The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  And so, Verrill went to do as he had to do.

  * * * *

  The space-freighter veered from her course only a little; instead of landing in the sun-blasted plain at the foot of the mountains into which Verrill was to go, she launched a crew-boat which took him to the trading-post at the foot of barren limestone bulwarks.

  Dawson was not at the post. But while a head start was a happy omen, Verrill knew that it had its limits, since his plan to ingratiate himself with the barbarians until he could seize the fetish-ruby and return to the post involved so much time that the gain of hours or days meant little.

  Ingratiate himself—steal the Fire of Skanderbek—and get out—infinitely simpler than Linda’s suggestion, probably an utterly impossible one, of deserving it finally as a gift. His first look at the bearded mountaineers convinced him that no amount of do-gooding could ever move them to gratitude.

  Those lounging in the compound of the fortified trading-post wore homespun pants and sheepskin jackets. They fairly clanked with trade daggers, trade pistols, and trade hatchets; some carried trade muskets, and some had the new repeating rifles. Their tanned and hairy faces and bitter eyes made it plain that looting and robbing, brawling and mayhem and murder were their very breath of life.

  They spoke the international language which had developed sufficiently to come into common use around 2200 A.D. English, while a nightmare of contradictions to baffle a foreigner, had offered these advantages: next to Chinese, no other language was so free of inflections; and it could so readily assimilate all manner of foreign words. Thus, since the tone-deaf Occidental had not been able to master the simplicities of Chinese or other Mongolian tongues, the Asiatics had taken up English, with which had been blended Arabic, Urdu, Malay, and a good deal of Western European; and, while seven centuries of Venusian isolation had made the speech of the people of the Domes diverge from the original international Terrestrian, Verrill had not too much difficulty in making himself understood.

  “This black bag,” he told a group of the caravan men, “will interest Ardelan—that’s your chief’s name, isn’t it? Let me go into the mountains with you to talk to him.”

  “You’re crazy,” a craggy faced fellow with drooping moustaches and hard blue eyes told him, levelly. “You think I’m crazy.”

  Verrill laid out three daggers. He picked one up, jabbed it into the top of a table cluttered with heaps of goatskins, dried apricots, raisins, and bags of coriander seed. He bent the weapon until the grip touched the table top. He released it. It snapped straight up, with a fine, high pitched spang. He plucked a dagger from the mountaineer’s belt, drew the other weapon from the table, and slashed them edge to edge.

  He cut shavings from the mountaineer’s weapon. Then he stropped his own blade on the palm of his hand for a couple of strokes, and next ran it along his arm. The hairs toppled as he cut them free; there was no drag at all, the edge was so keen.

  “Mine are not trade daggers,” he said. “Bet you the three that Ardelan will listen to me, and not throw me out.”

  The Terrestrian’s eyes gleamed. “What do I put up for a bet?”

  “A pair of those boots you’re wearing. Put my knives in your belt now. If I lose my bet, they’re yours. If I win, you’re welcome to them anyway.”

  So the caravan men fitted him out with garments and boots like their own; and Verrill went into the mountains with them.

  CHAPTER II

  The trail snaked along precipices and wound past narrow, hidden valleys. At the foot of a cliff lay the shell of a space-cruiser which had been telescoped from its original six-hundred feet to a bare two-hundred, though much of the nose had melted from the impact against the rocks. Gnarled oaks and junipers reached up from a riven seam of the shell. The metal had not rusted. It was merely tarnished to a slate gray. It was a mine of such metal as could have furnished all manner of implements for the Terrestrians—but they did not know how to exploit it

  Finally, Verrill was looking down into narrow, upland meadows where sheep grazed. There were barley patches. His eyes felt as though they were full of sand. The snow-white glare from cliffs, and the dust which rose in yellow puffs at every step, made the way a torment for one accustomed to the paradisiacal clime of the Venusian Domes.

  Each day’s march brought the donkey-caravan within sight of alternate trails, guarded by mud-brick towers, where armed men were stationed to watch the moves of hostile neighbors. The return, even without pursuit, would be dangerous.

