“Not that, Earl. You promise?”
“It would be kind.”
“As you are. But I have made my own plan. I want to die as Tazima died. I want to hear the voices of the Shining Ones.” She moved a little, one hand rising to point to the far edge of the dell. “Can you hear them? Listen! Can you?”
A soft hum of wind and with it a subdued rustling. A faint rasping as if a horde of insects were crawling over a resonant surface. A blur of ‘white sound’ that he had heard on another world in another time. And then-
“You heard!” The woman sobbed with frustration as she fought her injuries and tried to rear upright, her weight sagging against his arms. “Earl! You heard! You must have heard!”
“Sound,” he agreed. “A rustling-”
“The Shining Ones!” She was adamant. “They are here! They have come for me! For all of us, perhaps. We are saved! Saved!”
A woman delirious with hope, mastered by her delusion, dying, hearing what she needed to hear. To do other than bolster her conviction would be cruel.
“Earl?”
“I hear them!”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not! I can hear them!” He drew in his breath, concentrating, listening, hearing the soft medley of sounds change, alter in a subtle fashion, to break into segments that gained their own identity. To form words, signals, shouts, ululations.
The Shining Ones had arrived.
They came like wisps of smoke, white against white, slithering over the snow, melting, vanishing to appear again, their movements heralded by squeaks, whistles, piping notes, trills. A host dressed in perfect camouflage, shining with a faint nacreous shimmer, coming closer, closer.
The stuff of legend made real.
“Earl!” The woman stirred in his arms, struggling to cling to him as he set her down. Rising he faced the drifting shapes, tensing as they drew near, poised for combat, ready to strike, to twist, move, dodge. “No, Earl, don’t! They mean us no harm!”
A conviction he couldn’t share. These were no ineffable God-like beings glowing with a pure, inner grace, coming to deliver help and healing, safety, comfort and the endless pleasures of legendary Earth, but creatures wearing reflective garments and disguised weapons. Instruments that coughed and sent a swirling nacreous vapor towards himself and the woman. He heard her sigh, and felt the breath clog in his lungs. A numbing gas that froze his mobility and sent him to sprawl in the snow where time ceased to have meaning and order turned into nightmare.
CHAPTER TWO
He fought a dragon in a frigid sea of ebon chill, feeling the crushing grip of savage jaws, the rend of talons, the pain of wounds and the growing numbness of physical dissolution. Threshing he struggled for awareness, for warmth and light and conscious life. The darkness paled into a nacreous sheen. The crushing embrace of the dragon eased and reality replaced the nightmare.
One born of associated memories. There was no dragon, no ebon sea of frozen chill, no spouting wounds. They were distortions created from buried fears and hard experience of travelling in the containers designed to carry livestock, doped, frozen and ninety per cent dead. The caskets which offered cheap transport to those men and women willing to risk the fifteen per cent death rate. As yet he had been lucky. Now it seemed his luck had come to an end.
Lying supine, eyes closed, he recalled the onrush of the silvered shapes, the weapons, the gas, the overwhelming attack. Things belonging to the past now, fragments of dreams as had been the frigid sea and the dragon. But they had never existed outside his own mind. The beings that had taken him captive had been real.
He stirred and stretched and touched the surface on which he rested. A warm, soft texture taut over a yielding interior. The air, too was warm, scented with the delicate odor of a summer’s day and small sounds graced the emptiness which he sensed around him. A chamber, he decided. One holding a soft couch. A warm place that could be a haven or a jail.
Opening his eyes he stared at magic.
The chamber was vast, the vaulted roof soaring high, the walls distant, the illumination glowing from the floor and walls and the arching roof as if sunlight had been collected and stored and gently released to warm and gild all within view. Water gushed gently from a fountain and glimmering shapes rested on the surface of the surrounding pool. Among them a girl of gold and alabaster glided with the smooth agility of a fish.
Dumarest rose. He was naked beneath the gossamer silkiness of the fabric that had covered him and he wound it around his waist. The girl smiled as he approached lifting an arm in greeting
“Earl Dumarest. Welcome to Shandaha. Would you care to join me?”
“I would rather have some answers.”
“Of course. You are curious. That is to be expected. But there is time. There is always time. Too much time if the truth be admitted.” She swam to the edge of the pool and rose from the water to stand, a symphony of feminine perfection, droplets like pearls adorning her skin. “If you are interested you may call me Nada.”
“I am very interested.” Dumarest took a step towards her. “In you and this place and what has happened. How long have I been here? Am I alone? Was it your men who captured me? Those wearing white. What some poor, dying woman thought of as the Shining Ones?”
“So many questions, Earl. I promise you all will be answered but not now. You have just woken, you have yet to become accustomed to Shandaha, there are things to explain and ideas to exchange. You will accommodate me?”
“Have I a choice?”
“No, Earl. You have no choice. Here, in this place, the will of Shandaha is paramount.”
Not a haven then, but a jail. One luxurious beyond imagination but still a place where he was to be held and dominated and forced to live to the dictates of another’s whim. A prisoner of some unknown war. A captive as if he had been held by a raiding band. As a slave? For ransom?
He closed the space between them and gripped her upper arms and, thrusting his face close to her own, snarled his anger.
“I’ve had enough of this! Now take me to the one who owns this place! Move, damn you!”
“Don’t be a fool, Earl!”
“Just do it! Do it before I break your damned neck!” His hands lifted, changed their grip, fingers resting on soft tissue, firm bone. “Your choice, Nada. You have five seconds to make it. Shall I count?”
“Four,” she said calmly retaining her smile. “Three. Two. One-goodbye, Earl.”
And, suddenly, she was gone.
He stared before him, at his hands still raised before him, the fingers curved to mirror the shape of a neck that was no longer there. Perhaps had never been there. Like the imagined dragon of his dream the girl could have been a trick of his mind, a vision conjured from scents and colors and wistful longing. Nada-Nadine. Shandaha-Shemmar. Women he had known and loved and lost. Was he hoping to find them again? Here, on Earth, the planet of legend, all things were deemed possible. Or perhaps he was still lying in the snow where he had fallen. Freezing, lost in delirium, dying of hypothermia as Tazima had died.
“No. Earl, you are not dying.”
A man, tall, strong, graceful, with a deep musical voice. One with a thick mane of neatly dressed hair and an elaborately patterned beard. Hair, beard, eyes all of the same ebon hue as his skin and the clothing he wore. A creature of jet adorned with the glitter of gems. They flashed as he lifted a hand in warning as Dumarest strode towards him.
“Come no further!” Then, smiling, he added, “I must apologize. It seems my initial greeting was not to your liking. The girl, perhaps? Some men resent their air of superiority induced by the biological reactions of their opposite gender. Most lack that fine delicacy of feeling so essential to the establishment of a congenial harmony. I had hoped she would soothe your fear. I misjudged your reaction. It was a mistake to have used her as I did. Can any but a man truly understand another man? Your comments, Earl?”