CHAPTER XXIV
The Crimson Sea
I WAS in the heart of a rose pearl, swinging, swinging; no,
I was in a rosy dawn cloud, pendulous in space. Consciousness flooded me, in reality I was in the arms of one of the
man frogs, carrying me as though I were a babe, and we
were passing through some place suffused with glow enough
like heart of pearl or dawn cloud to justify my awakening
vagaries.
Just ahead walked Lakla in earnest talk with Rador, and
content enough was I for a time to watch her. She had
thrown off the metallic robes; her thick braids of golden
brown hair with their flame glints of bronze were twined in
a high coronal meshed in silken net of green; little clustering
curls escaped from it, clinging to the nape of the proud white
neck, shyly kissing it. From her shoulders fell a loose, sleeveless garment of shimmering green belted with a high golden
girdle; skirt folds dropping barely below the knees.
She had cast aside her buskins, too, and the slender, higharched feet were sandalled. Between the buckled edges of
her kirtle I caught gleams of translucent ivory as exquisitely
moulded, as delectably rounded, as those revealed so naively
beneath the hem.
Something was knocking at the doors of my consciousness
- some tragic thing. What was it? Larry! Where was Larry?
I remembered; raised my head abruptly; saw at my side another frog-man carrying O'Keefe, and behind him, Olaf, step
instinct with grief, following like some faithful, wistful dog
who has lost a loved master. Upon my movement the
monster bearing me halted, looked down inquiringly, uttered
a deep, booming note that held the quality of interrogation.
Lakla turned; the clear, golden eyes were sorrowful, the
sweet mouth drooping; but her loveliness, her gentleness,
that undefinable synthesis of all her tender self that seemed
always to circle her with an atmosphere of lucid normality,
lulled my panic.
"Drink this," she commanded, holding a small vial to my
lips.
Its contents were aromatic, unfamiliar but astonishingly
effective, for as soon as they passed my lips I felt a surge of
strength; consciousness was restored.
"Larry!" I cried. "Is he dead?"
Lakla shook her head; her eyes were troubled.
"No," she said; "but he is like one dead - and yet
unlike - "
"Put me down," I demanded of my bearer.
He tightened his hold; round eyes upon the Golden Girl.
She spoke - in sonorous, reverberating monosyllables - and
I was set upon my feet; I leaped to the side of the Irishman.
He lay limp, with a disquieting, abnormal sequacity, as
though every muscle were utterly flaccid; the antithesis of
the rigor mortis, thank God, but terrifyingly toward the other
end of its arc; a syncope I had never known. The flesh was
stone cold; the pulse barely perceptible, long intervalled;
the respiration undiscoverable; the pupils of the eyes were
enormously dilated; it was as though life had been drawn
from every nerve.
"A light flashed from the road. It struck his face and
seemed to sink in," I said.
"I saw," answered Rador; "but what it was I know not;
and I thought I knew all the weapons of our rulers." He
glanced at me curiously. "Some talk there has been that the
stranger who came with you, Double Tongue, was making
new death tools for Lugur," he ended.
Marakinoff! The Russian at work already in this storehouse of devastating energies, fashioning the weapons for
his plots! The Apocalyptic vision swept back upon me -
"He is not dead." Lakla's voice was poignant. "He is not
dead; and the Three have wondrous healing. They can restore him if they will - and they will, they WILL!" For a
moment she was silent. "Now their gods help Lugur and
Yolara," she whispered; "for come what may, whether the
Silent Ones be strong or weak, if he dies, surely shall I fall
upon them and I will slay those two - yea, though I, too
perish!"
"Yolara and Lugur shall both die." Olaf's eyes were burning. "But Lugur is mine to slay."
That pity I had seen before in Lakla's eyes when she
looked upon the Norseman banished the white wrath from
them. She turned, half hurriedly, as though to escape his
gaze.
"Walk with us," she said to me, "unless you are still
weak."
