Polaris and the Goddess Glorian

by Charles B. Stilson

At their right was the tossing blue and white of a harbor large enough to have given shelter to the ships of all the navies of the world, could they have come to it. Nearly three miles in width and length it lay, the whole girt round by the ring of a lofty mountain wall, in which on the seaward side there was not a notch or a break. Two hundred feet up from the water's edge the sheer cliffs towered, their faces smooth and precipitous.

It was more a lake than a harbor that held the navy of Bel-Ar. Later the Americans learned that its only entrance from the sea was a natural tunnel many feet below the level of the water, through which the fademes passed out and in. The harbor was the giant cup or crater of a volcano, ages quenched.

Along the wharves of stone and anchored in the lake rocked the fademes of the Maeronican fleet, each one resembling nothing so much as a monstrous goldfish carrying a glass tower on its back. Gold they were, indeed—and they shimmered and glittered in the sunlight as only gold can glitter.

Like immense, flattened globes the fademes were fashioned—globes forty feet through their lengthened axes, and drawn to points at their stems and sterns. Where the dorsal fin of a fish projects from its spine, each fademe bore a small, round deckhouse with ribs of metal and sides of polished crystal.

Yes; the harbor of Adlaz was very like a vast bowl with many goldfish (the fleet of fademes must have numbered one hundred and fifty). But they were far from being the harmless toys of children, these golden ships of the underseas. Deadly enspine, each fademe bore a small, round bee sent forth on cruel errands.

On the dancing surface of the lake and in and out among the gleaming fademes plied a number of small open boats, driven by oarsmen, and here and there in the anchorage were scattered undersea craft of a make smaller by half and more slender than the fademes. These were called marizels.

Back of the quays and the wharves was a line of low buildings of black and red stone, well constructed, with doors of wood and glass windows. Except that their architecture was quaint and ran much to carved faces of men and beasts, interspersed with squat domes and spires, they might have been the warehouses of some well-to-do port of the old world.

An open space, a number of acres in extent, lay beyond the buildings and reached to the frowning face of the cliff-wall. The wall itself was pierced by a broad arch or tunnel wide enough for a squadron of cavalry to have ridden through it abreast and so high that a galleon's masts would not have touched its vaulted roof.

Above the center of the arch, and carved in the rock of the cliffside, was a great round face, many feet across. It was a piece of sculpture to crook the fingers of a miser; for it was covered with beaten gold, so that it resembled a rising sun. That semblance was heightened further by long shafts or rays which extended from the face across the surface of the rock in all directions. They, too, were of gold. Work of a master-sculptor, it was, who had guided his chisel in bold, strong strokes. The features were noble, but the smiling lips were cruel, and there was cruelty in the golden eyes which looked down on the golden ships in the harbor.

All these things Polaris saw from the forward deck of the fademe, and more. The quays and the court were black with people. At one side of the archway was drawn up a line of horsemen clad in steel armor. In the midst of the throng in the court a man in a yellow tunic and cap was cleaving his way through the press toward the wharf on a big black horse.