The Sunbird Read online

  Now my lungs were clogged with the horrible colonies of living fungus, a growing living thing within me, feeding on the soft tissues of my body, and pouring out its poisons into my blood to be carried to my brain.

  ‘Treatment,’ I gasped, ‘got to find the treatment.’ And I staggered across to my bookshelves. I tried to read the letters on the spines of the books, but they changed to little black insects and crawled away. Suddenly a thick mottled snake uncoiled from the top shelf, and dangled down towards my face, a thick bloated puff-adder with a flicking black tongue. I backed away, then turned and fled out into the night.

  The smoke was thick, swirling around me, choking me so that I coughed wildly. The flames around me lit all with a lurid satanic glow, a flickering glow. There were dark shapes and strange sounds. I saw Louren’s hut, and ran towards it.

  ‘Louren,’ I screamed, bursting in through the door. ‘Louren!’ panting, coughing.

  The light went on. Sally was alone in Louren’s bed, she sat up, sleepy, soft-eyed, naked, and looked at me with unfocused vision.

  ‘Where is he?’ I shouted at her. She looked confused, not understanding.

  ‘Ben, what is it? You’re bleeding!’

  ‘Where is Lo?’ It was desperately urgent. I had to find him. He had been exposed to the fungus also. I had to find him.

  Sally looked down at the bed beside her. There was the indentation on the pillow where Louren’s head had lain.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, big-eyed, puzzled. ‘He was here. He must have gone out.’

  I coughed, great choking sobs, and felt fresh blood in my mouth. Sally was fully awake now. She stared at me.

  ‘Ben, what is it?’

  ‘Neuromyces,’ I told her, and she gasped seeing the blood streaming down my chin.

  ‘Louren and I have opened a secret passage beyond the sun image in the archives. It’s infected with the spores. We took no precautions. It has got us. I’m sure he’s there now. I’m going to him.’ I stopped to breathe. Sally was out of bed slipping into her gown, coming to me.

  ‘Get Ral Davidson. Respirators. Take all precautions. Follow us. I will prop the doors open. Down steps. Turn left at bottom. Follow us. Louren will have it also, drives you mad. Crazy. Terrible things. Come quickly - do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Ben.’

  ‘Get Ral,’ I said and turned. I ran out into the smoke and flames and darkness, running for the cliffs and the cavern. The great walls of the temple towered above me, walls long gone. The great phallic towers of Baal pointed to the moon, lit by the flames of a burning city. Towers that stood again after so long. They were screaming, the women, burning alive with their children. Dead men lay strewn in my path, cut down like the harvest of the devil, their dead faces terrible in the moonlight.

  ‘Louren,’ I shouted and ran on through the temple. They were in my path, dark and savage, crowding forward to oppose me. Dark, shapeless, terrifying, and I flew at them with a strange battle cry yelled from a blood-glutted throat. The mighty axe spun its silver circles in the firelight, and I was through them, running.

  I reached the cavern, saw it lit by the guttering torches, saw the pavement of stone bordering the circular green beauty of the emerald pool. The rows of stone benches, rising in tiers around it as they had 2,000 years before. With a last enormous effort of will, I forced my brain to discount this fantasy and to recognize reality.

  The wooden guard hut stood across the cavern from me. I staggered towards it. The guard sat at his desk reading. He looked up, his expression changing to surprise and incredulity.

  ‘Good God, are you all right, Doctor?’

  ‘Mr Sturvesant, is he in the tunnel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did he go in?’

  ‘An hour ago.’ The guard came towards me. ‘Is something wrong? You are bleeding, Doctor!’

  ‘Wait here,’ I told him. ‘The others are coming. They know what do to.’

  I hurried on into the archives, smelling the smoke still and hearing the clamour of a dying city ring in my ears.

  Before the image of the sun-god I let the great battle-axe slip from my hand and left it lying on the stone floor. I pushed the stone door open, and propped it with one of the war shields to prevent it swinging closed behind me.

  I ran down the staircase. Halfway down I saw the glow of light from the tomb below.

  The inscribed doorway with its graven curse of the gods stood open, jammed in the hinge by the cable of the arc-light. The light lay on its side in the centre of the tomb where Louren had dropped it. The bulb still burned, lighting the tomb vividly.

