Transit to Scorpio

by Alan Burt Akers

  We roused in the late afternoon and satisfied our hunger with the fresh light crispy bread of Kregen, loaves as long as rapiers, and thin rashers of vosk-back, and palines, with the Kregen tea—full-bodied, aromatic, pungent—to finish. When we saw Wanek again he greeted us kindly. I asked for Delia.

  “I will ask her to join us,” said Wanek, and a slave departed—only to come back with the word that Delia was not in her room and the slave who had with such kind care and attention insisted on attending to her was also missing. I sat up. My hand fell to the hilt of the rapier.

  “Please!” Wanek looked upset. A search was instituted; but Delia was not to be found. I raged. Wanek was beside himself at the insult he was thus forced to endure—the insult to him in that he insulted an honored guest.

  Delia of the Blue Mountains and I had exchanged only a few words during our escape, for Gloag was near and, at least on my part, I felt a constraint, sure that she hated and detested me for what I had done to her. She had said something that puzzled me mightily. When we had both vanished from the pool of baptism in far Aphrasöe she had opened her eyes to find herself on the beach with the Fristles bearing down upon her, so that she had not been surprised to see me. When I had, in the moment of victory, been tumbled from the zorca, she had been taken to the city and straight to the House of Esztercari. Because of their shipping interests the Esztercari did a thriving business in slaves, and they could also command those caught in other ways. Then Delia had shaken me. For, she said, the very next day, she had seen me in that corridor, dressed in those accursed clothes, and had spilled and broken the water jar.

  She also told me that one each of those occasions when she had been captured or enslaved she had seen a white dove flying high, with a great scarlet and golden raptor far above.

  A messenger was announced. A bluff, moustached bulky man looking oddly out-of-place in the powder blue of the Ewards stalked in, his rapier clamped to his side, his face alive with wrath and baffled fury. He was, I understood, the House Champion, a position occupied in Esztercari by Galna of the white face and mean eyes.

  “Well, Encar?”

  “A message, my leader, from—from the Esztercari. A slave whom we trusted—how they mock us for that!—has abducted the Lady Delia of the Blue Mountains—”

  I leaped to my feet, my blade half out of its scabbard, my hands trembling, and I know my face, ugly as it is, must have seemed diabolical to those around me.

  It was true. The slave wench with her blandishments had arranged it all. She was a spy for Natema. She had got a message out, it seemed clear, and men had been waiting in that damned emerald livery at a tiny postern. There they had snatched my Delia, thrown a hood over her head, carried her swiftly aboard a gondola and poled away to the enclave of Esztercari. It was all true, heart-breakingly true.

  But there was more.

  “Unless the men called Dray Prescot freely surrenders himself to the Kodifex,” Encar went on, his bluff honest face reflecting the distaste he felt at his words, “the Lady Delia of the Blue Mountains will meet a fate such as is meted out to recalcitrant slaves, to slaves who escape—” He faltered and looked at me.

  “Go on.”

  “She will be stripped and turned loose into the Rapa court.”

  I heard gasps. I did not know—but I could guess.

  “Dray Prescot—what can you do?” asked Gloag. He had risen to stand by me, splayfooted, incredibly tough, intelligent, a friend despite his dun bristly hide.

  As I may have indicated, I do not laugh easily. I threw back my head, I, Dray Prescot, and laughed, there in the Great Hall of the House of Esztercari.

  “I will go,” I said. “I will go. And if a hair of her head is injured I will raze their House to the ground and slay them all, every last one.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  In the leem pit

  Gloag wanted to fight for me.

  “No,” I said.

  “Give me a spear,” he growled in that rumbling voice.

  “It is my business.”

  “Your business is my business. At least, a spear.”

  “You will be killed.”

  “I know the warrens. Without me, you will be killed.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Then we will both be killed. Give me a spear.”

  I turned to Wanek, leader of the Noble House of Eward.

  “Give my friend a spear.”

  “Now may the light of Father Mehzta-Makku shine on us both.”

  From Wanek I obtained a high-quality rapier and dagger, and in return told him who had been the last owner of the rapier I bore.

