The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (25 page)

When his consciousness ceased whirling, he glanced at the dials that recorded the coordinate of the time-space equation. He had gone back, as nearly as he could calculate from old traditions, to the Golden Age, the fabled era before man learned of hate and iron.

War, King had reasoned, was an insane habit that some bird-brained primitive had devised as a substitute for judgment or intelligence; and thus, a man of the twentieth century, without any illusions as to the glory of strife, might direct the first warrior chief into a happier channel. If these people of the Golden Age, drunk by the novelty of Iron and Power, could see what evolution had finally made of war, they might sober up. War had once been an adventure, but it had long since lost whatever redeeming quality it had possessed.

Through the ports of the time machine, King looked at the green-gold jungles of an infant world. Tall tree ferns trembled in the breeze. The jade waters of a lake lapped a shore fringed with gigantic reeds and grasses; bright insects flashed gold and crimson.

King opened the hatch and stepped to the springy turf. Ages were not as sharply divided as political boundaries, and he would have to reconnoiter to see if he had actually reached the Golden Age.

Then he saw the girl. At the first stirring of the foliage, he had reached for his Colt, not knowing what prehistoric terrors might come out of the jungle; but now his hand dropped. She had the rounded hips and tapered lines of a wood nymph; she moved effortlessly, and the breeze pulled at the translucent tunic that modeled her bosom and the slim curve of her waist. King wondered for a moment if this exquisite creature were just another one of those taunting fancies that had at times crowded equations and integrals from his weary brain.

The girl’s blue skirt reached a little below her knees; a costume that reminded him somewhat of the classical drapes worn by women pictured on fragments of Greek pottery. The warm light shaped a golden halo about her head; her unbound hair trailed in copper-colored luxury to her hips.

She started, wide-eyed, when she saw King. Impulsively, he came toward her, and said,

“Don’t be afraid, I’m a stranger and maybe you could tell me where I am.”

Her grey-green eyes showed her perplexity, but she smiled, recognizing the friendliness of his voice. King could not understand a word of her answer, but that made little difference; her voice warmed him, and made him forget the wonder of having traveled all those centuries into time and space. Whatever she had said, she meant that he was welcome. Then, coming within arm’s length, he noted that the skirt was torn, and that scratches crisscrossed her calves and thighs. Her tunic was tattered, and her sides were bruised and scarred. He caught her arm and gestured toward the time machine, saying, “You’d better meet the first aid kit.”

He could not understand her answer, but there was meaning in the way she fell in step with him, her hip brushing against him, her arm closing against her side and imprisoning the hand he had laid on her elbow. King’s blood sang as if it had been blended with the sap of the young earth.

A rosy flush spread over the girl’s cheeks when she looked up and saw King’s ardent glance. She held up her free hand, and showed him the small band of yellow metal about her wrist. On this curious bracelet were two golden cases, neither of them much larger than a man’s watch; a small reel of fine cable connected them. With her other hand she took off one of the cases and clipped it to King’s wrist.

She spoke again, and King could now understand her speech; rather, read her thoughts, in spite of the foreign words.

“I am Ania, a slave, and I ran away from my master, Jurth. He beats me. As you can see—” She half turned, and King saw that her back was seamed with red welts. “He used to be so kind and friendly, like the rest of us. But who are you? I’ve never seen such strange clothes though they’re really becoming.”

“I’ll give you something to put on those scratches, and while you’re doctoring yourself, I’ll tell you, though I’m afraid I can’t make it very clear. I’ve come back from what is the future to you; back thirty-two thousand, seven hundred thirteen years—” He lost count of his dial reading, and had to start all over again, for Ania had snuggled up close to him in the cramped cabin of the time cruiser. He finished, “Six months and twenty-two days.”

He showed her how to use an iodine swab.

“Oh—that stings! But I can’t understand, coming back from the future. It sounds impossible. And why did you do it?”

“We have a disease in our time. A disease called war. Fighting that would be bad enough even if it settled anything, which it never does.” He bitterly went on, “Two of my brothers were killed, and a third one is a horrible cripple. I was too young to go. I was sorry then, but when I saw the one who returned, I wished he too had died. So I have come back through time to find the man who started war.”

