Chieftain of Andor

by Andrew J Offutt

  6 - The River of No Memory

  Robert Cleve awoke. For a moment he lay still, staring up at darkness.

  No, not darkness. A night sky, yes, but a sky alight with stars strewn like scintillant gems upon a jeweler’s case of black velvet. A sky lit further by three baubles much larger than the others, one rather greenish, the others pale and silver-glowing. Robert Cleve’s eyes rolled from one to the other.

  The stars were totally unfamiliar, nor was there any pattern or conformation he recognized. The larger jewels were … moons.

  Robert Cleve frowned. Robert Cleve? No. He was not Robert Cleve.

  He was …

  “My God! He did it! Gordon did it — but he failed! I’m not on Earth. But I do NOT have the memories he said I would have!”

  For a few seconds his mind tried to panic. He fought back, silently, quelling the rising cloud that sought to unnerve him from within. He was on Andor. He’d been told he would be — Doralan Andrah. Oh yes, Doralan Andrah, and the first name was the last. That is, on Earth the name would be Andrah Doralan, and here his own name would be Cleve Robert. Doralan. A noble of some sort, a man with a mission and a future of importance … of some sort. Someplace. But he could not remember!

  He had been told that he would possess all Doralan Andrah’s memories.

  But he possessed none.

  He knew only the name, and the language he had been taught by hypnorem, instead of gaining it from Doralan’s mind. A few other things: This was Andor, a perilous, primitive planet spinning close to a young sun, a planet on which barbaric strength and swordsmanship existed side by side with sorcery and witchcraft — if one could be expected to believe in such — and ferocious beasts, birds, even plants — and men.

  Slowly he became aware of his surroundings. He had explored the inner situation, with little satisfaction. Now he turned to the outer.

  He lay on his back on a wooden platform some seven feet long by about four feet wide. The gentle liquid sounds he heard, the constant lapping, the gentle undulance — these existed because the platform on which he lay outstretched was a raft. It — he — was moving, along a broad watercourse bordered by shadowy trees.

  He was naked. Unclothed, unarmed, on a strange river, on a strange planet, beneath a strange sky with three moons.

  He found himself laughing.

  Well, he’d asked for it. He had wanted excitement, adventure, danger. He’d been promised all those, as well as the constant proximity and possibility — probability! — of sudden, horrible death.

  He had to chuckle. Had he been tricked? Perhaps the bespectacled man named Gordon, the man with the nameless organization on Earth, perhaps he had tricked his recruit. And perhaps, that recruit thought, perhaps Gordon and his organization knew less than they thought or claimed. Or maybe the brown-suited man and his organization had merely erred.

  Well, he’d been promised precious little, Cleve thought. And he had received no more than he’d been promised!

  Lying on his back, naked, floating helplessly downriver on the oarless raft, he gazed up at the alien sky. He firmed his lips. All right; he was here. Presumably he occupied the body of someone named Doralan Andrah. Presumably there had been a slip. This was not like setting forth in Africa in a Land Rover with an experienced, Aussie-accented guide and an assortment of gear and high-powered weapons. This was not like seeking the mighty tigers of India, armed with heavy guns and riding a heavy beast with leathery gray skin. Perhaps this was more dangerous than Vietnam, where a man’s sole duty was to commit murder as many times as possible. At least there he had had training, weapons, companions — and a helmet.

  Here he had nothing. But he laughed. He had plenty. He had Doralan Andrah’s body, a hard, iron-muscled body in fine condition. (Why? Had not Gordon said Andrah had lain long abed? Had there been a time lapse?) He had his brain, the fine brain of Robert Cleve of Earth. More: He had the determination, the mental strength, the total inability ever to quit, that were Robert Cleve’s great assets. And the taciturnity and impetuousness that were perhaps assets, perhaps liabilities.

  ‘Til fight you, Andor,” he muttered. “I’ll fight you — and we’ll see which of us is the stronger.”

  And he laughed again, and the water gurgled and lapped, and he fell asleep.

  7 - The River of Death

  Morning. Morning beneath a young sun, bloated and yellow-red. A young sun, not yet white or even fully yellow, but so close it radiated intense heat. It was too large, in a sky too purpled, as if painted by an artist who had mixed red pigment with his blue by accident and rushed on with his job anyhow. Squinting, Cleve rolled his head.

