Read Ebook: The starmen by Brackett Leigh

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Ebook has 1269 lines and 56051 words, and 26 pages

g and stumbling in the mud and wet gorse. It was from the crest of one such low rise that he caught a glimmer of light, ahead and to the left.

He said aloud, "There is a cotter's hut," and would not allow himself to hope for anything else. But he spurred the horse on recklessly. Even so, it seemed hours before he reached the light.

He was close onto the place before he could make out its size and shape in the thick darkness. Then he reined in, completely baffled. This was no cotter's hut, nor was it a manor, nor any normal sort of dwelling. He saw a broken shaft of stone that had once been a squat crenellated tower, and around its foot was a ruin of walls and outbuildings. It was very old, Trehearne thought--probably medieval, and probably the onetime stronghold of a robber baron.

A ruin, lost in the wasteland. And yet it was inhabited. Yellow lamplight poured from the embrasures of the keep. There were horses in the courtyard. There was a sound of voices, and in the rickety outbuildings that leaned against the wall there were lanterns and noises and activity. Trehearne sat still for a time, trying to make some sort of sense out of what he saw, and failing. Then he dismounted and let his weary animal join its fellows, going himself toward the outbuildings and the men who were working there. He carried a small automatic in his pocket. He was not afraid, but he was glad he had it. There was an unsettling queerness about the place, about its situation and whatever reason it had for being.

The wooden structures were not nearly so tumbledown as they seemed at first look. In fact, Trehearne had a ridiculous idea that they had been built that way deliberately. They were crammed now with crates and packing cases, not wooden ones, Trehearne noticed, but light, strong plastic, marked with unfamiliar symbols. Others were being fetched up through openings in the stone that led apparently into the cellars beneath the keep. The men who handled them, with a good deal of laughter and loud talk, were mostly young, and all of the Vardda stock, and their dress was as strange as their language. Trehearne could think of no national costume that included quite that kind of a tunic belted over loose trousers, nor that particular type of sandal. A little shiver slid over him and he stopped just beyond the edge of the lantern-light. The men had not seen him yet, and he was suddenly not sure that he wanted them to. The strangeness began to come through to him, no longer in the mass, but in small casual detail that made it real, and now he began to be afraid, not with his body but with his mind.

From out of the rain and the shadows close by him, someone said, "You must be Trehearne."

The sheer reflex of tight-strung nerves closed Trehearne's grip on the automatic and brought him whirling around. The speaker must have seen the gesture, for he said quietly, "You won't need that. Come back a way, I want to talk to you."

"Who--?"

"Keep your voice down! Come on."

Trehearne followed the blurred figure of a man in a yellow tunic and dark trousers. Even in the gloom he could see that the belt around the man's waist was studded with gems, and the fastenings of his sandals glinted like fireflies in the wet grass. The small shiver twitched again at Trehearne's nerves, and he kept his hand in his pocket, over the comforting prosaic weight of the gun. He had thought at first that the man was Kerrel, but he was too short, and the voice was different. Neither spoke again until they had reached a blank corner of the keep well out of sight of the sheds. Then the man stopped and turned, and Trehearne said, "How did you know me?"

Faint light from an embrasure high above fell on the stranger's face. It was a Vardda face, but it was not beautiful. It was ugly, and kind, with very shrewd eyes and a merry mouth that was not really merry at all, even when it smiled. It was smiling now.

"Your fame has come ahead of you." He nodded toward the wall and what was beyond it. "Kerrel says you won't come, Shairn says you will. They're all betting on you in there." He examined Trehearne closely in the dim light, and shook his head. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. You really are remarkable."

"I've been told that before," said Trehearne sourly, and glanced at the stone wall, remembering what Shairn had said to him at the cove. An angry glint came into his eyes, "She's sure of herself."

"Shairn is sure of everything, and herself most of all." The man had been drinking, but he was not even slightly drunk. His tone was serious. "Now listen to me, my friend. I've stood around a long while in the rain watching for you when I should have been attending to my business, and I'm breaking a very important law right now. No one else has seen you. Take your horse and ride like hell away from here, and I'll forget that I have." He laid an urgent hand on Trehearne's shoulder. "This may be hard for you to believe, but I'm offering you your life."

The voices of the men rang down the wind, and Trehearne thought of the crates and cases they were bringing up from below as though preparing them for loading, and suddenly an answer came to him.

"Smuggling," he said. "You could land planes out here, and nobody would ever know it."

"Smuggling is precisely it. Now will you go? I haven't any right to do this, but I hate to see a man die just for a woman's amusement."

"Why are you so sure I'll die?"

"Because you're not true Vardda, and more than that I can't tell you. Just please for God's sake go!"

Trehearne thought, He's sincere, he means it, and smuggling isn't all the answer, these aren't common criminals. Something strange, very strange, and maybe he's right.... The fear that he had had before rose up in him and it was of the body now as well as the mind, a chill premonition of the unnatural. He hesitated, and the ugly man said softly, "Good! I'll get your horse."

