Генри Каттнер - Lands of the Earthquake

He slept. In his mind, something urged him to sleep and not to listen. He was still weary and sleep came easily. And how can a man fight the commands that rise from the center of his own brain?

Voices woke him.

“Hush—du Boyce sleeps. Speak softly.”

He recognized Sir Guillaume’s heavy whisper in reply and lay quiet, wondering if he should let the two men know he was awake.

Tancred, apparently still seated in the window, was speaking.

“Guillaume, you’re a reckless fool. You know you must not do it.”

“I do as I please,” Guillaume growled. “If the plan works, we may all be saved. If it fails, I’ll suffer for it alone.”

“Perhaps not alone. Have you thought you may return to us as Hugh de Mandois returned? How do you know what they may do to you if they catch you in the City?”

“I tell you, Tancred, I know what I’m doing. It will not be the first trip I’ve made into the City. I have my own friends there now. Men who know me—or think they do—by another name. A turncoat from Kerak is a prize for the City spies. They’ll buy all the information I give and beg for more. You knew my work there, Tancred. You never said no before. Why now? Since Hugh de Mandois, I feel more eager than ever to make this attempt.”

“Because of Hugh, my friend. Because I know now how deep their powers go. Never before have they worked a spy into our midst in the very likeness of ourselves. How can we trust you, Guillaume, even if you do come back?”

“You have the Oracle,” Guillaume said gruffly.

Tancred did not speak for a moment. When he did, his voice was soft and Boyce thought he heard sorrow in it.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes—we have the Oracle.”

“Very well, then. I see no cause for waiting. Two attacks from the City in so short a time must mean they plan to move upon us with all their forces. I say, learn what we can from them whatever the cost may be. If I risk my neck, who’s to forbid me in Kerak? Not you nor anyone!”

“You risk more than your life, Guillaume,” Tancred said.

There was no answer but a snort.

“Very well.” Tancred’s voice was level. “You are master here.”

Heavy feet crossed the floor. The door opened and closed. Lying with closed eyes, Boyce heard Tancred sigh. He thought of one question that he meant to ask, but it did not seem to him that just now was the moment to ask it. He wanted to know more of the ice–pale girl whom the Crusaders called the Oracle, who and what she was, and why Tancred spoke to her with gentleness and heard her name with such sorrow in his voice.

In Kerak Castle time stood still. But space around it flowed slowly by. Now that Boyce knew, he thought he could see the slow, slow ebbing past his window. The City itself, Tancred had told him, had drifted out of some distant foggy region into their valley. In time—no, in the passage of space, not time—it would float on and each citadel would forget the other.

But now, like enemy ships passing each other in neutral waters, they were engaged in battle and only the destruction of one—or both—or the widening of space between them could make an end to the conflict.

Guillaume had gone. Boyce knew it only because he missed the arrogant, deep–voiced presence on his convalescent journeys about the castle. No one would answer his questions when he inquired after his namesake. Godfrey had vanished too. Even Tancred had withdrawn and spent most of the waking hours locked in his towerheight, busy with secrets of his own. No man or woman in Kerak, except Tancred himself, knew what lay behind that tower door.

“He had a pool of water there,” one of the castle women whispered to Boyce when he spoke casually of the room. “No one knows how, but he uses it in his magic. And they say he has mirrors in his room that show a man his own thoughts.

“Voices come out of the room when we know only Tancred is within, and sometimes very sweet singing, like the voices of angels. And once a strange little beast, bright gold, with a blue halo around it, escaped under the door and ran down the stairs. The boy who caught it burnt his hands on the halo.”

Boyce had no way of guessing how much time went by before the morning of the Silence. It was very curious how impossible it was to measure time in this grey world. One could make a tally of the hours and still be helpless to reckon them up in intervals of longer than a week or two. Time was too slippery for the mind to grasp.

But one morning—though there was neither night nor morning in Kerak—Boyce woke to an awareness of profound silence. He sat up in his canopied bed and listened, bewildered, oddly sure that it was the silence itself that had awakened him. Silence and a—sense of pressure in the air.

He dressed rapidly and ran down the twisting stairs to the great hall of the castle, where at this hour the trestle tables should be set up and the castle folk gathered noisily at breakfast.

There were men and women in the hall, but they were not noisy. They lay silent in attitudes like those of puppets dropped in mid–stage when the hands of the puppet–master failed. Some had fallen over loads of wood brought to feed the great fire that should now be roaring up the chimney instead of smouldering in sullen ash beneath the stone hood of the fireplace.

Some lay with broken dishes and spilled food beside them. The dogs stretched silent in the rushes. Hawks in feathered hoods clasped their perches along the wall, rigid as hawks of stone.

Boyce stared in bewilderment over the silent room. Nothing moved—and yet it seemed to him that the air itself was in motion. It was as if people went by him unseen, brushing his shoulder in passing but weightless as the air they displaced. And there was a strange, sweet, pungent odor in the castle—very faint, nothing he had ever smelled before.

“Magic,” he whispered to himself, without any reason whatever. “The smell of magic!” He needed no reason for that thought. It came unbidden to his mind and he knew that he was not mistaken.

These people were not dead. They slept. He went among them anxiously, shaking the sleepers by the shoulder, calling their names. No one stirred. He dashed cold water in the face of a serving wench who slumbered beside her pitcher. She did not even sigh. It was a magical slumber and no power, he realized at last, but the power of him who had cast the spell could waken these people from the depths of enchantment in which they lay.

Alarm grew in him as he went through the silent castle, finding no waking man or woman or animal as he went. Only Boyce himself moved and was awake. And that in itself was frightening. There was a purpose so sure and grim behind all that had been happening to him since he broke the crystal window and heard the Huntsman laugh—no, since before that. Since the beginning of the year he had lost.

In all that while, he sensed now, he had been moving inexorably along some path predestined for him by an unseen planner. Nothing happened to him that did not move him nearer whatever relentless goal the planner meant him to reach.

Today, he thought, he had come to a milestone of that progress. Today, surely, he alone of all the castle was awake for a purpose not his own. The air whispered with the passage of invisible people as he went up floor by floor, searching the silent building.

Tancred, in the topmost tower, he did not seek until the last. He was not sure about Tancred. In that room of magic, there must surely have been a screen to protect the castle’s wisest man from the onslaught of the City.

Up and up Boyce went through the sleeping castle.

“Sleeping Beauty,” he thought. “Sleeping Beauty in the enchanted castle—a spell like this. I wonder—it might have been just such a castle. And there may be more precedents than we know for the old tales. Sleeping Beauty—”