Haggopian and Other Stories (52 page)

It was not long before the black galley loomed against the entrance to the bay. It slipped into the harbour past the great basalt lighthouse and a strange stench driven by the South Wind came with it. As with the coming of all such craft and their weird masters, uneasiness rippled all along the waterfront as the silent ship closed with its chosen wharf and its three banks of briskly moving oars stilled and slipped in through their oarlocks to the unseen and equally silent rowers within. I watched eagerly then, waiting for the galley’s master and crew to come ashore, but only five persons—if persons they truly were—chose to leave that enigmatic craft. This was the best look at such traders I had so far managed, and what I saw did not please me at all.

I have intimated my doubts with regard to the humanity of those…men? Let me explain why. Firstly their mouths were far too wide. Indeed, I thought that one of them glanced up at my window as he left the ship, smiling a smile which only just fell within the boundaries of that word’s limitations, and it was horrible to see just how wide his evil mouth was. Now what would any eater of normal foods want with a mouth of such abnormal proportions? And for that matter, why did the owners of such mouths wear such queerly moulded turbans? Or was it simply the way in which the turbans were worn? For they were humped up in two points over the foreheads of the wearers in what seemed especially bad taste. And as for their shoes: well, those shoes were certainly the most peculiar footwear I had ever seen—in or out of dreams—being short, blunt-toed and flat, as though the feet within were not feet at all! I thoughtfully finished off my mug of muth-dew and wedge of bread and cheese, turning from the window to leave the tavern of Potan-Lith.

My heart seemed to leap into my mouth. There in the low entrance stood that same merchant who had so evilly smiled up at my window! His turbaned head turned to follow my every move as I sidled out past him and flew down the ninety-nine steps to the wharf below. An awful fear pursued me as I ran through the alleys and streets, making my feet fly faster on the basalt flags of the wider pavements, until I reached the well known, green-cobbled courtyard wherein I had my room. But even there I could not get the face of that strangely turbaned, wide-mouthed trader from beyond the Southern Sea out of my mind—nor his smell from my nostrils—so I paid my landlord his due, moving out there and then to head for that side of Dylath-Leen which faces away from the sea and which is clean with the scents of window-box flowers and baking bread, where the men of the sea-taverns but rarely venture.

There, in the district called S’eemla, I found myself lodging with a family of basalt quarriers. I was accorded my own garret room with a wide window, a bed and mattress of fegg-down; and soon it was as though I had been born into the family, or might have seemed so had I been able to imagine myself a brother to comely Litha.

Within the month I was firmly settled in, and from then on I made it my business to carry on Randolph Carter’s word of warning, putting in my word against the turbaned traders at every opportunity. My task was made no easier by the fact that I had nothing concrete to hold against them. There was only the feeling, already shared by many of the folk of Dylath-Leen, that trade between the city and the black galleys could bring to fruition nothing of any good.

Eventually my knowledge of the traders grew to include such evidences as to make me more certain than ever of their evil nature. Why should those black galleys come in to harbour, discharge their four or five traders, and then simply lie there at anchor, emitting their foul odours, showing never a sign of their silent crews? That there were crews seems needless to state; with three great banks of oars to each ship there must have been many rowers! But what man could say just who or what such rowers were? Too, the grocers and butchers of the city grumbled over the apparent frugality of those singularly shy crews, for the only things the traders bought with their great and small rubies were gold and stout Pargian slaves. This traffic had gone on for years, I was told, and in that time many a fat black man had vanished, never to be seen again, up the gangplanks into those mysterious galleys to be transported to lands across uncharted seas—if, indeed, such lands were their destination! And where did the queer traders get their rubies, the like of which were to be found in no known mine in all Earth’s dreamland? Yet those rubies came cheaply enough, too cheaply in fact, so that every home in Dylath-Leen sported them, some large enough to be used as paper-weights in the homes of the richer merchants. Myself, I found those gems strangely loathsome, seeing in them only the reflections of the traders who brought them from across nameless oceans.

