For all that I would have to walk in and teach him how to behave to a son-in-law, a prospect full of unpleasantness.
This incident, I believe, finally made me make up my mind to act positively. I had been growing lethargic
— oh, not in the amount of work I dispatched each day, but in the attitude I had adopted. I love Valka and I could see all the fantastic promise of the island even then. I had become wrapped up in the place. I saw it as the home to which I would bring Delia of the Blue Mountains in triumph as my bride. Encar of the Fields came in then with a query about the new acreage of samphron trees we were clearing — from the gnarly-trunked samphron trees we pick glossy purple fruits which the watermills crush into fragrant oil — and after Encar waddled Erdgar, fat and out of breath, with a problem on the supply of shaped and seasoned knees for the new ships he was building down in Valkanium’s dockyards.
“Erdgar,” I said. “There is a journey I must make. I shall need your best-found ship. Rose of Valka, possibly? And fully-provisioned.”
“Rose of Valka, ”wheezed Erdgar the Shipwright. He took a glass of wine, sniffing it appreciatively.
“Aye, she is fleet and well-found and might venture into the Southern Ocean, if needs be.”
This was a neat way of asking me my destination. The breeze blew on that high terrace of Esser Rarioch and the scent of yellow mushk, clustered with bees in its shelter, smelled very sweet. My friends were relaxing after the day’s toil; soon we would go down to the great hall to eat and drink and sing the old songs — and the new, aye, the new! — and life was exceedingly good.
“Zenicce,” I told Erdgar. “I will go to Strombor.”
This, as it seemed to me, was a cunning plan, for I might thus be able to detour the gales that prevented me from reaching Vallia. And I had a hunger to see Strombor again.
“Strombor! The devils of Esztercari drove out the good folk of Strombor! There was a story that they had in their turn been driven out. I pray the invisible twins it is so.”
Tharu drained his glass. “Many of us were born of parents who escaped from Strombor.”
My surprise was complete.
It made sense. Valka lies about a hundred and fifty dwaburs southwest of Zenicce. And the Stromboramin were likely to stick together in the urgency of their departure in the few ships available to them in those days of horror.
While Erdgar the Shipwright wheezed and fussed over Rose of Valka I took a journey into the Heart Heights in connection with the construction of a new dam. I found I welcomed these duties of economist, husbandman, canalmaster, and organizer of a province. My party of engineers, secretaries, and supply officers traveled into the interior in a narrow boat. Through lock after lock that had been recently repaired and put back into service we mounted the ladder of water. The weather remained wonderful, the crops were ripening, there was not a slave within sight, and my only regret was that my Delia of Delphond was not at my side to share all these delights with me.
One warm and pinkly-golden evening as the Maiden with the Many Smiles and She of the Veils floated together in the sky I walked for a space on the canal bank, sunk in thought. The glorious pink and golden evening turned blue with a lambent refulgence of blueness I recognized with a savage surge of feeling. I looked up. Against the starshot sky with those two moons of Kregen floating so serenely I saw the luminescent blue outline of a gigantic scorpion. This was the sign! This scorpion with arrogantly upflung tail was the sign that in some way either brought me or indicated I was to be brought to Kregen. I had seen this phantom sky scorpion on Earth. Now I was seeing it on Kregen!
The old familiar blueness enveloped me and I was falling and twisting with the blueness roaring in my head — and I did not struggle, I did not shout my defiance, I merely waited for what the destiny of the scorpion would bring me.
CHAPTER SIX
The scorpion and the glacier
It is not my intention to speak freely or to go into details of my life here on this planet of my birth. Although I usually returned to some crisis or other and I spent some exhilarating years here, to put it mildly, my chief interest and absorbing passions were ever fixed on the planet of Kregen orbiting Antares in the constellation of Scorpio four hundred light-years away.