  At last they came to Ardelan’s mud-walled houses, huddled on a rocky shelf which overhung a fertile valley. The settlement was surrounded by a wall of earth and stone, and had escaped contamination because no one would have bombed a 12,000 foot range of limestone peaks except by mistake.

  When the trading convoy filed into the tangle of flat-roofed houses which surrounded a hard-packed central square, women, children, and dogs came out, each in full voice. The procession kept straight on toward the entrance of a two-storeyed building. Half the ground-level was a stable; the rest, a courtyard where Ardelan and a handful of armed companions lolled under an awning of black goat-hair.

  Terrestrian faces were no novelty to Verrill; but this time, being a stranger among them—instead of merely a spectator seeing a handful of them, half defiant and half uneasy in the strangeness of a trading-post—he saw what he had never before noticed. They tended toward height and ranginess, prominence of nose, angularity of face; yet behind this likeness was a shadow-pattern of racial differentiation. There were differences of flavor, rather than of outright form. The flare of a nostril, the shape of an eye, the fullness or thinness of lip—a thick necked one, here and there, suggested that, generations back, there had been among his ancestors a blocky Mongol from Central Asia.

  The guards, instead of presenting Verrill, explained him as though he had been some trade article. Ardelan, listening, studied his visitor with entire impersonality, as he might have scrutinized a basket of fresh ripe apricots to see how they had endured being hauled so far.

  “What’s in the bag?” he demanded, abruptly.

  “Medicine. I am a doctor.”

  “What for? People die anyway.”

  “A doctor,” Verrill explained, concealing his dismay, “is not to keep people from dying. He is to make it more agreeable for them until they finally have to die.” Ardelan addressed his henchmen. The answers summed up to this: that if nothing much ailed a man, he’d get well by himself, and if something really incapacitated him, it would of course be something so serious that he could not last long at the best.

  Ardelan digested this wisdom, then asked, “Verrill, can you make knives like these you gave that man?”

  “I am a doctor, not a blacksmith.”

  “Can you make guns or cartridges?”

  “No.”

  “Can you fight?”

  Verrill glanced uneasily about, as though Ardelan might be on the point of selecting an opponent to test the stranger’s claims. And, having read Verrill’s face, Ardelan snorted, and not waiting for a reply, demanded, “Then what are you good for?”

  “To treat the sick,” Verrill repeated, with growing sense of futility. “To bind wounds. To set broken bones.”

  “Look at us. We’ve done very well.”

  “I can do better.”

  “Can’t work, can’t fight! Good for nothing but doctoring. Bad as a priest! Lock him up; I want to think this over.” The guard hustled Verrill and his medical case into an empty granary. They slammed the door and rolled a boulder against it. It made no difference whether or not he could shove the door open; there was nowhere to go if he did get out. He could not find his way back to the trading-post except over the way which his escort had brought him: a guarded way.

  In the half-gloom, Verrill noted that the wall had been cracked by earthquakes. These cracks gave him hand and toe holds, to climb up unt
il he could catch the rough-hewn timber which supported the roof of brush and clay. Lying on the crown of the wall, he could look out through rifts in the roof.

  Herdsmen were driving their flocks in from distant slopes. Others drove donkeys laden with brush. Verrill was appalled by the ever present evidence that Terrestrian life was a matter of digging, scratching, and enduring the elements. The stark emptiness of the sky worried him; he was accustomed to the perpetual twilight and impenetrable clouds of Venus,

  Well away from the settlement, and outside the wall, was a small, squatty cube with a small tower at each corner. The structure was backed up against an overhanging cliff, and was unapproachable except from the walled town. The precipitous ending of the shelf guarded the whitewashed cube more surely than if it had been within the town wall.

  The open doorway was so large in proportion to the structure itself that surmise made Verrill’s pulse hammer. That must be the shrine where the Fire of Skanderbek was kept.