  The river’s gentle current held him in its center, so that the lavishly verdant shore was thirty feet away on either side. The water was strangely reddish, reflecting the sky. The shores were riotous, eye-searing, psychedelic with color. Huge ferns, tall as a man and taller, leaned their jonquil-yellow fronds out as if to admire their golden reflections in the vitriform surface of the water. Among them long-stemmed flowers nodded; sprawling, violet cup-shapes with yellow centers, like pasqueflowers — if Earthly pasqueflowers could somehow attain the size of dinner plates with hairy stems thick as a man’s thumb. There were twining clusters with blossoms magenta and snowy; tendrilly vetch-like beauties that climbed the ferns and tree trunks in shapes resembling huge peas. Heavy-leafed, triple-sepaled blossoms with three veined petals resembled trilliums seen through a magnifying glass. He knew their names — plumenia, and thrileen, and meiane, and jalalis.

  Above them reared tralib trees with bluish leaves and huge furry balls the size of Cleve’s head. Aspen-like beauties were hung with trailing veils of something resembling Spanish moss — if Spanish moss were scarlet, and quivering as if alive. Behind them, deeper in the forest that bordered Sky River on both sides, reared sequoia-like giants with their berylline heads scraping pink-bellied clouds. Birds trilled and warbled and skirled like bagpipes, and those latter orange-and-green-and-blue creatures of the sky were skreets, which could be taught to imitate speech.

  Robert Cleve rolled onto his side, cautiously, and then sat up with just as much care on his doorlike craft. He sat still, riding to he knew not where from he knew not whence. How far had he come, from wherever he’d come from?

  He was still; thinking, assimilating.

  He floated, naked.

  The orange sun swung up overhead, hesitated, and then reluctantly began its descent. Cleve’s belly grumbled its discontent, and he slapped it angrily. It was hard, muscularly divided into two hemispheres, each of which was divided and divided again by taut musculature. He flexed arms with mighty, knotted thews rolling beneath gleaming flesh like hand-burnished bronze. He raised one leg, noting that the naked thigh did not quiver, that the muscle leaped up in his calf like a ball of hard leather imbedded in a sheath of smooth flesh, deep bronze in color. It was a powerful body, a fighting body.

  He floated.

  The trees whispered, the insects chittered, the birds trilled and caroled and flitted and swooped. Sky River flowed on, and words entered his mind, words in a language now foreign:

  “He don’t say nothin’ … He just keeps rollin’ along … ”

  Peacefully, calmly, quietly, Ole Man Sky rolled along.

  Until the peace and tranquility was destroyed by yells and screams that sent the birds in terrified flapping protests.

  Cleve nearly swamped his raft as he jerked about to look at the source of the noise. Men. Men with bronzed skin the color of his own, with hair uniformly black and shaggily page-boyed, mouths wide as they voiced their savage yells. They pointed, jabbering. They wore belts of poorly tanned hide, supporting long daggers, one on each hip. Each wore an armlet of some sort of longhaired, orangeish hide; tribal totem, he presumed. They wore nothing else, save for the paint on their lower bellies and thighs. And … Andor or not, surely Nature did not give men such teeth. They had been filed.

  Not only were these swordless men savages, they were cannib
als!

  Two, either braver than their fellows or detailed by their big-bellied leader to fetch the naked, unarmed man from his precarious barge, leaped into the water. With daggers clenched in their terrible teeth they swam toward him. Their dark eyes remained fixed on him. He had more than once eyed a good rare steak the same way, though not, he thought, so ferally.

  Cleve glanced about. He saw water, a few square feet of wooden raft. No weapons, no clothing, not even a strip of cloth or leather he might somehow turn into a means of defense. He considered diving from the raft and striking out for the opposite shore — but could Doralan Andrah swim? Which swam, the body or the brain? Because Robert Cleve could ride a bicycle, could he do so in this body? Because he was a powerful swimmer — was his host-body?