Often I would stand and gaze into the starry sky, hoping and praying that the lambent-blue form of the ghostly scorpion would once more summon me, naked and unarmed, and pitch me headlong into bloody and violent adventure. The man whose name I do not mention who held my growing fortune in trust for me served me faithfully and well, and his descendants after him. He was always pleased to see me and asked no questions I could not answer. He and his sons knew of this habit of mine of looking up at the stars, but they passed no comment. I know they understood I was not as ordinary mortals. I found myself in Paris during the July days of 1830.
There was a time loop involved here; I had had the word from the Gdoinye as to that. I did not understand what was involved then; and even today, the mechanics of time distortion remain vague. I had spent more Terrestrial-span years on Kregen than there were between my first arrival there floating down the River Aph to Aphrasoe, the Swinging City, to meet the Savanti in 1805, and 1830. Caught up in the excitements of the dismissal of Charles X and the installation of Louis Phillipe, I played a part. Only after the seventh of August, however, was I free and able to walk alone by the Seine. The blue lambency caught me up swiftly, and the scorpion drew me willingly across the parsecs, hurtling through the empty dark to resume my destiny upon Kregen under the Suns of Scorpio. Even before I opened my eyes I knew I landed in a part of Kregen I had never visited before. The cold cut in like scalping knives.
As usual, I was unarmed, naked, left entirely to my own resources. I felt free, overjoyed, triumphant, profoundly thankful.
What, I wondered, was the emergency that had brought me back this time?
Whatever it might be I would deal with it as fast as I could and then, ascertaining just where I had been flung on this terrifying if beautiful world of Kregen, make my way to Vallia, march into Vondium, and confront the Emperor, demand from him his daughter in marriage. Yes, I had hesitated and hung back long enough. Only the gift of a thousand years of life had made what I had done possible. But my patience had run out. By Zim-Zair! No matter if the Emperor was belittled in the eyes of his daughter, and thereby I ran the risk of hurting her feelings — I had absolutely no fears that I would lose her love, as she knew she would never lose mine. I would take that risk and inflict that amount of pain on my beloved, believing sincerely that she would understand I moved not only for my own pleasure and greed and pride, but also for her sake as well.
I opened my eyes.
I shivered.
Snow lay everywhere in a thick, pale pink blanket through which the dark firs thrust like withered fingers of a buried army of crones.
A hundred yards off lay the crumpled shape of an airboat.
My task lay before me.
The wind cut into my naked hide and I knew that if I did not find clothes and food very quickly I could give up all hopes and ideas of finding my Delia again.
The airboat had landed badly and her petal shape had been grotesquely twisted. From the small aft cabin I dragged out four bodies. These men were Vallians. Under the heavy ponsho fleeces they wore the buff coats and the long black boots I knew so well. Selecting the body of the largest, I stripped him and donned his gear. The warmth of the ponsho skin struck in most gratefully and I shivered in reciprocal delight. Now I could attend to the two men still alive. Unconscious, they breathed stertorously; but an examination convinced me they were not seriously injured. These two men, then, were the reason I had been returned to Kregen.
The airboat had crashed through spiky fir trees to come to rest in a V-shaped valley between peaks. Up there the snow and ice glistened uglily. The thought occurred to me that we were stranded in The Stratemsk, a fate of almost certain disaster. The Stratemsk, although not the greatest range of mountains
upon Kregen, are so vast, so tall, so hostile, that the imagination shrinks from their contemplation. Downslope a panorama spread out where the valley ended, and between craggy outcrops the snow could not smooth or render less sinister a glacier began, vanishing below cloud. That, then, was our way out.
A cry brought my attention back to the flier. One of the men had crawled to the shattered opening. His face glared out on me more white, more stark, than the snow and the dark fir trees.
“What happened? Where are we? Who are you?” The voice carried that habitual ring of authority, so that I knew I was in the presence of a man accustomed to command, a high dignitary, a man of power.
“You crashed. We are in the mountains. I am Dray Prescot.”
He moved back as I approached, and before I reached the opening the second man crawled out. He was younger, handsome, his brown hair a fairer tint than the normal Vallian, although nowise of that outrageous chestnut glory of my Delia’s hair.
