“M’ALMÉ!
M’ALMÉ!”
The sweet, familiar voice came to Price’s ears upon silver wings, through dull clouds of pain. Delicate hands were plastering a cold wet cloth upon his brow. Memory was gone; his mind, like his body, was bruised, stiff,
inert
.
“Master!
Master!” the urgent voice kept pleading, in Arabic.
With a vague, dim impression that grave emergency, disaster, had been looming over him, Price forced open his eyes.
He lay upon a broad, smooth ledge of stone, frosted queerly with bright yellow crystals. He was propped against a huge slab of basalt. Before him was a bottomless pit of green-golden light, spanned with a bridge fantastically narrow. The world was thickly filled with dancing aureate mist—that mist, he remembered faintly, was somehow threatening.
Kneeling beside him was a girl. He turned his head painfully and looked at her.
A lovely girl.
Her hair was brown and waving, her skin a smooth, warm olive. Full, delicate, her mouth was pomegranate-red.
Wonderful, her eyes were. Somehow, they made him feel that he knew them. They were violet-blue, deep,
mysterious
, beneath long lashes. Keen pity was now in their shadowed depths, and distress.
Like the rocks about them, the girl’s clothing glittered with xanthic frost. Smudges of yellow powder sparkled on her face and arms.
And she had been urgently calling to him in Arabic, addressing him as “master.” Surely he could have no claim upon a being so lovely! But if he did, the circumstance was singularly fortunate.
He closed his eyes, racking his memory. This weird place of golden vapors, outrageously fantastic as it might be, was vaguely familiar. And he was certain he had known the girl before, somewhere. Sight of her filled him with a warming glow of pleasure.
He knew her name. It was—he probed dull mists of weary pain—it was Aysa!
Aysa! His lips had muttered it aloud. At the sound, the girl uttered a glad cry. She dropped beside him; her arms went round him. Queer how pleasant her embrace was!
A delightful girl.
He liked to have her near him; he mustn’t let her leave him, ever again. The nearness of her filled him with quick, tingling joy.
It was good to lie here with her arms around him. But he mustn’t do that. There was some danger… The yellow mist… He struggled with the idea: golden mist… that was it; the mist turned people to gold. It would turn him and Aysa into golden things. And he didn’t want that to happen.
He fumbled for the wet cloth the girl had been applying to his forehead, made her tie it over her face. She understood quickly, fixed another for him. His arms ached when he moved… he must have been fighting, to feel so bruised and groggy… Yes, he remembered hitting a yellow man.
He inhaled through the damp rag and closed his eyes and pondered the memory of the yellow man… a golden giant of a man, in scarlet.… He must remember his name… Malikar! He would ask the girl about him; she spoke Arabic.
“Where is Malikar?” he whispered.
She pointed into the shining chasm.
“I woke,
m’almé,
with a wet cloth upon my face, and saw you fighting. Malikar struck you with his club. Then you hit him with your hand, and he stumbled off into the pit. You fell upon the bridge, and I carried you back here.”
His head was clearing now, since he was breathing through the cloth.
“But how did you come here so soon,
m’almé,
from Anz? It was just last night that Malikar locked you in the tomb of Iru, and told me you were dead.”
Strange wonder was in the violet eyes.
Understanding swept through his brain, drove back the dull mists of oblivion. Everything was clear, now. And Aysa was with him, awake and free.
Darling Aysa, for whom he had fought so long.
It was not last night he had been locked in the catacombs of Anz, but many nights ago.
But no need to tell her now.
He slipped one aching arm around her shoulders. She snuggled up contentedly against him, lifted violet eyes, shining with gladness…
They must not stay here. The sleep of the golden vapor might steal upon them, unawares, with its strange transmutation. Aysa was not yet changed. But they must go, while they could…
“You are tired,
M’almé,”
Aysa whispered. “Let us rest here.”
The sun was low, and the black, basaltic mass of
Hajar Jehannum
was three miles behind them, across smooth lava flows, the gold and alabaster of the palace of Verl glowing luridly in red sunset. Two hours ago they had come through the explosion-twisted yellow gates, where Jacob Garth had entered, and begun the long trek to the oasis.
“You must not call me master,” Price told her, as they sat munching the hardtack and dried meat and dates old Sam Sorrows had given him.
“Why not?
Am I not yours? And did you not once buy me for half my weight in gold?” She laughed. “And do I want anything save to be yours?”
“What do you mean, darling? Buying you?”
“You don’t remember?
The story of Aysa and Iru in old Anz?
But you never heard it! I must tell you.”
“Then there
was
a woman named Aysa in Anz, when Iru was king?”
“Of course,
m’almé.
I am named for her, because my eyes are blue, as hers were. Few, you know, among the Beni Anz, have blue eyes. The ancient Aysa was a slave; Iru bought her from the
north country
.”
Price felt oddly disturbed. Was Vekyra’s strange tale, after all, true? Was Aysa—his lovely, innocent Aysa—the namesake, if not the avatar, of a murderess?
“Well, don’t worry about it, sweetheart!” Price told her. He put a bruised, stiff arm about her slender shoulders and drew her firmly to him. She laughed, a little, childish, happy laugh, and her violet eyes looked shining up at him.