  His delight at holding the trophy wrested from his hated enemy was keen.

  “You said the hilt has value,” I said. “And, here, will you keep these gems in trust for me?” I handed over the cloth-enfolded gems. Gloag insisted his share, also, should be handed over, and then I knew he meant business, for with that wealth he could have set himself up in a small way in business in the free section of the city and lived out his life in prosperity and respect.

  When I told Wanek what further I requested of him he slapped his thigh in merriment, and called Encar to ready a skiff in which would go one of his men disguised to look as much like me as possible. We then went up to the roof and not without a tremor I lay down on an airboat. This was the first time I had been in one; the first time I had ever flown. Such a thing was a marvel to me. It was petal-shaped, with a transparent windshield in front, and straps to retain one in place and pelts and silks to cover the rider. Gloag and I strapped down. The driver—the word pilot was unknown to me then—except in the connotation of a ship’s pilot—sent the little craft leaping into the air into the floods of sunset light from the crimson sun. The green sun would soon follow. In the course of time, after the suns’ eclipse, the green sun would precede the red in order of rising and setting. The Kregan calendar is based on the suns’ mutual rotations to a great extent. I braced myself as we skimmed through that ruddy falling light.

  I had planned to descend on the roof garden before the skiff bearing the pseudo-me reached the Esztercari landing stage. We slanted down and, thankfully, I saw the garden empty beneath us. Gloag and I leaped off and the airboat withdrew to a discreet distance. We raced for that stairway and so into the slave quarters. Wearing the slave breechclout of grimy gray we would still attract attention by reason of our weapons, so I had elected to retain my scarlet breechclout and scarlet cape, and Gloag had done likewise. Often I have been able to pass in disguise suddenly devised where, say, a man with red or green hair would find it impossible to go, although in the House of Esztercari green dyed hair, where it was not shaved off, was common.

  We found a slave girl who under the threat of Gloag’s spear was only too anxious to tell us that the prisoner, whom she remembered well, was shut in the cage above the leem pit. I shuddered. Bad enough it had been to plunge once again into that towering pile of the opal palace; but far worse was it to know that we must venture down itno the depths, below the water level, where the leems slunk, furry and feline and vicious, around the damp walls of their pit. Many human bones moldered there. The leem is eight-legged, sinuous like a ferret or a weasel, but the leopard-size, with wedge-shaped head and fangs that can strike through oak. We killed them without compunction on the great plains as they sought to raid the chunkrah herds, going for preference for the young; for a grown chunkrah will impale them on his horns and hurl them a hundred yards, spitting and mewling through the air.

  I have seen a blow from a leem paw with claws extended rip a warrior’s head from his body and squash it like a rotten pumpkin.

  Yet the leems would be far more preferable a fate for my Delia of the Blue Mountains than to be tossed nude into the Rapa court.

  Our only chance was the speed and audacity of our venture.

  I hoped that Cydones Esztercari and his evil daughter, the Princess Natema, would be awaiting with Galna at the landing stage the arrival of the skiff that wo
uld surely be reported to them. Yet—was Natema evil? If she truly loved me, and given the circumstances of her birth and upbringing so unfortunate as to character, would she not have acted exactly as she had done? A woman scorned is not a person to turn one’s back upon, especially when she wields a dagger or can hurl a terchick.

  We circled warily around the high ledge above the leem pit. The walls exuded moisture cloudy with nitrates. The place stank of leem, that close, furry, throat-clogging stench that is so noticeable in confined spaces and that is dispersed on the plains by the wind, to be scented by the savage chunkrah and warn them it is time to tail-lock, and with infants in the center, to face horn outward.

  A large fully-grown leem can pull down a zorca.

  A vove and two leems present so fightful a picture of mutual destruction in combat that its hideousness is best left to the imagination. I have witnessed it, and testify that truth. A vove will win, for a vove is a terrible machine of destruction; but he will need careful nursing for days thereafter, if the leems fought well.

  These were the creatures who circled the walls of the pit beneath us. In the center, hanging suspended, was the cage in which Delia slumped, her wrists bound. Lines led to the cage through blocks by which means it could be pulled in and out. When Delia saw us she cried out, and the leems below hissed and spat and leaped in graceful vicious arcs up the walls of the pit.

