Now Gaise’s legs were higher than his face; Jaire had vanished up into the darkness. For him to climb as they did, in total darkness, would be hard enough under any circumstances. But with armed men leaping up after him, hurling torches or spears or swords — he knew it was impossible.
For the second time on Andor, Cleve prepared to die.
Now he could see the torch itself, and the men, and the glitter of their blades in the torchlight. He looked up.
Gaise, too, had disappeared into the blackness, clambering up the wall. Both Oridorn women were still shouting:
“Oridorns! Oridorns! Help!”
Cleve sighted on the torch, striving to land his hurled stone just below it and to its left; he assumed its carrier held it in his left hand, with his weapon in his right. Hurling the stone with all his strength, Cleve quickly transferred another from his left hand to his right. Again he aimed and threw, then bent for the pitifully few more stones he had accumulated as they hurried along.
There was a yell, then a clatter as the rock rebounded from its target and rolled. The torch appeared to stagger. Cleve heard a loud curse and the sound of a falling body. Not the torchbearer; someone else must have slipped on the rolling stone. The second rock missed, somehow, clattering.
Cleve launched a third and a fourth missile in quick succession, bending instantly for more.
There was the high-pitched, hideous sound of a man’s agonized scream. And a groan, in another voice. A sword clanged and clattered as its owner went down. Cleve wondered where his missile had hit the man who had shrieked and fallen, dropping his blade. In the face? The eye? The groin? Or more prosaically, the leg? And the fourth stone, too, had struck flesh, eliciting a groan. All he had to do was get them there. They might possibly go over their heads, but the pursuers were too closely crowded in the narrow passage for a stone to go past them.
Cleve paused, listening to Bavuraat’s voice striving to outyell the others; he told them to string out, one behind the other, hugging the wall. And to advance.
Cleve hefted his last two chunks of rocks. He glanced upward.
There was nothing to be seen. The two women had ceased their shouts. The blackness of the shaft had swallowed them.
They’ve escaped, he thought. They’ve escaped slavery and returned to their people. Why yell? Why worry about a man of another race? He’d served his purpose!
He slammed the fifth rock down the tunnel, listened to it strike a wall, then another, then something softer than rock that screamed, then the tunnel floor. He had scored, not so miraculously because of the tunnel’s narrowness, several hits. But he had no idea as to the seriousness of any of them, nor for that matter how many cries and groans might have come from one highly unfortunate pursuer.
“Throw your brand as hard as you can,” Bavuraat yelled. “Perhaps it will light him so that we can see him!”
They were now no more than twenty yards away, Cleve gauged, watching the whirling wooden torch impregnated with grease from the llico. It whooshed, loud in the tunnel, as it spun, and as it came rushing toward him, streaming a quivering tail of fire. It struck the floor several feet in front of him in a bright cascade of sparks. It lay there, burning far less brightly for lying on the stone surface.
Keeping close against the wall, Cleve edged toward the torch, until it was only three or four feet away. He had but one remaining stone, and had been unable to find more in the darkness. The torch showed him no more. If he picked it up, he would make of himself a target, for stones or steel.
He hoped the two eyeless slaves — ex-slaves, now — were alive and well in Oridorna. He wished sincerely that the way home had not led him into a cul-de-sac. If he could have kept on moving —
That gave him an idea.
‘‘I can’t see him,” a man yelled, “torch or no torch!”
“I’m not going on until he is out of rocks to throw!” another snarled.
“Go, then,” Bavuraat yelled. “He has stopped throwing them!”
Cleve flung his last stone. He turned instantly and returned to the rocky wall forming the end of the passage. With his heart feeling as if it were in his mouth, yet threatening to pound its way through his chest, he commenced climbing, slowly and carefully and with trepidation, a wall he could not see — up into a shaft of total blackness.
Behind him the first voice roared, “He’s stopped throwing them? That one barely missed me! I agree — let’s wait him out. He can’t have an endless supply of rocks! And the torch will show him if he tries to creep on us.”
Good boy, Cleve thought, feeling about until he found a granite projection that, without promising, told him it might consider staying in place while he pulled himself up another few inches.