  Louren lay on his back at the foot of the huge granite sarcophagus of Lannon Hycanus, the last king of Opet.

  He was naked to the waist. His face was deathly pale, his eyes closed, and bright blood stained the corners of his mouth and ran back down his cheeks into his ears and hair.

  With the last of my strength I staggered to where he lay and dropped onto my knees beside him. I stooped over him and tried to lift him, my arms around his shoulders.

  His skin was moist and burning hot, and his head flopped helplessly backwards. A new bright gush of blood ran out of his mouth, wetting my hands.

  ‘Louren,’ I cried, holding him to my chest. ‘Oh please, God, help me! Help me!’

  There was still life in him, just the last flicker of it. He opened his eyes, those pale blue eyes with the first shadows of death darkening them.

  ‘Ben,’ he whispered, choking with his own blood. He coughed, spattering droplets of the bright lung blood.

  ‘Ben,’ he whispered so softly I could scarcely hear it. ‘All the way?’

  ‘All the way, Lo.’ I whispered, holding him like a sleepy child. His head of golden curls cradled against my shoulder. He was quiet for a little while, then suddenly he stirred again, and when he spoke it was in a clear strong voice.

  ‘Fly!’ he said. ‘Fly for me, bird of the sun.’ And the life went out of him, he turned to nothing in my arms, the great wild spirit flown - gone.

  I knelt over him, feeling my own senses reel. The world turned and swung beneath me. I slipped over the edge of it, down into the swirling darkness of time. Down into a kind of death, a kind of life, for in my dying I dreamed a dream. In my poisoned sleep of death which lasted a moment and a million years I dreamed of long-dead men in a time long passed…

  Part II

  Of the thirty days of the prophecy there were but two remaining when Lannon Hycanus and his train came at last to the Bay of the Little Fish on the farthest southerly shores of the great lake. It was already dark when ten ships of the fleet anchored in the shallow waters of the bay, and their torches and lamps smeared long ruddy paths of light across the black waters.

  Lannon stood beside the wooden gunwale of his steering-deck, and looked out across the fields of papyrus and hidden waterways to the south where the open country began and spread away endlessly into the unknown. He knew that here lay his destiny and that of the nation. For twenty-eight days he had hunted and now he felt an unaccustomed chill of fear fan his arms and neck, fear not of the terrible animal he had come to find, but of the consequences of the animal continuing to evade him.

  Behind him there were light footsteps on the wooden deck and Lannon turned quickly. His hand on the hilt of the dagger beneath his leather cloak relaxed as he saw the unmistakable shape of the man in the light of the torches.

  ‘Huy,’ he greeted him.

  ‘Highness, you must eat now and sleep.’

  ‘Have they come yet?’

  ‘Not yet, but they will before morning,’ replied the hunchback, moving closer to his prince. ‘Come now. You will have need of a steady hand and clear eye on the morrow.’

  ‘Sometimes it seems I have ten wives, not nine,’ laughed Lannon, and regretted the jest when he saw the blood darken the face of the hunchback; quickly he went on. ‘You pamper me, old friend, but I think that tonight I will hunt sleep with as little success as I have hunted
the gry-lion these twenty-eight days since my father’s funeral.’ He turned back to the bridge tail and looked across at the other nine ships. The ships of the nine families, come to watch him make good his claim to the throne of Opet and the four kingdoms, come to watch him take his gry-lion.

  ‘Look at them, Huy.’ And his friend came to his side. ‘How many of them have made sacrifices to the gods for my failure?’

  ‘Three of them, certainly - you know which I mean. There are perhaps more of them.’

  ‘And those who are loyal to house Barca, those we can count upon without question?’

  ‘You know them also, my lord. Habbakuk Lal will stand with you until the seas turn to sand, house Amon, house Hasmon—’

  ‘Yes,’ Lannon interrupted. ‘I know them, Huy, every one of them, for and against. I was but talking to have the comfort of your voice.’ He touched the hunchback’s shoulder in a gesture of affection, before turning away to gaze once more into the southern wilderness.

