The Valley Where Time Stood Still Read online

  By Lin Carter

  THE VALLEY

  WHERE TIME

  STOOD STILL

  POPULAR LIBRARY • NEW YORK

  Contents

  I THE WAY TO YGNARH

  I. Just This Side of Death

  II. Dragon Hawk

  III. Fear Has Yellow Eyes

  IV. The Road of Millions of Years

  V. To the Gates of Ygnarh

  VI. Zerild

  VII. The Empty Place on the Map

  II THE ROAD TO OPHAR

  VIII. A Time of Healing

  IX. A City Like a Skull

  X. A Time of Waiting

  XI. They Leave Ygnarh

  XII. The Road

  XIII. Under Two Moons

  XIV. The Broken Land

  III THE SEARCH FORTHE SECRET

  XV. Into The Valley of Mystery

  XVI. The Descent

  XVII. Beyond The Barrier

  XVIII. The Gardens of The Ushongti

  XIX. Unsolved Mysteries

  XX. The Crystal Grail

  XXI. The Theft of Eden

  IV THE PATH TO PEACE

  XXII. Shadow over Eden

  XXIII. By the Pool

  XXIV. The Walking Trees

  XXV. When the Valley Woke

  XXVI. The Surrender

  XXVII. Expelled from Eden

  XXVIII. The End of It

  By Lin Carter THE VALLEY WHERE TIME STOOD STILL Contents

  I

  THE WAY

  TO YGNARH I. Just This Side of Death

  II. Dragon Hawk

  III. Fear Has Yellow Eyes

  IV. The Road of Millions of Years

  V. To the Gates of Ygnarh

  VI. Zerild

  VII. The Empty Place on the Map

  II

  THE ROAD

  TO OPHAR VIII. A Time of Healing

  IX. A City Like a Skull

  X. A Time of Waiting

  XI. They Leave Ygnarh

  XII. The Road

  XIII. Under Two Moons

  XIV. The Broken Land

  III

  THE SEARCH

  FOR

  THE SECRET XV. Into The Valley of Mystery

  XVI. The Descent

  XVII. Beyond The Barrier

  XVIII. The Gardens of The Ushongti

  XIX. Unsolved Mysteries

  XX. The Crystal Grail

  XXI. The Theft of Eden

  IV

  THE PATH TO

  PEACE XXII. Shadow over Eden

  XXIII. By the Pool

  XXIV. The Walking Trees

  XXV. When the Valley Woke

  XXVI. The Surrender

  XXVII. Expelled from Eden

  XXVIII. The End of It

  All POPULAR LIBRARY books are carefully selected by the

  POPULAR LIBRARY Editorial Board and represent titles by

  the world’s greatest authors.

  POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION February, 1976

  Copyright © 1974 by Lin Carter

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-22803

  Published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead is purely coincidental.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  All Rights Reserved

  For Leigh Brackett

  because it’s her kind, of story.

  Three Extracts

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

  The Bible/King James version/Philadelphia, 1947.

  None cometh from thence that he may tell thee how they fare, that he may tell thee of their fortunes, that he may comfort our hearts, until we also depart to the place whither they have gone. O, no man returneth again who is gone thither.

  The Book of the Dead/ Wallis Budge version/London, 1923.

  There is a land where no man ventures; for no man cometh back therefrom once he hath entered in. But even in the Valley of Life he that is pure of heart need not fear; even in the Valley Where Life Was Bom the pure have naught to fear. But woe unto him who is not pure of heart; for therein shall be given to each according to his deserving.

  The Book/Martinez-Schuster translation/Syrtis, 2031.

  I

  THE WAY

  TO YGNARH

  I. Just This Side of Death

  Vultures gather at the scent of death and circle lazily on the wind. You can see them for miles, far up, black flecks against the acetylene-blue, and when you see them, you know that death came by this place today.

  There are no vultures on Mars; the air is too thin for birds of any kind. But slidars can smell death on the dry, cold air as well as any Earthside scavenger.

  The natives break and tame slidars for riding-beasts. But in the wild, the ungainly, long-legged scarlet reptiles are carrion eaters, and they love the smell of dead things on the desert air.

  The slidar M’Cord was riding jerked its head up at the scent of death. Ignoring the bite of the mouth rings as the reins pulled taut, it twisted its head about, flexing its long, snaky neck. Fanged jaws agape, it hissed hungrily at the taste in the air.

  M’Cord had been prospecting the equatorial dustlands for ten years and he knew the way of slidars well. The beast sidled, tossing its head restlessly, uttering the wailing cry of its kind.

  He knew what the slidar knew.

  Something nearby was dead; or dying.

  He gave the brute its head, loosening the reins. The ungainly reptile broke into its loose-jointed, loping stride. Slidar means “loper” in the Tongue. The beasts are aptly named; they shamble with the splay-footed stride of camels.