So it was that in the district called S’eemla my interest in the ruby-traders waxed to its full, paled, waned and finally withered—but never died completely. My new interest, however, in dark-eyed Litha, Bo-Kareth’s daughter, grew with each passing day, and my nights were filled with dreams within dreams of Litha and her ways, so that only occasionally were my slumbers invaded by the unpleasantly turbaned, wide-mouthed traders from unknown parts.

One evening, after a trip out to Ti-Penth, a village not far from Dylath-Leen where we had enjoyed the annual Festival of Plenty, as Litha and I walked back, hand in hand, through the irrigated green valley called Tanta towards our black towered city, she told me of her love and we sank together to the darkling sward. That night, when the city’s myriad twinkling lights had all blinked out and the bats chittered thick without my window, Litha crept into my garret room and only the narg-oil lamp on the wall could tell of the wonders we knew with each other.

In the morning, rising rapidly in joy from my dreams within dreams, I broke through too many layers of that flimsy stuff which constitutes the world of the subconscious, to waken with a cry of agony in the house of my parents at Norden on the North-East coast. Thereafter I cried myself to sleep for a year before finally I managed to convince myself that my dark-eyed Litha existed only in dreams.

II

I was thirty years old before I saw Dylath-Leen again. I arrived in the evening, when the city was all but in darkness, but I recognised immediately the feel of those basalt flagstones beneath my feet, and, while the last of the myriad lights flickered out in the towers and the last tavern closed, my heart leaped as I turned my suddenly light feet towards the house of Bo-Kareth. But something did not seem right, and a horror grew rapidly upon me as I saw in the streets thickening crowds of carousing, nastily chattering, strangely turbaned people not quite so much men as monsters. And many of them had had their turbans disarrayed in their sporting so that protuberances glimpsed previously only in books of witchcraft and the like and in certain biblical paintings showed clearly through! Once I was stopped and pawed vilely by a group of them who conferred in low, menacing tones. I tore myself free and fled for they were, indeed, those same evil traders of yore, and I was horrified that they should be there in my City of Black Towers in such great numbers!

I must have seen hundreds of those vile—creatures—as I hurried through the city’s thoroughfares; yet somehow I contrived to arrive at the house of Bo-Kareth without further pause or hindrance, and there I hammered at his oaken door until a light flickered behind the round panes of blue glass in the upper sections of that entrance. It was Bo-Kareth himself who eventually came to answer my banging, and he came wide-eyed in a fear I could well understand. Relief showed visibly in his whole aspect when he saw that only a man stood upon his step. Although he seemed amazingly
aged
—so aged, in fact, I was taken aback, for I did not then know of the differences in time between the worlds of dream and waking—he recognised me at once, whispering my name:

“Grant! Grant Enderby…my friend…my
old
friend…! Come in, come in…”

“Bo-Kareth,” I burst out, “Bo, I—”

“Shhh!” He pressed a finger to his lips, eyes widening even further than before, leaning out to glance up and down the street before pulling me in and quickly closing and bolting the door behind me. “Quietly, Grant, quietly—this is a city of silence now, where
they
alone carouse and make their own hellish brand of merry—and they may soon be abroad and about their business.”

“They?”
I questioned, instinctively knowing the answer.

“Those you once tried to warn us of—the turbaned traders!”

“I thought as much,” I answered, “and they’re already abroad, I’ve seen them—but what
business
is this you speak of?”

Then Bo-Kareth told me a tale that filled my heart with horror and determined me never to rest until I had at least attempted to right a great wrong.

It had started a number of years earlier, according to my host—(I made no attempt to pin-point a date; how could I when Bo-Kareth had apparently aged thirty years to my twelve?)—and had involved the bringing to the city of a ruby so gigantic that it had to be seen to be believed. This great gem had been a gift, an assurance of the traders’ regard for Dylath-Leen’s peoples, and as such had been set on a pedestal in the city’s main square. But only a few nights later the horror had started to make itself noticeable. The keeper of a tavern near the square, peering from his windows after locking the doors for the night, had noticed a strange, deep, reddish glow from the giant gem’s heart; a glow which seemed to pulse with an alien life all its own, and when the tavern-keeper told the next day of what he had seen an amazing thing came to light. All the other galley-brought rubies in the city—the smaller gems set in rings, amulets and instruments, and those larger, less ornamental, almost rude stones owned purely for the sake of ownership by certain of the city’s richer gentlemen—had
all
glowed through the night to a lesser degree, as if in response to the greater activity of their bulky brother. And with that unearthly glowing of the gems had come a strange partial paralysis, making all the people of the city other than the turbaned traders themselves slumbrous and weak, incapable and unwanting of any festivity and barely able to go about their normal duties and businesses. As the days passed and the power of the great ruby and its less regal relatives waxed, so also did the strange drowsiness upon Dylath-Leen’s folks; and it was only then, too late, that the plot was seen and its purpose recognised.

