The Moon Pool Page 24

  CHAPTER XXIV

  The Crimson Sea

  I was in the heart of a rose pearl, swinging, swinging; no, I was in arosy dawn cloud, pendulous in space. Consciousness flooded me, inreality I was in the arms of one of the man frogs, carrying me asthough I were a babe, and we were passing through some place suffusedwith glow enough like heart of pearl or dawn cloud to justify myawakening vagaries.

  Just ahead walked Lakla in earnest talk with Rador, and content enoughwas I for a time to watch her. She had thrown off the metallic robes;her thick braids of golden brown hair with their flame glints ofbronze were twined in a high coronal meshed in silken net of green;little clustering curls escaped from it, clinging to the nape of theproud white neck, shyly kissing it. From her shoulders fell a loose,sleeveless garment of shimmering green belted with a high goldengirdle; skirt folds dropping barely below the knees.

  She had cast aside her buskins, too, and the slender, high-arched feetwere sandalled. Between the buckled edges of her kirtle I caughtgleams of translucent ivory as exquisitely moulded, as delectablyrounded, as those revealed so naively beneath the hem.

  Something was knocking at the doors of my consciousness--some tragicthing. What was it? Larry! Where was Larry? I remembered; raised myhead abruptly; saw at my side another frog-man carrying O'Keefe, andbehind him, Olaf, step instinct with grief, following like somefaithful, wistful dog who has lost a loved master. Upon my movementthe monster bearing me halted, looked down inquiringly, uttered adeep, booming note that held the quality of interrogation.

  Lakla turned; the clear, golden eyes were sorrowful, the sweet mouthdrooping; but her loveliness, her gentleness, that undefinablesynthesis of all her tender self that seemed always to circle her withan atmosphere of lucid normality, lulled my panic.

  "Drink this," she commanded, holding a small vial to my lips.

  Its contents were aromatic, unfamiliar but astonishingly effective,for as soon as they passed my lips I felt a surge of strength;consciousness was restored.

  "Larry!" I cried. "Is he dead?"

  Lakla shook her head; her eyes were troubled.

  "No," she said; "but he is like one dead--and yet unlike--"

  "Put me down," I demanded of my bearer.

  He tightened his hold; round eyes upon the Golden Girl. She spoke--insonorous, reverberating monosyllables--and I was set upon my feet; Ileaped to the side of the Irishman. He lay limp, with a disquieting,abnormal sequacity, as though every muscle were utterly flaccid; theantithesis of the _rigor mortis_, thank God, but terrifyingly towardthe other end of its arc; a syncope I had never known. The flesh wasstone cold; the pulse barely perceptible, long intervalled; therespiration undiscoverable; the pupils of the eyes were enormouslydilated; it was as though life had been drawn from every nerve.

  "A light flashed from the road. It struck his face and seemed to sinkin," I said.

  "I saw," answered Rador; "but what it was I know not; and I thought Iknew all the weapons of our rulers." He glanced at me curiously. "Sometalk there has been that the stranger who came with you, DoubleTongue, was making new death tools for Lugur," he ended.

  Marakinoff! The Russian at work already in this storehouse ofdevastating energies, fashioning the weapons for his plots! TheApocalyptic vision swept back upon me--

  "He is not dead." Lakla's voice was poignant. "He is not dead; andthe Three have wondrous healing. They can restore him if theywill--and they will, they _will_!" For a moment she was silent. "Nowtheir gods help Lugur and Yolara," she whispered; "for come what may,whether the Silent Ones be strong or weak, if he dies, surely shall Ifall upon them and I will slay those two--yea, though I, too perish!"

  "Yolara and Lugur shall both die." Olaf's eyes were burning. "ButLugur is mine to slay."

  That pity I had seen before in Lakla's eyes when she looked upon theNorseman banished the white wrath from them. She turned, halfhurriedly, as though to escape his gaze.

  "Walk with us," she said to me, "unless you are still weak."

