The Sword Lord

by Robert Leader

  “Treat this, but do it slowly, and do it so that they can all watch what you are doing.”

  Laurya nodded, and conscious that almost every eye was fixed on her movements, she took the medical kit from her belt pack and began her task. Carefully, she cut away the bloodied silver sleeve, and then cleaned the long gash on Zela’s arm. Then, holding the two edges of the cut together, she used a combined anaesthetic and sealing spray to dull the pain and close the wound. Finally she administered an injection against infection.

  When the job was done, Zela rose to her feet and showed her arm to both Kaseem and Ramesh. The old priest had now opened up his eyes, giving up the hopeless struggle to understand, and simply watched with wonder. Zela displayed her arm on all sides, and then, trusting that she had made her point, took out her own medical kit and knelt over Kananda. There was an immediate rustle of spears and movement among the alarmed warriors.

  Kaseem was still at a loss. He stared into the face of Zela, and then at Laurya who had cautiously moved back one pace. He realized that the backward step was meant to be reassuring and non-threatening, and for the first time he took full notice of the gently smiling face of the second of these strange females.

  Laurya’s eyes were green under fine golden lashes, the deep cool green of a forest pool fringed with golden rushes, or the bright flash of green in the gold of a sunbird’s wing. And they were another violent shock to his already over-loaded nervous system, a sharp emotional upheaval that seemed to leap up in his very soul. It was as though he had seen those eyes before, even though the woman was an alien deity.

  The thought was impossible and again he almost swooned. The tree tops and the spires of the black steel temple all seemed to revolve slowly around his head. With them, the nearest warriors swam in and out of his vision. They were still awaiting his word, spears raised, muscles tensed. Ramesh was looking to him desperately. One of the spear arms moved back another few inches, the last move before the throw.

  “No,” Kaseem croaked. His reasons were conflicting but the command came through. He felt instinctively that these strange gods were trying to help. If not, then mere human arms with spears and swords were probably powerless against them. But most of all, something inside him knew that he had to protect the green-eyed woman, even if the other was a threat to his prince. He realized that he could hardly hear his own voice and struggled to speak again.

  “No, hold your weapons.”

  Ramesh still looked uncertain, but the warriors heard and obeyed.

  Zela made sure that all her movements were as clearly visible as Laurya’s had been, and it was while she was cleaning the fearsome gash on his thigh that Kananda came slowly to his senses. The first thing he saw was her face, the smiling, beautiful face of an administering angel, framed in its glorious cascade of rich golden hair. Her eyes were a deep, magical blue, a colour unknown among his brown-eyed people, with curling golden lashes. His gaze flickered to the open silver suit, still revealing those magnificent, plumply rounded golden breasts, and he was a man with a soul lost in wonder and a body lost to desire. In his mind there was none of the priest’s doubt and confusion. To Kananda she could only be a goddess, and he did not need to be told that she came from the stars.

  He tried to rise, supporting himself on one elbow and reaching out one hand toward her. Pain stabbed through his thigh and made him wince. Zela leaned forward and gently pushed him down.

  “Do not try to move,” she advised softly.

  Her words were alien to Kananda, but her voice sounded like sweet music to his ears and her meaning was plain. He looked down at the dressing on his thigh. He saw that the linen was of a different colour and texture to the wound wrappings that Kaseem carried in his saddle bag, and so understood that the strangers had treated his hurts. He remembered the goddess helping him to fight off the tiger and saw the beast lying dead. He gave her a grateful smile.

  “I am Kananda,” he told her, “First Prince of Golden Karakhor.” He launched into the full list of his titles and then saw from her blank look that she could not understand him either. He laughed at his own folly. “Kananda,” he repeated more simply and touched a finger to his own forehead.

  Zela still looked uncertain. Kananda repeated his name and the gesture. Then he pointed to Ramesh and Kaseem, stating their names in turn.

  Zela understood. She placed a forefinger on her own temple and said, “Zela.”