I shook my head, gave a last look at O'Keefe; there was
nothing I could do; I stepped beside her. She thrust a white
arm into mine protectingly, the wonderfully moulded hand
with its long, tapering fingers catching about my wrist; my
heart glowed toward her.
"Your medicine is potent, handmaiden," I answered. "And
the touch of your hand would give me strength enough, even
had I not drunk it," I added in Larry's best manner.
Her eyes danced, trouble flying.
"Now, that was well spoken for such a man of wisdom
as Rador tells me you are," she laughed; and a little pang
shot through me. Could not a lover of science present a compliment without it always seeming to be as unusual as plucking a damask rose from a cabinet of fossils?
Mustering my philosophy, I smiled back at her. Again I
noted that broad, classic brow, with the little tendrils of
shining bronze caressing it, the tilted, delicate, nut-brown
brows that gave a curious touch of innocent diablerie to
the lovely face - flowerlike, pure, high-bred, a touch of roguishness, subtly alluring, sparkling over the maiden Madonnaness that lay ever like a delicate, luminous suggestion
beneath it; the long, black, curling lashes - the tender,
rounded, bare left breast -
"I have always liked you," she murmured naively, "since
first I saw you in that place where the Shining One goes
forth into your world. And I am glad you like my medicine
as well as that you carry in the black box that you left behind," she added swiftly.
"How know you of that, Lakla?" I gasped.
"Oft and oft I came to him there, and to you, while you
lay sleeping. How call you HIM?" She paused.
"Larry!" I said.
"Larry!" she repeated it excellently. "And you?"
"Goodwin," said Rador.
I bowed quite as though I were being introduced to some
charming young lady met in that old life now seemingly
aeons removed.
"Yes - Goodwin." she said. "Oft and oft I came. Sometimes I thought you saw me. And HE - did he not dream of
me sometime - ?" she asked wistfully.
"He did." I said, "and watched for you." Then amazement grew vocal. "But how came you?" I asked.
"By a strange road," she whispered, "to see that all was
well with HIM - and to look into his heart; for I feared Yolara
and her beauty. But I saw that she was not in his heart." A
blush burned over her, turning even the little bare breast
rosy. "It is a strange road," she went on hurriedly. "Many
times have I followed it and watched the Shining One bear
back its prey to the blue pool; seen the woman HE seeks" -
she made a quick gesture toward Olaf - "and a babe cast
from her arms in the last pang of her mother love; seen
another woman throw herself into the Shining One's embrace to save a man she loved; and I could not help!" Her
voice grew deep, thrilled. "The friend, it comes to me, who
drew you here, Goodwin!"
She was silent, walking as one who sees visions and listens
to voices unheard by others, Rador made a warning gesture;
I crowded back my questions, glanced about me. We were
passing over a smooth strand, hard packed as some beach of
long-thrust-back ocean. It was like crushed garnets, each
grain stained deep red, faintly sparkling. On each side were
distances, the floor stretching away into them bare of vegetation - stretching on and on into infinitudes of rosy mist,
even as did the space above.
Flanking and behind us marched the giant batrachians,
fivescore of them at least, black scale and crimson scale lustrous and gleaming in the rosaceous radiance; saucer eyes
shining circles of phosphorescence green, purple, red; spurs
clicking as they crouched along with a gait at once grotesque and formidable.
Ahead the mist deepened into a ruddier glow; through it
a long, dark line began to appear - the mouth I thought of
the caverned space through which we were going; it was
just before us; over us - we stood bathed in a flood of rubescence!
A sea stretched before us - a crimson sea, gleaming like
that lost lacquer of royal coral and the Flame Dragon's
blood which Fu S'cze set upon the bower he built for his
stolen sun maiden - that going toward it she might think it
the sun itself rising over the summer seas. Unmoved by wave
or ripple, it was placid as some deep woodland pool when
night rushes up over the world.
It seemed molten - or as though some hand great enough
to rock earth had distilled here from conflagrations of autumn sunsets their flaming essences.
