The Reign of Wizardry Read online

  THE REIGN OF WIZARDRY

  Jack Williamson

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Website

  Also by Jack Williamson

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  ONCE THERE was an island empire. Its fleets ruled the seas for a thousand years. Its wealth and splendor dazzled all the world. Then it was destroyed—cataclysmically!

  Its fall still presents a mystery. For it was cut off abruptly, in the full tide of power. The fleets that had guarded its rich commerce and its unwalled cities were suddenly no more. Its capital city, where men had dwelt for ten thousand years, was looted and burned and leveled by earthquake shock. Its people were scattered, and presently lost even the memory of their departed greatness.

  The history of that empire’s splendor and its passing became a legend. Generations of retelling confused the details. Men came to call that lost world Atlantis, and at last began to doubt that it had ever been.

  But the account of Atlantis that Plato heard from the Egyptian priests—in almost every detail save the vague location beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and the complete submersion of the land itself—fits what is now known of Minoan Crete.

  The conquerors, also, told their own story of what happened. Minos the god-king, the monstrous Minotaur of the Labyrinth, the artificer Daedalus, fair-tressed Ariadne and the victorious Greek hero, all became the figures of a splendid myth.

  But merely a myth—until, a hundred years ago, a poor child named Heinrich Schlieman was given a storybook of Homeric Greece. He saw a picture of the walls of Troy, and said that such walls could not have been obliterated, even in three thousand years.

  Schlieman ignored the derision of scholars. Beginning life as an ill-paid grocer’s clerk, he educated himself, made a fortune, and at last realized his splendid, stubborn dream—he excavated the mound at Hissarlik, and found not one Troy, but nine!

  The forgotten gates of a magnificent pre-Homeric world were thus thrown open to knowledge. Sir Arthur Evans was one of the brilliant men who followed Schlieman. He uncovered the great building that was the very heart of that lost world—the Palace of Minos at Knossos in Crete.

  Even the carved stone throne of Minos has been preserved, with the griffin frescoes that graced the throne room; a cast of it may be seen in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Excavations at other sites in Crete, at Mycenae and Tiryns, have filled out the picture of a reality more amazing than the legend of Atlantis and the myths of the Greeks.

  It was a strangely modern world, whose remains the spades have brought to light. Uncannily modern, in matters as various as plumbing and art and architecture and women’s gowns. Every find at Knossos helps bring to life a gay and sophisticated court.

  But the Minoan world had its darker side. Archaeology supports the grim legend of the Minotaur. Wall paintings show men and girls engaged in the deadly game of “bull vaulting”; and Dr. Evans found even the dungeon pits, in which the victims of a cruel religion must have awaited sacrifice.

  After all the scraps of knowledge have been pieced together, however, Minoan Crete remains a strange and fascinating riddle. The Minoans, it is true, left records. They were, in fact, the first printers—on clay—from movable type; and the alphabet itself may have been carried from them to the Phoenicians after the disaster by the Philistines, who seem to have been Minoan émigrés. The Minoan script known a “Linear B” was brilliantly deciphered in the early 1950’s by Michael Ventris, turning out to be Greek. Other recent work in Minoan archaeology has generated more controversy than fact, however; and the true history of the fall of Knossos is still veiled in myth and magic.

  The fall of the ruthless and decadent Minoan despotism, it seems, must have been one of the decisive events of history. For the democracy and the civilization of Greece, the basis of our own, could have been built only upon the ruins of the Minoan age. The Greek conqueror, then, is one of the supreme men of history. Legend has brought us his name—Theseus.

  Knossos fell. The coincidence of earthquake and sword and torch is still a riddle. But the world’s oldest and greatest palace was turned into a mound of ruin. For three thousand years it lay abandoned, “uncanny, haunted ground.”

  Magic and ritual—as the findings of Evans and McKenzie and Pendlebury and the Haweses and others confirm—played a grimly dominant part in the life of Crete. Immemorial Knossos may well have been the cradle of the magical arts. The jigsaw puzzle of myth and archaeology and the fragmentary Egyptian records seem inevitably to fall into a dreadful pattern. The most plausible answer to all the riddles of Minoan Crete is—wizardry!

  ONE

  “WHAT ARE the omens, Captain Firebrand?” Cyron, the bearded Dorian pirate, looked nervous. A hairy hand clutched one of the stays that supported the long galley’s single mast, and his scarred face was apprehensive as he peered across the glancing blue water between the green head-lands. “Shall we run for the islands?”

  Theseus, the tall Achean, stood near the high wolf’s-head standard that rose above the prow. His legs were set wide against the roll and toss of the narrow ship, and his long red hair whipped back in the wind. He shaded his blue eyes, and looked with Cyron into the strait ahead.