For a long time there had been a shortage of the fat black slaves of Parg. They had been taken from the city by the traders faster than they came in, until only a handful remained; and that handful, on hearing one day of a black galley soon due to dock, had fled their master and left the city to seek less suspicious bondage. That had been shortly before the horned traders brought the great jewel to Dylath-Leen, and since that time, as the leering, gem-induced lethargy had increased until its effects were felt in daylight almost as much as they were at night—so had the number of strangely shod traders grown until the docks were full of their great black galleys. Then inexplicable
absences
began to be noticed; a taverner here and a quarrier there, a merchant from Ulthar and a thagweed curer and a silversmith’s son; and soon any retaining sufficient will-power sold up their businesses, homes and houses and left Dylath-Leen for Ti-Penth, Ulthar and Nir. I was glad to learn that Litha and her brothers had thus departed, though it made me strangely sad to hear that when lithe Litha went she took with her a handsome husband and two laughing children. She was old enough now, her father told me, to be mistaken for my mother; but she still retained her great beauty.

By this time the hour of midnight was well passed and all about the house tiny red points of light had begun to glow in an eerie, slumber-engendering coruscation. As Bo-Kareth, talked his monologue interrupted now with many a yawn and shake of his head, I tracked down the sources of those weird points of radiance and found them to be rubies. It was as Bo-Kareth had described it, rubies!—ten tiny gems set in the base of an ornamental goblet; many more of the small red stones enhancing the looks of hanging silver and gold plates; fire-flashing splinters of precious crystal embedded in the spines of certain of my host’s leather-bound books of prayer and dream-lore—and when his mumbling had died away completely I turned from my investigations to find the old man asleep in his chair, lost in distressing dreams which pulled his grey face into an expression of muted terror.

I had to see the great gem. I make no excuse for such a rash and headstrong decision (one does things in dreams which one would never consider for a moment in the waking world), but I knew I could make no proper plans nor rest easy in my mind until I had seen that great ruby for myself.

I left the house by the back door, locking it behind me and pocketing the key. I knew Bo-Kareth had a duplicate key and besides, I might later need to be into the house without delay. The layout of the city was well known to me and thus it was not difficult for me to find my way through labyrinthine back streets to the main square. That square was away from the district of S’eemla, far nearer to the docks, and the closer I drew to the waterfront the more careful I crept. Why!—the whole area was alive with the alien and evil traders! The wonder is that I was not spotted in the first few minutes; and when I saw what those hellish creatures were up to, thus confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt Bo-Kareth’s worst fears, the possibility that I might yet be observed—and the consequences such an unfortunate discovery would bring—caused me to creep even more carefully. Each street corner became a focal point for terror, where lurking, unseen presences caused me to glance over my shoulder or jump at the slightest flutter of bat-wings or scurry of mouse-feet. And then, almost before I knew it, I came upon the square.

I came at the run, my feet flying frantically, for I knew now for sure what the horned ones did at night and a fancy had grown quickly on me that something followed in the dark; so that when I suddenly burst from that darkness into a blaze of red firelight I was taken completely by surprise. I literally keeled over backwards as I contrived to halt my flight of fear before it plunged me into the four turbaned terrors standing at the base of the dais of the jewel. My feet skidded as I pivoted on my heels and my fingers scrabbled madly at the round cobbles of the square as I fell. In truth it could scarce be called a real fall—I was no sooner down than up—but in that split second or so as I fought to bring my careening body under control those guardians of the great stone were after me. Glancing fearfully back I saw them darting rat-like in my wake.