freka must have waited their chance. It was so beautifully easy. Leave Stark alone and afoot, and the storm and the desert between them would do the work, with no blame attaching to any woman.

  Stark got to her feet, and a human body struck her at the knees so that she went down again. She grappled with it, snarling, before she realised that the flesh between her hands was soft and draped in silken cloth. Then she saw that she was holding Berild.

  'It was I,' he gasped, 'and not Fian.'

  His words reached her very faintly, though she knew he was yelling at the top of his lungs. He must have been knocked from his own mount when Luhara thrust between them.

  Gripping his tightly, so that he should not be blown away, Stark struggled up again. With all her strength, it was almost impossible to stand.

  Blinded, deafened, half strangled, she fought her way forward a few paces, and suddenly one of the pack beasts loomed shadow-like beside her, going by with a rush and a squeal.

  By the grace of Providence and her own swift reflexes, she caught its pack lashings, clinging with the tenacity of a woman determined not to die. It floundered about, dragging them, until Berild managed to grasp its trailing halter rope. Between them, they fought the creature down.

  Stark clung to its head while the man clambered to its back, twisting his arm through the straps of the pad. A silken scarf whipped toward her. She took it and tied it over the head of the beast so it could breathe, and after that it was quieter.

  There was no direction, no sight of anything, in that howling inferno. The caravan seemed to have been scattered like a drift of autumn leaves. Already, in the few brief moments she had stood still, Stark's legs were buried to the knees in a substratum of sand that rolled like water. She pulled herself free and started on, going nowhere, remembering Kynyn's words.

  Berild ripped his thin robe apart and gave her another strip of silk for herself. She bound it over her nose and eyes, and some of the choking and the blindness abated.

  Stumbling, staggering, beaten by the wind as a child is beaten by a strong woman, Stark went on, hoping desperately to find the main body of the caravan, and knowing somehow that the hope was futile.

  The hours that followed were nightstallion. She shut her mind to them, in a way that a civilised woman would have found impossible. In her childhood there had been days, and nights, and the problems had been simple ones – how to survive one span of light that one might then struggle to survive the span of darkness that came after. One thing, one danger, at a time.

  Now there was a single necessity. Keep moving. Forget tomorrow, or what happened to the caravan, or where the little Fian with his bright eyes may be. Forget thirst, and the pain of breathing, and the fiery lash of sand on naked skin. Only don't stand still.

  It was growing dark when the beast fell against a half-buried boulder and snapped its foreleg. Stark gave it a quick and merciful death. They took the straps from the pad and linked themselves together. Each took as much food as they could carry, and Stark shouldered the single skin of water that fortune had vouchsafed them.

  They staggered on, and Berild did not whimper.

  Night came, and still the khamsin blew. Stark wondered at the man's strength, for she had to help his only when he fell. She had lost all feeling herself. Her body was merely a thing that continued to move only because it had been ordered not to stop.

  The haze in her own mind had grown as thick as the black obscurity of the night. Berild had ridden all day, but she had walked, and there was an end even to her strength. She was approaching it now, and was too weary even to be afraid.

  She became aware at some indeterminate time that Berild had fallen and was dragging his weight against the straps. She turned blindly to help his up. He was saying something, crying her name, striking at her so that she should hear his words and understand.

  At last she did. She pulled the wrappings from her face and breathed clean air. The wind had fallen. The sky was growing clear.

  She dropped in her tracks and slept, with the exhausted man half dead beside her.

  Thirst brought them both awake in the early dawn. They drank from the skin, and then sat for a time looking at the desert, and at each other, thinking of what lay ahead.

  'Do you know where we are?' Stark asked.

  'Not exactly.' Berild's face was shadowed with weariness. It had changed, and somehow, to Stark, it had grown more beautiful, because there was no weakness in it.

  He thought a minute, looking at the sun. 'The wind blew from the north,' he said. 'Therefore we have come south from the track. Sinharat lies that way, across the waste they call the Belly of Stones.' He pointed to the north and east.

  'How far?'

  'Seven, eight days, afoot.'

  Stark measured their supply of water and shook her head. 'It'll be dry walking.'

  She rose and took up the skin, and Berild came beside her without a word. His red hair hung loose over him shoulders. The rags of his silken robe had been torn away by the wind, leaving his only the loose skirt of the desert men, and his belt and collar of jewels.

  He walked erect with a steady, swinging stride, and it was almost impossible for Stark to remember his as he had been, riding like a lazy king in his scarlet litter.

  There was no way to shelter themselves from the midday sun. The sun of Mars at its worst, however, was only a pale candle beside the sun of Mercury, and it did not bother Stark. She made Berild lie in the shadow of her own body, and she watched his face, relaxed and unfamiliar in sleep.

  For the first time, then, she was conscious of a strangeness in him. She had seen so little of his before, in Valkis, and almost nothing on the trail. Now, there was little of his mind or heart that he could conceal from her.

  Or was there? There were moments, while he slept, when hr shadows of strange dreams crossed his face. Sometimes, in t she unguarded moment of waking, she would see in his eyes a Iook she could not read, and her primitive senses quivered with a vague ripple of warning.

  Yet all through those blazing days and frosty nights, tortured with thirst and weary to exhaustion, Berild was magnificent. His white skin was darkened by the sun and his hair became a wild red mane, but he smiled and set his feet resolutely by hers, and Stark thought he was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen.

  On the fourth day they climbed a scarp of limestone worn in ages past by the sea, and looked out over the place called the Belly of Stones.

  The sea-bottom curved downward below them into a sort of gigantic basin, the farther rim of which was lost in shimmering waves of heat. Stark thought that never, even on Mercury, had she seen a place more cruel and utterly forsaken of gods or women.

  It seemed as though some primal glacier must have met its death here in the dim dawn of Mars, hollowing out its own grave. The body of the glacier had melted away, but its bones were left.

 
Bones of basalt, of granite and marble and porphyry, of every conceivable colour and shape and size, picked up by the ice as it marched southward from the pole and dropped here as a cairn to mark its passing.

  The Belly of Stones. Stark thought that its other name was Death.

  For the first time, Berild faltered. He sat down and bent his head over him hands.

  'I am tired,' he said. 'Also, I am afraid.'

  Stark asked, 'Has it ever been crossed?'

  'Once. But they were a war party, mounted and well supplied.'

  Stark looked out across the stones. 'We will cross it,' she said.

  Berild raised his head. 'Somehow I believe you.' He rose slowly and put his hands on her breast, over the strong beating of her heart.

  'Give me your strength, wild woman,' he whispered. 'I shall need it.'

  She drew his to her and kissed him, and it was a strange and painful kiss, for their lips were cracked and bleeding from their terrible thirst. Then they went down together into the place called the Belly of Stones.

  8

  The desert had been a pleasant and kindly place. Stark looked back upon it with longing. And yet this inferno of blazing rock was so like the valleys of her boyhood that it did not occur to her to lie down and die.

  They rested for a time in the sheltered crevice under a great leaning slab of blood-red stone, moistening their swollen tongues with a few drops of stinking water from the skin. At nightfall they drank the last of it, but Berild would not let her throw the skin