“Dray Prescot?”
The older man pushed through quickly and the younger was, perforce, thrust aside. The elder wriggled as he crawled out onto the snow, and turning his head spoke in a low voice to the younger. He stood up, and swayed, and I was at his side, supporting him.
“You’d best rest easy, dom. You’ve had a tidy whack.”
He drew himself up, although still clutching my arm for support. Blood had dried along the clean-shaven upper edge of his beard, frozen, glittering coldly.
“I am Naghan Furtway, Kov of Falinur, and this is my nephew, Jenbar. You address me as Kov, and my nephew as Tyr. Is that understood?”
I held him and I looked into his eyes. I knew those eyes of old, I had seen their like many times in the faces of men accustomed to absolute power. Corrupt, sadistic, merciless, yes; but the eyes of men accustomed to moving the strings of this world, as they manipulate those of Earth. The friendly name of dom — the nearest equivalent in English is mate, and in American, pal — had affronted him. It was necessary to put our relationship on its proper footing instantly, and now I cursed that my stay on Earth had loosened my tongue. For these men were Vallians, and I had given them my real name. I should have remained Drak, Strom of Valka. So I simply said: “Very good, Kov. We must collect what things are necessary and travel as far downslope as is possible before nightfall.”
He grunted. “Quite so.” He turned to his nephew. “Jenbar — do you feel fit enough to walk?”
“I do not!” Jenbar spat out, with a curse.
Naghan Furtway, Kov of Falinur, merely looked at the young man, and then pushed past back into the shattered cabin. I had buried the naked body of the man I had stripped, and if Furtway bothered to notice he probably assumed the disappearance had been caused by the unfortunate man being flung out as the flier crashed. He began taking ponsho skins from the dead bodies. Jenbar studied me.
“Koter Prescot,” he said, at last, and his voice betrayed his weakness. “I ask you to pardon my ill-temper. But I think you will understand it when you see our condition, and good men dead. I thank you for your assistance. I will try to walk bravely.”
I warmed to him then, responding to his frankness. I, too, would have been in a filthy temper had my airboat crashed in these surroundings.
In truth, our surroundings were unpleasant in the extreme, and if we were caught out here by nightfall, desperately dangerous. The airboat might provide some shelter, and I fancied we might manage a fire with tree wood, but I preferred to make the effort to reach lower altitudes before dark.
“Oolie Opaz!” exclaimed Jenbar. “What a miserable business!”
His expression warned me that there might be more than a mere curse in his intentions; for I had once seen the long lines of chanting men and women, garishly clad and strung with blossoms, winding in and out of the streets of Pomdermam, the capital of the nation of Tomboram on the island of Pandahem.
“Oolie Opaz! Oolie Opaz! Oolie Opaz!” they would chant, singing and swaying, hour after hour the same metronomic hypnotic words, swinging up and down the scale, changing key, on and on maddeningly. This hypnotic chanting held power. It sucked a man in, singing, until his eyeballs rolled up and he drifted away to a white and empty state of which philosophers and mystics talk. I contented myself with a nod to the ponsho fleeces.
“Best to dress yourself warmly, Tyr Jenbar. The way will be long and hard.” Then, because he was young and there was in him a steely inner strength I could perceive, I added: “I know you will march well, but I will be here to help you if necessary.”
He looked downslope. His features hardened and a ridge jumped into life along his jaw, for he was clean-shaven. His face held a strong damn-you-to-hell look, and I guessed that ferocity was not for me, perhaps not even for the fates that had flung him here, but for the hostility of the way we must tread. He chuckled. “It will be a task for Tyr Nath! But we will win through, Koter Prescot. We of Falinur always win through to our desires in the end!”
“So be it,” I said, and busied myself in making what small preparations we could. So we set off, the three of us, and, in truth, had I not been with them, hurled there across the gulf of four hundred light-years by the inscrutable purposes of the Star Lords, they would not have survived. I fancied the Star Lords had brought me to Kregen this time, for this business bore all the hallmarks of their handiwork, and not that of the Savanti.