  Dancing on the white-glinting blue, between the points of land, he found two black dots and a yellow one. He stu
died them carefully, and the cloud-streaked westward sky, and the ruffled track of the wind upon the sea.

  At last his hard tanned body straightened, in the simple loincloth of captured Egyptian linen. He tossed his red mane back again, and his quick voice rang above the weary monotonous chant of the oar slaves and the creak of the wind-strained rigging.

  “The wind is with us, Gamecock,” he said. “They are only two against our one—we can forget the trader until the war galleys are sunk. And our bronze beak makes us the equal of three—you said so yourself, when we rammed the last Egyptian.”

  “Yes, Captain Fireband,” agreed the anxious Dorian. “But that was an Egyptian—”

  The hairy pirate shuddered a little, in the long stiff cloak of bead-embroidered purple silk that had belonged to a Cretan naval officer. But Theseus drew the long straight sword from his belt, and looked into the polish of its blue steel.

  “The men are hungry for plunder,” he told Cyron. “And the Falling Star is thirsty for blood.” A tense little smile touched his lean face. “I read my omens in the mirror of the Falling Star,” he said, “and they are always good!”

  He turned on the planking that decked the narrow bow, and shouted past the mast to the slave-driver perched on the lip of the oarsmen’s pit beyond:

  “A faster stroke! We must cut them off before they pass the headland!”

  “Aye, Captain Firebrand!”

  The Mycenean’s long whip hissed and cracked. Forty-four slaves bent to twenty-two oars, eleven to the side. Their endless chant grew swifter, and the galley leapt to its rhythm.

  “Hail, Captain Firebrand!” came a shout from the two score of sailors and fighting men crowded on the deck above the after cabin, beyond the pit. “Do we fight again?”

  Theseus cupped tanned hands to his face. “We fight,” he shouted. “And when the lots are cast, we shall have treasure from the north coasts to divide. Gold and amber and furs—and perhaps even fair northern slaves!”

  Cheers answered, and he ordered:

  “All hands make ready to attack and board!”

  Bronze blades rang to the stone. Archers flexed and strung their bows, a slinger stretched his thongs. The boarding crew fitted on leathern helmets, laid ready their long bullhide shields. At his fire above the pit, the one-eyed Tirynthian cook began heating pots of sulfur.

  But Cyron shook his scarred dark head uneasily. Anxiously fingering the edges of the beaded cape, he stepped close to Theseus and protested in a husky whisper:

  “But those leading sails are black, Captain Firebrand.”

  “I see that they are black, Gamecock.”

  “The black sails mean that they are war galleys of the royal navy of Minos,” rasped the apprehensive pirate. “They are guarded by the uncanny artifices of the warlock Daedalus, and by the wizardry of Minos himself. There will be black priests of the Dark One aboard them, to blast our bodies and our souls with their deadly magic.”

  Urgently, he touched the bronze arm of Theseus. “Let us turn and run for the islands, Captain Firebrand,” he begged, “before their tricks of wizardry set the wind against us, to shatter us against some hostile coast!

  “Let us wait for an Egyptian galley,” he pleaded huskily, “guarded only by the distant sleepy gods of the Nile. Or perhaps a trader from the East, that trusts in the dusty deities of dead Babylon. Or maybe we shall meet another merchant that carries only the feeble godlings of Troy.”

  His hairy hand trembled. “Captain Firebrand, we dare not defy the gods and the warlocks of Crete—your attacks must already have angered them, and their wizardry is the strongest in the world. An Egyptian priest told me once—before I disemboweled him—that all magic came first from that evil island. Shall we turn back, Captain?”

  Theseus touched the gleaming gold-and-silver inlay that covered the hilt of the Falling Star.

  “Not so long as I am your elected captain, Gamecock,” he said soberly. “I joined your ship, a year ago, because the pirates are the only men in the world who defy the magic and the fleets of Crete. Even the great Pharaoh flatters Minos, and sends him gifts of silver and black slaves and apes.”

  Cyron looked up at the taller, clean-shaven Achean, with a look of uneasy admiration.

  “I know you have done mighty deeds, Captain Firebrand,” he said, “for the stories follow you. I know that you have destroyed savage animals, and slain outlaws and tyrants, and fought the men of far lands. But aren’t your deeds great enough to rest upon? Must you make war against the wizardry, and earn the anger of the very gods?”

  The red head of Theseus nodded slowly, and his face was very grave. “I must,” he said. “For always I have fought the enemies of men. And the greatest enemy is not the manhunting animals, nor outlaws, nor barbarian tribes. It is not lurking in the wilderness, but it rules in the heart of the greatest city!”

