Page:Famous Fantastic Mysteries (1951-03).djvu/106

 He did not answer. He could not. He stood appalled by the knowledge that through all her speech she had not once opened her lips. Not once.

And yet she had spoken in a voice that was very sweet, very clear and not exactly in English. Not in any language at all. The thought behind her speech was as clear in his mind as her golden figure was clear in the sunshine, but she had used no words. And he had no time to marvel over it, because something that had been nagging at the fringes of consciousness sprang suddenly now into full clarity. Hers was not the only "voice" that spoke here. The air was heavy with "voices", not easy to catch because they had no human focus. Distorted pictures flashed by through his mind of many thoughts—winged thoughts in the sunny upper air, with the green world tilting below. Deep, soft, shadowy thoughts of woodlands and brown sliding water and solitude. Grassroot thoughts, tiny, distorted, unfocused. He had been hearing them as one hears the noises of a summer night, many small sounds blending into stillness. He knew the little minds that must lie behind them, the hares and the birds and the foxes so dear to medieval artists. He could not see them, but he caught the voices of their minds.

And then, for just one glancing moment, a thought as red and dangerous as fresh wet blood flashed through every other thought that wavered in the air. Flashed, and was gone. There was no counterpart for the thinker of that terrible thought in any medieval picture he had ever seen. A dumb, blind, murderous thought, keen as a sword in the sunlight, but keen for killing and for no other purpose. No intelligence in it. Only murder.

Then it was gone, and the girl was stooping to pull a flower from the grass, her skirts collapsing about her in a great golden billow. It was a little six-pointed star of a flower, yellow petaled, with yellow leaf and stem, and in its heart a quivering triangle of scarlet. And he remembered suddenly something he had never known he knew until this moment—how the four queens of the card deck carry flowers in their stiff little fists. Small flowers like this one

"You have never been here before, have you?" said the girl in her clear and voiceless speech. "No one ever comes back, of course" She peered up at him. She had a medieval face, with a round, childlike forehead and a soft, small mouth and the great, dark, sidelong eyes, a little sad now. She twirled the flower between her fingers and looked at him. "They never come back," she said again.

"Who?" he asked, his voice sounding strangely loud in this silent world of thoughts. And he was watching the woods restlessly, waiting a repetition of that dangerous flash he had caught a moment ago. "Who never comes back?"

"No one," said the girl. "Not even the Sorceror, any more. I'm glad, anyhow, that you are not old, like him."

"You'll have to tell me about the Sorceror," Argyle said gently. "I don't know anything about this world, you know." She looked up at him with a puzzled smile.

"It seems strange to hear you say so, when you stand there in the Sorceror's clothing. But I can see that you speak the truth."

Argyle looked down in surprise. He was wearing something unfamiliar, a stiff tunic as fantastic as her gown, heavy with golden embroidery and medieval in cut and richness. Only the pomander remained now to link him with a London that might have been a dream

"Others have come in the Sorcerer's garments," the girl said, and shrugged a little beneath the golden collar. "Two of them were old, and I did not care when they went away. The young man—well, he went away very quickly, before I could tell him the way back. I was sorry. I thought for a moment when I saw you but you are young too, aren't you? Perhaps you'll stay."

"Perhaps," Argyle said. "I'd like to stay Why did the young man leave so quickly?"