He was no more than six feet off the cavern floor when his foot slipped and a rock fell noisily and he was just able to save himself from falling back. He succeeded in painfully banging one knee and in scraping an ounce or so of skin off several knuckles.
“He didn’t throw that one,” Bavuraat yelled, almost screaming. “You idiots! He’s climbing! He’ll escape! Rush him!”
“YOU rush him, Bav, you’re the one so anxious to kill him! Me, I can sleep just as well with him alive as dead!”
“No, you can’t,” Bavuraat snapped, and Cleve gained another few inches, gasping. “Not when I tell Shilaat you let him escape with his two slavegirls!”
Cleve paused, gasping, his arms and clawing fingers already aching, and shouted back: “Bavuraat will tell Shilaat nothing if you kill him!” And he moved up another two or three inches.
Despair began to nudge hope aside, then, as he heard them coming. They had ignored his suggestion, or it had only angered them; they were running toward him, aided by the torch still flickering weakly on the floor. He had not been so brilliant after all. He’d hoped they would wait long enough, making certain he was out of missiles, to enable him to get himself far up the wall. But climbing in the darkness was no simple matter, and for the second time he realized the advantage, in some situations, of sightlessness — provided the sightless one possessed a built-in radar system enabling him to find his way in the darkness, even to find hand-and footholds!
He should have held to his first idea: to wait there for them, near the torch, then snatch it up to meet their charge. Perhaps that way he’d have got his hand an a sword. This way he’d only get a sword or one of their short spears in the back.
He was about eight feet off the cavern floor when they reached the wall he had climbed. One of them snatched up the torch, waving it. Cleve scrambled, now able to see several tempting handholds above. But the shaft remained black overhead.
“Stand back,” Bavuraat said. “The torch will bring him down! All it has to do is touch him — reflex will make him fall!”
Danger, Cleve thought, and excitement … and perhaps your death, Mr. Cleve. Right, Gordon, on all three counts. Good-bye, to you and your scummy organization that promised me at least another man’s position and followers! I’ve never had either. I haven’t had even a fighting chance!
He heard the rope as it rushed by, dropped from above, and he turned his head just in time to see the white male body as it hurtled down the rope; surely the white-haired man was burning his hands!
“An Oridorn!”
“Look out, he — ”
Cleve looked down. The eyeless man of Oridorna struck the tunnel floor only a few feet in front of the Orisans; there were four, Cleve saw, in the torchlight The man yanked something that looked like metal from the belt he wore and held it before him. Cleve saw the flash of the luminescent rocklight, Orisana’s best friend.
Not this time. The Orisans screamed. Swords clanged to the rocky floor at their feet Cleve saw nothing, heard nothing; there was no sound, no visible beam. But they fell, and he knew he was watching an Oridorn rocklight projector in action. An Andorite pistol.
The man raised his head as if looking up at Cleve. “Take hold of the rope, Cleve of Earth,” he said. “They will p
ull you up.”
Cleve’s hand closed around the rope, carefully; he’d be sure he had a safe grip before he let go with his other hand and took his feet from their precarious perches on tiny outcroppings in the shaft wall.
He glanced down. Yelled. The Oridorn was already jerking up the rocklight projector. All too late: Bavuraat lunged up from the floor and spitted the poor fellow on his curved sword, straight through the belly.
Cleve kicked at the wall, swung a little, and let go the rope. He dropped directly onto Bavuraat’s back. Both of them fell, and Cleve knew new pain as he slammed to the rocky tunnel floor and rolled. Something cold touched his thigh as he rolled across it.
Steel. Or iron.
He scrambled around, snatching up the sword as he rose. Bavuraat must have been behind one of the others and missed being swept by the invisible ray the Oridorn projected. It was lethal, Cleve realized. The men at his feet were dead, all three of them.
Bavuraat rose, bloody scimitar in hand, and turned, grinning. The smile left his face as he saw that the man facing him was also sword-armed, not defenseless as he’d expected.
