The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  He circled wide, to avoid an encounter. This made Verrill uneasy. The man was dust-caked, sweat-drenched, and sagging.

  Ardelan frowned. “More trouble! That’s one of the outpost guards. I wish I could have just the right amount of raiding, and no more.”

  “He might have told you what it was about.”

  “He will, at the sunset council. But Kwangtan has to dip his long nose into everything first, or he makes trouble.”

  They got the news in a hurry.

  Standing in the entrance of the shrine, Kwangtan cursed his chief and the doctor as well. “Get that fellow out of here! He’s come to steal the Fire of Skanderbek. And you’re a fool for allowing him around here!”

  Ardelan endured the cursing until he had a chance to ask, “Have you had another vision, Holy One?”

  “The man who just rode up told me what I had already learned from the fire gods. This Verrill has promised the ruby to one of his women.”

  “Who said that?” Verrill demanded.

  “One of your own people who fly down from heaven. One called Dawson. At the trading-post. Dawson talked about you to our men, and to our neighbors.”

  “You stick to your own business,” Ardelan interposed, quietly. “He will stick to his. He is an outlaw from his own people. Naturally, his enemies try to harm him.”

  The snarling saint listened. He and Ardelan eyed each other. What unspoken thought passed between them was beyond Verrill’s guessing; yet it must have had force, for Kwangtan offered no objection when Ardelan said, “Verrill, come in with, me and bow to the flame.”

  The interior of the shrine was much larger than the front had suggested. This was because of a grotto in the overhang of the cliff. From a rift in the natural shelf of rock came hissing jets of fire. They wavered, varied, blending into each other and separating again.

  Behind the low barrier of flames was a monstrous ruby, uncut, yet a perfect hexagonal crystal, with edges clean and sharp. This was not from any alluvial deposit, else the faces would have been dulled and the edges chipped.

  Whether or not the stone had been polished, Verrill could not even surmise. At all events, this was a ruby that had come from the original matrix, the rocky birthplace of gems. It collected all the wavering light, transformed it, and poured it back again, transmuted into living red. The crystal seemed to pulsate with a life of its own.

  The beauty and the splendor made Verrill picture the Fire of Skanderbek against Linda’s white skin—and the wonder of it must have showed in his face, rather than the resolve to have the gem at any cost, for Kwangtan’s radiant hostility softened perceptibly. Verrill imitated Ardelan’s gesture and bow: and the two withdrew from the shrine.

  “I don’t doubt,” said Ardelan, once he was in the saddle, and Verrill tramping alongside, “that you’d steal it if you could get out of here with it. Don’t try it. Maybe I could—but probably I could not—save your life.”

  “You’d not try any too hard.”

  “You are wrong,” the chief countered, earnestly. “Slitting that kid’s gullet and not hurting him was something I’d never heard about. Maybe you can be useful around here.”

  “Not with what Kwangtan thinks of me.”

  “It really depends on the women—though quite a few of the men believe in the fire god.”

  “You don’t,” Verrill said, boldly. “Though you do wonder a lot about fire that comes out of a rock, with no fuel.”

  “I don’t wonder as much as you think. There’s a place, far away from here, where a blaze like that comes from the ground sometimes when a camp fire is built too near it. But the wind whisks the flames out and then there’s nothing but a smell.”

  Verrill had by now revised somewhat his notions on savages. “Then why do you put up with that wild-eyed fanatic?”

  Ardelan smiled indulgently. “You people from the outside know many strange things. How to come down from the stars. How to make guns. But the few of you I’ve talked to are dog-ignorant when it comes to people. The fire god is something our neighbors don’t have. It makes us stick together better, and keeps us from fighting among ourselves. Aren’t any of your people smart enough to have gods?”

  Verrill answered, with feigned humility, “I came to teach you people a few things but it seems I can learn something. Then it will be a fair exchange.”

