Landscape with Figures 49 – Fraser · Verses Across
Literature · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Landscape with Figures 49Chapter 48
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Literature · Science Fiction & Fantasy
Landscape with Figures 49
Chapter 48
FraserEnglish
Late in the afternoon, three days’ journey from the Gorge, they put up for the night at a mountain-village inn. The inn was high and isolated, the innkeeper attentive (obedient to the sign of the Dragon). But he warned them that a band of revolutionary troops was thought to be approaching the neighbourhood, with fire and sword.
“Are they, the festering blackheads?” Fulke’s revolutionary sympathies were a little alienated since his engagement to Ruby. “A lot of scrofulous thieves unworthy of the high name of revolutionary. By the giblets of St. Francis’s little dog——! I beg pardon, my darling.”
“You were going to remark,” put in Quentin, “that these do not carry bricks for the New Jerusalem.”
The Sages, the two girls, and Ambrose were gathered in the eating-room of the inn, talking, and watching the effect of sunset among the hills. Lychnis alone was silent, turning a matter over and over. Apparently she had recovered her firmness of heart, but not the transcendent experience. She had come to a point where she was indifferent to the past and future. The green tip of a budding flower of joy was fighting the winter snow and icy wind, the cold death in her mind.
The Sages and Ruby were apprehensive, at the same time somewhat boastful. Ambrose found a great deal to amuse him in their conversation, for, strangely enough, each considered that he alone among all the others had probed the experience of the summer to the bottom. Blackwood, perhaps, was the most jaunty. He did not really quite know where he stood in regard to life, but he fully trusted that he should soon find out, and in the meantime took an extra lump of sugar in coffee. Ambrose surmises that the words of Wang Li had given sanction for the release of impulses too long pent up and not dissipated or re-directed, and in the first capital they came to there would be an expenditure of energy.
Sprot was assertive. “I always said,” he pointed out to them, “that you would come round to my point of view. You admit that I was right about....” He did not venture to name names.
“A fool,” observed Lord Sombrewater, who had no longer any regard to Sprot’s feelings—“a fool is a man who knows from birth what it takes others seventy years to find out.”
But Sprot was not put out. “I do hope,” he continued, “that we are not in real danger here.”
“If we are not,” observed Frew-Gaff, “it will probably be due to your friends in the Valley.”
“I would like to feel certain that we shall see Europe again,” put in Blackwood anxiously.
“I trust,” said Frew-Gaff, “that the Dragon will fulfil his obligations. I fear, from what the villagers say, that we are in for trouble.”
“It would always be possible to go back,” said Fulke. “We had a wonderful time there, after all. I for one should be contented to stay there for the rest of my life—now.” He looked fondly at his wench, who leaned against his shoulder.
“No,” said Blackwood promptly, “do not let us go back—not unless the danger is really considerable.”
“Great things are awaiting us in Europe,” said Terence. “I feel it. I have seen Europe in a vision, and we are to arrive there safely after this time of exile and cleansing purgatory.”
“The Valley would be a very nice place with a decent up-to-date hotel and a golf-course,” said Sprot. “I should like to see a little enterprise and capital put into that Valley. Men were made to work, not to think. I shall never forget....” He shuddered as he thought of that frightful period of imprisonment with twelve lunatics on the mountain of meditation.
“I have not yet understood,” remarked Lord Sombrewater, “what there was to prevent your coming away.”
“What there was...! Well, if you were put on a rock surrounded by water, and every time you put your foot in the water to wade across you were sort of shrivelled all up your legs and spine with a frightful tingling pain, you’d soon know what there was to prevent you coming away.”
“Couldn’t you jump?”
“Jump? I tried once! Those devils always seemed to know what you were thinking about, night and day, and when I jumped one of them gave me a twitch that sent me in head first. Not till my dying day shall I forget it. I couldn’t remember where I was for a week. My God! if I had my way with them!” He went purple at the thought of the indignities to which he had been subjected. “Go back you may,” he added, “but you go without George Sprot.”
“There are some experiments that I greatly desire to make,” added Frew-Gaff. “I believe I can reproduce some things we have seen lately, if I can only grasp one or two principles that baffle me.” He kindled his brows.
“That you never will,” thought Lychnis. She despised them for having hopes and fears. It was all one to her, she told herself, if she were slain there that night. She was looking out through the window of the inn. Opposite, a toppling jade crag flamed with a faint fire of sunset from beyond the Valley. The scene did not move her greatly, she found. She was calm in face of the once heart-hurting beauty of sunsets. She turned once more to examine her thoughts, all upside down as Ambrose had put them. He sat there with his back to her, but the current of all her moods was toward him.
As the last rays of light departed from the Chinese landscape, stranger here to them than in the Valley, they heard sounds of considerable excitement in the village. They all went out into the street, and presently little crowds of chattering peasants began to pass the inn. The innkeeper came out at Lord Sombrewater’s request. Such-a-one had vanished.
“Ask what the trouble is, Lychnis,” commanded Lord Sombrewater.
“Refugees,” the innkeeper conveyed, standing impassively with his hands hidden in his sleeves.
“What is happening, then?” she asked.
He directed their gaze across the Valley. A young moon had risen over the zigzagging mountain, and there on the precipitous side of it, not half a mile from the inn, were a hundred lights—the camp-fires of the revolutionaries—and on other hills there were other lights.
Even as the Sages were looking at one another, and Ruby and Fulke, in each other’s arms, were making appointments for eternity, a flash came from the hillside. The revolutionaries had discharged their field-piece. The shell burst very short. They tried again, with the same effect, and this seemed to put them in a frenzy, for they began a furious cannonade and opened fire with their rifles. But not a shot came over the village, and they slew nothing but the breeze. The villagers, perceiving that the strangers were miraculously protected, sought to share in the working of the charm, and soon the party was surrounded by a dense crowd of bead-eyed Orientals, chattering in the dark. The flash of guns and a flare in the sky told that the attack was proceeding over a wide front.