“You plotted to kill me, Bavuraat, because you want Siraa,” Cleve told him. “You followed me like a thief, skulking, and you’d have killed us, all three. Now the man who saved my life is dead at your hands. Come, Bavuraat. Die.”
“How — how did you know I meant to kill you?” Bavuraat demanded, half-crouching.
It was all Cleve wanted to know; Jaire had spoken the truth. And she had sent help. She had neither lied nor escaped to abandon him. And Bavuraat was as she had described him: a skulking killer. Cleve did not wait to be attacked; he leaped at the other man.
Bavuraat’s sword came up to meet Cleve’s, but Cleve’s blade was not there. He twisted as he leaped, swinging the curved sword, and Bavuraat parried empty air.
In midleap, Cleve brought his scimitar sharply down. Not sharply enough; it bit into Bavuraat’s arm, and the Orisan cried out, but the cut was not serious and he did not drop his own weapon. They were long blades, too long for the confined space in which they dueled. The curved swords were meant for open fighting, for the world outside this strange, self-contained one within the mountain.
Bavuraat swung and they faced one another, the ghostly white man with the bleeding arm and the darker one with the jet club of hair on his nape, bound by a salver ring. Their eyes met, searing grey ones and icily pale ones like those of a fish. For a moment they were still, panting, two near-naked men in the bowels of a mountain. Their faces, their bodies were lit eerily by the glim lying on the cavern floor a few feet away.
Bavuraat came in a two-step advance, swinging his scimitar in a vicious side-armed delivery. Cleve’s sword leaped out to meet the other blade, to parry the hard-swung stroke, and metal clanged loudly and then clanged again and again as it echoed and reechoed along the cavern and in the shaft overhead. After beating Bavuraat’s blade aside, Cleve strove to cut, backhand, at the man’s chest; the Orisan backed too quickly. Again they gazed at each other in frozen crouches.
Then Cleve advanced, his eyes on Bavuraat’s legs, his sword swinging forward low. Bavuraat’s blade arced down to intercept the hamstringing cut. And Cleve’s biceps sprang up as his arm curved, almost in a cranking motion. His sword shot up as he lunged, and the long, curved blade entered Bavuraat’s body just below his sternum. It passed completely through him. He stared at Cleve with very wide eyes, eyes that remained wide and staring as he fell back against the rocky wall, hung there motionless a moment, and then slid slowly down to a sitting position. Cleve withdrew his sword from the corpse.
14 - The Meat of Oridorna
Cleve glanced up the shaft. It remained dark. The rope hung there, motionless. There was no sound.
He bent quickly over the body of the Oridorn man who’d slid fearlessly down to rescue a man he had never met, a man he could never see. Opening his fingers, Cleve extricated the little object they clutched.
It was not of metal, as it had appeared. It was a box, carefully carved from two, no three pieces of some smooth, bluish stone. His thumb, he supposed, would go into this loop of llicogut. Pull it. That would open the counterbalanced, cleverly hinged little “door” in one end of the closed box. That, presumably, exposed the rocklight within, somehow channeled outward in an invisible beam that meant death to breathing creatures. It weighed much less than a pound.
Shaking his head, he bent over the Orisans downed by the beam. He turned one over and made a face; the man’s chest was blackened, neatly holed as if by a laser beam. There was another bum, another hole in his arm; the Oridorn had downed all three of them by swinging the weapon. All three were dead. Cleve wondered: Had they died of the burns, of the hole that ate swiftly into and through their bodies, or of a burst of pure radioactivity?
He did not know. Nor would he experiment with the little stone box until he knew more of it; it held far too much potential danger for casual experimentation. Again he glanced at the rope hanging from the dark shaft. It twitched. Others were up there, waiting, listening. He called up.
“Jaire? Gaise? I am Cleve of Earth. The Orisans are dead, but Bavuraat slew your man. I will secure your rope to him so that you may pull him up.”
“We will descend to handle that, Cleve of Earth,” a man’s voice said, and the rope writhed as, somewhere up in that absolute darkness, someone swung down on it. Cleve glanced about.
