The First Adventure

Chapter Three

Kenton lay listening to a soft whispering; persistent, continuous. It was like the breaking crests of little waves. The sound was all about him; a rippling susurration growing steadily more insistent. A light beat through his closed lids. He felt motion beneath him, a gentle, cradling lift and fall. He opened his eyes.

He was on a ship, on a narrow deck, his head against the bulwarks. Before him was a mast rising out of a pit. Inside the pit he caught a glimpse of men straining at great oars. The mast seemed to be of wood covered with translucent, emerald lacquer. It stirred reluctant memories.

Where had he seen such a mast before?

His gaze crept up the shining shaft. There was a wide sail; a sail made of silk of opal, and bellying in the breath of a scented breeze. Low overhead hung a sky that was all a soft mist of silver.

Kenton heard a girl’s voice, low and sweet. He sat up, dizzily. At his right he saw a templed cabin nestling under the curved tip of a sickled prow; it gleamed rosily. A balcony ran around it. Small trees blossomed on that balcony; while birds with feet and bills crimson as though dipped in wine of rubies flew and fluttered among the branches.

And suddenly he remembered the block from Babylon—the ship of enchantment he had freed from it. Swift upon that memory came realization, staggering, incredible.

He was on that ship—the Ship of Ishtar!

The girl’s voice sounded again; was answered by a deep-toned golden other, in whose liquidly throaty notes was vibrant a debonair imperiousness. His gaze coursed along that trail of golden sound, leaped over the three women kneeling at its source; it fastened upon one face and hung there.

Never had he beheld such a woman!

Tall, willow-lithe, flame-slender she stood, staring beyond him. Her wide eyes beneath straight, daintily fine black brows were green as shoals of tropic seas, of depths of forest glens. Like sea and woods, they were filled with drifting, mysterious shadows. Her head was small; the features fine; the red mouth delicately amorous. In the hollow of her throat a dimple lay; a chalice for kisses; empty of them and eager to be filled.

Above her brows a silver crescent was set, slim as a newborn moon. Over each horn of the crescent poured a flood of red-gold hair, framing the lovely face, streaming down over high, bare breasts, falling in ringlets almost to sandaled feet. Pale pearls and rosy gems gleamed in those red-gold waves like jeweled drops of dew.

Were she maid or woman, Kenton could not tell. As young as spring she seemed—yet wise as autumn; Primavera of some archaic Botticelli—but Mona Lisa, too. If virginal in body, certainly not in soul.

He followed her mocking gaze. It led him to the door of the black cabin, where stood a man. Taller by a head than Kenton, massively built, his pale gray eyes stared unwinkingly upon the woman, somberly menacing, impassively malignant. His face was beardless, pallid, heavy and cruel. Despite his bulk his pose was snakelike; and in the pale eyes serpent and wolf were mated. His huge and flattened head was shaven; his great nose vulture-beaked; and from his shoulders black robes fell, shrouding him to his feet.

Behind him were three others, with shaven heads. Two were as still as he, and as deadly; each of the twain held a brazen, conch-shaped horn.

On the third Kenton’s eyes lingered, fascinated. His pointed chin rested on a tall drum whose curved sides glistened with the diamonded skin of the royal python. He squatted, huge torso bare, knotted and gnarled, prodigiously powerful. His apelike arms were wound around the barreled tambour; spiderlike were the long fingers standing upon their tips on the drum head.

But it was the face that held Kenton. Sardonic, malicious—there was in it none of that evil concentrate in the others. The wide slit of his mouth was froglike; humor was on the thin lips. His deep-set, twinkling-black eyes dwelt upon the woman with frank admiration. From the lobes of his outstanding ears hung disks of jet.

Kenton felt a quick glow of friendliness for this squatting incarnation of satyr ugliness.

The woman paced swiftly down toward Kenton. When she halted he could have reached out a hand and touched her. Yet she did not seem to see him! Indeed, this was part of the strangeness of his first adventure upon the ship—that none heeded him; gave no hint of knowledge that he was there.

“Ho—Klaneth!” she cried. “Ho—Worm of Pestilence! I hear the voice of Ishtar! She is drawing near! Are you ready to do her homage, Worm of Nergal?”

A flicker of hate passed over the pallid face, like a little wave from hell.

“The House of the Goddess brims with light, Sharane,” the man answered with a voice thick and dead and in some way foul. “But tell me, temple drab—does not my Dread Lord’s shadow thicken behind me?”

Now Kenton saw that from the rosy temple a light was pulsing, stronger and ever stronger like a waxing moon within gigantic pearl; while down upon the black cabin gloom was gathering like a storm cloud!

“Yea!” mocked the woman. “The goddess comes! And your Dark Lord speeds to meet her! But why should that make you rejoice? For lo—she gives me clean strength ten thousandfold! And what are you, Klaneth, but a drain through which pours that filth you worship as Nergal!”

Now at this the two priests with the horns thrust themselves forward, gesturing, howling imprecations at the woman. The pale, cruel face of Klaneth grew grayer still and writhed with hate; he raised clenched hands, and from his mouth, flecked with foam, came a dreadful hissing.

A sudden wind smote the ship, like an opened hand, heeling it. From the doves burst a tumult of cries; they flew up like a little white cloud flecked with crimson; they fluttered around the woman. Three quick, backward steps she took.

The apelike arms of the frog-mouth drummer unwrapped, his spidery fingers poised over the head of the snake drum. The blackness deepened about him; hid him; cloaked all the ship’s stern.

Kenton felt vast presences seize the ship—felt the gathering of fearful, unknown forces. He slid down on his haunches, pressed himself against the bulwarks. From the ivory deck blared a golden trumpeting; defiant; inhuman. Kenton turned his head, and on it the hair lifted and prickled.