  He knelt, crosswise to the raft’s length, hooking his toes over the other side. He waited, watching the shaggy-headed approach of the two warriors with their teeth-gripped knives. The knives, he saw, were of flint Whatever he was, however far he’d come, he was no longer in Doralan Andrah’s purlieu. These men were savages who, like savages of his own Earth, lived still in the Stone Age.

  And ate human flesh.

  One swimmer soon forged ahead of the other, and Cleve sucked in a deep breath as a black-nailed hand slapped at the edge of his raft, gripping it. The man would thus support himself in the water while with the other hand he took his dagger from his teeth. The dagger the kneeling Cleve wanted. For a moment their eyes met, and then Cleve fell forward. One of his big hands was fisted, the other outstretched with open fingers. The first smashed down on the savage’s fingers. The warrior opened wide his mouth to howl, as Cleve had expected, and Cleve’s other hand snatched the dagger as it dropped from filed teeth. With his toes over the other edge of the raft, balancing it however precariously, Cleve slashed out with the long flint blade. It laid open the man’s forehead as he released his grip on the raft and tried desperately to backpedal.

  Then Cleve slid forward directly toward him, into the water, as the other swimmer upended one end of the raft. Cleve entered the water headfirst. His outstretched hands contacted the first man, he of the bloody forehead. Instantly the Andorite savage gripped him and they grappled in the water, Cleve striving to use the dagger. His gasping head surfaced and he rolled his eyes to see the other man swimming close, his dagger now in his hand. It hampered his swimming, but he was ready to sip the blood of the naked raft man. Desperately Cleve rolled, gripping his opponent, and felt the man shudder as his own compatriot drove his knife into his back in a blow intended for Cleve. Cleve kicked free, striving at once to retain his grip on his newly acquired dagger, to keep himself afloat, and to get clear of the jerking, floundering body of the dying man — and out of reach of his enraged fellow.

  Behind him there were more splashes. He knew their meaning without glancing: More enemies were swimming out either to slay him or force him ashore to their cook-pots — if they cooked their meat. He drew a breath and dived.

  All that happened thereafter took place far more swiftly than it can be described.

  He arced beneath the surface of Sky River, making the constant physical effort always required to open his eyes underwater. Before him were legs, two churning, two lifeless, in pink-stained water. Knowing there were too many for him to attempt to fight, Cleve wheeled underwater, twisting to swim for the shore opposite that controlled by his Stone Age enemies.

  Coming directly toward him, hair streaming out about their dark heads, were two of the savages. They separated slightly to come at him from two directions. Again he made an instantaneous decision, and he hurled himself forward beneath the water in an attempt to drive between them.

  Undoubtedly by pure accident, the foot of a swimmer above him trod Cleve’s head. He was swung slightly toward one of his underwater enemies — and the man whose foot had struck his head immediately shouted and upended himself to come streaking down. Cleve twisted as he neared his opponent, turning upside down in the strange slow motion of submarine activity. As he passed beneath the savage, Cleve’s Stone Age dagger laid open the other’s belly. There was a hard wrench as the blade struck the man’s belt, and then the weapon was dragged from Cleve’s grasp.

  Hopelessly, already in need of air, he turned back to try to take one of the others down to death with him. He had found adventure on Andor, and excitement, and danger — and the death Gordon had warned him of.

  His eyes went wide. The strange colors, the monster sun, the enormous, riotously colored flowers and trees and ferns, the savages with their filed teeth — all these were as everyday occurrences compared to what he now saw. He and his cannibalistic attackers were not alone in their silent arena beneath the river’s surface. One of them was already twisting downward, his dagger falling free. His chest streamed a scarlet cloud that became rapidly pink in the water. Another was hurling himself up to the surface, his eyes bulging in what Cleve thought — with amazement — was fear.

  A third was grappling with the newcomer.

  She was a lithe, muscular girl with long white hair streaming out behind her like a fringed cloak.

