Essential Science Fiction Novels - Volume 5. Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон

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!

      III

      THE SHIP RETURNS

      One by one Kenton pulled at the manikins, each toy. Immovable, gem hard, each was, seemingly part of the deck itself; no force he could exert would move them.

      Yet something had shifted them—and where were the vanished ones? From where had the new ones come?

      Nor was there any haze around the little figures, nor blurring; each lineament stood out clean cut. The pointing toy on the black deck had dwarfed, bowed legs; his torso was that of a giant; his bald pate glinted and in his ears were wide discs of gold. Kenton recognized him—the beater of the serpent drum.

      There was a tiny silver crescent upon the head of the bending woman toy, and over its tips poured flood of red-gold hair—

      Sharane!

      And that place at which she peered—was it not where he had lain on that other ship of his dream?

      That—other ship? He saw again its decks ebon and ivory, its rosy cabin and its emerald mast. It had been this ship before him—no other! Dream? Then what had moved the toys?

      Kenton's wonder grew. Within it moved a sharp unease, a sharper curiosity. He found he could not think clearly with the ship filling his eyes; it seemed to focus all his attention upon it, to draw it taut, to fill him with a tense expectancy. He unhooked a hanging from the wall and threw it over the gleaming mystery. He walked from the room, fighting with each step an imperative desire to turn his head. He dragged himself through the doorway as though hands were gripping his ankles, drawing him back. Head still turned away Kenton lurched shoulders against the door; closed it; locked it.

      In his bathroom he examined the bruise on his head. It was painful enough, but nothing serious. Half an hour of cold compresses fairly well removed all outward marks of it. He told himself that he might have fallen upon the floor, overcome by the strange perfumes—he knew that he had not.

      Kenton dined alone, scarce heeding what was set before him, his mind groping through perplexities. What was the history of the block from Babylon? Who had set the ship within it—and why? Forsyth's letter had said that he had found it in the mound called Amran, just south of the Qser or crumbled "palace" of Nabopolasser. There was evidence, Kenton knew, that the Amran mound was the site of E-Sagilla, the ziggurat or terraced temple that had been the Great House of the Gods in ancient Babylon. The block must have been held in peculiar reverence, so Forsyth had conjectured, since only so would it have been saved from the destruction of the city by Sennacherib and afterwards have been put back in the re-built temple.

      But why had it been held in such reverence? Why had such a miracle as the ship been imprisoned in the stone?

      The inscription might have given some clue had it not been so mutilated. In his letter Forsyth had pointed out that the name of Ishtar, Mother Goddess of the Babylonians—Goddess of Vengeance and Destruction as well —appeared over and over again; that plain too were the arrowed symbols of Nergal, God of the Babylonian Hades and Lord of the Dead; that the symbols of Nabu, the God of Wisdom, appeared many times. These three names had been almost the only legible words on the block. It was as though the acid of time which had etched out the other characters had been held back from them.

      Kenton could read the cuneatic well nigh as readily as his native English. He recalled now that in the inscription Ishtar's name had been coupled with her wrathful aspect rather than her softer