On Bavuraat’s belt hung a pouch; it was a hide pouch, worn by the Tree-men on their belts for the purpose of carrying arrowheads. Cleve bent swiftly and removed the dead man’s belt, transferring it to his own hips. He wore, otherwise, only one of the tight groin pouches of Orisana. As soon as he had secured the belt about himself, he emptied the pouch — it contained nothing of consequence — and pushed the Oridorn rocklight projector down into it. The pouch was equipped with a flap closure with two punched holes; it was simply fastened by means of a bit of gut from some jungle animal. Cleve fastened it.
The man who came down the rope was completely naked, save for a baldric he wore, a finger-width strap from left shoulder to right hip. From it depended a flint dagger and, Cleve saw with some amusement, a pouch similar to his own. He had created a holster for the projector; the Oridorns had thought of that long ago!
The man was as Jaire and Gaise and the dead Oridorn near his feet: pale, almost translucent of skin, with that faint bluish cast from the visible veins beneath; stringy white hair that was almost not-white, almost translucent. And he was eyeless, the sockets closed over smoothly with skin, leaving only two little depressions beneath his brow on either side of his nose. Like the girls, he had no eyebrows. And his mouth was ajar.
“I am Zaire of Oridorna.”
“I am Cleve of Earth.” Cleve extended his hand. Then, despite the fact that there was none to see his faux pas, he felt embarrassed and hot of face. But as he started to withdraw the hand, Zaire gripped his wrist. His fingers touched Cleve’s palm.
“Yes,” he said, “I see that you are unarmed. Thank you. Jaire and Gaise say that you are neither of the Tree-men nor of Orisana, that you are from the outer world and that the Orisans say that there is color in your eyes and your hair, and on your flesh. Is this so?”
“Yes,” he said, “I am a man like yourself. Except for the color and my eyes, we are identical.”
“What,” Zaire of Oridorna asked, “is color?”
Cleve raised his eyebrows. It was an old philosophical question on Earth — how to describe color to a blind man.
“Without eyes you can perceive distance and size, is that not true?”
“Of course.” It was strange, talking with an erect, almost statue-still man who neither nodded nor gestured and whose stance was as if he were intently staring — save that he had no eyes with which to stare.
“We perceive the same with our eyes, but we are also able to see that the objects differ in color as well as in size. It has nothing to do with shape or texture, Zaire of Oridorna. As a matte
r of fact — I find it impossible to explain to you, any more than you could describe to me how you knew I had stretched out my hand to you. Nature has given us different abilities. I cannot conceive of not seeing color, you cannot conceive of what color is. Nor light and dark. They are unnecessary to you.”
“Yes. You are not quite right, I think, but that is for later. We want all of them up in Oridorna. You will help me?”
“Of course. But — you mean your people want the bodies of the Orisans your young warrior slew?”
“Yes. How was he killed?”
Cleve told him.
“You were on the rope and had only to call to be drawn up,” Zaire said. “You were unarmed. But you dropped back down here to fight the Orisan. Why?” Cleve cocked his head; a tiny smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “It was my fight. The Oridorn saved me, and died for me. I — did not think about it, I avenged him.”
“It was not your fight,” Zaire said. “You rescued my sister and another of our women, stolen and enslaved by the Orisans. You are a brave man, Cleve of Earth. You have the deathbox he carried?”
Cleve had intended to lie, or had thought he would. But he could not. “Yes,” he said.
“Keep it,” Zaire told him. “It is yours. You are a warrior of Oridorna. Come — we will let our dead warrior be drawn up first.”
They did, working together, Zaire’s “sight” nearly as good as Cleve’s. Once, twice, five times the rope went up and returned. Then a sixth time; in the basket lowered from above, Cleve heaped the Orisan weapons and watched them vanish upward into blackness. Again the rope descended, and Cleve, standing alone, felt a qualm as he watched Zaire drawn up. He had known considerable violence and treachery since his arrival on this planet. Again he felt doubt; suppose the rope did not return for him? The Oridorns had their slaves back — one of them Zaire’s sister — and their dead warrior and four Orisans and all their arms. Zaire had warned Cleve to bring the torch, but —
Chieftain of Andor Page 10
