Haggopian and Other Stories

My heart seemed to leap into my mouth. There in the low entrance stood that same merchant who had so evilly smiled up at my window! His turbaned head turned to follow my every move as I sidled out past him and flew down the ninety-nine steps to the wharf below. An awful fear pursued me as I ran through the alleys and streets, making my feet fly faster on the basalt flags of the wider pavements, until I reached the well known, green-cobbled courtyard wherein I had my room. But even there I could not get the face of that strangely turbaned, wide-mouthed trader from beyond the Southern Sea out of my mind—nor his smell from my nostrils—so I paid my landlord his due, moving out there and then to head for that side of Dylath-Leen which faces away from the sea and which is clean with the scents of window-box flowers and baking bread, where the men of the sea-taverns but rarely venture.

There, in the district called S’eemla, I found myself lodging with a family of basalt quarriers. I was accorded my own garret room with a wide window, a bed and mattress of fegg-down; and soon it was as though I had been born into the family, or might have seemed so had I been able to imagine myself a brother to comely Litha.

Within the month I was firmly settled in, and from then on I made it my business to carry on Randolph Carter’s word of warning, putting in my word against the turbaned traders at every opportunity. My task was made no easier by the fact that I had nothing concrete to hold against them. There was only the feeling, already shared by many of the folk of Dylath-Leen, that trade between the city and the black galleys could bring to fruition nothing of any good.

Eventually my knowledge of the traders grew to include such evidences as to make me more certain than ever of their evil nature. Why should those black galleys come in to harbour, discharge their four or five traders, and then simply lie there at anchor, emitting their foul odours, showing never a sign of their silent crews? That there were crews seems needless to state; with three great banks of oars to each ship there must have been many rowers! But what man could say just who or what such rowers were? Too, the grocers and butchers of the city grumbled over the apparent frugality of those singularly shy crews, for the only things the traders bought with their great and small rubies were gold and stout Pargian slaves. This traffic had gone on for years, I was told, and in that time many a fat black man had vanished, never to be seen again, up the gangplanks into those mysterious galleys to be transported to lands across uncharted seas—if, indeed, such lands were their destination! And where did the queer traders get their rubies, the like of which were to be found in no known mine in all Earth’s dreamland? Yet those rubies came cheaply enough, too cheaply in fact, so that every home in Dylath-Leen sported them, some large enough to be used as paper-weights in the homes of the richer merchants. Myself, I found those gems strangely loathsome, seeing in them only the reflections of the traders who brought them from across nameless oceans.

So it was that in the district called S’eemla my interest in the ruby-traders waxed to its full, paled, waned and finally withered—but never died completely. My new interest, however, in dark-eyed Litha, Bo-Kareth’s daughter, grew with each passing day, and my nights were filled with dreams within dreams of Litha and her ways, so that only occasionally were my slumbers invaded by the unpleasantly turbaned, wide-mouthed traders from unknown parts.

One evening, after a trip out to Ti-Penth, a village not far from Dylath-Leen where we had enjoyed the annual Festival of Plenty, as Litha and I walked back, hand in hand, through the irrigated green valley called Tanta towards our black towered city, she told me of her love and we sank together to the darkling sward. That night, when the city’s myriad twinkling lights had all blinked out and the bats chittered thick without my window, Litha crept into my garret room and only the narg-oil lamp on the wall could tell of the wonders we knew with each other.

In the morning, rising rapidly in joy from my dreams within dreams, I broke through too many layers of that flimsy stuff which constitutes the world of the subconscious, to waken with a cry of agony in the house of my parents at Norden on the North-East coast. Thereafter I cried myself to sleep for a year before finally I managed to convince myself that my dark-eyed Litha existed only in dreams.

II