  Kananda repeated the name three times until its pronounciation rang true. Again he named himself, Ramesh and Kaseem. Zela entered into the spirit of the exchange and named Blair and Kyle and Laurya. Kananda’s enthusiasm outran itself and he began naming the entire hunting party. He stopped and laughed at himself again as he realized that this was all too much. There were smiles all round and the original tension was broken.

  Only Ramesh remained still uncertain. “We should return to the main camp,” he suggested. “There Prince Kananda can rest until his wound is healed.”

  “No,” Kananda said immediately. He had no intention of being parted from his administering angel. “We can camp and rest here.”

  Ramesh looked to Kaseem for support and the old priest deliberated.

  “We should stay,” Kaseem said at last. “We have no chariots here, and to seat the prince on a horse would restart the bleeding from his leg.”

  Ramesh looked sulky at being opposed, but Kananda was delighted with the decision.

  The days that followed passed pleasantly in the shaded palm grove. Kananda’s leg healed quickly and cleanly, and it was not long before he could hobble with the help of a spear, but the wound was deep and needed time to heal fully. Except for a small party whom Kaseem had sent back to the plains with their news, the hunt had made camp. There was clean water in the stream, and plenty of fruit and game, pheasant’s eggs and bee’s honey, in the surrounding forest. Zela and her crew were well pleased to have made friendly contact, and they found more than willing collaborators in Kananda and the old priest as the two parties endeavoured to understand each other’s language. The encounter with the tiger, and the time-consuming delay provided by Kananda’s wound was a perfect opportunity.

  Kaseem was torn between continued mental discomfort and fascination. His logic slowly told him that these people were not gods, for they had to eat, sleep and function like mortal men and women, and yet he could not be sure that they were not from the gods. There had been no more voices from the sky, but the black temple of steel was a mighty edifice with three needle-pointed spires that were twice as high as any temple he had ever seen in stone, and he could not see how the hands of mortal men could have shaped it. The whole fabric of his philosophy and beliefs was under brutal attack and he performed his regular ablutions and sacrifices with the desperation of uncertainty.

  Even so, his thirst for knowledge held him fast, and he would not willingly have left the valley until all his questions were answered. Always a humble Brahmin, he did not see himself in any brave or noble light, but only as an old and unworthy priest who had been chosen by capricious fate to meet this new challenge to learning. He prayed endlessly as he struggled to understand the meaning of this new wealth of experience.

  Kananda was locked in a simpler, more fatal fascination. That of a young man’s awakened passion for a rare and lovely young woman, as ideal and mysterious as any vision from his wildest dreams. He hardly dared to admit his immediate infatuation for Zela, even to himself, for it would have taken the boldness of a god to declare his love for a goddess. Even so, he knew that he loved her, and constantly pricked or pierced his own flesh to determine that he was not dreaming.

  The bulk of the warriors and hunters, as their first fears diminished, were content to loaf and be idle. They stared often at the spaceship and its silver-suited crew, but eventually their attention turned more and more to gambling with the dice cubes that every soldier carried in his pack.

  Only Ramesh was dissatisfied with the unending delay. He fretted and pouted and nursed a grievance
, for the tiger that Kananda and the woman had slain should have been his by right. The sabre teeth should even now be adorning his youthful chest, but he could not wear a trophy he had not killed. He felt cheated and more and more frustrated as it became painfully obvious that neither Kananda nor Kaseem were in any hurry to renew the hunt.

  Kananda had many times visited the port of Baneswar, where the great river Mahanadi opened out into the heaving blue waves of the Indian Ocean. The main port and channel of trade for the empire of Karakhor, Baneswar was a proud bustle of inns and commerce. At its wharves lay ships that plied between the far coasts with silks and gold, timber and ivory, spices and salt, and a hundred other cargoes. On one visit, the young prince had seen a three-hulled trimaran lifted out of the water for scraping and repair, and he was reminded of that proud sailing vessel as he looked up at the sleek, rakish lines of the Tri-Thruster. The spaceship stood erect, but like the trimaran, its main hull was much taller than the wing pods of its subsidiary rockets. It was designed for atmospheric as well as deep space flight, and so its long, smooth curves were aerodynamic. Kaseem had likened it to a bird, a mighty black raven poised for flight, but Kananda could still see the resemblance to the trimaran. He could imagine the ship sailing between the stars on the heavens as the trimaran had sailed on the waves of the ocean.

