The Enchantress of World's End

The vortex faded and was gone. Now there was nothing behind them but empty leagues of long grass blowing in the wind.

The hour was early morning, he assumed, from the dewy freshness of the air and the cold, wet touch of the nodding plumes of grass that brushed against his bare knees. The sun was a dim, faint red-gold disk at the very edge of the world, in the direction he presumed to be the east.

Ganelon had not the faintest notion of where the hyperspatial tube had deposited them, and he said as much to Grrff when the Tigerman, looking puzzled, inquired.

“Well, wherever we are, it doesn’t look like Dwarfland, or the domain of the Red Bitch,” growled the Karjixian. “But where are we—and why did we come out here?”

“Nor does it look like Ning, or Holy Horx, or the country of the Chxians,” mused Silvermane. “And it certainly isn’t any part of the Hegemony, or the Voormish Desert, or even Karjixia! In fact, the only country I’ve ever heard of that’s supposed to look anything like this is the Purple Plain itself—”

“The Purple Plain?” grumbled the ‘Hgerman, wrinkling his snout distastefully. “Isn’t that where the Indigons are supposed to herd? Why would the Labyrinth let us out here? Why, it’s way up north, isn’t it? Grrffs heard tell of it before.”

Ganelon nodded, his face expressionless, black eyes moody.

“What did the Old Dragon say? Something about *your friends will be getting anxious about you,’ or words to that effect. I don’t know about your friends, but mine ought to be back in Chx, or flying around Dwarfland and the Land of Red Magic, hunting for me; at least, I presume the Dragon was talking about my master, Xarda and that prince fellow. But if this is the Purple Plain, it’s way up north as you said, beyond Yombok and all those countries. I can’t imagine why master would come here … we were on our way to the kingdom of Jemmerdy, really.”

“And Jemmerdy is down south, next to Parvania,” muttered the Tigerman. “Well … here we are, and here we’re going to stay, Grrfr” guesses! The question is—not why we got transported here—but what we’re supposed to do now that we are here?”

They looked around, without any ideas in particular. For as far as the eye could see in any direction, there was nothing else to be seen, except league on league of blowing grass rippling under the invisible caress of the wind. The sky which arched above them was as empty as the plain whereon they stood. Gold and crimson appeared in the direction they assumed to be the east; the sky was still dark purple directly overhead, but gradually the flush of rosy dawn illuminated the dome of heaven.

“All I can suggest is to go south,” Ganelon confessed after some moments of silent cogitation. “South of here, somewhere, is Jemmerdy. And if my master has given up trying to find me, that’s where he would go. We were taking Xarda home. Xarda is one of those lady knights they have in Jemmerdy … you know, that’s the country where the men are all artists, and intellectuals, and the women do the hard work and the fighting.”

Griff nodded; he had heard of Jemmerdy.

“So … if that’s east, which it must be, then back there must be south. And we might as well get started, as we have a lot of walking to do. It’ll be easier in early morning, before the heat of the day comes upon us …”

Phadia had contributed exactly nothing to this desultory conversation. The boy was too busy looking around at this newness, and anyway, he was accustomed to leaving all of the decisions in his life to grown-ups. Since leaving the hothouse atmosphere of the Pueratormm, in which everything always remained exactly the same and nothing was ever different or particularly exciting, the lad had gone through a remarkable series of strange, marvelously new experiences. He regarded the whole thing as a lark, a spree: it was, in fact, the first real holiday he had ever known, and he was enjoying it enormously.

Just standing here like this, up to your tummy in damp grass, was new and strange and therefore, exciting to him. Whatever was going to happen next was a matter of complete indifference to him. If his new friends wanted to march south all day, well, he would march along with them as best he could.

Blue clear sky … red-and-gold sunrise … empty expanses of cool, dewy grass … he was eagerly determined to enjoy everything. The decisions were made by the grown-ups; which was, he thought to himself in a satisfied way, the way things ought to be.

So they started walking south.

The city caught up to them before they had been walking for a half-hour. Phadia had been the first to glimpse it, moving swiftly and almost silently across the plains. His companions had regarded it with great amazement, for even on Old Earth’s last and mightiest continent, in these days of the Twilight of Time, a City that moved along overland all by itself was an object of considerable rarity.

At first, they simply continued along the way they had been heading before the weird, hovering metal metropolis appeared on the horizon. And at first the City moved in a straight line, evidently following a course which ran divergent to their own.

But before very long the City turned about and came towards them, and they realized they had been seen or sensed by whatever creatures might be the inhabitants of the futuristic mobile metropolis. They began to run, but in a little while they abandoned this attempt as futile. It became obvious that the Mobile City could traverse the Purple Plains many times faster than could they.