  There were six cords and I laid my hands on the one I could see would haul in the cage.

  Gloag laid his spear across my arms.

  “No,” he said. I looked at him. “My Lady!” he called to Delia. “You must stand up and lock your arms in the bars of the cage. Hold on tightly—for your life!”

  I hesitated no longer. “Do as Gloag says!”

  Stumbling, her hair falling across her face, Delia stood and wedged her bound arms between two bars, hung onto a crossbar. “I am ready, Gloag,” she said. Her voice did not falter.

  I hauled in.

  The instant the line tautened the bottom of the cage parted along the center and flapped down in two halves. Had Delia been meekly standing there she would have been pitched out like coal from a dumper, to plummet down to the fangs and claws of the leems.

  I hauled her in and caught her in my arms and lowered her to the ledge. She still wore the scarlet breechclout. She trembled, suddenly, uncontrollably, and I lifted her up and a single slice of the rapier freed her from her bonds. Then we were hurrying and slipping and sliding around the ledge and out of that infernal pit.

  Lamplight streaked across the sweat slicked on Delia’s smooth long back and cupped in the hollows at the base of her spine. We reached the roof and the green sun had sunk; now the largest moon of Kregen, the maiden with the many smiles, sailed above us drenching the garden in a cool pink haze. The airboat driver was on the alert and came slanting in. Another airboat was approaching; the two were on converging courses. The night breeze rustled the blooms which had closed their petals at sunset and were now opening their larger outer rim of petals to the moonlight, and there were footsteps on the stairs, and voices, and harsh torchlight and the flicker of swords and daggers.

  Our airboat touched. The second dropped beside it and Chuliks bounded out, their gray and emerald a weird sheen under the light. Men boiled out onto the roof behind us.

  I pushed Delia toward the airboat and Gloag with his spear low made a dead run for the Chuliks.

  Men behind, Chuliks before; we were outnumbered and trapped; but we would fight.

  I slew three with quick simple passes, backing toward the airboats. Chuliks were attempting to get at Gloag, who passed his spear, and lunged and returned, with a wild exultant precision; but he was bringing their life’s blood out to stain the flowers a more sinister color. I caught Delia around the waist with my left arm, the dagger dabbling her breast with blood.

  “Up into the airboat, Gloag!” I yelled. “Hold them off from there with that damn long implement of yours!”

  With a shout he leaped. The driver was now in action, his sword a glitter of fire beneath the moon. We were being pressed. Chuliks slid before me, and I battled on. Delia squirmed against my arm.

  “Let me go, you great ninny!”

  I released her and she scooped a dropped dagger, plunged it into the heart of a Chulik who would have taken that opportunity to do the same to me, and sprang for the Chulik airboat. The next Chulik was dispatched by me with a single thrust. I jumped for the airboat, bundling in alongside Delia, turning like a leem to slice my blade down on an upturned face, beating down his rapier guard and biting deep into his skull. An arrow caromed from the windshield. I yelled, deep and fierce, and Gloag’s driver sent his craft swinging upward. The driver of the Chulik airboat, a soft-looking young man in Esztercari green, stared at my blade, gulped, and passed his hands over his controls. We began to rise. Pink moonlight fell about us. The breeze caught at my scarlet cape.

  A hand grasped the gunwhale of the craft, tipping it. A Chulik rose into view, his dagger between his teeth, his rapier leaping for Delia. I brought my blade down overhand onto his head, splitting it, and he shrieked once; his hand flung up and the dagger spun away, and he fell back and wrenched the rapier, wedged in the bones of his skull, from my hand.

  A long soft groan like a small explosion sounded from the airboat and whirled and all the world jumped into my throat. Delia… ?

  An arrow had struck the driver, passing through him, and a shower more, passing where my head had been, tinkled and feathered into his controls. The airboat leaped wildly.

  It rose like a cork, swinging, the wind catching it and driving it under the moonlight.

  Faintly, far below, I could hear shouts.

