Shannach—the Last
Copyright© 2024 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 7
Saul stared at him sickly. “There’s no way over the mountains. There isn’t even air up there.”
“There’s a way. I found it in the ship.”
Trevor stood up, speaking with a sudden harshness. “Not a way for us all, not now, but if three or four of us go, one may live to make it. And he could bring back men with ships for the others.”
He looked at Saul. “Will you try it with me?”
The gaunt man said hoarsely, “I still don’t trust you, Trevor! But anything—anything, to get away from that...”
“I’ll go too,” Jen said suddenly. “I’m as strong as Saul.”
That was true, and Trevor knew it. He stared at her for a long minute, but he could not read her face.
Saul shrugged. “All right.”
“But it’s all craziness!” murmured a voice. “You can’t breathe up there on the ridges. There’s no air!”
Trevor climbed painfully into what was left of the twisted wreck, and brought out the helmets and oxygen bottles that had survived for just this purpose.
“We’ll breathe,” he said. “These—” He tried for a word that would explain to them. “—these containers hold an essence of air. We can take them with us and breathe.”
“But the cold?”
“You have tanned skins, haven’t you? And gums? I can show you how to make us protective garments. Unless you’d rather stay here with Shannach.”
Saul shivered a little. “No, we’ll try it.”
In all the hours that followed—while the women of the slaves worked with soft tanned skins and resinous gums, while Trevor labored over the clumsy helmets they must have—in all that time, Shannach was silent.
Silent, but not gone. Trevor felt that shadow on his mind, he knew that Shannach was watching. Yet the Last One made no attempt upon him.
The slaves watched him, too. He saw the fear and hatred still in their eyes as they looked at the sun-stone between his brows.
And Jen watched him, and said nothing, and he could read nothing at all in her face. Was she thinking of Hugh and how the hawks had come?
By mid-afternoon they were ready. They started climbing slowly, toward the passes that went up beyond the sky. He and Saul and Jen were three grotesque and shapeless figures, in the three-layered garments of skin that were crudely sealed with gum, and the clumsy helmets that were padded out with cloth because there was no collar-rest to hold them. Their faces were wrapped close, and they held the ends of the oxygen tubes in their mouths because no amount of ingenuity could make the helmets space-tight.
The evening shadow flowed upward from the valley floor as they climbed, and the men who had come to help them dropped back. These three went on, with Saul leading the way and Trevor last.
And still Shannach had not spoken.
The atmosphere slipped behind them. They were climbing into space now, tiny creatures clambering up an infinity of virgin rock, in the utter black between the blazing peaks above and the flaring lightnings of the evening storm below.
Up and up toward the pass, toiling forward painfully with each other’s help where no man could have made it alone, through a numbing and awful cold and silence. Three clumsy, dragging figures, up here above the sky itself, walking in the awfulness of infinity, where the rocks their feet dislodged rushed away as noiseless as a dream, where there was no sound, no light, no time.
Trevor knew they must have reached the pass, for on both sides now there rose up slopes that had never been touched by wind or rain or living root. He staggered on, and presently the ground began to drop and the way was easier. They had passed the crest. And the oxygen was almost gone.
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