A fish broke through, large as a shark, blunt-headed, flashing bronze, ridged and mailed as though with serrate plates
of armour. It leaped high, shaking from it a sparkling spray
of rubies; dropped and shot up a geyser of fiery gems.
Across my line of vision, moving stately over the sea,
floated a half globe, luminous, diaphanous, its iridescence
melting into turquoise, thence to amethyst, to orange, to
scarlet shot with rose, to vermilion, a translucent green,
thence back into the iridescence; behind it four others, and
the least of them ten feet in diameter, and the largest no less
than thirty. They drifted past like bubbles blown from froth
of rainbows by pipes in mouths of Titans' young. Then from
the base of one arose a tangle of shimmering strands, long,
slender whiplashes that played about and sank slowly again
beneath the crimson surface.
I gasped - for the fish had been a ganoid - that ancient,
armoured form that was perhaps the most intelligent of all
life on our planet during the Devonian era, but which for
age upon age had vanished, save for its fossils held in the
embrace of the stone that once was their soft bottom beds;
and the half-globes were Medusae, jelly-fish - but of a size,
luminosity, and colour unheard of.
Now Lakla cupped her mouth with pink palms and sent a
clarion note ringing out. The ledge on which we stood continued a few hundred feet before us, falling abruptly, though
from no great height to the Crimson Sea; at right and left
it extended in a long semicircle. Turning to the right whence
she had sent her call, I saw rising a mile or more away,
veiled lightly by the haze, a rainbow, a gigantic prismatic
arch, flattened, I thought, by some quality of the strange
atmosphere. It sprang from the ruddy strand, leaped the
crimson tide, and dropped three miles away upon a precipitous, jagged upthrust of rock frowning black from the lacquered depths.
And surmounting a higher ledge beyond this upthrust a
huge dome of dull gold, Cyclopean, striking eyes and mind
with something unhumanly alien, baffling; sending the mind
groping, as though across the deserts of space, from some
far-flung star, should fall upon us linked sounds, coherent
certainly, meaningful surely, vaguely familiar - yet never
to be translated into any symbol or thought of our own
particular planet.
The sea of crimson lacquer, with its floating moons of
luminous colour - this bow of prismed stone leaping to the
weird isle crowned by the anomalous, aureate excrescence
- the half human batrachians-the elfland through which
we had passed, with all its hidden wonders and terrors -
I felt the foundations of my cherished knowledge shaking.
Was this all a dream? Was this body of mine lying somewhere, fighting a fevered death, and all these but images
floating through the breaking chambers of my brain? My
knees shook; involuntarily I groaned.
Lakla turned, looked at me anxiously, slipped a soft arm
behind me, held me till the vertigo passed.
"Patience," she said. "The bearers come. Soon you shall
rest."
I looked; down toward us from the bow's end were leaping swiftly another score of the frog-men. Some bore litters, high, handled, not unlike palanquins -
"Asgard!" Olaf stood beside me, eyes burning, pointing
to the arch. "Bifrost Bridge, sharp as sword edge, over which
souls go to Valhalla. And SHE - she is a Valkyr - a sword
maiden, Ja!"
I gripped the Norseman's hand. It was hot, and a pang of
remorse shot through me. If this place had so shaken me,
how must it have shaken Olaf? It was with relief that I
watched him, at Lakla's gentle command, drop into one of
the litters and lie back, eyes closed, as two of the monsters
raised its yoke to their scaled shoulders. Nor was it without
further relief that I myself lay back on the soft velvety
cushions of another.
The cavalcade began to move. Lakla had ordered O'Keefe
placed beside her, and she sat, knees crossed Orient fashion,
leaning over the pale head on her lap, the white, tapering
fingers straying fondly through his hair.
Presently I saw her reach up, slowly unwind the coronal
of her tresses, shake them loose, and let them fall like a veil
over her and him.
Her head bent low; I heard a soft sobbing - I turned away
my gaze, lorn enough in my own heart, God knew!
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