Sea Kings of Mars Read online

  SEA-KINGS OF MARS

  And Otherwordly Stories

  LEIGH BRACKETT

  Fantasy Masterworks Volume 46

  eGod

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Maps of Mars

  Introduction

  The Sorcerer of Rhiannon

  The Jewel of Bas

  Terror out of Space

  Lorelei of the Red Mist

  The Moon that Vanished

  Sea-Kings of Mars

  Queen of the Martian Catacombs

  Enchantress of Venus

  Black Amazon of Mars

  The Last Days of Shandakor

  The Tweener

  The Road to Sinharat

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  With special thanks to Jo Fletcher, Malcolm Edwards, Gillian Rcdfearn, Hugh Lamb, Ralph Vicinanza, Ray Bradbury, Alexandra Bradbury, Randy Broecker, Jay Broecker, Val and Les Edwards, John and Kathy Pelan, Mike Ashley, Martin Trouse, Erik Arthur, Ted Ball and Bob Wardzinski.

  Map of Leigh Brackett's Mars copyright © Dave Senior 2005, from a map prepared by Margaret M. Howes.

  'Introduction: Letting My Imagination Go' copyright Jonathan Bacon 1976. A version of this was originally published as part of 'Return to Wonder' by Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton in Fantasy Crossroads, May 1976.

  'The Sorcerer of Rhiannon' copyright © Street & Smith Publications, Inc. 1942. Originally published in Astounding, February 1942.

  'The Jewel of Bas' copyright Love Romances Publishing Company, Inc. 1944. Originally published in Planet Stories, Spring 1944.

  'Terror out of Space' copyright Romances Publishing Company, Inc. 1944. Originally published in Planet Stories, Summer 1944.

  'Lorelei of the Red Mist' copyright © Romances Publishing Company, Inc. 1946. Originally published in Planet Stories, Summer 1946. Reprinted by permission of Ray Bradbury and his agents, Abner Stein and Son Congdon Associates, Inc.

  'The Moon that Vanished' copyright © Standard Magazines, Inc. 1948. Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1949.

  'Sea Kings of Mars' copyright © Standard Magazines, Inc. 1949. Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1949.

  'Queen of the Martian Catacombs' copyright © Love Romances Publishing Company, Inc. 1949. Originally published in Planet Stories, Summer 1949.

  'Enchantress of Venus' copyright © Love Romances Publishing Company, Inc. 1949. Originally published in Planet Stories, Fall 1949.

  'Black Amazon of Mars' copyright © Love Romances Publishing Company, Inc. 1951. Originally published in Planet Stories, March 1951.

  'The Last Days of Shandakor' copyright © Better Publications, Inc. 1952. Originally published in Startling Stories, April 1951.

  The Tweener' copyright © Fantasy House, Inc. 1955. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1955.

  'The Road to Sinharat' copyright © Ziff-Davis Publishing Company 1963. Originally published in Amazing Stories, May 1963.

  'Afterword: The Enchantress of Worlds' copyright © Stephen Jones 2005.

  Maps of Mars

  Introduction

  Letting My Imagination Go

  I became a writer because, I suppose, I couldn't help myself. From earliest childhood I had a compulsive desire to fill up blank pages in copybooks. When I was seven or eight, I wrote a sequel to a Douglas Fairbanks film because I wanted more and there wasn't any infantile scribbling on odd bits of paper, but still, a beginning. At thirteen, I made a mature, reasoned decision to be a professional writer. Ten years later I sold my first story.

  I got into fantasy and science fiction partly because, at a very early age, someone gave me a copy of Burroughs' The Gods of Mars and my entire life was changed. I watch the films of Apollo flights with my heart in my throat, and remember how long ago on a Venice beach I quarrelled furiously with my grandfather about space-flight, he saying it was impossible and could never be (What would they push against?), and I stamping my foot and yelling, 'But they will, they will!' And they have. And I think this has been the single greatest thrill of my life, having dreamed of space flight and having seen it come true.