  Three of them walked slowly around the ship: Zela, Kananda and Kaseem. The other members of the spacecraft’s crew had formed their own friendships among the Hindus, and due to their combined and determined efforts the language barrier was slowly breaking down. Kyle and Laurya, always inseparable, were trying their skill at archery and spear-throwing, much to the amusement of Gujar and a group of his companions who had loaned their weapons. Blair was somewhere in the forest with the head huntsman, having recognized that the man had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the planet’s terrain and wildlife. Cadel was rolling dice with a circle of warriors, and was wryly trying to calculate mathematical probability against chance.

  Kananda and Kaseem had ventured inside the ship at Zela’s invitation, but they had found the interior cramped and claustrophobic, and the bewildering array of dials, screens and switches was totally beyond their comprehension. They had been apprehensive and relieved to escape again to the blue sky and fresh air, but they never tired of walking round the ship and gazing up at its triple spires in awe-struck wonder. With difficulty Kananda asked where were the sails which enabled the vessel to make a passage between the stars. He imagined that they must be folded away inside the hull, together with the masts, although he could not see where they might emerge, nor fathom out how.

  Zela smiled when she grasped the question, although she was perplexed as to how best to answer it. The ship’s main propulsion was derived from a nuclear pulse rocket engine, in which pellets of deuterium and helium-3 were ignited by electronic beam energy to create controlled fusion. The secondary engines used for atmospheric flight, together with the lazer banks, were all powered by energy converted from the intense friction heat that was generated by each planetary orbit during space launch and re-entry. All of this she could have explained in explicit technical detail in her own language, with an expertise equal to that of Cadel or the engineers who had designed the ship, but there were no equivalent earth words to explain these things even in simplified terms to the Hindu prince.

  There are no sails,” she said carefully. “When we leave your world to travel to our world there is no air and no wind. There is nothing to move sails.”

  “Then how does this ship move?”

  “Perhaps it flies,” Kaseem suggested. He was still thinking of its likeness to a bird. “Perhaps the wings move.”

  “It does not fly in that way,” Zela told him. “Even a bird needs air in which to fly.” She saw the priest’s brow wrinkle even more deeply with hopeless concentration on her words, and sought for some descriptive example. A shout of applause caused her to glance to where Laurya had just shot an arrow into a target and she seized on the inspiration it gave her. “It flies like an arrow.” she said awkwardly, “Without the flapping of wings or sails.”

  Prince and priest were still baffled. Kananda stared up at the towering height of the spaceship, and then searchingly at the jungle all around. There was a long silence while Kananda considered what Zela had just said, and Kaseem found his own gaze drawn back to where Laurya was still surrounded by the laughing circle of young men. He felt the now familiar surge of anguished emotion, anguished because he could not understand it.

  She was the other reason for his indulgence of Kananda’s obvious attraction to Zela. He had not spoken to Laurya directly, and deliberately chose to avoid her. In fact he hardly dared to look into her eyes. Forest pool or sunbird’s wing, he still could not decide, but they were familiar. He knew her, or at least, he knew the soul behind the eyes. It was an insane thought and he wondered if he were on the edge of madness. Until these last few days he had not even been sure that he had believed in souls. He had taught the doctrine of the Atman, the Divine Self that was in all things, and all beings, but like all his teachings of the gods, and the whole body of his religious belief, it had been an act of faith which rose dominant over a partially open mind.

  He finally heard Kananda speak and forced his attention back to their present conversation.

  “But where is the bow?” Kananda had asked.

  Zela laughed, understanding his mental predicament. “There is no bow, Kananda. Your language does not have the words for me to explain. But the ship shoots into the sky—as if it were shot from a bow.”

  “Like an arrow that is shot without a bow? And it shoots all the way to the stars?” Kaseem tried to concentrate, fearing to say that her words were false and yet unable to believe her.

  “Not to the stars,” Zela said. “The stars are like other suns. Our world is like your world, it circles this sun.”

