The Last Hieroglyph (63 page)

1. Anthony Boucher, letter to CAS, August 10, 1957 (ms, JHL).

The Dart of Rasasfa

W
e wish that we could say that Clark Ashton Smith’s final story was one of his best, that he went out at the top of his game, but we regret that we cannot. “The Dart of Rasasfa” was commissioned by Cele Goldsmith, editor of
Fantastic
, a digest-sized magazine that under her direction published a great deal of high-quality fantasy, including some of Fritz Leiber’s best tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Smith was supposed to write a story around a cover by artist George Barr. According to Donald Sidney-Fryer, Smith completed the story in July 1961. Smith was in ill health during that period, having been exhausted both physically and emotionally when he was forced by legal order to have a bulldozer fill in the well that he had helped his father dig years earlier. Steve Behrends quotes Carol Smith’s unpublished memoir, reporting that the story’s Gernsbackian flavor was meant to be ironic. After reading the manuscript of this story, Goldsmith wrote to Forrest J. Ackerman, who was acting as Smith’s agent, expressing her regrets in having to decline what would turn out to be Smith’s last story:

If you read it, I think you can understand why it puts us in the embarrassing position of having to return it. There is no story, no plot, nothing. It would be an injustice to Smith fans and to the magazine audience to think of printing this. It would only detract from the wonderful stories he has written in the past and from the excellent reputation that is attached to his name.

These remarks were written on August 15, 1961. Smith had died from a stroke the previous day, so he never knew that the story was rejected.

1.
SS
252–254.

2. Cele Goldsmith, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, August 15, 1961 (ms, private collection).

A
PPENDIX
T
WO:
V
ARIANT
T
EMPTATION
S
CENES FROM “
T
HE
W
ITCHCRAFT OF
U
LUA”

Version I (Rejected by
Weird Tales
)

“T
here are other things than the pouring of wine for a sottish monarch, or the study of worm-eaten volumes,” said Ulua in a voice like molten honey. “Sir Cupbearer, your youth should have a better employment than these.”

“I ask no other employment,” replied Amalzain. “But tell me, O princess, what is your will? Why has your serving-woman brought me here in a fashion so unseemly?”

“I would have you for my lover,” said Ulua. “Behold! my arms are the portals of untold raptures and felicities. The pleasures I give are keener than the pangs of a fiery death. The dead kings of Tasuun will whisper enviously of our love to their dead queens in the immemorial granite vaults below Chaon Gacca. Thaisadon, the black, shadowy lord of hell, hearing the tale that his demons bring to him of us, will wish to become incarnate in a mortal body.”

“Nonetheless, I cannot love you,” said Amalzain. (
Typescript ends at this point
)

Version III (Published by
Weird Tales
)

“There are other things than the pouring of wine for a sottish monarch, or the study of worm-eaten volumes,” said Ulua in a voice that was like the flowing of hot honey. “Sir cup-bearer, your youth should have a better employment than these.”

“I ask no employment, other than my duties and studies,” replied Amalzain ungraciously. “But tell me, O princess, what is your will? Why has your serving-woman brought me here in a fashion so unseemly?”           

“For a youth so erudite and clever, the question should be needless,” answered Ulua, smiling obliquely. “See you not that I am beautiful and desirable? Or can it be that your perceptions are duller than I had thought?”

“I do not doubt that you are beautiful,” said the boy, “but such matters hardly concern a humble cup-bearer.”

The vapors, mounting thickly from golden thuribles before the couch, were parted with a motion as of drawn draperies; and Amalzain lowered his gaze before the enchantress, who shook with a soft laughter that made the jewels upon her bosom twinkle like living eyes.

“It would seem that those musty volumes have indeed blinded you,” she told him. “You have need of that euphrasy which purges the sight. Go now: but return presently—of your own accord.”

A
PPENDIX
T
HREE:
“
T
HE
T
RAVELER”

(Dedicated to V.H.)