  I shook my head, gave a last look at O'Keefe; there was nothing Icould do; I stepped beside her. She thrust a white arm into mineprotectingly, the wonderfully moulded hand with its long, taperingfingers catching about my wrist; my heart glowed toward her.

  "Your medicine is potent, handmaiden," I answered. "And the touch ofyour hand would give me strength enough, even had I not drunk it," Iadded in Larry's best manner.

  Her eyes danced, trouble flying.

  "Now, that was well spoken for such a man of wisdom as Rador tells meyou are," she laughed; and a little pang shot through me. Could not alover of science present a compliment without it always seeming to beas unusual as plucking a damask rose from a cabinet of fossils?

  Mustering my philosophy, I smiled back at her. Again I noted thatbroad, classic brow, with the little tendrils of shining bronzecaressing it, the tilted, delicate, nut-brown brows that gave acurious touch of innocent _diablerie_ to the lovely face--flowerlike,pure, high-bred, a touch of roguishness, subtly alluring, sparklingover the maiden Madonnaness that lay ever like a delicate, luminoussuggestion beneath it; the long, black, curling lashes--the tender,rounded, bare left breast--

  "I have always liked you," she murmured naively, "since first I sawyou in that place where the Shining One goes forth into your world.And I am glad you like my medicine as well as that you carry in theblack box that you left behind," she added swiftly.

  "How know you of that, Lakla?" I gasped.

  "Oft and oft I came to him there, and to you, while you lay sleeping.How call you _him_?" She paused.

  "Larry!" I said.

  "Larry!" she repeated it excellently. "And you?"

  "Goodwin," said Rador.

  I bowed quite as though I were being introduced to some charming younglady met in that old life now seemingly aeons removed.

  "Yes--Goodwin." she said. "Oft and oft I came. Sometimes I thoughtyou saw me. And _he_--did he not dream of me sometime--?" she askedwistfully.

  "He did." I said, "and watched for you." Then amazement grew vocal."But how came you?" I asked.

  "By a strange road," she whispered, "to see that all was well with_him_--and to look into his heart; for I feared Yolara and her beauty.But I saw that she was not in his heart." A blush burned over her,turning even the little bare breast rosy. "It is a strange road," shewent on hurriedly. "Many times have I followed it and watched theShining One bear back its prey to the blue pool; seen the woman _he_seeks"--she made a quick gesture toward Olaf--"and a babe cast fromher arms in the last pang of her mother love; seen another woman throwherself into the Shining One's embrace to save a man she loved; and Icould not help!" Her voice grew deep, thrilled. "The friend, it comesto me, who drew you here, Goodwin!"

  She was silent, walking as one who sees visions and listens to voicesunheard by others, Rador made a warning gesture; I crowded back myquestions, glanced about me. We were passing over a smooth strand,hard packed as some beach of long-thrust-back ocean. It was likecrushed garnets, each grain stained deep red, faintly sparkling. Oneach side were distances, the floor stretching away into them bare ofvegetation--stretching on and on into infinitudes of rosy mist, evenas did the space above.

  Flanking and behind us marched the giant batrachians, fivescore ofthem at least, black scale and crimson scale lustrous and gleaming inthe rosaceous radiance; saucer eyes shining circles of phosphorescencegreen, purple, red; spurs clicking as they crouched along with a gaitat once grotesque and formidable.

  Ahead the mist deepened into a ruddier glow; through it a long, darkline began to appear--the mouth I thought of the caverned spacethrough which we were going; it was just before us; over us--we stoodbathed in a flood of rubescence!

  A sea stretched before us--a crimson sea, gleaming like that lostlacquer of royal coral and the Flame Dragon's blood which Fu S'cze setupon the bower he built for his stolen sun maiden--that going towardit she might think it the sun itself rising over the summer seas.Unmoved by wave or ripple, it was placid as some deep
woodland poolwhen night rushes up over the world.

  It seemed molten--or as though some hand great enough to rock earthhad distilled here from conflagrations of autumn sunsets their flamingessences.