  The next day, he had Ardelan send a courier to the trading-post. The man carried an order for a consignment of medical supplies to be sent from the Venusian Domes via the next freighter. There was also a letter for Linda, telling of the success of his first operation, and of Dawson’s first move to make trouble.

  “But Gil was a bit late,” he wrote. “I’d already got in pretty solid. That won’t keep him front trying something else. He must have talked a good deal before he left. If you hear any gossip as to what he planned to do or how he intended to do it, be sure and write me the details. From all I’ve seen of Terra so far, they should have bombed it even more than they did. One well organized Dome is worth a dozen Earths. But the natives don’t seem to mind a bit…”

  * * * *

  Knife and gunshot wounds and fractures, Verrill reasoned, would make up most of his practice: surgery, that is, in its engineering aspect, rather than as a corrective of ailments. And the centuries, fortunately, had worked to keep his task from being utterly beyond a well-educated layman. Whereas in the twentieth century, there had not been more than two or three specifics, there were now ten times as many. It was a matter of taking the proper bottle, just as, in ancient times, one had reached automatically for quinine, the primitive specific against malaria.

  Meanwhile, what had been his prison became his home and his dispensary. During his wait for the shipment from Venus, he instituted a garbage-disposal program. He condemned the shallow well, and had them build a wooden flume from a spring high up on the mountainside. Each radical move, however, had to wait until a cure he had effected assured him of sufficient momentary popularity to enable him to kick an ancient unsanitary practice overboard.

  Then one night came a furtive sound at his door, as though someone were trying to enter by stealth. A cold shiver trickled down his spine. Though he doubted that the fire priest was coming to dispose of him, there was all too much chance that Kwangtan had convinced one of the tribe that carving the stranger would in the long run be beneficial. Despite the warning, and Verrill’s readiness for whatever might be creeping up, he had his moment of terror. However well he handled himself, he could not win—for if he killed an intruder, there would be a blood feud.

  Groping in the dark, he found a length of firewood. He had to end the matter by knocking the other out before he could come to grips to make it a finish fight. Stealthily, he skirted the wall. He heard the soft mumble of the leather-hinged door as it dragged the hard earth. A sliver of moonlight reached into the darkness. Barefooted, Verrill made no sound as he evaded the widening streak of light. A patch of shadow broke it. A dark shape edged into the gloom. Verrill measured the distance. He gathered himself.

  He had to make sure whether there was only that one, or whether others had joined. He held his breath until his pulse hammered in his ears. The motion at the door had stopped. He was afraid to exhale—

  And then he breathed again.

  The one who approached had long hair which mirrored red glints. She had shifted enough for the moonlight to outline the curve of cheek and throat, and hint at the smoothness of shoulder and ripeness of breast. The arms were white and slender. Her stalking motion was beautiful even in the obscurity.

  There was a whisper of sandals, and of breath. She was then of a sudden close against him, and seemingly not at all surprised. It was as though she had expected him to be precisely where they met in the darkness. He must have dropped the cudgel, for at the first touch of her, he was stroking the sleek red hair, and with the other hand tracing the curve of waist and
back.

  She snuggled closer, and he said, “Falana!” as though touch and taste and smell had identified the girl as surely as sight. She was Falana, the aunt of his first patient. She wore the shapeless, crude garments of the tribe, yet it was as though there were neither homespun nor even a wisp of air between them.

  Falana had no words to waste as she found his mouth in the darkness. There was nothing to explain. When he stepped back and further into the gloom, she was close as ever; and, as if seeing in the darkness, she seemed to know exactly where he spread his sheepskin mat—

  She did know. Or else he must have remembered.

  When Falana finally got around to talking with words, she did not tell him how she had admired him from first sight, or that his surgery had been marvelous. She said, “I’ll bring my things over in the morning,” and yawned contentedly, and snuggled closer.

  * * * *

  Verrill spent a restless night, being intensely occupied in telling himself, over and over again, that Venus was a long way off, and that whatever happened on Terra did not really count, unless as a result he became embroiled in feuds on Falana’s account and to such an extent that he would be unable to make off with the Fire of Skanderbek.

