Delia of Vallia [Dray Prescot #28]

by Alan Burt Akers

  The flier leaped up and down like a crazed sliptinger, that beautiful salmon of Western Vallia, and Jordio met each leap and lunge and held her. Delia looked ahead and down. Were those lights below?

  She banged Lathdo on a bulky armored shoulder and pointed.

  He nodded.

  Jordio inched his controls carefully, and the flier, responding, lunged down and kept at the angle, sweeping in through the gusts. The lights grew firmer. Wind struck into her face as a force, tearing, liberating. But however much she might exult in fronting the elements, those same elemental forces could take the flier and twist her end over end and shred her and cast her down as a mass of tumbled wreckage onto the ground below.

  Her hair blew back in a whiplash of abandon. Poor Mimi! The lights brightened. A village, perhaps a small town, huddled against the fury of the storm. The place was somewhere in Vindelka, on the way to the provincial capital.

  “...get ... down!” bellowed Lathdo. He looked furious in that dark light, his jaw muscles bulging. If aught happened to the empress!

  Delia could guess his thoughts. She could feel a small sorrow for him; after all, he was new to the job and the big blow-hard was eager to do what he imagined to be the right things around an empress. He, like Mimi, could be trained.

  Nothing of any of the seven Moons of Kregen could be glimpsed in that wracked sky. The darkness lashed with the wind, and the wind scourged with the darkness. No one saw it.

  One moment Jordio was bringing the flier down in a steep descent, angling her to catch the wind, and the next they'd slammed slap bang into the roof of a building.

  The flier simply broke up.

  Upside down, whirled on the breath of the wind, Delia caught a fantastic glimpse of Mimi flying out of the aft cabin like a kite.

  Something hard struck Delia across the back. It was probably the edge of the guttering. Bits and pieces of destroyed airboat whirled about her. She saw nothing in the clamping dark of either Lathdo or Jordio. She fell off the edge of the roof, her back aching like the devil, her eyes filled with tears of pain, of fury and frustration, and her mouth wide open and yelling blue bloody murder.

  She hit the dung heap.

  Well, Seg and her husband knew about those kinds of adventure. She sat up, spitting straw, and glared about with such a look of savage hatred as would have fried a leem.

  She could barely smell the stink, for the wind lashed it away. Her hair blew all over her face when she turned to look downwind. All she could see was the whole world leaping up and down. Then she realized this uncanny movement was merely a tree, blowing bent, and straightening, and so bowing once again to the power of the storm.

  She stood up and went a dozen staggering steps to leeward. She bumped into a wall, grazed her fingers, and held on. She dragged in a few gulps of breath. That she kept on her feet meant that her legs weren't broken. That she gripped to the wall meant her arms weren't broken. That she remained upright meant her back wasn't broken—although it damned-well felt like it. And because her head did not roll off and get blown away by the wind, her neck wasn't broken.

  She gulped more air, shook her face free of hair, and crabbed along the wall. Her groping fingers felt the door long before she saw it. It fitted snugly into the jamb.

  The exhilaration she'd felt at the touch of the wind faded. She felt exhausted. She was feeling far more tired lately than she should. When the rain began she knew she'd have to cave in, or, being a Sister of the Rose, think about giving in and then go marching on, stupid though the marching might be.

  But the tiredness dragged at her. This was frightening, the way she could feel the fatigue deep within her bones. This was something new to her, and nauseating, unnerving.

  Holding onto the edge of the jamb and getting her breath, resisting the tug of the wind, she recalled herself after she had fallen from the zorca and become a cripple. Yes, there had been something of that feeling then. Certainly, she'd never felt like this when she'd been carrying any of her children.

  She put her teeth together, bit down, hunched up her shoulders, and swinging her leg vigorously, delivered a thumping great kick at the door.

  She had to kick three times before she roused any answer.

  The door cracked the space of a narrow nose and one eye. She put her mouth to the slot of light and bellowed.

  “Let me in!"