  In the beginning of my writing career, I tried my hand at nearly everything and failed miserably; I hadn't enough experience of writing, or anything else, to compete in the adventure field for instance. I had been advised to try this market or that market, but not science fiction because there wasn't much money there. Finally, I decided I was going to do what I wanted to do, which was to write fantasy and science fiction, where I could really let my imagination go, even if I starved to death. I still had a lot to learn, but at least I was on the right track.

  Henry Kuttner was at that time doing work for the Laurence D'Orsay Literary Agency, and he went far beyond the call of duty in criticising my manuscripts, offering help and suggestions, patiently getting me over the hurdles. I am sure that because of Hank I sold my first story much sooner that I would have done otherwise. It was also Hank who introduced me to the wonderful world of fandom, in particular the Los Angeles Science-Fiction Society. Actually, I met Edmund Hamilton and Jack Williamson through our mutual agent, Julius Schwartz, and a mutual editor, Mort Weisinger. But over the years LASFS figured as a friendly meeting place and it was there I came to know Ray Bradbury.

  We used to meet every Sunday afternoon at the beach and read each other's manuscripts, sitting in the sun with the smell of frying hamburgers, dreaming furiously. I don't know who gave whom the most help, though Ray has generously given me more credit than I think I deserve; it was more or less mutual, I believe, and the wonderful thing about it was having another nut-case to talk to: we science fiction writers and readers were pretty well isolated in those days, when the average person considered the whole thing suitable only for the mentally retarted.

  I began to branch out into the crime and suspense field and finally felt bold enough to do a full-length novel. This was No Good from a Corpse, published in '44. A friend of mine in a Beverly Hills bookstore saw to it that the book was in a stack of thrillers he sold to Howard Hawks. The first thing I knew, I was working for Mr Hawks on The Big Sleep, teamed with William Faulkner.

  At that time I had an order for a novel (20,000 words!) from Planet Stories. I had written exactly 10,000 words, or one-half of the story. When this heaven-sent job in the flicks dropped out of the blue, I asked Ray Bradbury if he would like to finish the yarn because I wouldn't have time. He said yes, and forthwith did so, without any outline or a stitch of anything to go on except the first 10,000 words.

  The result was 'Lorelei of the Red Mist', one-half pure Brackett, one-half pure Bradbury. I have heard all sorts of theories about how I did the action bits and he did the poetry, etc. Not so. It was not even a collaboration in the ordinary sense. Ray simply pitched in and turned out a beautiful job.

  I was overawed to be working with William Faulkner (although, despite American Lit. professors and critics, I had always found him quite unreadable). In the event, we had very little contact in working, since we did alternate sections of the book with a minimum of conferring. He was punctilious, polite, unfailingly courteous, and as remote as the moon: a closed-in, closed-up, lonely man, driven by some dark inner devil. I suppose it is no secret to anyone that he would vanish sometimes for days while his loyal friends - and he had them - would front for him at the studio, seek him out, take care of him, and get him back on his feet again. Everybody pretended not to notice. Apart from these absences, he worked hard, worked long hours and proved to be remarkably good on construction.

  As to his dialogue, he was famous as the writer who had never had one line of dialogue actually spoken by an actor. It was, quite simply, unread
able, and it was all changed on the set ... not by me, by Mr Hawks and Bogey, both of whom were/are pretty good at it.

  I've been in and out of screenwriting ever since, and my relationship with Mr Hawks continues to this day; I am in fact at the moment awaiting his summons to discuss the current job. Then, I trust, back to Kinsman (Ohio) and my corn patch!

  Leigh Brackett

  May, 1969

  The Sorcerer of Rhiannon

  He had been without water for three days. The last of his concentrated food, spared by the sandstorm that had caught him away from his ship and driven him beyond all hope of finding it, rattled uselessly in his belt pouch, because his throat refused to swallow.

  Now Max Brandon stood on a dune of restless ocher dust, watching the coming of another storm.

  It rolled crouching across the uneasy distances of the desert, touched blood-red above by the little far sun of Mars. Brandon heard the first faint keening of it above the thin whine of the eternal winds that wander across the dead sea bottoms.