  Well before dawn, Falana went to the door to get a small bundle she had left lying at the jamb. Before Verrill knew what was happening, he got his first whiff of breakfast cooked in his own home.

  “Eating with neighbors,” Falana observed, “must have been awful. And you never know who might poison you.” Watching Falana patting oat cakes into shape, and baking them on a hot rock, he began to see her as a very pleasant reality, though he could not help but go long-faced when he considered how he had without doubt inherited a few dangerous animosities as well.

  She must have read his thought, for she said, “It’s much better this way, Verrill. You haven’t more than maybe one-two-three enemies on my account. But as long as you lived alone, doctoring all day while most of the men are out with the flocks, they’d all be suspecting and hating you.”

  There was nothing to explain to Ardelan. The chief seemed to have been expecting something of the sort. “Falana,” he said to Verrill, “probably didn’t get around to telling you this, but you can either send her home, or else take her to the fire temple to get Kwangtan’s blessing. Then you won’t be a stranger any more, and you’ll get along better.”

  That very day, Falana and Verrill knelt before the altar of living flame and passed their joined hands quickly through the fire. This time, Verrill got a good look at the shrine as Kwangtan blessed them.

  He likewise got a look at the surroundings. He noted Kwangtan’s cell, hewn out of the limestone cliff. He noted the cairns of rock raised above the grave of each of Kwangtan’s predecessors. Having sized up the situation, he decided that his next move would be to ride a circuit of Ardelan’s territory, to treat those tribesmen who rarely if ever got to town. By becoming acquainted with all the trails, he would have a better chance of escaping with the Fire of Skanderbek.

  Too bad he could not take Falana along. She would be a sensation, back home. The most skilled cosmeticians of the Venusian Domes could not begin to duplicate Falana’s glowing red-bronze hair.

  CHAPTER IV

  By the time medical supplies and equipment arrived—and also a message from Linda, who was thrilled from having heard of his good work among the barbarians—Ardelan’s mountaineers had begun to accept Verrill as a man, and not a mere medico. His efforts to ride their half-tamed horses, time and again picking himself up from where they had thrown him, to mount and try again, amused them enormously, and gave them a comfortable feeling of superiority—and evoked a degree of respect.

  To make his escape with the Fire of Skanderbek, he would have to ride on a few cattle-and sheep-stealing raids and so acquire sufficient skill for getting away with his loot.

  It was Falana who explained the monstrous ruby’s status as a tribal fetish. “Ages ago,” she said, “the gods destroyed the world with fire, and after the flames had gone, the ghosts of the dead flames danced over the earth, and killed whoever came near. They killed without burning. The ghosts of the fire lived in the earth and air and water. And there were only small patches where men could live.

  “And there was Skanderbek, a wise man who talked to the ghosts. Maybe he smelled them. Maybe he could see what others could not. Others say that he had a talisman that talked to him, and warned him where not to go. There are many stories.

  “Skanderbek led his people to these mountains in time to keep them from starving or being poisoned. He made fire come out of the rock—Everlasting fire. Over it he hung the fire stone you now see. He taught us to bow to the fire and serve it, so that when the fire gods stopped hating mankind, the ghosts of the dead flames would go away. The years passed, and there was always further range for our animals. Other people came, and then of course there was looting and war.

  “But Skanderbek talked with gods and devils, and so no one could drive us out of here. One day Skanderbek said, ‘I am going back to the gods. Let such and such a one take my place; I have taught him what to do and what to say to the holy flame, so that fire will never again destroy the earth. And one day, wearing a new body, I will come back.’ All this was a long time ago, long before your people came out of the sky with knives of steel, and with, guns, to trade with us.

  “And now tell me about your gods, Verrill.”