  Their faces were blank. Zela was momentarily at a loss, but then she broke off a twig of foliage and, began to draw a sketch of the solar system on a patch of smooth earth. “Here is the sun,” she pointed to the, small circle in the centre of her map. “There are ten worlds that circle the sun.” She drew in the ten orbits like rapidly widening ripples round a pebble. “Your world—this world—which you call Earth—is here. It is the third world from the sun. Our world, which we call Dooma, is here. It is the fifth planet from the sun.”

  The old man and the youth both crouched to stare at what she had drawn but their faces showed no enlightenment. Then Kaseem reached tentatively for the twig. He drew his own map, in which there was just the central pebble and one orbiting ripple.

  “Our world,” the priest insisted, pointing at the centre of his universe. The twig sketched the single orbit around it once again and then he pointed upward. “Our sun.”

  “No,” Zela said, and again she went over the details of her own map. Kaseem scratched his head and then squinted his eyes against the glare of the sun. This new idea was an almost impossible one to accept.

  Zela tried again, describing the solar system for the third time, and struggling to explain its relationship to the stars and galaxies. Kaseem shared the struggle with her, the old priest desperately wanted to understand. But Kananda was losing interest in these dry scratchings in the dust. The frontal zip on Zela’s silver suit was almost imperceptibly sliding downward as she talked, and he could see again a tantalizing and gradually expanding view of her breasts. He began to wish fervently that Kaseem would shut up and go away.

  The old man was oblivious to the desires of youth. He squatted with his robe clutched tight around him, listening intently with his gaze moving constantly from the drawings to the woman’s face, but to his frustration he comprehended little. The woman was talking about the stars, but in among the Hindu words she had learned were strange words from her own language which had no meaning for him. In the end he gave up and changed the subject to one that was dearer to his own heart.

  “You are from the gods,” he challenged he
r. “Do you know the gods? Are they in the stars?”

  Zela sighed. “You ask difficult questions, friend Kaseem. No, we are not gods. Nor are we messengers from your gods. We are people like yourselves, from another planet in this solar system which is much like your own.”

  “But you know the gods,” Kaseem insisted, almost fiercely. You know Indra, the god of war and thunder and storm. You know Varuna, the high god of heaven who is Lord over all.”

  “We do not know the names Indra and Varuna,” Zela said carefully, knowing that this was an area where she might easily offend, or worse, turn the old priest into a deadly enemy. “But I think these are two different names for one god, and on Dooma we do believe in one God.”

  Confusion registered on the old man’s face. He frowned and scowled, and then dared to look her directly in the eyes. “If you do not know Indra and Varuna—then who is your God? Do you worship fire, or sky, or Earth? Or do you worship monkey totems like the primitive tribes of the forest?”

  “Please, Kaseem, let me explain.” Zela tried to calm him with a gentle smile and by resting a light hand on his bare shoulder. “Our world is much older than your Earth. Because it is further from the sun the oceans cooled more quickly and intelligent life began to develop there long before it did here. Our recorded history on the continent of Alpha goes back for ten thousand years. During that time our ancestors fought endless battles and wars, most of them for power and conquest, but always with the followers of one saint or god fighting the followers of another. Religions and gods always divided our people, and those divisions always enabled the power-hungry to mobilize the masses for war.”

  “Tell me about your gods.” Kaseem was not willing to be side-tracked into history.

  “We had many gods,” Zela admitted wryly, “And many religions. But their names and doctrines are only of importance to the individual subscribers of that particular belief. What our philosophers gradually came to realize was that if any god existed then there could only be one God, and that this was a spiritual and not a physical reality. It became clear then that we fought only over names and definitions of that which could never be finally named or defined. From this it followed that all religions worshipped the same god, even though they did not realize this truth, and that if the god-names and the doctrines were not of prime importance, then it must be faith itself which leads all believers to the One God. Once we had reached this understanding—that all religious faiths must lead inevitably to the One God—then it became easier for the different religious groups to tolerate each other. They did not have to accept other doctrines or god-names in place of their own, but only to understand that other groups worshipped the same spiritual reality in a different way.”