  Another thumping great thwack with her toes reinforced the demand. She was prepared to lay about her with her tongue, get ‘em jumping, have a fire and a hot toddy, a meal, find a decent bed, and—first and most important—stir ‘em all up into going out and scouring everywhere to find Mimi and Lathdo and Jordio.

  The door slapped open. She tumbled in. An oniony sack clapped over her head. Whoever they were in here, one of them hit her over the head. The smell of onions faded with everything else, faded and went away, went with the wind.

  * * *

  Chapter nine

  A Walk in the Radiance of the Suns

  She supposed, with deep rancor and considerable soul-searching, that this was what happened to girls who grew to think themselves too important. They had given her a tunic, and a breechclout. Both were of grey.

  Slave grey.

  Well, she'd been slave before. She had helped to outlaw slavery in Vallia. But, here she was, trudging along with a forlorn group of other slaves, all following a coach down a long and dusty road, going from where to where she had not the slightest idea.

  After the onion sack, she'd been kicked awake to find herself stark naked chained in a bed. And that damned spot on her chest had changed into a swelling. The swelling was ugly in her eyes, a bulging lump. A cautious swivel of her eyes revealed other lumps. When she could touch her face she felt more.

  So these people, whoever they were, had led her out to the waiting coffle of slaves, and taken their chains off and affixed the slavers’ chains. She trudged along with the others, and no one wanted to talk to her.

  She was merchandise.

  The day sparkled about her. The streaming mingled radiance of Zim and Genodras, the twin Suns of Kregen, touched everything with fire. She half-shut her eyes. The road was ochreish, dusty and dry. Her feet, naked, did not pain her, for empress or no empress, she was hardened to going barefoot. Perhaps, toward the end of the day if the march was long, her feet would pain; but, then, she was in all truth a little out of practice for this particular brand of adventure.

  Her latest escapades had been more in the nature of riding a superb saddle animal at the head of armies.

  The road, like most roads of Vallia, was atrocious. Relying mainly for transport on her magnificent system of canals, Vallia neglected roadworks. This specimen stretched out between fields of Strafin and Chawinseed, all glowing purple and orange above the green in the rays of the suns. If these slavers put her to work in the fields, she'd make a break and run for it.

  The guards who marched beside the small column, only occasionally flicking their whips, were not apims. They were diffs, Fristles whose cat faces bristled with whiskers, and whose fur showed the patternings of various races. They did not look so much bored with their job as indifferent to what they were doing. They continually scanned the sky.

  If they expected a patrol of Vallian aerial cavalry to sweep down and rescue the slaves, they would, in Delia's opinion, be expecting nothing. She trudged on. The coach up ahead swayed and jolted along. Over the heads of the intervening slaves Delia made out the ornate gildings on the coach, the real glass in the rear window, the rail at top retaining a piled mass of boxes and trunks. To trudge along as a slave at the back end of a handsome coach? There was an incongruity here.

  The other people taken up into slavery smelled less than sweet. The dust stung her nostrils. The suns blazed down, pouring a conciliatory warmth upon the world for the violence of the storm. The coffle passed through a village which she did not recognize. Every door was bolted, every window shuttered; nothing moved save the gilded coach and the slavers and their merchandise
.

  The woman who slouched along beside Delia twisted a narrow neck to peer with filmed eyes upon the scene. Her hair straggled, dust smothered, unkempt. It was, surmised Delia with distaste, just like her own.

  “All run off. Bad cess to ‘em, says I. More of us there are, the lighter the work."

  “Where are we going?” Delia responded with a quick eagerness to the advance. But the woman relapsed into the indifferent silence chaining them all.

  They trailed on, a hopeless, miserable crew, bound for the horrors of the unknown.

  Delia eyed the nearest Fristle guard who marched along with wilting whiskers, his cat face sullen, the dust staining the brass-studded leather jerkin. He carried an axe at his belt, and a spear sloped over his shoulder. Every now and again he tilted his head up, so that the leather flaps of his cap dangled free, scanning the sky.