“War?” Ania frowned. “I can say it, but I don’t understand.”

He was in the Golden Age; her answer assured him of that. His theory was justified. More than that, her master, Jurth, was strangely and unaccountably becoming vicious.

Jurth, the father of strife? Then this was the dawn of discord!

King caught Ania in his arms. “Tell me about Jurth. I won’t let him hurt you.”

Ania anxiously asked, “You won’t go back into the future without taking me with you?”

“Tell me about Jurth,” he evaded, and turned toward the shade of the swaying tree ferns.

There he seated himself on the springy turf, and drew in an exhilarating breath. The air of this young world gave him vitality that no human being had had for centuries. He drew Ania closer and kissed her upturned lips; she clung to him, sighed rapturously, and the warmth of her mouth and the pressure of her encircling arms troubled King until there was no room left in his whirling brain for anything but this dawn woman and her possessive beauty.

When King finally got the conversation back to Jurth, Ania explained, “He has studied the forces of nature and bent them to his own use. This thing that makes me understand you—or any other foreigner I might meet—a sort of thought-reading thing, I guess you’d call it, is one of the things Jurth made. But some of his inventions are evil. He makes weapons to kill, to paralyze. Every wise man has servants, lots of them, but Jurth sends out fighting men to take prisoners. That’s why he invented this thought-disc, so the strangers could understand his orders.”

Pride; greed; restless ambition—this Jurth was moved by the very things that made war. Find Jurth, and give peace to all the centuries to come. For all his horror of killing and wounding, King knew that he had to finish Jurth.

In the meanwhile, the sun was setting, and the time machine, cramped though it was, would be the safest shelter. King rose, gave Ania his hand. “Tomorrow—”

Ania’s cry of dismay cut him short. There was a crashing in the brush, and a confusion of deep voices. “That’s Jurth!” she cried. “Hurry—before….”

Three men bounded from the edge of the small clearing, and cut off King’s retreat to the time machine. The foremost was as tall as King, but heavier of limb and deeper of chest; a black beard jutted aggressively from his craggy face. In one big hand he had a nine-thonged whip. The muscles of his legs and arms were like hawsers. He halted, cracked his scourge, and gestured to Ania. In his other hand he had a rod of bluish metal, tipped with a glass-like bulb; King, taking in the newcomers at a glance, assumed that this was a scepter or other emblem of rank.

Like their chief, Jurth’s two retainers wore kilts and short-sleeved jackets, but their weapons were three-pronged spears. King jerked clear of Ania’s embrace. “Let go! You run to the machine while I stop these fellows!”

He snapped the telepathic coil and cord from his wrist, and thrust the girl from him. He drew the heavy pistol. The two spearmen were easy targets. But something stayed his hand, and he was glad, for an envoy of peace should certainly not shoot men armed with tridents; so he yelled a warning, and gestured, hoping that they would know enough to stop.

Ania, instead of dashing on, had stopped, unwilling to leave King. One of the spearmen swerved and bounded toward her. King fired, purposely throwing the shot against a rock that jutted up out of the turf, right in front of the big fellow’s path. Chips of rock peppered his legs. “Halt, or I’ll hit you!” King warned.

The man stopped. Then Jurth raised the rod, and King learned that it was more than a scepter. A tongue of light the length of a man’s hand flamed from the glass bulb. King’s right arm went numb, and his pistol dropped from his grasp. Amazement froze him; he did not know which way to go, or what to do.

Jurth was now upon him, the scourge hissing in a backward arc. King ducked. While his right arm was still useless, his left was unharmed. He came up, bringing one from the turf, and the blow snapped Jurth’s head back. But he had an iron jaw, and instead of dropping in his tracks, Jurth bellowed and slashed home again with the short-lashed scourge.

Apparently he forgot his peculiar ray projector, or else the whip suited his mood. He drove King back with cutting lashes; one peeled his ribs, a second crippled his arm to the shoulder.

King took a third blow. He recoiled, raised his arm as if to shield his face, yelled as if in terror. Jurth laughed and wound up for the cut to lay him out. This was what King had expected. He lunged, letting his legs propel him, and with shoulder and one sound arm he caught Jurth below the knees, just as the whip hissed through empty space.

