"Strange," he said thickly. "So strange. And I feel now now discomfort. My thirst has gone, my hunger. But how?"
Dumarest frowned, flexing his back and shoulders. The nagging discomfort of his barely healed wounds had total shy;ly vanished and he too felt neither hunger or thirst. Lallia?
She lay sprawled on the grass, hands touching the mound, her face a strained mask of torment. As Dumarest watched, it contorted and writhed, adopting a snarling mask of hide shy;ous aspect. Then it relaxed to reveal the familiar planes and contours.
"Lallia!" He knelt at her side, touching her skin, the pulse in her throat. Her muscles were like iron.
"No!" she screamed as he tried to pull her hands from the mound. "No!" and then, quieter, "Dear God, how long, how old!"
Yalung rose, a yellow shadow to kneel at her far side. "She is ill," he said. "A fit perhaps?"
It was no fit, not unless psychic shock could be called that. Too late Dumarest remembered her wild talent, the ability to remember the past of any object she touched. The ancient book should have warned him but he had been engrossed in the possibility that it could help in his search. He had not thought of the possibility that the mound could hold a similar danger. Not even when he had recognized it as an artifact.
And now it was too late for regret.
"Earl!" She writhed again, sensing an agonizing past, the dusty span of painful years. "Three suns," she whispered. "A fault in the engines. Suspended animation and millennia of travel. Such darkness and chill and then the dust and the wakening. Too late. The crash and the waiting, the endless waiting." She twisted and moaned, midnight hair wreathed on the grass. "It's alive, Earl. Still alive. Waiting and hoping. Such forlorn longing, Earl!"
She stiffened, and from the very pores of her skin seeped a lambent effulgence, a mist of luminescence which flowed down her arms to the material of the ancient wreck and, as it finally separated from her body, she sighed and totally relaxed.
"Is she dead?" Yalung's face was a yellow mask in the shadows.
Dumarest examined her body, heart pounding with the fear of what he might find. Relieved he sat back and looked at the other man.
"Not dead," he said. "Exhausted by tremendous psychic shock. You understand?"
"Yes," said Yalung. "I understand."
"All of it?" Dumarest glanced at the mound. "It is a wrecked spaceship. It came from God alone knows where, but I will guess that it was never made in our galaxy. And, somehow, something within it is still alive."
Crippled, perhaps, hurt, but still aware. For unguessed millennia it had lain within the vessel tended only by the repair mechanisms the ship had contained-and by the enigmatic guardians if there were more than one? It was possible, they could have bred the birds and the protoplas shy;mic machines which tended the field and the Place itself. Or perhaps they were extensions of the entity within the ship, prosthetic devices governed by its intelligence. Who could begin to guess at the mental structure of an alien race?
And, by means of her talent, Lallia had contacted it. She had sent a part of her mentality back down through the ages, barely understanding, capable only of feeling the terrible shock and despair, the age-long time it had traversed the endless dark, the indescribable alienness of its emotions as it waited and waited for years without end.
For rescue, perhaps? For death? For someone to come who would know and understand?
Dumarest looked at the mound and then back at the girl. She was not dead and that was the important thing. She would lie in a coma for a while and then wake as she had back on the Moray, alive and sane and well. They would still have a future.
Stooping he lifted her in his arms.
"Where are you taking her?" Yalung glanced around the clearing then down the length of the avenue to the gate and high fence at the end. "Perhaps close to the landing field would be best. Anywhere away from this mound which seems to have distressed her."
Away from the ancient vessel, the enigmatic guardian who stood, still immobile, dancing flickers gleaming from the shadow of its cowl. Away from the brooding stillness of the Place, the psychic influences which seemed to pervade the very grass and trees.
Dumarest began to walk down the wide avenue.
He staggered and frowned. The girl was not that heavy and he felt strong enough. Strong but suddenly weary as if he had suffered some tremendous strain and fatigue was the natural aftermath. Yalung tripped and almost fell, shaking his head as he recovered his balance.
"I am fatigued," he said. "Filled with the desire to sleep. At the end of the avenue, perhaps? There is open space between the trees."
He led the way, falling to sprawl on the grass as Dumarest gently set down the body of the girl. For a long moment he stared at her, drinking in the smooth beauty of her face, the lustrous waterfall of her hair. She stirred a little sighing like a child in a pleasant dream, full lips parted to breathe his name.
"Earl, my darling. I love you so very much."
He moved a coil of hair from her cheek and arranged her limbs so as to avoid later cramps then, barely able to keep open his eyes, lay down beside her on the soft and yielding turf.
He fell asleep immediately, falling into a dreamless, time shy;less oblivion.
When he woke Lallia was dead.
XI
she looked very small and helpless as she lay on the grass. She rested on her side, the long curves of her thighs white beneath the hem of her dress, the dark tresses of her hair covering cheek and throat. One arm was lifted, the palm close to her mouth, the other rested in her lap. She looked as if she would wake at a touch, a word, springing to her feet, red lips smiling, warm flesh pulsing with the desire of life, but he had tried both word and touch and she was dead. "She could not have survived the psychic shock she re shy;ceived at the mound," said Yalung quietly. He stood beside Dumarest looking down at the kneeling man, the dead body of the girl. "It is unfortunate but it would appear to be the case."
"No," said Dumarest. "It wasn't that."
"How can you be sure?"
"I'm sure."
She had spoken his name, rising up from the deathlike coma of shock to drift into normal sleep, yielding to the strange fatigue which had gripped them all. Dumarest looked at the grass, the trees, lifting his face to search the soaring arch high above, the fading light of the sun. If she had died because of subtle emanations then why not all? The guard shy;ians, perhaps? But then, again, why kill the girl and not those with her? And how had she died? He could see no mark or injury, no fleck of blood from a minute puncture which would have betrayed the injection of poison from sting or needle.
Reaching out he caught the rounded chin and turned the dead face towards the sky. He stooped, bending his face close to the skin, moving so as to see it against the light. Faint against the marbled whiteness he could see the smudge of bruises against nostrils and mouth.
Rising he looked at Yalung. "You," he said. "You mur shy;dered her."
"You wrong me." Yalung raised his hands in denial. His eyes were wary in the yellow mask of his face. "Why do you say that? You have no proof."
"She was smothered to death by a hand which closed her nostrils and covered her mouth." Dumarest fought to control his rising anger. "I did not do it. We are the only humans in the vicinity. You must have woken earlier than I did and you killed the woman. But why? What harm had she done you?"
"None," admitted Yalung. He moved a step nearer to Dumarest, yellow and black rippling as he moved his arms, extending the broad spades of his hands. "But alive she was an inconvenience."