“A small price.” Carse smiled. “A small price for the sword of a god.”
“An evil god,” muttered Penkawr. “For more than a million years, Mars has called him the Cursed One.”
“I know,” Carse nodded. “Rhiannon, the Cursed One, the Fallen One, the rebel one of the gods of long ago. I know the legend, yes. The legend of how the old gods conquered Rhiannon and thrust him into a hidden tomb.”
Penkawr looked away. He said, “I know nothing of any tomb.”
“You lie,” Carse told him softly. “You found the Tomb of Rhiannon or you could not have found his sword. You found, somehow, the key to the oldest sacred legend on Mars. The very stones of that place are worth their weight in gold to the right people.”
“I found no tomb,” Penkawr insisted sullenly. He went on quickly. “But the sword itself is worth a fortune. I daren’t try to sell it—these Jekkarans would snatch it away from me like wolves, if they saw it.
“But you can sell it, Carse.” The little thief was shivering in the urgency of his greed. “You can smuggle it to Kahora and sell it to some Earthman for a fortune.”
“And I will,” Carse nodded. “But first we will get the other things in that tomb.”
Penkawr had a sweat of agony on his face. After a long time he whispered, “Leave it at the sword, Carse. That’s enough.”
It came to Carse that Penkawr’s agony was blended of greed and fear. And it was not fear of the Jekkarans but of something else, something that would have to be awesome indeed to daunt the greed of Penkawr.
Carse swore contemptuously. “Are you afraid of ‘the Cursed One? Afraid of a mere legend that time has woven around some old king who’s been a ghost for a million years?”
He laughed and made the sword flash in the lamplight, “Don’t worry, little one. I’ll keep the ghosts away. Think of the money. You can have your own palace with a hundred lovely slaves to keep you happy.”
He watched fear struggle again with greed in the Martian’s face.
“I saw something there, Carse. Something that scared me, I don’t know why.”
Greed won out. Penkawr licked dry lips. “But perhaps, as you say, it is all only legend. And there are treasures there—even my half share of them would make me wealthy beyond dreams.”
“Half?” Carse repeated blandly. “You’re mistaken, Penkawr. Your share will be one-third.”
Penkawr’s face distorted with fury, and he leaped up. “But I found the Tomb! It’s my discovery!”
Carse shrugged. “If you’d rather not share that way, then keep your secret to yourself. Keep it—till your ‘brothers’ of Jekkara tear it from you with hot pincers when I tell them what you’ve found.”
“You’d do that?” choked Penkawr. “You’d tell them and get me killed?”
The little thief stared in impotent rage at Carse, standing tall in the lamp glow with the sword in his hands, his cloak falling back from his naked shoulders, his collar and belt of jewels looted from a dead king flaring. There was no softness in Carse, no relenting. The deserts and the suns of Mars, the cold and the heat and the hunger of them, had flayed away all but the bone and the iron sinew.
Penkawr shivered. “Very well, Carse. I’ll take you there—for one-third share.”
Carse nodded and smiled. “I thought you would.”
Two hours later, they were riding up into the dark time-worn hills that loomed behind Jekkara and the dead sea-bottom.
It was very late now, an hour that Carse loved because it seemed then that Mars was most perfectly itself. It reminded him of a very old warrior, wrapped in a black cloak and holding a broken sword, dreaming the dreams of age which are so close to reality, remembering the sound of trumpets and the laughter and the strength.
The dust of the ancient hills whispered under the eternal wind Phobos had set, and the stars were coldly brilliant. The lights of Jekkara and the great black blankness of the dead sea-bottom lay far behind and below them now. Penkawr led the way up the ascending gorges, their ungainly mounts picking their way with astonishing agility over the treacherous ground.
“This is how I stumbled on the place,” Penkawr said. “On a ledge my beast broke its leg in a hole—and the sand widened the hole as it flowed inward, and there was the tomb, cut right into the rock of the cliff. But the entrance was choked when I found it.”
He turned and fixed Carse with a sulky yellow stare. “I found it,” he repeated. “I still don’t see why I should give you the lion’s share.”
“Because I’m the lion,” said Carse cheerfully.
He made passes with the sword, feeling it blend with his flexing wrist, watching the starlight slide down the blade. His heart was beating high with excitement and it was the excitement of the archaeologist as well as of the looter.
He knew better than Penkawr the importance of this find. Martian history is so vastly long that it fades back into a dimness from which only vague legends have come down—legends of human and half-human races, of forgotten wars, of vanished gods.
Greatest of those gods had been the Quiru, hero-gods who were human yet superhuman, who had had all wisdom and power. But there had been a rebel among them—dark Rhiannon, the Cursed One, whose sinful pride had caused some mysterious catastrophe.
The Quiru, said the myths, had for that sin crushed Rhiannon and locked him into a hidden tomb. And for more than a million years men had hunted the Tomb of Rhiannon because they believed it held the secrets of Rhiannon’s power.
Carse knew too much archaeology to take old legends too seriously. But he did believe that there was an incredibly ancient tomb that had engendered all these myths. And as the oldest relic on Mars it and the things in it would make Matthew Carse the richest man on three worlds—if he lived.
“This way,” said Penkawr abruptly. He had ridden in silence for a long time, brooding.
They were far up in the highest hills behind Jekkara. Carse followed the little thief along a narrow ledge on the face of a steep cliff.
Penkawr dismounted and rolled aside a large stone, disclosing a hole in the cliff that was big enough for a man to wriggle through.
“You first,” said Carse. “Take the lamp.”
Reluctantly Penkawr obeyed, and Carse followed him into the foxhole.
At first there was only an utter darkness beyond the glow of the krypton-lamp. Penkawr slunk, cringing now like a frightened jackal.
Carse snatched the lamp away from him and held it high. They had scrambled through the narrow foxhole into a corridor that led straight back into the cliff. It was square and without ornament, the stone beautifully polished. He started off along it, Penkawr following.
The corridor ended in a vast chamber. It too was square and magnificently plain from what Carse could see of it. There was a dais at one end with an altar of marble, upon which was carved the same symbol that appeared on the hilt of the sword—the ouroboros in the shape of a winged serpent. But the circle was broken, the head of the serpent lifted as though looking into some new infinity.
Penkawr’s voice came in a reedy whisper from behind his shoulder. “It was here that I found the sword. There are other things around the room but I did not touch them.”
Carse had already glimpsed objects ranged around the walls of the great chamber, glittering vaguely through the gloom. He hooked the lamp to his belt and started to examine them.
Here was treasure, indeed! There were suits of mail of the finest workmanship, blazoned with patterns of unfamiliar jewels. There were strangely shaped helmets of unfamiliar glistening metals. A heavy thronelike chair of gold, subtly inlaid in dark metal, and had a big tawny gem burning in each armpost.
All these things, Carse knew, were incredibly ancient. They must come from the farthest part of Mars.