The Pool

deep in the swamp they found the legendary waters, potent and magical enough to craze men with a wild greed to drink—and to kill

Behind their Clumsy Skiff in the red torchlight—late afternoon was black and shadowy as deep twilight in the swamp—the sluggish green reeds rose once more above the brackish waters, masking their wake almost before it could form. Francisco found he was not surprised at the unwonted silence of his men, the silence in which the slow gurgling sounds of their passage could be heard in moist distinctness; even the sucking squelch of the long pole by which the bronze-fleshed native propelled their dangerously shallow craft seemed loud as a whiplash. He felt the strange urge to silence, himself. Something about the place enforced tongues—even the necessity for breathing—to scant employment, like a dark-on-darkness edict hanging before their faces in the gloom.

When the prow of the low-slung boat suddenly scraped upon sand, Francisco was incredulous at first; they had not drifted more than two miles from the main camp, he was certain. The trip, which he had assumed would last well into the time of actual nightfall—if indeed one could tell night from anything other than noon in these shadowed regions—was over, now, in less than an hour's journey.

"Wait!" he urged his men, as he sensed the latency of eager motion in their tensed bodies. There was a murmur, but no man moved from his place. There were four men besides Francisco himself: Gonzales, the youngest, and least battle-scarred of the ambition-ridden conquistadors under his command, with Lola—an oyster-eyed, rag-feathered, ancient parrot—digging her claws into the cuff of the youth's heavy leather gauntlet; Rivera, a thin, short man with a small pointed beard jutting out defiantly over the strap of his iron helmet, and eyes like cold rapier blades; Gregorio—"Gollo" to his fellow soldiers— a thickset, amiable clown; and Rafael, tall, broad, garnet-eyed, who swaggered and drank and charmed the women like the French cavalier he so resembled.

Francisco did not deign to count the fifth man. When he had done his job, he would die.

Only on the orders of the expeditionary commander (continued on page 174)The Pool(continued from page 93) himself had Francisco stayed his hand this long. Their guide, discovered musing among the charred ruins of a native village long after the last of its inhabitants had been driven into the swamps before the Hashing swords of the armored soldiers, had been perilously near death and despoilment of his negotiable finery, and then——

The native interpreter had whispered urgently into the ear of the commander, a harsh order was shouted in time, and the soldiers had reluctantly drawn back, leaving their proud-visaged victim unharmed. Then there had been much palavering, via the interpreter, and Francisco had been issued his strict orders. The native was not to be molested, not to be robbed. Not yet. Not until he had served his purpose.

Igniting the pitch-tipped knob of his own torch from the one borne by Rafael, Francisco was careful to bear it aloft in his left hand as they debarked, his right always ready to draw his sword in the event that their native guide was in the practice of one of the subtle treacheries common to his breed. Treacheries that had lately betrayed many an expedition before this one, until the Spanish soldiers razed a village or so with steel, gunpowder and fire in terrible reprisal.

The land upon which they finally inched forward, uncomfortably warm in their metal breastplates and tight leggings, was a long island, a surprisingly high mass of land in the swamp that otherwise could boast but a hump of dry earth to the square mile.

Francisco was moving almost at a trot when they came to the summit of the slope and saw before them a legend realized. For one insane moment, Francisco's hand moved toward the strap of his helmet, to remove it, as he would have in a cathedral, or a hallowed wayside shrine. One inch the fingers moved, then not a fraction farther. With himself, Francisco could be even more harsh than with his men. Self-control, mastery of one's own instincts, was imperative in a leader of men.

The native had stepped to one side, his lined face impassive, his arms folded across his naked chest. He did not look toward the armored soldiers who had dogged his pace up the slope. Beside the rippling pool he stood in the dancing torchlight, saying nothing, even his breathing imperceptible, as though he were as much solid stone as the natural basin at his feet, at whose spray-flecked rim the five men hovered, in slack-jawed, lip-working silence, none of them for a moment capable of coherent speech.

Beyond the small, natural-rock basin in which the clear waters plashed and rang, with a sound like small silver chimes, a wall of flat-faced rock arose, taller than a man, black as the night itself. It was from a fissure halfway up this bare wall that the fountain originated, gushing forth in a frothing white arc, cold and clean and beautiful, and dashing eternally into the basin carved there before it, ages long gone, by the brunt of its own relentless effluence. Around the fissure, etched by the crude instruments of skilled men—perhaps the ancestors of their guide; even his lineal forebears— was the likeness of a face ... It was a discomfiting face, not quite human, not quite demon. And these ancient artisans had arranged their sculpture so that the fissure was drawn into their work, its V-shaped gaping orifice having been polished and trimmed and blended within the face so that the hurtling waters seemed to burst like crystalline largess from its smiling lips.

"It is almost," Francisco said, not realizing he spoke his thought aloud, "as though the face had been carved first— and then by some evil miracle began to speak its message of life, its words of water, its magical mercy... "

"Dare we drink, my captain?" said a voice beside him.

Francisco, pulling his mind from its own uneasy introspections, turned to see the face of Gollo beside him, the clownish face abruptly amusing in the midst of the sudden shock at so easily reaching what had seemed a virtually unattainable goal. Francisco found he could still chuckle. "Not yet, my eager friend," he said.

