Lin Carter - The City Outside the World by Lin Carter Read Free Book Online Page B

north. Reaching the foot of the plateau, they skirted it, riding west until sundown, and slept that night in the mouth of one of the innumerable ravines into which the cliffs of Casius were cloven.
    The following day they caught their first glimpse of the broad Nilosyrtis. Once this canal had been amighty river, perhaps, flowing down into the lowlands from the mountainous heights of Casius, and watering the Old City which stood at the northern extremity of that huge peninsula now called Syrtis Major. Now it was only a level plain covered with knee-high vegetation, weirdly blue.
    When Mars began to dry up as the free water vapor in its atmosphere escaped in ever-dwindling amounts into space, the crust of the planet had shrunk and cracked, forming a network of long, geometrical lesions in the surface. Into these titanic ravines the shrinking oceans, or what was left of them, had drained. And over succeeding ages the Martian vegetation, adapting to ever-dwindling supplies of moisture, had taken root along these fissures, forming thick belts of hardy growths whose root systems delved down for miles into the pockets of moisture trapped within the bowels of the planet.
    It was these broad strips of fertile vegetation the Earth astronomers had mistaken for artificial waterways. Only some of them, like Nilosyrtis, had once been the beds of primordial rivers, and only a very few showed any signs of having been engineered by human hands. While it was now thought that a few of the old canals had actually been
    "mined'' for water with immense rigs which had probably resembled the oil wells of Texas and Oklahoma, most of them were natural phenomena, and none of them bore even the slightest resemblance to the super Venetian canals which had webbed the planet from pole to pole in the imagination of Earthsider astronomers and fiction writers two centuries ago.
    But here there was, truly, a source of water. For the low, rubbery, bright blue plants were a tough and hardy species whose leathery leaves and stems stored precious moisture hoisted drop by drop from whatever was left of the lost oceans at the planet's core. Here was both food and drink for man and beast, and a safe road they could follow to Yhakhah.
    They rode into the old town at sundown and took rooms at an inn whose walls had already been ancient before the glaciers retreated from Europe, or the English Channel was born, or the first man made friends with the first dog.
    There were a dozen of these oasis towns scattered over the face of Mars, and here all enmity was held in strict abeyance. Clan war or tribal feud or private vengeance were unknown. For towns such as Yhakhah were under Water Truce; here all men were as brothers banded togeth- = er against a universal enemy, which was grim and hostile Nature herself. Here even the F'yagha could come without fear of danger. Here even the priests who had hunted Valarda would be powerless to harm her. (And Ryker wondered if they were still hunting her—and now him.)
    And here she masked her eyes again, before they entered the town.
    Ryker wished he knew more about the folklore of the People. Perhaps golden eyes, which he knew to be rare, were thought unlucky, or a stigma of witchcraft. Crossed
    eyes were once so regarded back on Earth, centuries ago, he knew—the origin of the "Evil Eye" of legend.
    At any rate, she masked her own as they came riding into Yhakhah.
    It was old, that town. The low wall around it, and parts of the buildings, showed that originally it had been built of huge blocks of the pale golden marble mined from the worn, low hills of Mars. The tooth of Time does not bite deep upon such dense stone, and they rode through pillared gates and down a long arcade of marble columns that hud stood a million years or more, and still looked new and fresh, as if carried hither from the quarries only yesterday.
    But the buildings had worn less well, and many of their walls had fallen and been patched together with the clay