There was a creak and a bang and a burst of sound as the great oaken door of the keep swung open. The stranger pressed Trehearne flat against the wall. The doorway was just out of sight, but Trehearne could hear the voices clearly. They were speaking their own unfamiliar tongue, so that what they said was lost to him, but he knew they were talking about him. He heard his name, and the voice that spoke it was Shairn's. Then she laughed. She didn't need to laugh. The sound of her voice would have been enough. Trehearne flung off the stranger's restraining arm and stood away from the wall.

"You fool!" whispered the stranger furiously, and caught at him, but Trehearne was remembering things, words, looks, and the anger in him burned away the fear. He walked out into the light that spilled across the courtyard from the open door. Kerrel and a number of others, mostly women, were standing there, but the only one he saw was Shairn, girdled with jewels and wearing a tunic the color of flame, holding in her hand a goblet of wine. A silence fell, and Shairn's gaze was fixed on his. Even so, he could not read it.

She smiled and said, "Thank you, Michael. I've won my bet."

FOUR

A hand fell upon Trehearne's shoulder from behind. It was the man in the yellow tunic, and he had become, in the last few seconds, quite jovially drunk. He gave Trehearne a friendly shove toward the door and called out to the people who stood there, "I found him out here looking for a way in--and I swear the man's a Vardda!" Under his breath he said rapidly in Trehearne's ear, "Keep your mouth shut, or we'll both be in trouble!"

They went together into the keep. The men stared closely at Trehearne, and the women chattered about him in their own tongue. And Kerrel said to Shairn, "Are you satisfied, now you've got him here?"

She handed him the goblet. He took it and said, "Oh yes, that's so. You'd better collect your bet."

"I think," she answered, "I'll let it ride." She raised her goblet to sip the wine, doing it in such a way that her sleeve fell back and showed him the dark bruised ring his fingers had left around her wrist.

The man in the yellow tunic said something in his own language, and her eyes narrowed. But she turned to Kerrel and said mildly, "Edri doesn't approve of me."

"I don't think any of us do right now," said Kerrel. "You should have let the man alone."

"Michael doesn't think so--do you, Michael? I didn't tempt him to follow me. That was his idea."

"Well, he followed you," said Edri, and there was a deep anger in his voice.

Kerrel said irritably, "That's impossible, and you know it." He began to speak to Edri and the other men, in that language that Trehearne had never heard before. They seemed disturbed and ill at ease, men beset by a problem to which there was no good solution. Their attitude, and the particular way in which the women looked at him, took away the fine edge of Trehearne's excitement. "They act," he said to Shairn, "as though they're planning where to bury me."

She shrugged. "Oh, they're discussing all sorts of alternatives, but there's only one possible answer." She sat down on the edge of the table, watching him in the catlike way that she had. "Nervous?"

"Cold. The rain was very wet." That was only half the truth, but he was damned if he was going to admit it to her. "And I'm curious. Where do you people come from? What are you doing here? What's all the mystery about?"

"Don't be impatient, Michael. It can't all be told at once." She had been listening intently to what the men were saying, and now she rose again. "I think it's time I took a hand in this. Men always talk in circles."

She joined the group. Trehearne finished off his wine and poured more from a queer stone bottle. It was good, but he couldn't place it on any list of vintages. There was beginning to be a nightmare quality about this culmination of his long search. Everything was too business-like, too solemn--and too insane. He wished they would stop talking about him. He wished somebody would explain to him what was going on out here. The voices went on and on, and suddenly he realized that Shairn had shifted into a language he could understand.

"You see?" she was saying to Kerrel. "I can quote the law as well as you. And you know I'm right."

Kerrel muttered, "It seems to me a choice of evils." And he added furiously, "You should have let the man alone!"

"He has a right to his chance," Shairn said. "He came a long way to get it."

"Do I detect a note of malice there?" inquired Edri.

"Detect what you like. Anyway, there is no other course--unless one of you feels up to killing him right here, in cold blood."

Trehearne's wine-glass came down with a clatter on the table, and he thrust his hand into his pocket so that the automatic bulged it very plainly. He said, "You wouldn't find that so easy."

Edri gave a wry sort of shudder and made gestures at him to relax. "We're not violent people," he said. "It's only that you've faced us with a damnably involved problem, and one we've never had to meet before. You see, there are certain laws."

"Laws?"

Shairn came before him, her face uplifted, smiling, sweet. "You're coming with us, Michael. That's what you wanted. Aren't you happy?"

"To Llyrdis."

He did not like her smile. He did not like the wisdom in it, the mockery, the knowledge of things beyond his ken. She bore him malice, and somehow she had got her revenge, and he didn't understand how. All the little details joined together in his mind, the language, the dress, the physical appearance, the taste of a purple wine that came from no familiar vineyard, and they pressed down on him like an avalanche, crowned with the echo of an unknown name, and he was cold deep inside himself, cold with a dread that even yet had no clear shape to it.

He repeated, "Llyrdis?"

"Oh, Christ, don't torture the man," said Edri wearily to Shairn. Then he looked at Trehearne and said, "Llyrdis is our home world, the fourth planet of the star you call Aldebaran."

He said to Edri, quite reasonably, "But that isn't possible."

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