"We will make certain there is no danger, first. Our guide's shall be the first libation." He turned toward the stolid form of the native guide—and found bare rock, silent shadows and the undisturbed foliage. With a cry of cheated rage, Francisco whipped his sword from its sheath so that the blade whistled through the air, and led his men forward into the tangled thicket in search of the runaway.

They sought for an hour. The native was not to be found. Yet the skiff awaited their use where it had been abandoned.

"He must have waded off into the swamp," Francisco had to admit, when he and his men gathered once more at the stone basin. "He's been pulled down by quicksand, or is in the stomach of some wild beast by now. Never mind him. Our task is yet before us." He looked to his youthful lieutenant. "Gon-zales—where is Lola?"

The young man had forgotten the old parrot in the haste and excitement of the chase. Now, searching with great care, he found the sluggish bird in the shadow of a bush, too lazy to fly away, so long had it been in the company of men, its needs taken care of, its appetites calcified by age. It hopped obediently back upon the youth's gauntlet when he pushed his wrist hard enough against its wrinkled-looking green-feathered belly, and he brought it back to Francisco.

"How many years would you say this bird has lived?" said the captain.

"Twice the number of an old man's," replied Gonzales promptly. "It is even said Lola was one of the animals taken by Noah upon the ark. I know no way to disprove the tale."

Francisco smiled. "Then before we fill our flasks, or try the waters ourselves, we shall have Lola drink. If she survives it, and if she should become what she must —if the legend be true—then, and then only, shall we drink."

Gonzales hurried to obey. Lola, reluctant as always, finally clacked her tattered beak in weak protest at being held so stiffly about the neck, and began to lap with her ugly gray tongue at the water of the pool. Croaking vile phrases in her brainless avian rasp, she hopped from the cuff of the gauntlet to the branch of a nearby low-limbed tree, and began—rather irritably—to preen herself.

"Well?" said Gonzales, turning to his superior.

"We will wait awhile more,' said Francisco, part of his mind on his present task of observation, but most of it dwelling angrily upon the escape of the native, who should have died slowly, with many an artistic touch of torture, at his hands. Time seemed to slow its pace, to scuff its toes in unhurried, laggard passage. On the branch, Lola preened with abruptly increased vigor. Then, "Look!" said Francisco, overcome with joy.

The oyster-dull eyes were now sharp beads of jet in the parrot's face; its beak was ragged no longer; its gold-and-green feathers had a new firmness, neatness, luster. "Lola——" said Gonzales, stepping toward the bird and extending his gauntleted wrist. The parrot gave a cry, the proud cry of an untamed animal, and, flapping suddenly strong pinions, soared to a higher branch, provocatively just beyond reach.

"The ancients be praised!" said Francisco. "The legend spoke true! This is indeed the fabulous Fountain of Youth!" His mind glittered with the gold he would receive from a profoundly grateful Ponce de Leon when he and his men—flasks brim full of the magical waters—returned in triumph to the main camp, hardly an hour's journey away through the swamp.

Gonzales, with an incoherent cry of elation, threw himself prone upon the earth, and whipped off his helmet before bending his face to the surface of the pool, his lips sucking hungrily at the chill draughts of clear, clean liquid. "Have you not youth enough already!?" mocked his captain, but then he and the others were dropping almost prayerfully to the ground and following Gonzales' example.

When the orgy of sucking and choking and swallowing was over, Francisco lay on his back in the dimness—the torches guttered noisily, lying lengthwise upon the rock where they had been carelessly dropped and forgotten—and gave the belated order that the flasks be filled, then belched up the bubbles of air he had swallowed with the cooling drink, and sighed in contentment. Lazily, he looked once again for Lola, but she was not to be seen. "Probably," he told himself with anticipatory relish, "she has found some of the old desires along with her reborn youth! A pity," he chuckled, "if there are no birds of her own species in this accursed swamp ... "He found the notion amusing enough to pass on to his men. He turned his head —and they were not to be seen.

Francisco rose to his feet, a nagging fear lying like ice inside his belly. And then he saw the armor, and the empty leggings, and the fallen gauntlets, and stepped back in dismay. The heel of his boot, where it should have met barren rock, stepped into something soft, slimy and sickeningly viscous. He yanked his foot away, automatically, and turned to see what lay there upon the ground. Spreading a thick, opaque liquid from the torn yolk, the shell-less egg lay there before him, half its gluey volume still clinging, quivering, to his boot. He looked upward to the branch upon which Lola had been perched, and knew the ghastly truth at last.

Then, like a madman he ran down the slope, until the armor became too brutal a burden for his shrinking, boyish shoulders. Mere moments later, he was reduced enough in size to crawl on soft pink hands and uncallouscd knees out of the neck-hole of the breastplate itself, screaming through his toothless gums as his body continued to pass through gestation in swift reverse.

And then a shadow fell across his path, a shadow which swam into solidity before his uncontrolled infant eyes, and the last sight that met his blurring gaze was the face of the squatting native guide, no longer stoic and inscrutable. The lips grinned like those on the face of the stone demon he so closely resembled.