  There was very little to tell Falana, except that Science had become, had from the beginning been the god of Venus. He was quite too busy reflecting that Skanderbek, a man like himself, had undoubtedly used a Geiger counter and some imagination, and had as a result become a god.

  He was thinking also of Linda’s letter. She had not been able to give him much gossip about Dawson’s plans to oppose him, since Dawson had left without having done much talking. But he inferred from what she did write, and from stories Ardelan’s tribesmen brought from the disputed frontier, that a Venusian was living with the neighboring tribe, giving them rifles to take the place of their trade muskets. This suggested that Dawson was taking the simple and direct approach: coaching his protectors in the art of more efficient fighting, so that as the climax of an eventual raid into Ardelan’s almost inaccessible fortress, Dawson could seize the Fire of Skanderbek and make off with it in the confusion.

  Whatever Verrill intended to do, he would have to do it quickly.

  He went to the shrine and asked, “Kwangtan, where is the grave of Skanderbek?”

  “Skanderbek,” the priest said, contemptuous of ignorance, “is not buried. He went back to the gods. Now go, and stay away.”

  “I have heard a story like that,” Verrill retorted. “Among my own people, there are old books, ancient before Skanderbek was even dreamed of. And it is written always how one leader or another went back to the gods, not dying as other men died. But we know better. A man dies, and his bones remain.”

  Kwangtan’s eyes sharpened and changed. He seemed to be asking himself whether this might not be one of those times when the wise thing was to make an ally of an enemy. And Verrill was at the same time thinking, “Lies are the foundation of all priestcraft, and I’ve got this one searching the foundations.”

  Verrill said, “If a man found the bones of Skanderbek, he could build a shrine there for the gods of death. Men serve most what they fear most.”

  “Which of us fears death?” the priest challenged. “We are fighting-men.”

  “My patients act otherwise,” Verrill blandly countered. Then: “Skanderbek had no wings. His bones can not be far from here. The bones of Skanderbek will give a light like a glow-worm or a firefly. Wherever they are lying, they will be easily recognized. Any herdsman would know if he found them.”

  Verrill was gambling on the probability that Skanderbek, leading a group of Terrestrians to safety, had exposed himself overmuch to the deadly radioactivity, more so tha
n any of those he led. Whether there had been sufficient to make his bones radioactive until they would glow, either then or now, was an open question. But Kwangtan was of the line of priests who create and maintain a tradition: the blend of knowledge and falsehood that keeps their craft alive and their privilege secure. Kwangtan would surely have enough of that blend to set him wondering, and in his own interests.

  It was time to leave; and, nodding contentedly, Verrill left, rightly assured that the old devil would lose no time hunting the bones of Skanderbek, lest someone else find them first and set up a rival shrine. He would have to hunt by night, and alone. The nights were cold, and the trails dangerous.

  A few nights later, Verrill went out, high on the rimrock, to lurk in a perilous perch overhanging the shrine. He saw Kwangtan momentarily outlined by the light that came from the grotto. The priest was making for the spring, and then climbing higher. Apparently he was going out by a secret way, for a concealed purpose. Well satisfied, Verrill climbed down out of the bitter cold wind which whined eternally about the limestone buttresses. Unobserved, he went down again into the shelter of the ledge, and to the house where Falana was asleep.

  She no more perceived his return than she had his departure.

  * * * *

  Before many days had passed, Verrill was busily probing for bullets, suturing sword slashes, and setting bones. When the fighting men he had salvaged were well enough to be about and looking for more trouble, Ardelan confessed that he had entirely revised his notions on doctors. And that gave Verrill his chance to say, “I’ll go along the next time there’s a raid. I could have saved that one who died on the way.”

  Ardelan shook his head. “There is a personal enemy of yours among our neighbors. I can’t take any chance of your being killed or captured.”

  “You’re making a priest of me!” Verrill said, mockingly. “Living on the fat of the land, and taking none of the risks.”

  “You’ve made that for yourself,” Ardelan retorted. “And speaking of priests, you’ll have one for a patient.”