Lychnis watched the proceedings with unconcern.
Very soon, perceiving the uselessness of his artillery, the enemy commander changed tactics, and seemed, from the noise that his troops made, about to deliver a hand assault.
“There are perhaps five thousand of them,” muttered Sombrewater. “Richard—if we could get the girls away? If you could steal down to the river and get off in the boats?”
“It could be tried,” said Sir Richard tentatively. “But it is for you to go, Arnold....”
“Leg it with me,” suggested Quentin, prepared to die if his last hours might be amorous.
“I will not leave this spot in any circumstances whatever,” Lychnis answered, low and decisively.
Lord Sombrewater was about to speak, but the words perished in his mouth, for at that moment the colossal apparition of a dragon, with eyes like burning topaz, writhed in fearful silence through the Valley and vanished among the hills. The clamour of the attack ceased, and the people of the village prostrated themselves.
“We were rewarded by heaven,” said Quentin devoutly, “for the purity of our lives!”
But the attack was forward again. The enemy came on, yelling like pandemonium, and one after another the flame-beasts came galloping out of the mountains, and where they passed through the attacking forces their trail was blazed with paralysed men.
“This helps,” exclaimed Sombrewater, “but they’re still swarming up every valley. Do you see them where the flame goes? They’re not being held.” He sought for his daughter’s hand, and she gave it him. She wore the smile of a holy one. It had come to her that there was nothing but a quietness akin to the quietness of space in her heart. The world might crack and she would be calm, for there was now nothing in her subject to death.
It was true that the enemy were not being held, but the mind that was defending the Sages had reserves in hand; indeed, he disposed of the attack in a way that was cynically humorous. In the days when Yuan had taken interest in appearances his interest had been keen and productive. As he had told them, he was able to reproduce appearances and conjure up phenomena. The secret of the toys he had devised for the defence of the Valley had been communicated, in accordance with family tradition, to the engineers, and they, doubtless, were handling the matter at the present time. With great subtlety the fiery dragons were managed so as to force the attack into certain defined areas. They did not kill, except inadvertently, and, once he was used to them, they served to provoke the enemy to defiance, so that he was gradually drawn on. Yet for a long time it seemed to the Sages as if the defence must fail. But now the dragons were followed by monsters in human form, with blue, scowling faces and tongues of red fire, who floated over the forest. Their robes seemed to blow and flap in the breeze, disclosing the limbs of demons; shadows of hate lurked on their brows, and their green eyeballs glowed balefully. Each carried a scimitar under his arm, and one of them, by way of preparatory gesture, cynically shaved a forest from the mountain. The revolutionaries were checked, but amid scenes of compulsion and terror their commander forced his way to the village—a big, hideous man—hewing and slaughtering with an immense curved blade.
He was on them, with a dozen followers, before the Sages realized what had happened, and Fulke and Ruby were already in their hands. The commander himself, smiling like a death’s head, fixed his eyes on Lychnis and swung his blade. She found herself looking darkness in the face, and there was only one thought in her mind—Ambrose would die too. His existence and hers would disappear in the non-existing. Already from the cold threshold she looked back at the world, and saw it as a bright place where those who had learnt to stare in the face of darkness might command and enjoy desire. Then she saw Ambrose. His eyes were very far away. He, too, was looking in the face of darkness. Or did he not love her then? For her, now, he suddenly became the darkness, the heedless, the unnameable. It was in him, in him, that her existence was to disappear.
The bandit lifted his curved blade. It swung once, twice, hissing, and she still brooded on her revelation. But Such-a-one appeared at an upper window in the inn with a device in his hand, and at the third death-bringing swing of the blade he dealt with the chemical composition of the bandit in such a way that the characteristics which distinguish the living from the dead suddenly ceased to be present. Thus also with his followers.
The din and yelling were now terrific. Lychnis ran to help Ruby, who had fainted, and tended her while the conflict raged. The angel of annunciation had visited her and her eyes shone, and Ruby, coming to herself, perceived that something had happened to her friend. “Oh, Licky,” she exclaimed, “are we dead? For you look like a spirit in heaven.”
“Yes,” answered Lychnis. “I have died, and I am looking back at the world. I see that I never knew till I died what it was that I wanted.”
But Ruby, seeing the battle and hearing the din, was puzzled. “I do not know what you mean,” she murmured. “I only feel that you have become different from the living.”
“It is true, my dearest—really true.” Lychnis smiled at her friend.
A vast blaze of light thrust the reeling hills out into blackness, and they saw a mass of the enemy pallid and paralysed in the ghastly glare. Then Ruby shrieked, for a monstrous flame-demon swung a scythe through a huge circle of the night, and the men who had been standing huddled before him stood no more. The rest of the attacking horde turned to save themselves while they could. Then, with a hiss and a roar that seemed to blast the forests, fire sprang from every hillside and streamed over the flying forces. The sky became full of burning villages, and the ears were stifled with the streaming of unearthly flames. Stricken phantom hosts scattered in panic terror along the spines of the mountains; crags of burning sulphur toppled down upon them in obliterating thunder; the mountains themselves seemed to collapse upon flying armies of spectres; and of the actual and substantial fugitives who sought among the rocks for some cover from this spectacle there was none whose heart was not squeezed and ruptured by the cold hand of fear.
Our friends watched in silence until the cynical and jocular fireworks came to an end in fitful lightning and muttering thunder. The terror of the Dragon was in their minds. But there were two in whom terror had no place.
