The Edmond Hamilton MEGAPACK ®. Edmond Hamilton
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the best thing to happen would be if Khal Kan got himself killed in that dream-life. Then, the moment before he ‘died,’ the dream of Thar would vanish utterly as always in such dreams.”
Henry was a little appalled. “You mean—Thar and Jotan and Golden Wings and all the rest would be gone forever?”
“That’s right—you wouldn’t ever again be oppressed by the dream,” encouraged the psychoanalyst.
Henry Stevens felt a chill as he drove homeward. That was something he hadn’t forseen, that the death of Khal Kan in that other life would destroy Thar forever if Thar was the dream.
Henry didn’t want that. He had spent just as much of his life in Thar, as Khal Kan, as he had done here on Earth. No matter if that life should turn out to be merely a dream, it was real and vivid, and he didn’t want to see it utterly destroyed.
He felt a little panic as he pictured himself cut off from Thar forever, never again riding with Brusul and Zoor on crazy adventure, never seeing again that brooding smile in Golden Wings’ eyes, nor the towers of Jotan brooding under the rosy moons.
Life as Henry Stevens of Earth, without his nightly existence in Thar, would be tame and profitless. Yet he knew that he must once and for all settle the question of which of his lives was real, even though it risked destroying one of those lives.
“I’ll do what Doctor Thorn said, when I’m Khal Kan tonight,” Henry muttered. “I’ll tell myself Thar isn’t real, and see if it has any effect.”
He was so strung up by anticipation of the test he was about to make, that he paid even less attention than usual to Emma’s placid account of neighborhood gossip and small household happenings.
That night as he lay, waiting for sleep, Henry repeated over and over to himself the formula that he must repeat as Khal Kan. His last waking thought, as he drifted into sleep, was of that.
* * * *
Khal Kan awoke with a vague sense of some duty oppressing his mind. There was something he must do, or say—
He opened his eyes, to look with contentment upon the dawn-lit interior of his own black stone chamber in the great palace at Jotan. On the wall were his favorite weapons—the sword with which he’d killed a sea-dragon when he was fourteen years old, the battered shield with the great scar which he had borne in his first real battle.
Golden Wings stirred sleepily against him, her perfumed black hair brushing his cheek. He patted her head with rough tenderness. Then he became aware of the tramp of many feet outside, of distant clank of arms and hard voices barking orders, and rattle of hurrying hoofs.
His pulse leaped. “Today we go south to meet Egir and the Bunts!”
Then he remembered what it was that dimly oppressed his mind. It was something from his dream—the queer nightly dream in which he was the timid little man Henry Stevens on that strange world called Earth.
He remembered now that Henry Stevens had promised a doctor that he would say aloud, “Thar isn’t real—I, Khal Kan, am not real.”
Khal Kan laughed. The idea of saying such a thing, of asserting that Thar and Jotan and everything else was not real, seemed idiotic.
“That timid little man I am in the dream each night—he thinks I would mouth such folly as that!” Khal Kan chuckled.
Golden Wings had awakened. Her slumbrous black eyes regarded him questioningly.
“It’s my own private joke, sweet,” he told her. And he went on to tell her of the nightly dream he had had since childhood, of a queer world, called Earth in which he was another man. “It’s the maddest world you can imagine, my pet—that dream-world. Men don’t even wear swords, they don’t know how to ride or fight like men, and they spend their lives plotting in stuffy rooms for a thing they call ‘money’—bits of paper and metal.
“And the cream of the joke,” Khal Kan laughed, “is that in my dream, I even doubt whether Thar is real. The dream-me believes that maybe this is the dream, that Jotan and Brusul and Zoor and even you are but phantom visions of my sleeping brain.”
* * * *
He rose to his feet. “Enough of dreams and visions. Today we ride to meet Egir and the Bunts. That is no dream!”
Ten thousand strong massed the fighting-men of Jotan later that morning, outside the walls of the city. Under the red sun their bronzed faces were sternly confident and eager for battle.
Kan Abul rode out through their ranks, with his captains behind him in full armor. Khal Kan was among them, and beside him rode Golden Wings. The desert princess had fiercely refused to be left behind.
Their helmets flashed in die red sunlight, and the cheers of the troops were deafening as Kan Abul spoke to his captains.
“Egir’s main force is already ten leagues north of Galoon,” he told them. “There’s talk of some new weapon which the Bunts have, with which they claim to be invincible. So we’re going to take them by surprise.
“I’ll lead our main force of eight thousand archers and spearmen south along the coast road,” the king continued. “My son, you will take our two thousand horsemen and ride over the first ridge of the Dragals, then ride south ten leagues. We’ll join battle with the Bunts down on the coastal plain, and you can come down from the Dragals and strike their flank. And the gods will be against us if we don’t roll them up and destroy them as our forefathers did, generations ago.”
Kan Abul led the troops down the coast road, and as they marched along they roared out the old fighting-song of Jotan.
“The Bunts came up to Jotan,
Long ago!”
* * * *
Hours later, Khal Kan sat his horse amid a thin screen of brush high in the red easternmost ridge of the Dragals, leagues south of Jotan. Golden Wings sat her pony beside him, and their two thousand horsemen waited below the concealment of the ridge.
Down there below them, the red slopes dropped into a narrow plain between the mountains and the blue Zambrian. Far southward, a pall of black smoke marked the site of sacked Galoon. And from there, something like a glittering snake was crawling north along the coast.
“My Uncle Egir and his green devils,” muttered Khal Kan. “Now where are father and our footmen?”
“See—they come!” Golden Wings cried, pointing northward eagerly.
* * * *
In the north, a glittering serpent of almost equal size seemed crawling southward to meet the advancing Bunt columns.
“Your desert eyes see well,” declared Khal Kan. “Now we wait.”
The two armies drew closer to each other. Horns were blaring now down in the Bunt columns, and the green bowmen were hastily forming up in double columns, a solid, blocky formation. More slowly, they advanced.
Trumpets roared in the north, where the footmen of Jotan marched steadily on. Faintly to the two on the ridge came the distant chorus.
“The Bunts fled back on the homeward track
When blood did flow!”
“There is my uncle, damn him!” exclaimed Khal Kan, pointing.
He felt the old, bitter rage as he saw the stalwart, bright-helmed figure that rode with a group of Bunts at the head of the green men’s army.
“He leads them to the battle,” he muttered. “He never was a coward, whatever else he is. But today I will wipe out his menace to Jotan.”
“They are fighting!” Golden Wings cried, with flaring eagerness.
Clouds of arrows were whizzing between the two nearing armies, as Jotan archers and Bunt bowmen came within range.
Men began to drop in both armies—but in the Jotan