He wasn’t going to let anything take her away from him, ever. No part of her. He was going to forget that silly story of Vekyra’s. He didn’t believe in this reincarnation business, anyhow… not too much…
“I’ll tell you the story,
m’almé,”
Aysa whispered, in his arms.
“No, let’s forget it.
Nothing to it, anyhow.
And happy as we are, we can’t let anything—”
“But,
m’almé,
this story can not ruin our happiness.”
“Then tell me, of course.”
“Since he was a child, Iru the king was betrothed, by the wishes of his mother, to Vekyra, who was the daughter of a powerful prince—and not golden, then.
“Iru, by the legend, loved the slave-girl, Aysa. And Vekyra was jealous. One night she made the king drunk, and won the slave from him in a game of chance.”
“I understand how she might have done that,” said Price, recalling his own adventure in the castle of Verl.
“When Iru was sober, he demanded that Vekyra trade him back the slave. She dared not deny him. But she set the greatest price she could think of. She told Iru she would exchange him the girl for a tiger tame enough to ride.
“So Iru rode into the mountains, and caught a live tiger cub, and tamed it. When it was grown, he gave it to Vekyra, and she had to surrender the slave—but still she hated Aysa.”
Price’s disquiet was returning. This was the same story Vekyra had told, of the pampered and adored slave—who was to murder her adorer. He resisted an impulse to stop the girl. After all, what happened twenty centuries ago could not come between them
now.
“Iru did not like the cruel worship of the snake. He destroyed the snake’s
temple,
slew its priests in battle. But Malikar, when all thought him dead, came back, a man of gold, to avenge the desecration of the temple. In vain he made war on Iru, and at last he disguised himself and slipped into Anz, to slay Iru by stealth.
“He found a woman to do murder for him.”
Price’s heart sank. This was the same evil tale.
“I know not what he told Vekyra. He must have offered her the immortal golden life he afterward gave her, and the power with him over Anz. And Vekyra must have hated Iru, because of the slave.
“So Vekyra poisoned Iru’s wine—”
A paean of joy rose in Price’s heart. He drew Aysa abruptly to him, smothered her words with kisses.
“Why are you so glad,” she inquired innocently, “that Vekyra poisoned the wine?”
“Never mind, darling.
Go on with the story.”
“Vekyra herself handed Iru the bowl. The slave-girl was near. She saw the look on Vekyra’s face, and cried out, and told Iru not to drink.
“Then Vekyra, to save herself, pretended to be very angry. She cursed the slave-girl. She said she herself would drink the wine, if Iru would give back the girl to her.
“But Iru refused. He was too brave to understand how another could do a cowardly thing. In the haste of his anger, he put the bowl to his own lips. Aysa tried to strike it from his hand; he held her back.
“Aysa then implored the king to let her drink it, rather than he. But he drained the bowl himself. Instantly he fell. His last breath was a promise that he would return to destroy Vekyra.
“The slave-girl threw herself down upon his body. Vekyra pinned the two together with a dagger she had ready in her clothing, to use if the poison failed. Leaving them so, she escaped from the palace to Malikar, who gave her reward for the thing.”
Price did not speak.
The story had removed his last unwilling doubt, the final barrier between them. Now they were one. It seemed to Price as if a vast purpose had come to pass. A unity, an ultimate completeness, emerged from the confused, painful conflict of his life. He knew that every incident in his years of discontented roving had been but a step toward this moment with Aysa in the desert.
The sun descended, reddened. A purple sea, the vast shadow of
Hajar Jehannum
flowed over the rugged basalt plain behind them. Cooler air breathed against their blistered faces; the savage violence of the day surrendered to the mystic peace of twilight.
Aysa moved a little, sighing happily, and relaxed against him. His arm pillowed her fair head. The still desert wrapped them with a peace deeper than Price had ever known, with a quiet happiness that became changeless and enduring as the very desert.
That new peace was not broken when Aysa tensed abruptly in his arms, listening, and asked:
“What is that, humming like a great bee?”
Price heard the distant droning. He pointed out the gray mote wheeling up against the deepening azure of the southward sky. He knew that it was one of the fighting-planes that had been called by Jacob Garth’s radio.
It came northward, following the trail. Price and Aysa stood up as it came near; Price took off his shirt and waved it. The gray ship found them, roared low over them. Price saw Sam Sorrows, the old Kansan, bareheaded, leaning recklessly from the cockpit, gesturing with his arms. He waved in return, and the plane flew back toward the oasis.
“That is a flying-ship of my own people,” he told Aysa. “We may ride in it back to my land, if you wish. The man who waved is my friend. The rocks are so rough that he could not come down here. But he will come for us tomorrow.”
Wide-eyed with wonder, she asked many questions as the droning of the plane died in purple twilight. Price answered them, while the ancient stillness of the rock desert came back and the broad gold disk of the moon broke above a rugged horizon.
Aysa was eager, excited. But Price’s new, joyous peace lived on in a world of silver light and purple shadow, at one with silence and mystery that had endured a million years. She sat by him in the moonlight, and he was content.