Minos Of Sardanes

2:-1

Chapter 2

The Curse of Analos

ON THE BRINK of the ledge of death in the crater of the Gateway to the Future crouched Analos, high priest in Sardanes. Two hundred feet below him in the monstrous funnel of the crater, seethed the lake of undying fires. Billowing vapors wafted from that troubled caldron passed upward beyond him, an endless procession of many-hued wraiths. First mist, smoke and sulfurous gases intermingled, spiraled and coiled in the drafts that blew through the mountain's cone, and passed on to the vent of the enormous flue, three hundred feet above.

The rumble and muttering of the raging flames smote his ears continually. Beneath his feet the solid rock of the hollow hill vibrated and trembled. Anon as the wreaths and curtains of vapor shifted and curled, disclosing their furious source, the weird light shone garishly on his red vestments of office. His high-templed, crafty face, above its black beard, turned livid in the glare.

It was evident from the tense bearing of the man that he was himself in the grip of an inward fire that threatened to break forth with consuming fury. He ground his teeth, and blood ran from his bitten lips into his beard.

"Curse them, O Lord Hephaistos! Curse them, for thy sake and for thy servant's!" he prayed as he prayed many times before. He stretched his arms out over the gasping pit, raised himself on one knee and sent his voice wailing out across the fire-shot depths.

"Aye, curse them and spare them not! Curse him that was before me here! May Kalin be accursed! Curse him who now opposeth my will! May Minos be accursed! Curse her who hath flouted me, thy priest! May she be thrice accursed! Curse them all, and for all the years to come! May they know no rest in Sardanes or in the world! May they find no peace in that far place beyond, whither thy gateway leadeth!"

Panting for breath, he paused. His writhing features were hideous in the flare from the chasm. Again he tossed his arms wildly.

"Come to my aid, Hephaistos!" he screamed. "Aid thou thy servant! Give me a sign, that I may know. A sign, Master, send me a sign!"

Booming up from the depths, his answer came— a mighty diapason from the throat of the crater that seemed to carry with it every chord of nature's tonal gamut. As if the hammer of Hephaistos, indeed, had smitten, the solid rock beneath him quivered to a terrific shock from the bowels of the earth.

Almost jarred from his foothold, the man by a quick spring backward, saved himself from toppling into the fiery funnel. Crawling on hands and knees, he approached the brink of the ledge again, and there lay flat. His eyeballs bulged and his senses swam when he gazed downward.

He saw the fire-fretted sides of the giant crater swept free of all their clouding vapors: every glittering vein every projection, every detail of their many strata, revealed in startling clearness by a blinding flood of light. He saw the fire lake itself surge upward in its white-hot sheath. Up, up the sheer declivity of the crater it crept. As it came, for yards above it the rocks glowed red.

Another tremendous shock swayed the ledge where the priest lay. Masses of rock, reft from the precipitous walls near the mountain summit, hurtled past him down the chasm. Again the molten lava heaved up a great wave. Never in all the traditions of Sardanes had the fires of the Gateway leaped so far! From the center of that swirling maelstrom there arose a cone twenty feet high. It opened with a shriek as of a legion of devils released, and an appalling pillar of blue flame shot up from it and stood like a plume.

Although the highest reach of the flame was a full hundred feet below him, the blast of the heat was like to burst the veins of the watching priest. His very beard curled in it. Springing to his feet, Analos went back to the darkness of the passage that led to the terraces on the lower slope. Already it was hot to suffocation in the winding corridor.

Down the spirals ahead of him Analos heard the squealing of his affrighted priests as they scurried for the open. But Analos quaked not. He strode forth from the lofty arch of the portal and trod the upper terrace with the step of a master conqueror. He glanced up the outer acclivity of the mountain. He saw its peak ablaze with a crown of fire against the gloom of the Antarctic night— a crown which shone there for the first time since man had made history in the valley of Sardanes. He drew a deep breath, a breath of triumph and exaltation.

"Master, thy sign is sent!" he cried.

With head held high, Analos passed down the fire-lighted terraces. As he went, he heard through the red twilight of the valley cries of wonder and heart-rending wails of fear.

AFAR ON the Hunter's Road, twenty miles to the north and west of the valley, Minos the king and eight of his hunters followed the trail of the white bear. Two sledges they had with them, each hauled by six-horse teams of the sturdy little Sardanian ponies. But Minos coursed the snows more swiftly by far with a lighter sledge, whisked over the frozen crusts by a racing chain of beasts that could outstrip the small horses by two miles to one. Seven great gray dogs drew the sledge of Minos!

Now, a strange thing must be related. When Polaris fought his way put of Sardanes, along the crater ledge and through the rift in the wall of the Gateway to the Future, his team of splendid dogs battled with him. Their fighting fangs aided him fully as much as did his long, brown rifle and brace of revolvers in holding Minos and his men back until it was time to pass the rift and join Kalin the priest and the Rose maid. One of his fiercest charges was made to avenge the dog Pallas, when she was struck down by an ilium spear, and pitched over the brink of the ledge.

