Читать книгу Essential Science Fiction Novels - Volume 5 - Эдвард Джордж Бульвер-Литтон, Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон - Страница 5

THE FIRST ADVENTURE

Kenton lay listening to a soft whispering, persistent and continuous. It was like the breaking crests of sleepy waves. The sound was all about him; a rippling susurration becoming steadily more insistent. A light beat through his closed lids. He felt motion under him, a gentle, cradling lift and fall. He opened his eyes.

He was on a ship; lying on a narrow deck, his head against the bulwarks. In front of him was a mast rising out of a pit. Inside the pit were chained men straining at great oars. The mast seemed to be of wood covered with translucent, emerald lacquer. It stirred reluctant memories.

Where had he seen such a mast before?

His gaze crept up the mast. There was a wide sail; a sail made of opaled silk. Low overhead hung a sky that was all a soft mist of silver.

He heard a woman's voice, deep toned, liquidly golden. Kenton sat up, dizzily. At his right was a cabin nestling under the curved tip of a scimitared prow; it gleamed rosily. A balcony ran round its top; little trees blossomed on that balcony; doves with feet and bills crimson as though dipped in wine of rubies fluttered snowy wings among the branches.

At the cabin's door stood a woman, tall, willow-lithe, staring beyond him. At her feet crouched three girls. Two of them clasped harps, the other held to her lips a double flute. Again the reluctant memories stirred and fled and were forgotten as Kenton's gaze fastened upon the woman.

Her wide eyes were green as depths of forest glens, and like them they were filled with drifting shadows. Her head was small; the features fine; the red mouth delicately amorous. In the hollow of her throat a dimple lay; a chalice for kisses and empty of them and eager to be filled. Above her brows was set a silver crescent, slim as a newborn moon. Over each horn of the crescent poured a flood of red-gold hair, framing the lovely face; the flood streamed over and was parted by her tilted breasts; it fell in ringlets almost to her sandaled feet.

As young as Spring, she seemed—yet wise as Autumn; Primavera of some archaic Botticelli—but Mona Lisa too; if virginal in body, certainly not in soul.

He followed her gaze. It led him across the pit of the oarsmen. Four men stood there. One was taller by a head than Kenton, and built massively. His pale eyes stared unwinkingly at the woman; menacing; malignant. His face was beardless and pallid. His huge and flattened head was shaven; his nose vulture beaked; from his shoulders black robes fell, shrouding him to feet. Two shaven heads were at his left, wiry, wolfish, black-robed; each of them held a brazen, conch-shaped horn.

On the last of the group Kenton's eyes lingered, fascinated. This man squatted, his pointed chin resting on a tall drum whose curved sides glittered scarlet and jet with the polished scales of some great snake. His legs were sturdy but dwarfed—his torso that of a giant, knotted and gnarled, prodigiously powerful. His ape-like arms were wound around the barrelled tambour; spider-like were the long fingers standing on their tips upon the drum head.

It was his face that held Kenton. Sardonic and malicious—there was in it none of the evil concentrate in the others. The wide slit of his mouth was frog-like and humor was on the thin lips. His deep-set, twinkling black eyes dwelt upon the crescented woman with frank admiration. From the lobes of his outstanding ears hung disks of hammered gold.

The woman paced swiftly down toward Kenton. When she halted he could have reached out a hand and touched her. Yet she did not seem to see him.

"Ho—Klaneth!" she cried. "I hear the voice of Ishtar. She is coming to her ship. Are you ready to do her homage, Slime of Nergal?"

A flicker of hate passed over the massive man's pallid face like a little wave from hell.

"This is Ishtar's Ship," he answered, "yet my Dread Lord has claim upon it too, Sharane? The House of the Goddess brims with light—but tell me, does not Nergal's shadow darken behind me?"

And Kenton saw that the deck on which were these men was black as polished jet and again memory strove to make itself heard.

A sudden wind smote the ship, like an open hand, heeling it. From the doves within the trees of the rosy cabin broke a tumult of cries; they flew up like a white cloud flecked with crimson; they fluttered around the woman.

The ape-like arms of the drummer unwrapped, his spidery fingers poised over the head of the snake drum. Darkness deepened about him and hid him; darkness cloaked all the ship's stern.

Kenton felt the gathering of unknown forces. He slid down, upon his haunches, pressed himself against the bulwarks.

From the deck of the rosy cabin blared a golden trumpeting; defiant; inhuman. He turned his head, and on it the hair lifted and prickled.

Resting on the rosy cabin was a great orb, an orb like the moon at full; but not, like the moon, white and cold—an orb alive with pulsing roseate candescence. Over the ship it poured its rays and where the woman called Sharane had been was now—no woman!