  Suppose she were such a guard, herding slaves along? And one of the slaves in her grey slave tunic and breechclout accosted her, saying something like: “I am the Empress of Vallia. Release me at once, or your head is forfeit"?

  What would she think; what do?

  A swift thwack with the spear, an insult? Perhaps a taste of the sharp end to keep the cramphs in order? Certainly, it would be a surprising guard who would immediately leap into a torrent of majestrixes and unshackle the chains and bow and scrape.

  There was no hope there.

  Not yet. When she reached their destination, and managed to gain converse with someone in authority, then would be the time. The person riding so grandly in the gold coach, Delia surmised with a chill, might believe, and, believing, dispatch her out of hand.

  The aragorn and the slavemasters chased out of Vallia bore a sullen resentment against the emperor and empress for depriving them of a livelihood. Not all people welcomed the manumission imposed from above.

  Only a short time after leaving the village the slaves began to falter. Soon some dropped to the ground, unable to continue. Chains clanked and dragged in the dust.

  Delia was pulled down by the woman at her side.

  Instinctively, she tried to help the woman up, a hand under her armpit. The woman's head lolled. Other people began to drop. The guards used their whips, and shrieks lifted, cutting in the bright air. But the coffle stopped.

  A totrix came lolloping back from up front. It bore a rider in silvered armor who flourished a whip and swore most vilely. She slashed at the slaves and the guards indiscriminately, shouting at them to go on.

  “Grak!” she shrieked. “Grak, you useless bunch of tapos. Grak, or you'll all have your throats cut!"

  A second totrix appeared from the front of the column.

  Dully, Delia wondered how many more cavalry trotted so grandly as advance guard.

  The second rider reined in beside the first.

  “Easy, Chica. It is clear they must have water—as I said in the village."

  “Since when does anyone listen to you, Nath the Muncible? They must be whipped into marching."

  “They will be whipped to death. Then who will pay you?"

  “Ah—your piddling ways sicken me."

  Despite this altercation, the coach up ahead rumbled to a halt and presently a few tame slaves brought pannikins of water. Delia drank. She was not at all surprised that she drank as the other slaves drank, huge greedy gulps, grasping and jostling. After a bur or so the whips snapped and the coffle slowly resumed the march.

  Slavery had been outlawed in Vallia and the slavers and aragorn banished, if they failed to take up an honest living. So this nightmare could not be happening—should not be happening. But it was.

  She was far stronger than most of the people in the slave coffle. She could march. She had to retain her sense of identity, bide her time. There was great danger for the empress in this situation, paradoxically, far more danger than for a citizen. Her death would be well rewarded in the circles of her enemies. By keeping on, attracting no special attention to herself, keeping herself to herself, she could survive until she met someone to whom she could talk. If the gods favored her, it would be someone she knew, someone who was a friend.

  She was far more frightened of the horrible swellings disfiguring her body. Her thoughts had to be kept under control. She made her legs go up and down and carry her on as she had in the Ochre Limits. But, truly, this trudging along, even loaded with chains, was nowhere as bad as that experience. These lumps and bumps, these rashes speckled with yellow pimples that grew into obscene blemishes upon her body, growing into smooth hard lumps ... No. If she thought that, then she would have infected all of Lancival, those in Vondium and Drakanium...

  No. No, that could not be the cause of the swellings.

  And, if she thought rationally about this march, it was far far worse than struggling across the Ochre Limits. Then she had been a free woman, able to make her own decisions and affect, in however small a way, her own destiny. Now she was slave.

  Did she have the Affliction of the Sores of Combabbry?

  This pimple-speckled rash, those smooth swellings, were unlike the suppurating sores of the disease. But she had bathed in the Sacred Pool in far Aphrasöe. That would make a difference. Must make a difference to the course of the disease, surely? Perhaps she was a walking bed of infestation.