  The hair was white, not blond; that was obvious even in its present wet state, although its owner was just as obviously a very young woman. Stranger still were her hands and feet: Her fingers and toes, he saw with disbelief, were webbed! Her toes were almost nonexistent, little lumps protruding from the webbing at the ends of long, wedge-shaped feet. And — her right hand was finned. No, Cleve realized, seeing the bindings of what looked like gut; she but wore a six-inch fin strapped to her palm. With it she had obviously slain one of his attackers, frightened off another, and was even now slashing a third. She wore slightly less than her opponent; bare of ornamentation, her nudity was adorned only with a slender strip of black about her hips; it was of some glistening stuff he could not identify. There was no sheath, and Cleve supposed she merely thrust her fin knife into the thong, or perhaps tied it there by the same straps with which it was bound to her palm.

  Batting aside a fourth attacker, Cleve propelled himself rapidly toward her. She had come to his rescue; now she needed help. His hands gripped the ankles of the man she fought; jerked. The girl slashed the savage’s throat open, and for a moment her eyes met Cleve’s. Hers, he saw, were completely colorless; great black pupils seemingly afloat in elongated circles totally devoid of coloration.

  Then her gaze leaped past him, and those strange, fishlike eyes went wider.

  He started instantly to flail himself into a roll, knowing by her gaze and her reaction that another enemy was streaking down behind him. This, he knew, would be the last of them he’d face, or try to face. His strained lungs would burst in another few seconds. Whoever she was, whatever she was, wherever she had come from, his strange aide was too late. And there were too many foes, even had she been a man, or armed with a spear gun — had there been spear guns on Andor.

  Even as the hopeless thoughts seared his mind, he was wriggling around to meet his armed enemy as best he could with bare hands. Then a cold, strong hand closed about his wrist. He was yanked downward. And down, and down, until the water was dark and he felt pressure, felt himself weakening. His head roared and the blood strove to burst through his throbbing temples and his heart shrieked within him for release from the impossible burden.

  His lungs gave up. The water was darker, much darker, but he was certain the dark was behind his eyes. He exhaled, trying to stretch it out, knowing he would inhale at once. He was beyond caring. His eyes bulged. His head roared and pounded. They seemed to be entering an underwater tunnel of some sort, but the last of the air streamed from Cleve’s lungs and bubbled upward through the darkling waters.

  8 - The Mermaid of Orisana

  Robert Cleve regained consciousness with a pounding headache, a sore chest, and an intensely sore throat. He lay on his back in a dark, wet place whose air was dank and fetid. But — it was air. Heaven, he was convinced, would be more pleasant, and Hell would be worse. In which case he was most pro
bably alive.

  “Am I alive?”

  A feminine giggle, from a young throat. Then she spoke, in an accent so extreme he barely understood her. Universal language, Gordon had said, and it had not occurred to Cleve that that was not so marvelous and simple as it sounded. His native tongue on Earth was English, but he spoke American, not English. England and America, Bernard Shaw had observed, were two countries separated by a common language. Not only did the accents differ, even within each nation, but there were divergent word meanings as well as idioms. Then there was Australia, speaking the same language — sort of — and Canada. Cleve wondered: What was the universal language of Andor like on the other side of this planet?

  “You are alive,” the accented voice from the darkness said, and a soft hand caressed his chest. “So long as you can talk, Skyman, you are alive.”

  He smiled in the blackness. “Skyman?”

  “You come from above, but you are not of the Tree-men. Your teeth are different, and your hair, and they are your enemies. You are not of the water, though, as I am, nor of the trees. You must be from the sky.”

  He chuckled. “I guess I am, come to think, and a lot farther up than you think! My name is — ” He hesitated.

  He had two names now. And Doralan Andrah was apparently a man of some importance. But — this was not his land. “My name is Cleve,” he told her, for the first time realizing that Doralan had been of some value, anyhow; at least this body could swim!

  “Cleve? Rich air, Cleve. I am Siraa.”

  “I owe you this life, Siraa,” he said, wondering at what had sounded like a ritual greeting: “Rich air.” His phrasing, too, was ritual: “I owe you this life,” not “my life,” among a people who knew, as most of Earth did, that there had been lives before this one and that more would follow in the ring of reincarnated return. “Where are we, Siraa?”

  “In — oh, you don’t know at all. We entered an underwater cavern. Beneath the river. The passageway into the shore angles up sharply, until it is above the water level. You were unconscious when we surfaced in here, but I expelled most of the water from your lungs — you took but half a watery breath, I think.”