  It was just past midday. .The sun burned bright but gave no warmth, cold against the cold dusky sky that was bruise-purple rather than blue, for the air was thinner here than on Earth. M’Cord had left the colony of Sun Lake City three months ago; he had taken a wandering, circuitous route through Tharsis and Xanthe and across the Hydraotes into the dustlands of Southern Chryse. He was heading for the uplands of Eos to do some scouting around the canyons along the coast of Mare Erythraeum.

  But he was in no particular hurry to get there.

  He was a hard-faced, lanky Earthsider, lean and rangy, with long legs and cold gray eyes. His people had been of the Black Irish from County Kerry, but somewhere along the line a dour, dry strain of Highlands Scots had entered his blood. He was shrewd and tough and a mean man with a knife in a barroom brawl. He had been hurt, once, long ago, and never got over it. Now he hurt back, whenever he could; but mostly he kept to himself, closemouthed and hard-eyed, a man with few acquaintances and no friends.

  Only a Low Clan woman with black silk hair and little crystal bells woven in it, who kept a room for him on a back alley in Sun Lake behind the Presidium, knew that he could be tender at times, and could laugh when he wanted to.

  But she knew, too, that when the black mood was on him he could be harsh and even cruel.

  He was crudest of all to himself; that was M’Cord’s way.

  He let his loper follow the smell of death that rode on the bitter air. This was the Aram Desert, smack on the equator at about eleven degrees west longitude. No one lived here; there was not even a camping-place of the People within a thousand miles, and the nearest Earth-sider colony was Sun Lake.

  No one lived here because here nothing could survive. The yellow dustland was like talcum, desiccated and sterile. Even the rare predators w
ho lived in the desert countries avoided Aram.

  M’Cord wondered, then, what it was that had died.

  Sometimes a skimmer comes down in the dustlahds, its flimsy airfoils punctured by micrometeorites. It might be a colonist; it might even be a CA cop.

  M’Cord grinned at the thought, a hard grin that pulled his lean cheeks taut and bared his teeth. A grin like a fighting snarl.

  He had no love for cops.

  But it wasn’t a CA patrol skimmer, it was a dead loper. With a man pinned under it, not dead, but not far from it, either.

  He was a native, M’Cord knew, from his coppery-red skin and russet furcap. A big man, strong, with long arms and long legs corded with tough sinew, and a lean harsh face, grim and expressionless. A face of dry, burned leather in which only his yellow eyes lived and moved.

  He lay on his back, propped up on his left elbow, and he watched M’Cord come up to him without a word or a gesture.

  His left leg was pinned under the dead beast.

  His right leg was drawn up flat against the loper’s big shoulder. He had been trying to push the corpse off him, using only his foot. He had been trying to do that for three days and nights.

  His lips were dry and cracked. His tongue was black and swollen. The flesh on his face and neck had fallen in and hard bone and lean sinew stood out in sharp relief.

  Beside him on the powdery sand lay a flat waterskin. It was long-since dry, and he had ripped it open, reversed it, and chewed the lining to suck up the last trace of moisture.

  He was just this side of death; but he was still fighting.

  His right hand lay on his thigh. It clasped an energy gun.

  The gun was not lifted, pointing at M’Cord; but it was out and ready.

  He lay there, unspeaking, watching the Earthsider with yellow, hating eyes.

  M’Cord pulled up and sat in the saddle, looking at the Martian and thinking it out.

  Neither said a word.

  The natives hate Earthsider colonists; but they hate CA cops even more. M’Cord was neither, but it made no difference. For more than half a century M’Cord’s fellow countrymen had looted and bilked and robbed the last remnants of a proud and ancient race of warriors. Plundered their tombs and holy places, raped their women, and chained the men to slave in the barium mines.

  To the People, all Earthsiders are the F’yagha—the Hated Ones. And M’Cord was a F’yagh.

  But they who roam the dustlands share a common code. Survival in the hostile, powdery deserts is infinitely difficult. Here, a man helps another in need, and blood-feud and clan-war alike are of no importance.

  M’Cord slid out of the saddle, but slowly, keeping both hands clearly in sight. He came around the dead slidar toward the helpless man. The native lay motionless, watching him come without a word; but his fingers tightened on the butt of his energy weapon.

  Belted low on his lean hips, M’Cord wore two guns of his own, of course. No one rides out of the Wetlands without a weapon by his side. There is no law beyond Tharsis. So M’Cord packed two power pistols; they were old and worn, but General Electric had built them to last. M’Cord could have them unholstered and ready for action in a tenth of a second.

  Before he came up to the prone figure pinned under the dead slidar, M’Cord stopped, slowly and carefully unbuckled his gunbelt, and let it fall in the dust behind him.

  The native’s yellow eyes watched him, hard and cold and fierce as a hawk, as he knelt by his side and unsnapped one of the two canteens he wore.

  “This water is not my property,” M’Cord said slowly and as clearly as he could, wishing he knew the Tongue better than he did. “I found it in the desert. It belongs to no one. I will leave it here for anyone who passes.”

  Then he sat back, squatting on his heels, watching as the half-dead native picked up the full canteen in trembling hands, unscrewed the cap, and drank.