“S
tranger, where goest thou, in the sad raiment of a pilgrim, with shattered sandals retaining the dust and mire of so many devious ways? With thy brows that alien suns have darkened, and thy hair made white from the cold rime of alien moons? Wanderest thou in search of the cities greater than Rome, with walls of opal and crystal, and fanes more white than the summer clouds, or the foam of hyperboreal seas? Or farest thou to the lands unpeopled and unexplored, to the sunless deserts lit by the baleful and calamitous beacons of volcanoes? Or seekest thou an extremer shore, where the red and monstrous lilies are like a royal pageant, pausing with innumerable flambeaux held aloft on the verge of the waveless waters?”

“Nay, it is none of these that I seek, but forevermore I seek the city and the land of my former home: In the quest thereof I have wandered from the first, immemorable years of my youth till now, and have mingled the dust of many realms, of many highways, in my garments’ hem. I have seen the cities greater than Rome, and the fanes more white than the clouds of summer; the lands unpeopled and unexplored, and the land that is thronged by the red and monstrous lilies. Even the far, aerial walls of the cities of mirage, and the saffron meadows of sunset I have seen, but nevermore the city and land of my former home.”

“Where lieth the land of thine home? And by what name shall we know it, and distinguish the rumour thereof, among the rumours of many lands?”

“Alas! I know not where it lieth: nor in the broad, black scrolls of geographers, and the charts of old seamen who have sailed to the marge of the seventh sea, is the place thereof recorded. And its name I have never learned, howbeit I have learned the name of empires lying beneath stars to us invisible. In many languages have I spoken, in barbarous tongues unknown to Babel; and I have heard the speech of many men, even of them that inhabit the strange isles of the sea of fire and the sea of snow. Thunder, and lutes, and battle-drums, the unceasing querulousness of gnats, and the stupendous moaning of the simoon; lyres of ebony damascened with crystal, bells of malachite with golden clappers, the song of exotic birds that sigh like women or sob like fountains; whispers and shoutings of fire, the multitudinous mutter of cities asleep, the manifold tumult of cities at dawn, and the slow and weary murmur of desert-wandering streams—all, all have I heard, but never, in any place, from any tongue, a word or syllable that resembled in the least the name I would learn.”

A
PPENDIX
F
OUR:
M
ATERIAL
R
EMOVED FROM
“
T
HE
B
LACK
A
BBOT OF
P
UTHUUM”

T
he girl, whose name was Rubalsa, dwelt, being parentless, with her grandmother in a village beside the Vos. Regarding her with the shrewd eye of one whose business was the study of women, Simban at once conceived the idea that Rubalsa was no daughter of that outland race. The women of the herders were all swarthy, and, in their youth, most of them were inclined to a not ungainly fatness. But Rubalsa was slender and of queenly height, and her skin was pale as the petals of white poppies, and the undulant blackness of her heavy hair was full of sullen copper gleamings beneath the sun. The eunuch had seen such girls before, but none of them had come from the valleys of the Vos.

[…]

At last the bargain was driven and the price paid, to the sore depletion of Simban’s money-bag. Afterward, to satisfy his own curiosity, the eunuch questioned the old woman as to Rubalsa’s true parentage. She, fearing that a contrary admission might nullify her right to the money, repeated at first her claim that Rubalsa was the child of her own son, the herder Olot, now dead together with his wife. Simban, perceiving her apprehension, quickly reassured her. He tempted her with a few additional coins, and a leather bottle filled with palm-arrack which he had brought along for his own solacement; and she then told him that Olot, while watering his kine at eventide, had once found a small barge that the lazily flowing Vos had stranded in the mud of the drinking-place; and in the barge was a girl-infant, swaddled with rich fabrics of unknown weave and pattern. Olot had taken the infant home, and he and his wife, being childless, had reared her as their own daughter; and as such she had commonly been regarded. And this infant, in the course of eighteen summers, had grown to be the strange and lovely maiden, Rubalsa.