We struggled through waist-high snow, which glittered with the frosting colors of jade and crimson as the twin suns struck through from a sky of purple and indigo. We reached the end of the valley, after many halts, and there stretching below us lay the beginning of the glacier, a tumbled confused mass, with the clouds drifting above it, obscuring the panorama beyond.
I am no man to love fir trees, for they look thin and harsh and dispiriting; I am a man who loves the wide-leaved expansive openhearted trees of the south. Fir trees are valuable for spars, and other artifacts, but here I welcomed their presence as clear proof we were below the tree line. As soon as possible we must reach below the snow-line.
“We will slide,” I said.
They did not argue. They had become stupefied — puggled is the old word for it — and they meekly accepted my dictates. I spread the ponsho fleeces. We lay upon them, belted together, and I pushed off
— and we went.
We went!
It was a mad helter-skelter of a ride, a wild swooping rush of icy-cold wind and the hiss of the ice and jouncing bouncing and the desperate booted thrusting to avoid debris and the moraines that built up as side glaciers joined the main stem. Four times I had to haul us painfully to a halt, against the scraped sides, so that we might not crash full tilt into the low pile of rocks. Then we had to slip and slide over the obstacles, find a fresh glide path, and so down once more on the skins and take off with a breathless swooshing. My face was numb. Ice smothered me and I had to brush the crisp glassy crystals from my eyelids. The cold continued to cut intensely, and our very progress intensified its freezing grip. We had taken rapiers and daggers — for very few men, and they either fools or protected in other ways, travel Kregen unarmed — and with a dagger in each hand I was in some measure able to control and direct our descent. I thrust the daggers angling downward, and by varying the pressures from side to side could both slow and steer us. But it was exhausting work and I sweated a little, which is excruciatingly unpleasant in such cold temperatures.
We plunged boldly into the clouds.
“Have a care, Koter Prescot!” Furtway’s words were weak. The cold was numbing him through to the marrow. If he was to survive we must get down — and get down fast.
The rate of descent was slowed by the daggers. We left a wide swathe of ice chips spilling across the glacier after us. If we hit a rock now. .
The clouds thinned, thickened, whereat I thrust hard with the daggers, thinned again and then we were through them and almost on the lip of the glacier.
I lunged sideways, plunging both daggers over onto the right. We swirled in
a great fanning of ice chips and for an instant I thought we would skate right off the ponsho fleeces.
“Hold on!” I yelled, and ice cracked and flaked from my mouth.
We held on. Just short of the lip of the glacier, where it calved and in a great crevasse and a white thunder fell a thousand feet, we skidded and slewed into the side. We hit the scored bank of ice and snow, tumbled out, and so lay exhausted.
“Up!” I said.
They moaned.
“Let me lie, rast,” said Naghan Furtway, Kov of Falinur. “I am tired and would like to rest.”
“If you rest here you will never rise again.”
His eyes were closed and so he did not see my face as I leaned over him. I gripped him beneath the shoulders and stood him up, but his legs buckled and he slid down again. I turned to his nephew.
“Up,” I said. “Now is when you must march like a man.”
He groaned and sat up, and tumbled over sideways.
“Life is sweet and there is much to live for,” he said, the gush of white mist spuming from his lips at each word. “Now I know that, but I cannot feel it. I am done for. Leave me, Koter Prescot. It is soft and comfortable and warm here.”
“It’s as cold as the Ice Floes of Sicce,” I said, “which is where you’ll find yourself if you do not brace up.”
I stared at them. If they died I would have failed the Star Lords, and then I would be flung contemptuously back to Earth. I might rot there for years. I could not face that. These men must be saved, so that I might remain on Kregen and seek my lost love and demand her from her all-powerful father.
The task was extraordinarily difficult and painful, but I got Furtway up on my back, bundled with ponsho fleeces, and buckled him in place. I put my left arm around Jenbar and dragged him up, and so, carrying one and dragging the other, I set off.
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