“I remember.”
“It was only right,” said Tuan. “Then we were few among very many, outnumbered and alone.”
“I know,” said Brant levelly.
Suddenly, Tuan did an amazing thing. He extended both hands to Brant, offering the power guns hilt forward. Brant refused to let his surprise show in his face. He accepted the weapons without changing expression, but in his heart he knew. When a warrior of Mars offers a weapon to one of the Hated Ones, it is a gesture of brotherhood, not of friendship: a gesture that means even more than the sharing of water.
Meeting Tuan’s eyes squarely, he replaced the guns in their worn holsters.
“He who stole the treasure of my ancestors from me has gone down to death, and paid the expiation for his crime,” said Tuan. “Those who were his companions, who remain, are innocent of wrongdoing, for they knew him not at that time, neither did they learn of his crime until later. So be it.”
Brant nodded silently. Tuan wet his lips.
“They have been through much together, Tuan and Brant,” he declared. “Side by side, they have looked upon wonders such as no man would believe. And never has the one betrayed the other, even when death threatened them all. True has been the trust which Tuan placed in Brant, and truly has that trust been returned. Is it not so?”
“It is so,” answered Brant softly.
Tuan grinned. “Then let the truce continue—forever, if needs must! Never shall we be foes again: comrades, if it comes to that—”
“And friends, anyway, if it doesn’t,” remarked Brant.
They smiled at each other. It was not a Martian custom to shake hands, but the touch was there in their linked eyes.
Tuan turned away, clearing his throat noisily.
“Then let us begone from this place that welcomes us no more,” he said gruffly.
Securing their garments and their gear, they found the entrance to the stair again, and paused thereupon for a time, looking off over the strange vista of this weird world, which had become so familiar to them in so brief a span of time.
Zuarra fingered something in the pocket of her robes. She withdrew it and opened her fingers to show Brant the glimmering and jewel-like stone she had taken up from the shores of the luminous sea during the first hours they had spent here in the world of Zhah.
“Zuarra knows in her heart that we are forbidden this place ever again,” she said sadly. “But—O, Brant, must I give this stone back to the shores of the sea?”
Brant put his arm around her and grinned down into her wistful, upturned face.
“I think a souvenir is permitted to us,” he said gently. The Martian woman said nothing. She replaced the smooth, richly colored gemstone in its pocket, and her expression was radiant.
They stood and gazed for one last time upon the sloping sward of indigo moss, upon the fantastic fungus-forest, and upon the old, gentle hills that hid from their view the luminous waters of the Last Ocean.
Then they turned and began to ascend the stony stair.
28 The Return
The way back up the great stair was harder than before, but, then, this is always the case. It is more difficult to climb a stair than it is to go down one, simply because of gravity.
They carried with them that of their gear and clothing they had abandoned on the indigo moss-slopes. And they climbed— and climbed—with the stronger assisting the weaker of them. From time to time, as before, they paused to rest and refresh themselves on the stone platforms.
It had occurred to them, of course, to take precautions against thirst and hunger. So the outlaws, with their long knives, had carved off slabs of mushroom-meat, and had filled their canteens with sweet fluid from those growths in the fungus-forest which bore the honey-hearted meadlike liquor.
They yearned for fresh water and for cooked meat. But these were not to be had on the stair, and there was naught else for them to do but try to ignore those yearnings which could not then be appeased.
They continued the ascent. After a time, weary, they slept. Only to wake and climb again.
Presently, they began to notice a reversal of the conditions they had observed during their descent of the stair. That is, the wan and pearly luminance slowly ebbed; the humidity seeped from the air and it became dry; the warmth faded, and when, despite the heat of their exertions, it became unpleasantly chill, they paused during one rest-period to don again their garments.
Brant and Will Harbin climbed into their protective, heated suits of nioflex. The natives, including Zuarra, resumed their long, loose robes. And they climbed up and up, while the air became more like the atmosphere they had known on the surface—cruelly dry, bitterly cold, depleted of all but vestiges of life-giving oxygen.
It was as difficult for their bodies and respiratory systems to readjust to these conditions as it had been earlier. They must pause to rest themselves many times, panting, starved for air, their flesh slick with greasy perspiration as their body-chemistry reverted to the conditions they had known before, on the surface.
In time, they returned to normal.
They spoke little between themselves, saving their breath for the ascent of the stone stair. But during the breaks between the intervals of the ascent, when they rested, drank frugally, ate sparingly of their scant supplies, a few words were exchanged.
Will Harbin’s face was screwed into a doleful expression during one such rest period. Brant asked if he was feeling all right; it had occurred to him that the strain on the older man’s heart, caused by the long and painful ascent of the stair, might very well prove injurious.
The other shook his head. “My ticker’s strong as ever,” he declared. “No, I was just mourning the loss to science of the information, the knowledge, the data we could have brought back from Zhah. If only I had brought along a camera! Or specimen-bottles. Incredible or not, my colleagues would have to pay some attention to tissue-samples from the mushroom-trees, or a segment of a dragonfly wing. …”
He cast Brant a sour glance, and the big man grinned ruefully, knowing what was in Will Harbin’s mind at that moment. He had mightily wished to fill his canteen with water from the luminous sea, but Brant had refused to permit this, on the grounds that they would become mighty thirsty on the stair, and every canteen was needed for nourishing fungus juices.
And, of course, he was quite right. Long before they reached the top of the stair, their supplies of drinkables gave out and their mouths and throats became parched with thirst. But knowing that Brant had been right in refusing him permission made it no easier for the scientist to do without the single water sample which would, if not exactly have proven beyond all doubt or question the existence of the subterranean world beneath the dunes of Mars, at least have surprised and interested the world of science.
He heaved a heavy sigh, and stopped thinking about the loss to human knowledge. Many and strange were the mysteries of Mars, and in all the generations since first the Earthsiders came hither to explore, to colonize, to exploit, few had been uncovered, and multitudes more remained hidden in the hostile wastes of the Red Planet.
Brant’s physical powers were amazing to the outlaws, and won him their admiration and respect as nothing had before.
The fact of the matter was very simple. Mars has a gravity far less than that of Earth, where Brant was born and bred. His muscles were shaped to battle against a stronger pull of gravitation, whereas those of the Martian natives were adapted to the lighter gravity of their world.
Nevertheless, his stamina and endurance, his sheer strength alone, made him the object of their admiration. Fighting men from whatever world admire in others the same abilities which they respect in themselves. They found nothing to marvel at in his physical courage, his fighting skills, or his instinct for survival. But his strength and endurance were so far greater than their own—even those lean, tough, rangy desert hawks—that they strove, however in vain, to emulate him.