  ‘When the prophecy was made did they ever foresee the day when the great gry-lion would pass from the land? When a prince might search for all thirty of the days allotted to the task without seeing even the marks of the beasts’ paws in the earth of Opet?’ Lannon spoke with sudden anger. He flung his cloak back over his shoulder and folded his arms across his naked chest. His skin was freshly oiled and the muscles glowed in the torch light, he kneaded his own flesh with the long powerful fingers.

  ‘My father killed on the twenty-fifth day, and that was forty-six years ago. They said even then that the gry-lion was finished. Since then how many have the scouts reported?’

  ‘My Lord, the gods will decide,’ Huy tried to soothe him.

  ‘We have hunted every covert where the gry-lion has been seen in the last 200 years. Five full legions have swept the swamps in the north, three more along the great river.’ He broke off and began pacing the deck, pausing to look down into the hull where the tiers of naked slaves slept chained upon their benches, leaning on the mighty oars in the position in which they would die. The stench of the rowing decks came up to him as a solid thing in the humid night. He turned back to Huy.

  ‘This reach of the swamps is the last place in the whole of my kingdoms which might hide a gry-lion. If it does not, then what will happen, Huy? Is there no other way in which I might prove my right? Is there no escape in the scrolls?’

  ‘None, my lord.’ Huy shook his head with regret.

  ‘The kingship must fall?’

  ‘Unless there is a gry-lion taken then Opet will have no king.’

  ‘Who will rule without a king?’

  ‘The Council of Nine, alone.’

  ‘And the royal house? What will become of house Barca?’

  ‘Let us not talk of it,’ Huy suggested softly. ‘Come, my lord. A slave is preparing a jug of hot spiced wine and a stew of fish. The wine will help you to sleep.’

  ‘Will you make an oracle for tomorrow, my priest of Baal?’ Lannon asked suddenly.

  ‘If the oracle is unfavourable, will it help you sleep?’ asked Huy, and Lannon stared at him a moment before barking with harsh laughter.

  ‘You are right, as always. Come then, I am hungry.’

  Lannon ate with vast appetite from the bowl of fish, sitting naked on his fur-covered bed. He had let his hair loose and it hung to his shoulders, curling and gleaming strangely golden in the light of the hanging lamp. He was a god-like figure among his dark-haired people.

  The leather awnings were opened, and a light breeze came tip from the south-east to cool the cabin and blow out the galley stench. The ship moved to the breeze and the light chop of the surface, her timber popped and creaked softly, a slave cried out in nightmare, and from the deck above came the steps of the night guard - all the familiar comforting sounds of the flagship at sea.

  Lannon wiped out the bowl with a piece of millet bread, popped it into his mouth, and washed it down with the last of the wine. He sighed with content, and smiled at Huy.

  ‘Sing for me, my bird of the sun.’

  Huy Ben-Amon squatted on the deck at the foot of the prince’s bed. He held his lute in his lap, and crouched over it.

  The curve of his back exaggerated the attitude, the long tar-black tresses of hair hung forward to hide his face, his massively developed arms seemed too powerful for the long delicate fingers that held the lute. He struck a note, and a listening hush fell upon the night. The footsteps overhead ceased, two slave girls ceased their work and came to kneel beside Lannon’s bed, the arguing voices from the ship anchored alongside quieted, and Huy sang.

  His voice rang sweetly across the dark waters, and the prince and the fleet listened. Dark shapes moved to the rails; of the nearest ships and stood quietly there looking across at the flagship. On the cheeks of one of the pretty slave girls stood tear-drops that glistened in the lamp light, when Huy sang of a lost love. Then she smiled through her tears when Huy changed the song to one of the bawdy marching tunes of the Sixth Legion.

  ‘Enough. Huy looked up from his lute at last, ’There will be work tomorrow, my lord.‘

  Lannon nodded and touched one of the slave girls on the cheek. Immediately she stood up and loosed the shoulder strap of her linen tunic, letting it fall from her body. She was young and lithe, her body almost boyishly slim in the lamp light. She stooped and gathered her robe, dropped it across the bench beside the door and stepped naked into Lannon’s bed. The other girl went to snuff the lamp, and Huy rose from the deck with his lute slung on his shoulder.