  A fish broke through, large as a shark, blunt-headed, flashing bronze,ridged and mailed as though with serrate plates of armour. It leapedhigh, shaking from it a sparkling spray of rubies; dropped and shot upa geyser of fiery gems.

  Across my line of vision, moving stately over the sea, floated a halfglobe, luminous, diaphanous, its iridescence melting into turquoise,thence to amethyst, to orange, to scarlet shot with rose, tovermilion, a translucent green, thence back into the iridescence;behind it four others, and the least of them ten feet in diameter, andthe largest no less than thirty. They drifted past like bubbles blownfrom froth of rainbows by pipes in mouths of Titans' young. Then fromthe base of one arose a tangle of shimmering strands, long, slenderwhiplashes that played about and sank slowly again beneath the crimsonsurface.

  I gasped--for the fish had been a _ganoid_--that ancient, armouredform that was perhaps the most intelligent of all life on our planetduring the Devonian era, but which for age upon age had vanished, savefor its fossils held in the embrace of the stone that once was theirsoft bottom beds; and the half-globes were _Medusae_, jelly-fish--butof a size, luminosity, and colour unheard of.

  Now Lakla cupped her mouth with pink palms and sent a clarion noteringing out. The ledge on which we stood continued a few hundred feetbefore us, falling abruptly, though from no great height to theCrimson Sea; at right and left it extended in a long semicircle.Turning to the right whence she had sent her call, I saw rising a mileor more away, veiled lightly by the haze, a rainbow, a giganticprismatic arch, flattened, I thought, by some quality of the strangeatmosphere. It sprang from the ruddy strand, leaped the crimson tide,and dropped three miles away upon a precipitous, jagged upthrust ofrock frowning black from the lacquered depths.

  And surmounting a higher ledge beyond this upthrust a huge dome ofdull gold, Cyclopean, striking eyes and mind with something unhumanlyalien, baffling; sending the mind groping, as though across thedeserts of space, from some far-flung star, should fall upon us linkedsounds, coherent certainly, meaningful surely, vaguely familiar--yetnever to be translated into any symbol or thought of our ownparticular planet.

  The sea of crimson lacquer, with its floating moons of luminouscolour--this bow of prismed stone leaping to the weird isle crowned bythe anomalous, aureate excrescence--the half human batrachians-theelfland through which we had passed, with all its hidden wonders andterrors--I felt the foundations of my cherished knowledge shaking.Was this all a dream? Was this body of mine lying somewhere, fightinga fevered death, and all these but images floating through thebreaking chambers of my brain? My knees shook; involuntarily Igroaned.

  Lakla turned, looked at me anxiously, slipped a soft arm behind me,held me till the vertigo passed.

  "Patience," she said. "The bearers come. Soon you shall rest."

  I looked; down toward us from the bow's end were leaping swiftlyanother score of the frog-men. Some bore litters, high, handled, notunlike palanquins--

  "Asgard!" Olaf stood beside me, eyes burning, pointing to the arch."Bifrost Bridge, sharp as sword edge, over which souls go to Valhalla.And _she_--she is a Valkyr--a sword maiden, _Ja!_"

  I gripped the Norseman's hand. It was hot, and a pang of remorse shotthrough me. If this place had so shaken me, how must it have shakenOlaf? It was with relief that I watched him, at Lakla's gentlecommand, drop into one of the litters and lie back, eyes closed, astwo of the monsters raised its yoke to their scaled shoulders. Nor wasit without further relief that I myself lay back on the soft velvetycushions of another.

  The cavalcade began to move. Lakla had ordered O'Keefe placed besideher, and she sat, knees crossed Orient fashion, leaning over the palehead on her lap, the white, tapering fingers straying fondly throughhis hair.

  Presently I saw her reach up, slowly unwind the coronal of hertresses, shake them loose, and let them fall like a veil over her andhim.

  Her head bent low; I heard a soft sobbing--I turned away my gaze, lornenough in my own heart, God knew!