  Toward dusk, drums rumbled and trumpets of ram’s horns bawled hoarsely. Men carrying tightly bound bundles of brush marched in procession toward the whitewashed cube, and chanted as they went. When they came to the place, they filed in, each coming out with his faggots ablaze.

  They returned to their houses. Before long, Verrill’s captors brought him a bowl of mutton stew, and leathery cakes of bread. “They couldn’t have cooked this stuff so soon,” he reasoned. “It must have been cooking all the while, on fires already lighted. That procession was fire worship.”

  He sat there a long time after he had licked the gravy from his fingers. A shocking business: meat so plentiful that it was fed to a prisoner, and yet the barbarians knew nothing at all about cookery.

  The town swarmed with flies. Vultures perched on the walls and watch-towers, waiting to clean up the garbage and offal flung from the houses. The community well had a nasty taint from surface drainage from the stables. Verrill, after a bad night’s sleep, spent the morning deciding that when pestilence did break out, he would need his medical supplies for himself.

  The women, shapely and graceful, gathered about the well to fill the earthenware jugs they carried balanced on their heads. They chattered mainly about the outsider, giving most emphasis to his looks, though devoting certain speculation to his possible usefulness, and probable destination.

  “Kwangtan,” they all agreed, “wants him killed or sent away.”

  From what he could piece together from the various relays of women he overheard, Verrill concluded that Kwangtan was the keeper of the shrine; and that medical practice was the monopoly of old women, who cooked up herbs. These potions, plus Kwangtan’s incantations, kept the community in health.

  The drowsy silence of mid-afternoon was broken by an hysterical screeching and screaming. Before Verrill could arouse himself from the stupor of half suffocation, the door was jerked open and several men pounced for him.

  “You, with the medicine! Work for you. Bring the black box!”

  They hustled him to a house where several old women were shaking and back-slapping a boy of three or four. The kid’s mother, one of the few redheads in the colony, was wailing at a pitch that made Verrill shiver. A beetle-browed young man with a wiry beard squatted on the floor, looking helpless. All he did was repeat, “Get Kwangtan!” And no one paid him any heed at all.

  At the sight of Verrill, one of the old women laid the child on a sheepskin spread on the floor. The child’s face was gray. His lips were bluish. His eyes bugged out. He wheezed agonizingly. It made Verrill’s skin twitch, just to see the little fellow’s losing battle for breath. He was slowly choking. With all voices suddenly stilled at Verrill’s approach, the sound became all the more ominous.

  In his utter perplexity and dismay, Verrill hoped that what he heard was the death-rattle which would relieve him of the task about to be forced upon him. The absence of Kwangtan, the holy man, told him the story: that wise fellow was not going to lose any prestige by tackling something he could not handle.

  “What’s wrong?” Verrill asked, with a show of assurance.

  “You’re a doctor,” the kid’s father snarled. “Do something.”

  “He swallowed an apricot seed,” the child’s red-haired mother said. “It’s stuck, we can’t shake it out, he’s choking. Get it out, you blinking fool!”

  The kid’s father drew and cocked his pistol. The dry click chilled Verrill to the heart. He remembered an old story of an emergency operation at a trading-post. The yarn had given the Venusians quite a thrill.

  Ardelan stalked in. He nodded his approval of the man who had a pistol trained on the doctor. “Stranger, do not make any mistakes. Kwangtan has warned us.”

  Verrill had a raft of Venusian specifics for just about every known ailment; he had counted, however, on nothing of the sort which now confronted him—had looked forward simply to giving the savages pills, and swabbing them with antiseptics. As he knelt, he fumbled helplessly with the instruments in the case.

  “Do this right,” Ardelan said. “Or he shoots.”

  Verrill loaded a hypo with a local anesthetic. The glint of metal, and the sudden end of the child’s gagging as the injection stilled his struggles, nearly cost Verrill his life. Ardelan’s big hand knocked the pistol out of line as it blazed, and the slug scorched Verrill’s cheek and pounded a chunk out of the wall.