  “A Chulik rose into view, his dagger between his teeth.”

  I tipped the dead driver out of his reclining seat, and flung him overboard.

  Then I stared helplessly at the controls.

  “They are smashed, Dray Prescot,” said Delia of Delphond. “The airboat cannot be controlled.”

  The wind thrust us over the city faster and faster. In an instant the mammoth buildings fell away to the dimensions of toy blocks on a nursery floor. They they vanished in moon haze and we were alone, drifting helplessly over the face of the plains beneath the moons of Kregen.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On the Great Plains of Segesthes

  If you say to me that, in view of her two suns, Kregen was provided with an inordinate, not to say excessive, number of moons, I can only reply that nature is by nature prolific. That is Kregen. Wild and savage and beautiful, merciless to the incompetent and weak, tolerant of the ambitious and mercenary, positively rewarding to the stouthearted and unscrupulous, Kregen is a planet where the virtues take different forms from those of our Earth.

  And, too, as I understand it, Earth’s moon and the planet Mars, which is relatively small, were both fashioned from the molten crust of the Earth flung off in primeval days when the solar system was in process of formation. Something like two-thirds of the Earth’s crust was thus lost to space, and the floating plates of the Earth’s crust, on some of which lie continents, and on some seas, now slip and slide over the molten magma beneath bereft of the building materials that would have given us a greater area of land surface and consequently deeper seas. On Kregen, so I believe, only about a half of the original molten surface was flung off, to form not one moon and a planet but seven moons. It is all astronomically apposite.

  Of the nine islands of Kregen not one is lesser in area than Australia. There are, of course, uncounted numbers of smaller islands scattered about, and who, still, can say who or what lives there?

  We floated, Delia of the Blue Mountains, and I, Dray Prescot, in our crippled airboat far out onto the Great Plains of the continent of Segesthes.

  We talked but little. I, because I felt the hurt in this girl against me, the natural feelings of disgust and contempt she must have for me, despite that I worshiped her as no man has worshiped a girl in all Earth or Kregen, for
she did not know, must not know, of that selfish passion.

  At first she refused my offer of the scarlet cape; but before dawn when the Maiden with Many Faces paled in the sky she accepted, with a shiver. The red sun rose. This was the sun which was called Zim in Zenicce. The green sun was called Genodras. I doubt if any scribe knew the numbers of names there were all over the planet for the suns and the moons of Kregen.

  “Lahal, Dray Prescot,” said Delia of Delphond when the sun’s rim broke free of the horizon.

  “Lahal, Delia of the Blue Mountains,” I replied. I spoke gravely, and my ugly face must have oppressed her, for she turned away, sharply, and I saw she was sobbing.

  “If you look in that black box under the control column,” she said after a time, her voice still choked, “you may find a pair of silver boxes. If you can move them apart, just a little, just a fraction—”

  I did as she bid, and there were the two silver boxes, almost touching, and I forced them apart with a grunt, and the airboat began gently to descend.

  My surprise was genuine. “Why did you not—” I began.

  But she turned that gloriously-rounded shoulder on me, and pulled the scarlet cape higher, and so I desisted.

  We touched down at last and once more I stood on the prairie where I had spent five eventful years of my life. I was a clansman once again. Except—I had no clan about me.

  Our only weapons were my dagger, our hands and our brains.

  Soon I had caught a prairie fox, good eating if rolled in mud and roasted to remove the spines, and we drank from a bright clear spring, and sat before the fire, and I stared at the beauty that was Delia’s and I found it in my heart to be content.

  We had passed over the wide fertile cultivated strip of land that borders this sea—the sea into which the River Nicce flows, the sea men hereabouts call the Sunset Sea, for it is to the western edge of the continent. It reminds me, nowadays, of the sea into which the sun of San Francisco descends in those fantastic evening displays. We were in the outskirts of the Great Plains proper. Zenicce draws her revenues, and her slaves, the minerals from her mines and the produce from her fields, from all the coast and for far inland. There are settlements of small size all along the coast and for some way inland. I had hopes that if we were lucky we would run across a caravan before we decided to walk back to the city.