Jurth thumped to the turf. King followed through, booting his oppressor in the pit of the stomach. He had pretty well forgotten his pacific mission. He cut loose and booted his limp opponent another one, and wondered when he had ever had such a pleasant afternoon.

King was about to get up so he could trample Jurth into the ground when a trident prodded his back. The cold metal brought him to his senses. In his fury he had forgotten the spearmen and Ania. Now, startled and menaced, he realized what he had been trying to do, and he was ashamed. Not but that Jurth deserved a mauling for whipping a girl like Ania; rather, King felt cheap for that ecstasy of rage. Something was undermining his character; he had given up ten years of his life to confer the boon of peace on mankind, and now, a slugging match made him drunk with fighting spirit.

The other spearman had caught Ania. Seeing the trident that prodded King’s back, she screamed and broke away. Her captor dropped his weapon and bounded after her, before she could snatch the other spearman’s trident. He caught her shoulder, tore her tunic to the waist, and then made another lunge. This time he got her about the waist. Kicking and screaming, clawing and wriggling, Ania ended up with little more than a scrap of skirt and her ruddy hair to cover her. She went limp; her captor grinned, wiped the sweat from his forehead—and then Ania broke loose, and dashed for the time machine.

She had not the faintest idea of how to work it, but a struggle in the instrument compartment could disturb almost any combination of levers and start it off, marooning King in the dawn of discord, and carrying Ania and one of her assailants into the twentieth or any other century, past or future. Terror made King move without thought. He yelled and bounded forward, and the spearman at his back was so startled that for an instant, he did not thrust.

King had no time to retrieve his pistol. He outran the spearman, and overtook Ania’s pursuer. He tackled the fellow from the side, and sent him smashing against the trunk of a tree fern. That settled him. “Ania, get in!” King panted, and clawed at a rock, “while I finish this other fellow.”

He tore the rock from its bed of moss, and again the fine fury of the young world intoxicated him. He crouched near the hatch of the time machine, ready to heave the heavy missile. His lips were drawn back, his teeth showed.

The spearman backed away. He was afraid of a twentieth-century pacifist. And then Jurth rolled over on his face and got to his knees. He roared, levelled his scepter. King sidestepped, but he was too slow. There was a momentary spurt of flame, and King’s legs froze, his whole side and arm went dead, and he toppled over with his missile.

His brain had been touched by this last blast, and while he was not wholly unconscious, he was in a dreamlike haze. He knew only that they were carrying him past a lake, through a jungle, up a mountain. His wits receded, letting him into blackness, and when they returned, he saw a little of his approach to a grey granite fortress whose turrets reached into the clouds.

When King’s scrambled senses at last got in step with each other, he was lying on a low couch, and looking through a window which pierced a thick stone wall. A lock clicked, and he sat up. Jurth was coming through a narrow doorway; after him came a dark woman whose beauty was marred by her sullen mouth and stormy eyes.

Her hair had the sheen of a black panther’s coat, and her lips were full and luscious as the tawny curves that rounded out the bodice of her silken gown. King was fascinated by the sway of her hips, by the sudden brightening of her black eyes. On one wrist she had the telepathic device, one of whose units she unclasped as she came closer. Her perfume stirred King’s blood, and he forgot both Ania and his purpose in traveling back into the remote past.

Jurth remained in the doorway for a moment, then he retreated, closing the door. The dark woman knelt beside King, so close that her shapely body pressed against him; her fingertips were caressing as she fastened the golden clip on his wrist, soft and smooth as her speech. Her voice was like deep-piled velvet, persuasive as her perfume.

“I am Foma, one of Jurth’s discarded wives,” she purred, “and on the pretext of helping him, I came to help you, Man-From-Times-To-Come. You are in Jurth’s palace, high above the great city, Jhaggar, the city older than time. Now Jurth could see that you are stubborn and hard-willed and that he could not win the truth from you with any torture short of killing you, so he depends on me to persuade you to speak. But I can help you, and I will. For all his wisdom, there are things that Jurth does not understand.”