  “He’s not dead,” the chief said, “Not yet.”

  A splash of antiseptic.

  Then, nerving himself, Verrill made a slit in the throat. There was not much blood. He got the apricot seed free. With haggling jabs, he took a couple of stitches. He taped and bandaged.

  Then, shoulders sagging, he settled back, trying to keep from toppling to the floor. The kid’s lips were no longer bluish. He was breathing freely. At last he blinked, cried out, and reached for his throat.

  “He’s brought him back to life!” the redhead cried, and snatched up the boy.

  Verrill crumpled. He toppled, and sprawled. He was, however, conscious, and when he heard what the mountaineers were saying he realized that had he done it intentionally, he could not have done better than collapse.

  One said, “He’s left his body for awhile to fight off the devils, so they won’t come back to hurt the kid.”

  Verrill muttered and mumbled until, satisfied that his act had been up to their expectation, he sat up. Again, he faced a pistol, but this time it was presented butt foremost.

  “Take it, doctor. It’s yours,” the kid’s father said.

  And now Kwangtan, the fire priest, joined the group.

  His deep-set eyes blazed fiercely. His face was sunken. His hands were like parchment drawn over bones. He wore white pants and a white shirt. His beard and his shoulder-length hair were white. For a moment, Verrill thought that the old fellow was a veteran of The War. His age made him fantastic in a colony where men over forty were scarce, and those over fifty, rarities; though old women were more than plentiful.

  Verrill declined the gift of the pistol. “Give it to the holy man,” he said. “I did not come here for pay.”

  Then he went with Ardelan to sit under the black awning where the chief settled disputes, and planned raids on neighboring tribes.

  “Excellency,” Verrill pointed out, “holding a pistol at a doctor’s head is no way of making sure he’ll help the patient.”

  “You are a stranger. You might have killed him with a curse.”

  “He was already nearly dead.”

  “But he was still alive, and you might have finished him.”

  “He must have known I’d do my best.”

  “Still, if the boy had died, that clan would have lost a fighting man, so your clan had to lose. That is our law.”

  “Is that why Kwangtan wouldn’t help?”

  “Not at all. He’s not a stranger. And if the women who were working on the boy had kept a
t it until he choked to death, no one would have hurt them. They’re not strangers.”

  “The quicker I get out of here, the better!”

  Ardelan permitted himself to smile. “Once you are no longer a stranger, doctoring will not be so dangerous.”

  CHAPTER III

  As Ardelan’s reserve thawed out, Verrill pressed him with questions. “Your men talk about nothing but raids on your neighbors’ flocks, and about feuds. Haven’t you enough sheep?”

  “Doctor, you know how to save lives, but you know nothing at all about living.”

  Ardelan pointed toward the gateway, which opened from courtyard to the square. Half a dozen women, high-breasted and long-limbed, were gossiping at the well. Their wild gracefulness was blood-stirring. Verrill contrasted them with the studiedly elegant ladies of Venus, and with Linda particularly.

  “We have enough sheep, and enough women,” the chief explained. “The sheep don’t make trouble. The women do. If my men are not to cut each other’s throats, they must have outside enemies to keep them busy. Or the jealousies of their wives would prod them to too much competition with each other.”

  Thinking back to his quarrel with Gil Dawson, Verrill had to concede Ardelan’s point and principle. And then he got back to the perils of being a stranger. The following day, he proposed, “Let me take part in the fire ceremony of an evening. In that way, I won’t be a stranger so long.”

  The chief got up, presently, and clapped his hands. A retainer came forward with two horses. They were hammer-headed, shaggy, Roman-nosed, and with fierce eyes. The saddles were sheep-skin pads. There were no stirrups.

  Verrill said, “Excellency, you ride. I’ll walk.”

  They set out for the shrine. Meanwhile, half a dozen horsemen came in from the other end of the shelf. One, overtaking Verrill and the chief, slowed down enough to exchange a hail, and then pressed on. Before they came to the shrine, the rider had finished his business with Kwangtan, and was leaving.