Генри Каттнер: Lands of the Earthquake

Before him in the saddle he saw Godfrey’s mighty mailed back go rigid. He heard the Crusader’s caught breath. Then a deep–throated shout made the mist echo around them.

“Look—look at hell opening again!” roared Godfrey.

The horse beneath them staggered. No—not the horse, but the earth itself. Boyce saw a long swell of sandy ground swiftly rising as if the plain breathed. Between them and the castled heights of the mountain the land lay bare for a moment of mist, and all that space was heaving incredibly. It was more than earthquake—more purposeful, far more sinister.

Then the earth split. And the long jagged rent moved horribly, like a crawling serpent, toward the base of the crags that upheld the castle.

Godfrey Morel roared, “ Kerak! ” and waved a great arm toward the castle as if his shout could rouse the garrison to its danger. Then he bent in the saddle and drove his spurs deep. The war–horse gathered itself on the rocking earth and staggered, then leaped forward with a lengthening stride.

Boyce clutched the Crusader’s belt and coughed in the dust that billowed up from the pounding of the hoofs. The whole world seemed to be shaking now, with a shifting uneasy motion that tossed them like a ship on water.

And there was a crawling all over the plain, a converging of the serpentine rents as though the earth meant to swallow Kerak whole. Huge cracks tore themselves open, lengthening jaggedly. The plain was like a sheet of ice breaking in a spring thaw, shattering toward the crags upon which Kerak towered.

“ Sorcerers! ” Godfrey howled. He was upright in the stirrups now, yelling an ancient war–cry, blindly spurring the charger across the shuddering plain. Boyce hung on desperately, not daring to shift his grip.

Before them he saw the ground yawn suddenly. He could look down steep, crumbling lips of earth into darkness, and he felt the stallion shudder with the shudder of the plain. Then powerful muscles gathered beneath them, were ponderously released as the charger with its double burden hurdled the widening gap.

“ Dieu lo vult! ” Godfrey breathed suddenly, as they thundered on across the shaking ground. It was the Crusaders’ rallying cry, Boyce knew, but something in Godfrey’s voice told him this time it meant more—relief, prayerful thanks—“God wills it!”

He looked up. From the heights of Kerak a flicker of light was broadening like a halo around the topmost tower. It shivered and widened and pulsed outward as the rings widen in water from a dropped pebble. Circle after circle, broadening and slowly dropping, until the whole castle was ringed with falling wheels of fire….

They did not stop at the base of the castle. They dropped farther, ringing the crags. They came down and down, slowly, silently, flowing and widening as they came, and ever the topmost tower pulsed them forth anew.

Where the first of the broadening hoops of fire touched the plain the earth ceased to shudder—and none too soon. For by then Kerak itself had begun to pitch a little, like a great castled galleon riding a stormy sea. The deep groan of rocks shaken one upon another sounded from the tortured crags. A little more of that, and Kerak would have begun to crack like the plain itself.

But the touch of the fiery rings was like the touch of oil on angry water. The earth quieted, the groaning of the cliffs fell silent. Kerak was firm again upon its great grey crags. And as the showering wheels of fire fell slowly downward in circles that broadened toward the watchers, the cracks in the plain began to close.

Wherever the moving rings touched them, the earth healed itself. Without a sound the great rents were sealed like closing mouths. Boyce thought of the mouths of giants, silenced but not appeased by this quiet magic. There was a feel of sullenness to the yielding of the plain. The rings flowed steadily outward, healing and quieting as they came, but the earth was not appeased.

In silence it yielded, but it was not conquered. He could feel that, somehow, in the very silence of the place. The great gaping lips of earth closed, but they closed on threats to come. They bided their time.

Godfrey reined in his trembling charger. They waited while the first wave of light lapped gently around them and went on. Then the Crusader shook the caparisoned reins on the neck before him and they paced forward sedately, the stallion wading through wave upon wave of quiet fire.

Godfrey laughed, a deep, contented noise in his chest.

“The old mage has not lost his wisdom. Kerak is still safe in Tancred’s hands. But the day may come—” He flashed a glance across his shoulder.

“You may be a spy of the Huntsman—or worse,” he said. “Or you may be an honest man. It’s not my part to guess. There are few places now a man could come from—save the City. If spy you are, when you return tell the sorcerers that Tancred is still their match.”

“I’m no spy,” Boyce said hesitantly, fumbling for words in the strange, yet familiar tongue. “You saw the Huntsman follow me—”

“No man knows what drives the Huntsman,” Godfrey said. “Well, here are the bastions of Kerak. Look up, stranger. Feast your eyes, if you came to spy. This is Kerak of the Crusaders!”

“Look up, stranger,” Godfrey said. “This is Kerak of the Crusaders!”

High, high, tremendous with quarried blocks of granite, the mighty bastions towered. It made a man dizzy to stare up those vast, converging heights. And the banner that tore at its staff as if it fought for freedom with the wind made a sound of screaming cloth and a flame of burning crimson. It rolled over the tremendous battlements like a banner of fire, shrieking to the wind in a language of its own.

“Now you must face the Oracle,” Godfrey said. “And be judged, for life or death. But even if the judgment be death—by the Lance, stranger, you shall give me news from my old home before you die. That I have promised myself.”

The iron gates of Kerak screamed on their iron hinges and Godfrey’s stallion paced forward through the rings of falling fire. And it was thus Boyce first entered Kerak, where the last Crusaders dwelt.

Mist hung in the open courts of Kerak. Attendants in archaic garments ran forward to help the riders dismount; they crossed a stone–flagged pavement, invisible in mist, and entered a half–seen door. The cold smell of stone and the fragrance of wood–fires closed about them as they went down a corridor and into a great stone hall high enough to have a drift of mist like miniature clouds hanging in layers under the vast ceiling.

This was a room out of another age. Boyce had seen pictures of such halls many times, but he had certainly never thought to stand in one, looking down the length of the room toward the dais at one end with a bright fire roaring in the chimney and men and women in the garments of six hundred years past lounging before the blaze.

He followed Godfrey over the rush–strewn floor toward the dais. There were women there, in bright velvets, belted with jewels. The breath came suddenly thick in his throat. He knew no more about her than the outline of her body against a crystal window and the flash of a brilliant face glancing once at him across her shoulder. But if she sat here on the dais, he would know her. And perhaps she did. Perhaps she did….

A great voice rang out suddenly.

“Well, Godfrey! What skulker from the marshes d’you bring us now?”

Boyce started violently and paused among the rushes, staring toward the speaker. He knew the voice. He knew it as well as his own. He had heard it somewhere very lately—not with the arrogance that was in it now, but with the same inflections, the same pitch and pacing of phrase—the same voice.