  A voice hailed from the darkness, a great bull bellow from the edge of the papyrus beds that carried across the water to the flagship.

  ‘Open your lines for a friend!’

  ‘Who calls himself friend?’ One of the guards shouted a challenge, and the reply was bellowed hoarsely.

  ‘Mursil, huntmaster of house Barca.’ And Lannon was out of his bed in one bound.

  ‘He has come!’ he exclaimed, flinging his cloak over his shoulders and hurrying to the companion ladder with Huy scampering beside him.

  A small canoe bumped alongside and Mursil came up through the entry-port as Lannon and Huy reached the deck, a huge figure, gross and apelike with his big beefy round face ruddy from sun and wine.

  The ship was awake now. Her officers swarming up onto the deck, new torches flaring to light the scene as day, the bustle and hum of excitement affecting them all.

  Mursil saw Lannon and hurried to him down the aisle which opened for him across the crowded deck. He was followed closely by a pygmy figure, a tiny brown naked manikin that looked about him from slanted eyes in obvious terror at these unfamiliar surroundings.

  ‘My lord.’ Mursil opened his cloak and dropped heavily to one knee in front of Lannon. ‘I bring good news.’

  ‘Then you are welcome.’

  ‘This one,’ Mursil reached behind him and dragged the little bushman forward, ‘this one has found what we seek.’

  ‘You have seen it?’ Lannon demanded.

  ‘The tracks of his paws only, but this one has seen the beast itself.’

  ‘If it is true, you will be well rewarded, both of you,’ promised Lannon Hycanus and turned to grin triumphantly at Huy.

  ‘The gods have decided. House Barca will have its chance once more.’

  The sky was only a shade lighter than the black brooding swampland, the dawn-flighting duck ghost-whistled unseen overhead and each minute the light strengthened.

  Half a mile out on the open plain a herd of buffalo grazed in a dark bunch. Heads down, tails swinging lazily, they moved back steadily towards the tall dense banks of papyrus reed.

  They moved faster as the light strengthened, hurrying to reach the sanctuary of the reed-beds, 200 huge bovine shapes with their armoured heads and bunched black shoulders. Dawn’s first light showed the white tick birds which hovered above the dark herd in a cold pink sheen. The swampy earth smoked with mist and the endless banks of papyrus stood frozen in the hush of dawn, for once their fl
uffy white heads were not nodding and dancing - except where something moved amongst the reeds.

  Following its track the papyrus heads stirred, an opening and closing movement that set them nodding briefly before settling into stillness once more. The movement was sedate and yet so weighty that it betrayed the size of the animal which stalked beneath it.

  The big bull buffalo that led the herd, stopped suddenly fifty yards from the edge of the papyrus bed. He lifted his nose high and spread his ears wide beneath the heavy boss of horn. With little suspicious piggy eyes he examined the bed of reeds ahead of him. Behind him the herd stopped also, alerted by his stillness.

  The gry-lion came out of the reeds at full charge, a blur of soft roan-brown, an animal as tall and almost as heavy as the quarry it hunted. It crossed the open ground so swiftly that the bull had only begun to turn away before the gry-lion was on him.

  It landed on his back, curved yellow claws hooked through thick black skin and flesh at shoulder and haunch. The long fangs sank into the back of the buffalo’s neck, holding it steady while one paw reached forward and grasped the bull’s nose. A single powerful wrench twisted the black neck back against the holding fangs, the spine snapped with a sharp report and the bull folded in full run.

  Before he went down the gry-lion had left him, dropping lightly to the ground, seeming hardly to touch it before he was in the air again, a long arcing leap, flashing soft brown against the pink dawn sky to land easily across the back of an old black cow that ran beside the bull.

  Lightly as a humming bird flashing from flower to flower, the gry-lion had killed again. Bone breaking sharply in the dawn, the victim carrying the great lion forward in the press of galloping buffalo, and as the cow died the gry-lion was gone, flitting to the next, killing again in one fleeting movement and flitting again.

  Six times the gry-lion killed before the surging, plunging, panicking herd had run 300 paces. Then he let them run, the thunder of their hooves dwindled, a far bank of papyrus swallowed them and they were gone.