  Brandon's sharp-cut face, handsome with its sea-blue eyes and bronzed skin, and the thin scars of battle that enhanced rather than marred, creased into a grin.

  "So the grave-robber is going to be buried instead this time," he whispered. The skirling wind blew ocher dust in his eyes and mouth, the gold-brown stubble of beard.

  "All right," he said to the storm. "See if you can make me stay down." He waved a mocking hand at it and staggered down into the hollow.

  To himself, he said ironically, "There's no one here to see your act, Brandy. No pretty ladies, no interplanetary televisors. The storm doesn't care. And you're going to die, dead, just like ordinary mortals."

  His knees buckled under him, flung him headlong in the stifling dust. The simplest thing to do would be just to lie there. Drowning in these Martian sea bottoms was just like drowning in the sea. All you had to do was breathe.

  He thought of all the ships that had foundered when there was water here, and how his bones would join theirs in the end. Red dust, blowing forever in the wandering wind.

  His white grin flashed briefly. "I always said, Brandy, that you knew too much to take advice."

  Everybody had advised him not to come. Jarthur, head of the Society for the Preservation of Martian Relics. Sylvia Eustace. And Dhu Kar of Venus.

  Jarthur wanted to put him in the Phobos mines for looting, which was bad. Sylvia wanted to marry him, which was worse. And Dhu Kar, his best competitor and deadliest enemy, wanted to get to the Lost Islands first, which was worst of all.

  "So I came," Brandon reflected. "Right in the middle of the stormy season. And here, apparently, I stay."

  But he couldn't stay down. Something drove him up onto his feet again, something that wouldn't listen to what his reason was saying about its being no use.

  He went on, part of the time on hands and knees, to nowhere, with the Martian desert-thirst burning him like living fire, and the first red-dun veils of the storm blowing past him.

  He began to see things in the clouds. Ships in full sail, the ancient high-prowed Martian galleys. He could hear the thrumming of their rigging, knowing with the last sane scrap of his mind that it was his own blood drumming in his ears.

  The wind screamed over him and the red dust rolled like water. It was dark, and the galleys rushed by faster and faster. They got clearer, so that he knew that he was going, and still he wouldn't lie down.

  And then, through those fleeing phantom ships, he saw a wreck tossing.

  Her masts were gone, her hull canted, her high-flared bow thrust up in a last challenge to the wind. Max Brandon knew, because he could see so clearly the wide-winged bird that made her figurehead, that he was almost dead.

  His dust-filled eyes lost even the phantom ships. He wondered distantly why he should imagine a wreck among them. The wind hurled him on. He fell. And, driven by some blind, dogged stubbornness, struggled up again.

  The wind flung him with spiteful viciousness against something. Something solid. Something hard and unmoving, in the heart of the restless Martian desert.

  It hurt. He went down and would have stayed there, but for the stubborn thing that lashed him on.

  There was metal under his hands, singing with the impact of the storm. He looked up, forcing himself to see. A deck slanted down to him, bare of everything but the stumps of broken masts.

  He stared at the ship, not believing his sight. But his aching body told him it was there. He thumped it with his hand, and it rang thinly.

  It wasn't any use, really, because he had no water. But the thing that had driven him kicked him now up over the broken rail and along the canting deck to the broad cabin in the stern.

  Feeble and distant, his heart was pounding with excitement. A ship, sunk ages ago in the Sea of Kesh, sailing through the red clouds of the storm—

  It was impossible. He was delirious. But the closed door of the cabin was before him, and he tried to open it.

  There was no catch.

  He grew angry. He'd come this far. He wouldn't be balked. He drew himself erect, his tawny hair whipping in the storm, and roared at the door, commanding it to open.

  It did. Max Brandon walked through, and it closed silently.

  There was soft light in the cabin, and a faint choking pungency. A table of Martian teak inlaid with gold stood in the center of a room shaped to the curve of the galley's stern, furnished in somber richness.