  He did not offer to help, although the man was feeble and far gone. Neither did he address him directly. To the Martians, water is a precious thing, and a sacred. The sharing of water is a ritual that means much to them. One does not casually offer a drink, for the acceptance of water from the hands of another establishes a bond of rare intimacy, like blood-brotherhood; and one neither offers nor accepts such a bond lightly.

  But in denying ownership of the canteen, M’Cord made it possible for the clansman to take it without obligation.

  He watched as the man drank. First he only moistened his lips; then he wet his tongue; finally, he took a cautious sip into his mouth and held it there for a time before painfully swallowing.

  To survive in the dustlands you must learn how to use water. After three days’ exposure, had the native drunk deeply, as he yearned to drink, it could have killed him.

  His tissues, by now, were dehydrated; a bellyful of cold water could have sent him into convulsions.

  The man took another shallow sip, cherished it, swallowed slowly. Then, although his fingers trembled with yearning, he refastened the screw seal and set the canteen beside him. He would repeat these actions in thirty minutes or so, M’Cord knew.

  He studied the man thoughtfully, with narrowed eyes. This was no rider of the Low Clans, surely, but a warrior princeling of the High Blood, from his fine bones and keen eyes and lean, aristocratic symmetry. Low-clansmen are coarser of feature and wear their furcaps trimmed in a different fashion.

  This man was very far from home.

  M’Cord wondered why he had come to this place.

  And where he was going.

  The slidar had not suffered an injury, or none that M’Cord could see. But he was surely dead, and had been dead for days. Had this been Earth, and the beast a horse instead of a loper, the warrior could have cut a vein and drunk the beast’s blood. But there is a substance in the blood of slidars that reacts with some enzyme in a Martian’s system and makes a poison. Thus the warrior had been dying a slow death from thirst, and would soon have perished had not M’Cord decided to give his steed its head and see what it had scented on the dry air.

  He tended the native as best he could. First he dragged aside the corpse, freeing the Martian’s leg. It was broken below the knee, a clean break, as far as he could tell. He splinted the femur with two plastron rods kept in his medikit against just such need, and bound the leg tightly with celluflex.

  The warrior lay and watched him without a word. He grunted once as M’Cord set the bone, but that was all.

  When it was over he wet his lips from the canteen again and took another mouthful of water. M’Cord gave him a ration of beef stew in one of those self-heating containers. The warrior wolfed it down hungrily, never noticing the pain-killer and full set of antibiotics M’Cord had slipped in when his back had been turned.

  When at last the clansman decided to speak, it was gruffly, and in a harsh, croaking voice.

  “Are you a ‘god-peddler,’ F’yagh?” he rasped, meaning a missionary.

  M’Cord shook his head. “Your gods are your own,” he said, “and mine are mine.” He knew how the People felt toward missionaries; they have little love for such, and speak of them with dry contempt.

  The warrior grunted.

  “I was near my gods this day,” he said grimly, with a little laugh. “So close was I to the Bridge of Fire, I could feel the heat of the flames against my feet!”

  M’Cord nodded somberly. “Yhoom was not yet ready to welcome your spirit,” he said, for he had read The Book once or twice. “Mayhap the Timeless Ones have yet a task for you here.”

  The Martian eyed him without curiosity.

  “My name is Thaklar,” he said grudgingly. But he did not name his clan, M’Cord noticed.

  He gave him his name; the Martian wrinkled his face at the sound of it.

  “— ’Gort?” he said, not finding it easy to pronounce.

  “Close enough,” shrugged M’Cord. “Do you have the strength to ride?”

  They made ten miles before sunfall, Thaklar swaying, bent in the saddle, d
ozing, with M’Cord trudging on foot through the powdery yellow sand, leading the slidar by the reins.

  When the sun died and the stars flamed forth, bright as ice-blue diamonds in a sky like black velvet, they had reached the Oxus and camped for the night on the rubbery blue moss. M’Cord carried only one thermosac in his saddlebags, so they slept together. But they were not yet friends, the Earthsider and the Martian … who was three thousand miles from where he ought to be.

  II. Dragon Hawk

  M’Cord was up getting water before dawn. The Oxus is one of thirty-four thousand such strips of rudimentary vegetation that crisscross the surface of Mars and which Earthside astronomers of a couple of centuries ago mistakenly called canals.

  Mars has been drying up for seventy-three million years. When a planet dries its crust cracks, and if it has a crust like that of Mars—mostly a combination of silicon and magnesium-salts—the crystalline stuff cracks with geometrical regularity. What water remained from the drying-up of the primeval oceans drained into these cracks, and the hardy Martian vegetation rooted there, making long strips of knee-high, rubbery-leafed mosses whose root systems extend over a mile beneath the surface.

  The rubbery leaves are tougher than leather, but you can extract the moisture by using a pressure-still; which is how desert prospectors of M’Cord’s breed can survive for many months without having to find an oasis every few days.

  While his morning crop of fat, juicy leaves were percolating in the still, M’Cord roved about, checking the ground with a hand indicator. His guest sprawled lazily on the deflated thermosac, watching him, puzzled. At last his curiosity got the better of his natural taciturnity.