  When she had spoken to the woman who dragged along at her side, her own words had sounded odd. A lump swelled beside her mouth, distorting the shape, slurring her speech. Another lump had joined those on her breast, and her face matched the general lumpiness. She must look a sight!

  One leg—the left—was fully half again the size of her right leg. How odd it looked, to see one fat and one thin leg, striding forward under her!

  She was growing light-headed.

  Careful, girl! she said to herself, and bit down, and closed her eyes against the glare of dust, and marched on.

  The course of the Affliction of the Sores of Combabbry was known. She would never have allowed herself to be taken to Lancival without complete conviction that she was free of the disease. A period of quarantine would have been necessary, and because she had not taken the disease and it was being checked in Mellinsmot, she had, along with the doctor, taken it that she was free. Was she free?

  Just because these horrible lumps were different from the sores might not mean the disease too was different. If this woman at her side caught the infection—she would erupt in suppurating sores because she had not bathed in the Sacred Pool. All the mixed emotions experienced by Delia at thought of that magical baptism tormented her anew.

  The trudging progress of the coffle degenerated to a shuffle. They made little better than two or two and a half miles an hour. When the suns at last slid down to the western horizon and the air cooled and the coach halted and tents were erected, they'd covered perhaps twenty miles or so. The slaves fell down in their tracks at the side of the road, and slept.

  Those who remained awake kicked the others awake when a thin gruel, hard bread and pannikins of water came around. Then they all slept. Delia was not molested, although a few of the younger girls were removed from their chains and then, later, returned. A man slave, husky and with a mop of dark hair, was taken and likewise returned, much later than the others. He staggered in, groaning, was chained up and fell full length into an exhausted sleep.

  The next day they made another twenty-five miles or so, and picked up half a dozen new slaves from pinched-face people at a crossroads inn. Gold changed hands. The newcomers were shackled up and the dreary procession resumed.

  On this day the watching of the sky, although it persisted, was far more perfunctory. From this Delia deduced the coffle must be nearing its destination.

  She still could not recognize where she was. She was in Vindelka—the kovnate province of her half-brother, for Val's sake!—but that was the extent of her knowledge. When you flew so fleetly high above the ground, details below blurred. An hour or two in the air could cover all and more, far far more, than a girl could walk on her feet in a day...
>
  The cultivated fields were left behind. The coffle entered woods which thickened and deepened, cutting off the light. The track wound unevenly over bumpy ground. At the thought of bumps Delia touched herself, and winced. She was more lumpy than the ground upon which she walked.

  If these damned slavers erupted all over with putrescent sores and boils, she did not think she would grieve overmuch ... If her three companions who had crashed with her in the airboat were infected, she would not only grieve, she would have to face her own guilt.

  Common sense told her that she could not be held to blame. Medical opinion held that she could not have contracted the disease. But medical opinion was unaware of the existence of that Pool in the River Zelph of far Aphrasöe. Common sense might tell her all it liked; she was Delia and she was weighed down by self-recriminations far outside common sense.

  Although she had been unable to see everyone in the coffle, she was confident that Mimi, Lathdo and Jordio were not there. The two men with her in the forward part of the voller must have gone slap bang over the other side of the house. As for Mimi—she had sailed off like a kite in the cabin. Where she was now, Opaz alone knew, and Delia consigned the little handmaid's fate to that manifestation of the Invisible Twins in trust and hope.

  Then she fell over a snaggly root and pitched full length.

  The woman chained with her fell on top of her. Metal clanked. Guards appeared with whips, ferocious. Delia managed to wriggle around and drag the chains up so that the links took most of the blows. But some struck through, and stung, stung like liquid fire.

  The thought burst into her head...

  If I had my Whip now...!

  The guards sorted things out with blows and lashes and the coffle moved on. Delia felt a rising terror at her own fatigue. She was just so damned tired! She stumbled along in her chains as the shouts of “Grak! Grak!” beat about them. The woman she had dragged down said nothing. She walked as though encased in ice. Blood glimmered through a rent in her grey tunic.