  A man sat in a carven chair beside the table. He was fair and slight in a plain black robe, with no ornament but a curious band of gray metal about his head, bearing the figure of a wide-winged bird.

  His face was gentle, grave, rather young. Only in the strong lines about his mouth and the fathomless darkness of his eyes was there any hint—

  Of what? Max Brandon, dying on his feet, knew that the man wasn't there. Simply wasn't, because he couldn't be.

  He looked alive, but he was too rigid, and his eyes didn't wink. Didn't wink or move, staring at the girl who sat facing him.

  She was hardly more than a child, with the supple strength of a sleeping deer in the long lines of her, and the stamp of a burning, vital pride still on her clear-cut face.

  She wore a short white tunic with a jeweled girdle, and the cloth was no whiter than her skin. Her eyes looked at the man, unconquered even in death.

  They were golden, those eyes, clear and rich as pure metal. Her hair grew low in a peak between them, swept back and down and hung rippling over her shoulders.

  Max Brandon stared at it, swaying on his feet, feeling the blood swell and throb in his throat.

  Her hair was blue.

  Blue. The deep, living blue of an Earthly sea, with tints of cobalt in its ripples and the pale color of distance where it caught the light.

  He followed it down across her white arms, and then he saw the shackles on her wrists. Her hands lay on the table, slim and strong, and on the thumb of the left one was a ring with a dull-blue stone.

  Brandon's brain burned with more than thirst.

  "The Prira Cen!" he whispered, "The Blue Hairs, the oldest race of Mars. Half mythical. They were almost extinct when the Sorcerers of the Lost Islands were the governing brain of the planet, and that was forty thousand years ago!"

  A wave of blackness closed over him, as much from that staggering thought as from his desperate weakness. He fought it off, clinging to life for just that one instant longer—

  Something sparkled dully on the table, close by the arm of the man in black. A small, transparent bottle, filled with amber liquid.

  Somehow he crossed the deck. The bottle was sealed with some curious substance. He struck the neck off against the table.

  A drop of the fluid splashed on his hand. It tingled as though charged with a strong current, but Brandon was beyond caring. He drank.

  It was strong, burning and cooling all at once. Some of the madness died out of Brandon's eyes. He stood for a moment looking at that beautiful, incredible, impossible girl with the sea-bl
ue hair.

  A racing bolt of flame went through him suddenly, a queer shivering agony that had a perverse pleasure in it. He felt his mind rocking in its bed like an engine with a broken shaft, and then there was darkness and a great silence.

  He came to sprawled in a heap of dust. For a moment he thought he was back in the desert again. Then the madness that had happened swept back, and he got up, blinking into utter darkness. The light mechanism must have failed at last.

  Dust rose and choked him. He blundered into a corner of the table, and something fell behind him with a dry, soft whoosh. He couldn't see the door at all. When he finally found it with his hands, there was no catch.

  Blind panic shook him for a moment, until he remembered how he had got in. A little incredulously, he shouted at the door.

  "Open!"

  It didn't budge. And Brandon stood in the darkness like a trapped rat.

  From somewhere, quite unbidden, a thought came.

  "Set your hands on it and push. It will come open."

  He did. His palms barely touched the metal, his muscles had hardly gathered for the effort. The door broke from its hinges and fell with a thin clash on the deck.

  Pale Martian daylight flooded the cabin. Brandon saw now that the cushions and hangings had crumbled to dust. The teakwood table still stood, but its grain was splitting and softening. The man in black had vanished completely, save for the gray metal circlet that lay in a scatter of dust on the floor.

  Brandon knew now what had fallen behind him. His gaze darted to the woman, and his heart contracted with a faint stab of pain.

  There was only a naked skeleton, beautiful even now in its curved white perfection. The shackles, the blue stone of the thumb ring glinted dully on fleshless bones, the jeweled girdle burned across a splintered pelvis.

  That little puff of air he had let in must have done it. Whatever mechanism had controlled the door—he made a wild guess at some seleno-cell sensitive to thought currents instead of light—had gone with the rest.