  His hard fingers drew the steel half out of its scabbard. “The greatest enemy is magic, Gamecock. It is the wizardry of Crete that enslaves the world. Even in the tents of the desert, men cower in fear before a talisman that bears the double ax of Minos.” His tense face had turned a little white. “All nations send a tribute of boys and girls to be trained for the cruel games at Knossos. Even my own Attica is subject to Minos—my own father, at Athens, must kneel to the Cretan resident, and send gifts to the Dark One.”

  His breath made a sharp angry sound. “The wizardry of Knossos is a dark serpent that coils about the spirits of men,” he said bitterly. “The cruel sea-power of Minos is enforced with fear of the Dark One.”

  The sword flashed clear of the scabbard. “Well, Gamecock—Minos and the Dark One must be destroyed!”

  Cyron clutched the bronzed sword arm, desperately.

  “Hush, captain!” he gasped apprehensively. “That is blasphemy—and the ears and the horns of the Dark One are long!” He caught his breath. “You misunderstand us, Captain Firebrand. It is true that we are pirates, true that piracy is against the law of Minos. But, until you joined us, we had preyed only upon the shipping of Egypt and Tiryns and such-like rivals of Crete—so that the captains of Minos winked at us.”

  “But now,” Theseus reminded him, “I am your elected captain.”

  “And a good one—if you would forget this madness of a one-man war against the wizardy of Crete,” Cyron yielded. “This bronze beak you built upon the galley has already sunk a dozen ships for us.”

  Grimly, Theseus shook his head. “I invented the ram to destroy the power of Minos,” he said slowly. “But, alone, it isn’t enough. Great Ekoros, they say, and even the palace of Knossos itself, have no defensive walls. But that Cretan priest boasted to me—before I cut his lying throat—that the power of Minos is guarded by three walls.

  “First there is the fleet, that they call the wooden wall. And then, the priest said, there is a giant of living brass, named Talos—he is the second wall.”

  Cyron plucked uncomfortably at his beard. “I have heard of Talos,” he agreed apprehensively. “He is twice the height of a man, and so fleet of foot that he runs around all Crete in a day. He crushes his enemies in his arms, and roasts them against the hot metal of his body. I shall never touch that isle of evil!”

  “Unless the Cretans take you there, to feed their Dark One!” Theseus grinned at him. “Then there is another barrier about the power of Minos, that is called the third wall.” He stared at the far black sails. “The ram will break the wooden wall, perhaps. But there are still two more to pass.”

  Cyron pulled the purple cloak defensively about him. “All the walls of Crete,” he declared, “are better left alone!”

  “We shall see.” Theseus smiled again, and a tanned thumb tried his sword. “You had better find your spurs, Gamecock. The Cretans are turning to meet us!”

  Theseus walked aft, giving orders and grinning encouragement to the archers climbing to the foredeck, the boarding party waiting with their grapnels in the waist, the slingers on the cabin, the one-eyed cook, Vorkos, coughing over hi
s pots of boiling sulfur. He felt the sharp unease that chilled them all, like a freezing wind.

  “Ready, men!” he shouted. “Are you afraid of an old man’s muttering? There is a magic in hot blood and good bronze that is stronger than all the wizardry of Minos. Our beak would sink the galley of Admiral Phaistro himself.” He flourished his sword in a glittering circle. “And the Falling Star has an enchantment stronger than the Dark One. It was hammered from metal that fell from heaven. You have seen it sever blades of bronze. If you fear the wizards, you are already conquered. If you don’t, their power can’t touch you! Now, will you follow me?”

  He waited, concealing his anxiety.

  “Aye, Captain Firebrand!” The shout rang from half a hundred throats. “We will follow you!”

  But he heard the doubt, the dread, that lingered in it. He knew that these pirates, boldest men as they were of a dozen northern coasts, still shared Cyron’s awe of the wizardry of Crete. They would follow—but not all the way.

  It came to Theseus that he stood all alone against the gods of Crete. And even in his own heart was a small, cold fear. For he had met magicians, and he knew that they possessed undeniable powers.

  He was glad when the ships came into fighting range. Singing a bold song, the sailors quickly lowered the square red sheet, unshipped the mast. The first flight of arrows flashed out from the Cretan archers, and fell short in the water.

  The Mycenean cursed, and his black whip cracked, and red sweat ran down the backs of the slaves in their pit. Theseus called brief orders to Gothung, the tall blond steersman. And the pirate galley swept in toward the Cretans.

  The Cretan officers followed conventional tactics. They raced down upon the quarters of the pirate. Then, at the last moment, their slave shipped the exposed banks of oars.

  The object of the maneuver was to bring the ships together in a glancing collision, shearing off unshipped oars and crushing the enemy’s rowers with their shattering ends, and then grapple for boarding.