Bathed in the orb's rays she loomed gigantic. The lids of her eyes were closed, yet through those closed lids eyes glared! Plainly Kenton saw them —eyes hard as jade, glaring through the closed lids as though those lids had been gossamer! The slender crescent upon her brows was an arc of living fire, and all about it the masses of her red-gold hair beat and tossed.

Round and round, in clamorous rings above the ship, wheeled the cloud of doves, snowy wings beating, red beaks open; screaming.

Within the blackness of the ship's stern roared the thunder of the serpent drum.

The blackness thinned. A face stared out, half veiled, bodiless, floating in the shadow. It was the face of the man Klaneth—and yet no more his than that which challenged it was the woman Sharane's. The pale eyes had become twin pools of hell flames; pupilless. For a heart beat the face hovered, framed by the darkness. The shadow dropped over it and hid it.

Now Kenton saw that this shadow hung like a curtain over the exact center of the ship, and that he crouched hardly ten feet distant from where that curtain cut the craft in twain. The deck on which he lay was pale ivory and again memory stirred but did not awaken. The radiance from the roseate orb struck against the curtain of shadow and made upon it a disk, wider than the ship, that was like a web of beams spun from the rays of a rosy moon. Against this shining web the shadow pressed, straining to break through.

From the black deck the thunder of the serpent drum redoubled; the brazen conches shrieked. Drum-thunder and shrieking horn mingled; they became the pulse of Abaddon, lair of the damned.

From Sharane's three women, shot storm of harpings, arpeggios like gusts of tiny arrows and with them shrill javelin pipings from the double flute. Arrows and javelins of sound cut through the thunder-hammering of the drum and the bellow of the horns, sapping them, beating them back.

A movement began within the shadow. It seethed. It spawned.

Over the face of the disk of radiance black shapes swarmed. Their bodies were like monstrous larvae, slugs; faceless. They tore at the web; strove to thrust through it; flailed it.

The web gave!

Its edge held firm, but slowly the center was pushed back until the disk was like the half of a huge hollow sphere. Within that hollow crawled and writhed and struck the monstrous shapes. From the black deck serpent drum and brazen horns bellowed triumph.

Again rang the golden trumpet cry from the deck of ivory. Out of the orb streamed an incandescence intolerable. The edges of the web shot forward and curved.

They closed upon the black spawn; within it the black spawn milled and struggled like fish in a net. Like a net lifted by some mighty hand the web swung high up above the ship. Its brightness grew to match that of the orb. From netted shapes of blackness came a faint, high pitched, obscene wailing. They shrank, dissolved, were gone.

The net opened. Out of it drifted a little cloud of ebon dust.

The web streamed back into the orb that had sent it forth.

Then, swiftly, the orb was gone! Gone too was the shadow that had shrouded the black deck. High above the ship the snowy doves circled, screaming victory.

A hand touched Kenton's shoulder. He looked up into the shadowy eyes of the woman called Sharane; no goddess now, only woman. In her eyes he read amazement, startled disbelief.

Kenton sprang to his feet. A thrust of blinding pain shot through his head. The deck whirled round him. He tried to master the dizziness; he could not. Dizzily the ship spun beneath his feet; and beyond in wider arcs dizzily spun turquoise sea and silver horizon.

Now all formed a vortex, a maelstrom, down whose pit he was dropping —faster, ever faster. Around him was a formless blur. Again he heard the tumult of the tempests; the shrillings of the winds of space. The winds died away. There were three clear bell notes—

Kenton stood within his own room!

The bell had been his clock, striking the hour of six. Six o'clock? Why the last sound of his own world before the mystic sea had swept it from under him had been the third stroke of that hour clipped off in mid-note.

God—what a dream! And all in half a bell stroke!

He lifted his hand and touched a throbbing bruise over his right temple. He winced—well, that blow at least had been no dream. He stumbled over to the jeweled ship.

He stared at it, incredulous.

The toys upon the ship had moved—new toys had appeared!

No longer were there four manikins on the black deck.

There were only two. One stood pointing toward the starboard platform near the mast, his hand resting on the shoulder of a red-bearded, agate-eyed soldier toy clad all in glittering chain mail.

Nor was there any woman at the rosy cabin's door as there had been when Kenton had loosed the ship from the block. At its threshold were five slim girls with javelins in hands.

The woman was on the starboard platform, bent low beside the rail!

And the ship's oars were no longer buried in the waves of lapis lazuli. They were lifted, poised for the downward stroke!