Haggopian and Other Stories

Hadj Dyzm was peeved. “Hmm!” he grumbled. “Perhaps you’re not so daft after all, Hrossak. But…I’ve set my heart on an idol, and so you’d better be off, find and fetch it.”

“Not so fast,” said Tarra. “Your word before I go: you will fetch me up, when I return with the statue?” (Even though he knew very well that Hadj Dyzm would not.)

“My word,” said the other, very gravely.

“So be it,” said the Hrossak. “Now, which way do I go?”

“I was right after all,” said Dyzm. “You are daft—and deaf to boot! How should I know which way you must go? I would suggest you follow prints on dusty floor, as so recently you followed mine…”

V

A little while later Tarra knew exactly what the fox had meant by a labyrinth. Following sandal prints in the dust, he moved from cavern to cavern, and all of them alike as cells in a comb of honey. A veritable necropolis, this place, where bones were piled about the walls in terrible profusion, and skulls heaped high as a man’s waist. Not all dead kings, these ossified remains; no, for most wore fetters about their ankles, or heaps of rust where ages had eaten the metal away. And about their shoulders small wooden yokes turned almost to stone; and each skeleton right hand with its little finger missing, to mark him (or her) as property of the king.

Tarra wrinkled his nose. They had been savages in those days, he thought, for all their trappings of civilization, their carving and metal-moulding, their love of jewellery, their long-forgotten death-rituals, of which these bones formed the merest crumbling relics. Still, no time to ponder the ways of men whose race was old when the desert was young; there was much to be done, and not all of Hrossak’s searching concerned with golden idols, either!

Tarra Khash remembered all too clearly the years he’d spent trapped in Nud Annoxin’s well-cell in Thinhla. Hah!—he’d never thought to be in just such predicament again. And yet now…? Well, life is short enough; it was not Tarra’s intention to spend the rest of his down here. Ideas were slowly dawning, taking shape in his brain like wraiths of mist over fertile soil as he pondered the problem.

Shuddering a little (from the cold of the place, he told himself, for he had not brought his blanket with him), he passed through more of the domed caves, always following the print tracks where they were most dense—but to one side of them, so that his own trail would be clear and fresh—and knowing that these ways had been explored before. At least he had something of an advantage in that; but they, his predecessors, had had each other’s company. Company?—in this place of death Tarra would be satisfied right now by sight of rat, let alone fellow man!

His predecessors… He wondered what fate had overtaken them. Aye, and perhaps he’d soon enough find that out, too.

But for now—if he could only find something to use as grapple. And something else as rope. For the fox couldn’t sit up there forever. He too must eat and drink. Grapple and rope, aye—but what to use? A long golden chain, perhaps? No, too soft and much too heavy, and all other metal doubtless rotten or rusted utterly away. And Tarra aware with every passing moment, as ideas were first considered, then discarded, that the “guardians” of this place—if they weren’t merely frighteners conjured out of Hadj Dyzm’s own imagination—might even now be waking.

Such were his thoughts as he came by light of flaring fagot into a central chamber large by comparison as that of a queen at the centre of her hive. A queen, or a king, or many such. For here the walls had been cut into deep niches, and each niche containing a massy sarcophagus carved from solid rock, and all about these centuried coffins the floor strewn with wealth untold!

But in the middle of this circular, high-domed cavern, there reposed the mightiest tomb of all: a veritable mausoleum, with high marble ceiling of its own held up by fluted marble columns, and an entrance guarded by—

Guarded? The word was too close to “guardian” to do a lot for Tarra’s nerves. But like it or not the tomb was guarded—by a pair of golden krakens, wings and all, seated atop onyx pedestals, one on each side of the leering portal. Somewhat awed (for this must surely be the last resting place of the greatest of all these ancient monarchs) the Hrossak moved forward and stuck his torch in the rib-cage of a skeleton where it lay at the foot of the pedestal on the left…stuck it there and slowly straightened up, felt gooseflesh crawl on naked arms and thighs and back—and leapt backward as if fanged by viper!