Where the woman had been was now—no woman!

Resting on the rosy cabin was a great orb, an orb like the moon at full; but not like the moon, white and cold—an orb alive with pulsing roseate candescence. Out over the ship it poured its living, rosy rays and, bathed in them, the woman loomed—gigantic. The lids of the glorious eyes were closed. Yet through those closed lids eyes glared! Plainly he saw them—eyes hard as jade, white-hot with wrath, glaring through the closed lids as though those lids had been gossamer!

And the slender crescent upon the woman’s brows was radiant now as the young moon itself; and all about it the masses of red-gold hair beat and tossed, streaming like rack of racing storm, swirling like silken pennons in whirlwind of war. Round and round the shining crescent whirled the cloud of the doves; snowy wings beating, red beaks open; screaming.

Out of the blackness roared the thunder of the serpent drum.

“Ai-ai-i!” From the moon-crowned shape came a cry like the jubilant clamor of newly wakened winds of spring shouting over pine-crested billows of a thousand hills. Answering it, another roaring of the drum; sustained and menacing. The blackness thinned. A face stared out, half veiled; bodiless, floating in the shadow. It was the face of Klaneth—and yet no more his face than that which challenged it was the woman Sharane’s. The pale eyes had become twin pools of white hell flames; pupilless. On his brow sat throned the ageless, ultimate evil. For a heartbeat the face hovered, framed by the darkness. Then the shadow dropped over it; hid it.

Now Kenton saw that this shadow hung like a curtain at the line where black deck met ivory deck, and that he lay upon the latter hardly a yard distant from where that line cut the ship in twain. He saw, too, that the radiance from the orb struck against this curtain, and made upon it a great circle that was like a web of beams spun from the rays of a rosy moon; and that against this shining web the shadow pressed, striving to break through.

And suddenly from the black deck the thunder of the serpent drum redoubled; the brazen conches shrieked. Drum thunder and shrieking horn blasts mingled and became one—the pulse of Abaddon, Lair of the Damned, throbbing in the voice of the Abyss. They fed the shadow, strengthened it; they were the rhythm of its will. Blacker, denser now, the shadow thrust against the web of light.

From Sharane’s women, crouching low, shot storm of harpings, arpeggios like gusts of tiny arrows, and with them pipings from the double flutes that flew like shrill, swift javelins. Arrows and javelins of sound cut through the thunder hammer of the drum, the bellow of the horns; weakening them; beating them back.

A movement began within the shadow. It seethed. It—spawned!

Over all the face of the weblike disk of radiance black shapes swarmed. Their bodies were like monstrous larvæ, slug-shaped, faceless. They tore at the web with black talons, strove to thrust through it with hideous tentacles, flailed it with batlike wings.

The web gave!

Its edge held firm, but slowly, 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 hidden deck drum and brazen horns roared triumph!

Again rang the golden trumpet cry of the woman. Out of the orb poised upon the cabin streamed an incandescence intolerable. The edges of the radiant web shot forward, curved—and closed upon the black spawn. Within it they milled and struggled like fish in a net.

And like a net lifted by some mighty hand the closed web was swung up high above the ship with all its infernal burden. Its brightness grew to match that of the great orb, whose rays were now piercing the darkness at the stern; putting it to rout. Within it the shapes of blackness squirmed, shrank; dissolved! From them came a faint, high-pitched, obscene wailing.

They were gone!

The globular net that had been the shining web opened. Out of it drifted a little cloud of ebon dust!

The web hovered; streamed back to the orb that had sent it forth.

Then, swiftly, the orb—was gone!

Gone, too, was the darkness that had shrouded the deck of Klaneth!

High above the ship the doves of Ishtar wheeled in a vast ring, crying victory.

A hand touched Kenton’s shoulder. He looked up—straight into the shadowy eyes of the woman called Sharane: no goddess now, but only lovely, alluring woman. In those eyes he read amazement, startled disbelief. He felt the delicious warmth of her; inhaled her fragrance.

Kenton sprang to his feet. Too late he remembered the blow that had ended his fall upon the ship. A thrust of blinding pain shot through his head. The deck whirled round him. He tried to master the giddiness; he could not. Dizzily the ship spun beneath his feet; and beyond in wider arcs spun turquoise sea and silver horizon.

Now they 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. He abandoned himself to headlong, prodigious flight.

The winds died away. He was standing, his flight over, on solidity once more. He heard three clear bell notes. He opened tight-closed eyes.

Kenton stood within his own room!

There by the window glimmered the jeweled ship.

The bell he had heard had been his clock, chiming the hour of six. Six o’clock! The last sound of his familiar world before the mystic sea had swept that world from under him had been the third stroke of that same hour, clipped off in mid-note. Why then—all he had seen, all his adventure, must have happened in half a clock chime!

Adventure? Had it been that? Or only a dream?

He lifted a hand and winced as it touched a throbbing bruise over his right temple. Well—that blow had been no dream! He stumbled over to the ship. He stared at it, incredulous. Then one by one he pulled at each of the manikins, each toy. Immovable, gem-hard, part of the deck itself each seemed to be as each had been before.

And yet— In half a clock chime those toys had moved, new toys appeared!

For now the long-armed beater of the serpent drum stood upright on the black deck, peering toward the platform at the right of the mast, one hand pointing, the other resting on the shoulder of a manikin in glittering mail.

Nor was there any woman at the rosy cabin’s door as there had been when he had loosed the mystery from the block. Clustered around the threshold were five slim girl toys with javelin in hands.

And the woman was on the starboard platform, bent low beside the rail as though looking at some one lying there.

Looking where he had crouched while over him had waged the battle between the radiant orb and core of blackness!

And the ship’s oars were no longer buried in the turquoise waves—they were lifted, poised for a downward stroke!