Although her master gave her up for lost, Pallas did not die. When Minos the king made his way back to the valley after his last struggle with the outlander, men came and told him that the beast lay sore wounded and moaning on a rock-ledge in the side of the crater pit, some score of feet below that from which she had fallen. They would have stoned her to death, or let torches fall to drive her into the fire lake, but Minos would not suffer it. The king himself ordered that he be let down the crater wall with ropes. There he bound and muzzled Pallas and brought her to the upper ledge and to his palace, and tended her hurts, for Minos was skilled in the rude surgery of the valley.

Analos, who succeeded Kalin as high priest in Sardanes, later demanded the brute to be a sacrifice to Hephaistos, but Minos withstood him and his priests, and the dog lived on.

Some six weeks after her rescue from the pit, Pallas whined her mother joy over six blind puppies. Twice the great darkness had fallen on the Southland since the man of the snows had left it, and the pups had grown tall and strong. Minos had given them much care, and it was his whim to train them and use them as had Polaris. Now, with Pallas as the leader, they drew the king's sledge.

Sardanians, who had never known dogs until the advent of the strangers, eyed them askance, but the will of Minos was an ill thing to tamper with.

The chase was fruitful. When the king and his hunters broke camp and turned homeward, where the red haze of the moons of Sardanes lighted the southern horizon, the carcasses of two monarchs of the wastes were lashed to their sledges in token of the huntsmen's prowess.

Three miles from the north pass into the valley they stopped to rest and to feed their beasts. Minos was busied straightening out a kink in a harness strap, when he heard a shout of amazement. A flash of light shone with startling brightness across the wilderness of rocks and ice hummocks and snow.

The king sprang to his feet and saw a mighty, flaming pillar spread fanwise heavenward from the summit of the looming bulk of the mountain that lay to the left, at the northeast sweep of the oval range that encompassed Sardanes.

Gloomy and silent always through the centuries since their ancestors had found the valley, now the towering peak of the Gateway to the Future blazed with a fury that dimmed the moons of all its sister mountains. That sight smote the Sardanians with terror. With upraised arms, they stood among their snorting beasts, their staring, affrighted faces ghastly in the flare.

Beneath their feet they felt the rock-strewn bosom of the plain heave gently, and, after a short space, again. They moaned in terror.

Of a mold to be daunted little by natural or supernatural, Minos the king was less moved than the others. While they groaned and called on Hephaistos, he strode among them with a quieting word.

"Old Mother Nature played a trick for her amusement," he said. "She hath lighted Sardanes brighter than ever before, and now she melteth the snows of the wilderness. Look! Never saw I such a mist!"

He pointed to the east. Extending from the foothills below; the Gateway, north-east, as far as their eyes might see, a rolling bank of fog hung over the snow lands.

"Bring in the sledges as soon as may be," Minos ordered. "There will be many a shaken heart in Sardanes at yonder sight. I will hasten on."

He leaped on his own sledge, gave the word to his dogs, and in a moment the swift snow-runners had carried him around a bend in the pathway toward the valley. As he went, he heard the dull booming of the huge drum that hung in the hall of the Judgment House, whereon some lusty wight was making play with all the strength of his two arms.

So it happened that, as Analos crossed the green stone bridge over the river, the king entered the valley through the north pass, both of them bound in haste for the Judgment House.

As was his custom, Minos left his sledge in a rock-built shelter at the base of the pass cliffs, where the snows broke into bare ground and rock. With his gray beasts in leash, he hurried through the pass and set off across the valley at a loping, light-footed gait. Skirting the marshes, where the river lost itself in its subterranean channels at the lower end of the valley, the king and his shaggy companions crossed the bridge and took a path above the main road that led them over the slopes through groves of gigantic hymanan trees.

The yellow-bronze and rustling foliage of the forest monarchs reflected the radiance of the mountain moons in a shimmer of whispering gold. Among their gnarled trunks the shadows lay thick. He was still ten minutes' journey from the Judgment House when the gleam of a white robe in the dusk and a subdued growl from the dogs told the king that some one loitered in the path ahead of him. He heard a woman's voice raised in anger, a voice that thrilled him to his heart's core.

Silencing the muttering beasts, he went forward cautiously.

A black-haired girl stood with her back to the bole of a tree, against which, her white arms were thrown out at each side. Her head was tilted defiantly. Her bosom heaved and her black eyes snapped. In front of her the dark form of a man barred her way. He was draped in a long robe, the cowl of which obscured his features.

"How darest thou!" Her tones bit scornfully. "How darest thou lay a hand on the daughter of the Lord Karnaon? I care not for thy threats of powers. I tell thee that wert thou twice what thou art,— to me thou wouldst be all that is foul and abhorrent. Mate with thee!" She laughed shortly. "I'd sooner mate with the meanest of my father's servants than with thee."

Analos, for he it was whom opportunity had tempted thus to tarry, shook his clenched fists over the head of the girl. Brave as she was, his face turned so hideous in its leering rage that she shrank.

"Twice hast thou flouted me, girl," he said in a choked, hard voice, "me, the minister and mouthpiece of the Lord Hephaistos. It shall not be so again." He tossed an arm toward the flaming crown of the mountain whence he had come. "Yonder the god ruleth in all his splendor, and I am his faithful servant. To the Gateway shalt thou come, whether thou willst or no. Thither shouldst thou go this moment had I not more pressing business elsewhere."