In proof of her story, the crone brought out the swaddling clothes, which were of fine purple linen broidered with yellow and scarlet silk. She also displayed to Simban a queer amulet of green-zoned jasponyx which Olot had found hanging about the infant’s neck. This amulet was carved with the grotesquely grinning profile of the god Yuckla, patron of mirth and laughter. The weft and pattern of the swaddlings and the workmanship of the amulet were not unfamiliar to Simban, and they confirmed his suspicions regarding the girl’s nativity. He persuaded the crone to part with those tokens and promptly stored them in a great leather pouch which he carried at all times together with the money-bag at his girdle. He wished to show them to Hoaraph, thinking that the mystery of such matters would add another seduction to Rubalsa’s natural charms, and would serve to titivate the somewhat captious desires of the king.

[When the party reaches the monastery they meet another guest, a man in a broidered cloak, who passes out from drink. The following portion occurs at the end of the story after Zobal and Cushara draw lots for Rubalsa.]

An unexpected interruption occurred at that moment, for the man in the broidered cloak, whose very existence all had temporarily forgotten, appeared suddenly from the ruins and accosted Zobal. He seemed as one lost and bewildered, and plainly his bemazement was not wholly due to the after-effects of the heavy potations that had overcome him at the monastery table.

“Surely I have dreamed a strange dream,” he said. “Methought that I came to an abbey in the waste, after losing my way in a weird untimely darkness. I was entertained too well by the abbot and his monks, and fell asleep after sundry draughts of their strong amber-brown ale. But I awakened beneath the moon, in a foul pit with crumbling walls, where human bones and fragments of putrefying members were littered about me, like the leavings of a feast of ghouls. I climbed from the pit by a broken stair, to find myself amid this ancient ruin, to which I cannot remember coming.”

Zobal recounted succinctly the events of the night, and added, “Thou art fortunate, for mayhaps the fiend Ujuk had intended thee for his ghoulish repast when he had done playing the incubus.”

“Scarcely can I credit thy tale,” said the stranger. “Yet I seem to remember seeing thee and thy companions at the abbot’s table…. Yea, clearly I recall the girl who stands yonder, for she bears a strong likeness to one that was dear to me in the former time.”

Then, as if feeling that some further explanation was due, he went on.

“My name is Vadarth, and I hold the post of almoner to King Ilorgh of Tasuun. I am passing through Izdrel on my way to the valleys of the river Vos…. This girl reminds me of the reason of my journey: for she resembles Irali, the wife of my bosom, who died nearly nineteen years agone after giving birth to a girl-infant. The girl was stolen from me at the age of five months by a vengeful servant whom I had dismissed for certain peccadilloes. I sought long but vainly for any trace of her, and despaired at last of ever finding the child. But only a few weeks since, there came to me a man who had met the kidnapper in a far city; and the kidnapper, who was then at the point of death, had confessed to this man the stealing of my child, which he had come to repent; and he told him that he had fled into Yoros with the babe, and had set her adrift in a barge on the upper reaches of the Vos, and had known nothing of her fate thereafter.

“This tale has revived in me a dead hope: for it may be that the girl still lives. In search of her I shall follow the windings of the Vos and make inquiry among the bordering peoples.”

Cushara and Rubalsa had come forward, and they and Zobal were listening to the almoner with open wonderment.

“Verily,” exclaimed Cushara, “the marvels of this night are not yet done.” He then told Vadarth the circumstances under which he and his companions had found Rubalsa dwelling beside the Vos, and the story that Simban had extracted from the old crone as to the finding by her son Olot of the girl-baby in the barge.

“There were certain tokens that the crone gave to Simban,” interpolated Zobal. He stooped down beside the dead eunuch and began to examine the great pouch at his belt, which had been ripped open by Ujuk’s claws. A piece of embroidered cloth protruded from the rift, and pulling it forth, Zobal exhibited the swaddlings worn by the infant Rubalsa. Something that had been carefully wrapped in the folds dropped clattering on the flagstones, and before Zobal could recover it, Vadarth sank to his knees with a loud cry and held up the fallen object.

“Truly this is the amulet worn by my lost child, and those are her swaddlings,” he said in a voice that trembled. “The amulet bears an image of the god Yuckla, and I hung it about her neck to ward off the assailments of ill demons.”