Transit to Scorpio

Chapter Sixteen

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.

I had decided to wait a week. The chances of clansmen finding us were grave; for I could not hope that the Clans of Felschraung and of Longuelm would happen by. Any other clan might well be hostile to us. The girl, then, would be a burden in negotiations. We waited six days before we saw the caravan. During that time I had found a dawning break in the granite barrier that separated Delia and myself. She was beginning to lose that reserve and to be the impulsive, lovely, wayward girl she really was. She would not speak to me of Delphond, or of her family or her history. The only people who might have told me where Delphond was I had not asked-the House of Eward-and the slaves were ignorant of it.

We had made our little camp and Delia helped willingly about the chores. I had fashioned a stout sharpened stave from a sturm tree, and would twirl this about, remembering. Once I had to fight an outraged she-ling. It had crept from a bush and sought to snatch Delia away. The ling lives between the bushes and rocks of the small-prairie, where there are trees and streams, and is as large as a dog of the collie variety; but it has six legs, a long silky coat, and claws it can extend to four inches in length and open a rip in chunkrah-hide. From the pelt, I fashioned Delia a magnificent furred cape. It suited her well. She looked gorgeous and feminine in the furs.

Our first intimation that the caravan was near was not the tinkle of caravan bells, or the thud of calsany pads, or the shouts of the drivers; but the shrill yammer of men in combat and the gong-like notes of steel on steel.

I leaped for the fringe of bushes above our camp, the sharpened stake gripped in my fist. This period with Delia had become very precious to me. Had I deluded myself, or had there been a softening in her attitude to me? Always, she was correct, polite, meek and obliging about the camp in the small matters of domestic chores. When we avoided the agreed taboo subjects we could talk, lazily, for hours on topics ranging from that vexed question as to who was the first creature on Kregen, to the best way of dressing the silky white ling furs, and all manner of delicious speculations in between. Yes, very precious to me was that time beneath the moons of Kregen around our campfire at night. These thoughts rushed through my head as I saw a small caravan under attack by clansmen. Why should I embroil myself?

Far better to wait until it was over and the clansmen had taken their booty and such prisoners as would bring a ransom and had ridden off, singing the wild boisterous clan songs. Any interference on my part might well result in an ax-blade through my thick skull, and would certainly destroy this too short sweet period of growing friendship between Delia and myself.

“Look, Dray Prescot,” said Delia from where she lay at my side, peering down through the bushes. “Powder blue! Eward-a caravan of the Noble House of Eward.”

“I can see,” I grunted.

The clansmen were from a clan I did not recognize. When I rode the Great Plains as a clansman, had we met, there would have been bloodshed between us, perhaps; if we lived, the giving and taking of obi. They meant no more to me than the men of Eward. But Delia compressed her lips, and looked at me, and her eyes sparkled dangerously-at least, that is how they appeared to me, for whom, in two worlds, there was no other woman fit to hold the hem of her dress.

“Very well,” I said. Lately I had been speaking a very great deal. Naturally taciturn except when a subject excites me, with Delia lately I had, as a newer time would have it, been shooting my mouth off. Having decided, I wasted no time. I stood up, hefted my hunk of timber, and charged down into the fracas.

Men in powder blue were riding their half-voves in furious combat with zorca-mounted clansmen. That gave the men from the city some chance. Rapiers sliced past clumsy guards and pierced brawny chests; axes whirled high and descended to split skulls and spill brains. It was a small raiding party of clansmen-the zorcas told me that-and they must have stumbled on the caravan unexpectedly. I was down and among them before anyone realized a new force had been added to the conflict. I did not utter a sound.

In an instant I had dismounted two clansmen, seized an ax, swung violently against a group of three who sought to rip the hangings from a sumptuouslyappointed palanquin. I had discarded the notion of making a noise as though I were the forerunner of an army. I was not dressed as a clansman, nor as a city man-I was dressed as a hunter of Aphrasoe-and both sides would immediately have seen through the ruse and all surprise would have been lost.

The ax parted a neck from its trunk, sliced back to sever a cheek and knock the man from the saddle. The third man reined up his zorca, its hooves flashing, ready to swipe down on me, fully extended. I convulsed back and his blow swept through empty air. The hangings parted and a head crowned in a wide flat cap poked unsteadily out. Beyond the man about to attack me again I saw a man in powder blue sink his rapier into the throat of a clansman, the blade caught, and he jerked for a moment unavailingly. To his side a clansman lifted a bow string drawn to his ear. The next instant would see that iron bird buried in the man of Eward’s back.

I hurled the ax high and hard, in the old clansman’s cunning, and the daggered six inches of bladed steel sank into the zorca rider’s breast. He looked down stupidly and then fell off. Then the man facing me was spurring forward and bringing his ax down. I went in under the sweep of the blow, avoided the zorca’s mouth-with a vove I would have been already a dead man-and sprang upward and took him about the waist. We both toppled to the ground. When I arose and looked alertly about my dagger was brightly-stained.

“Well done, Jikai!” I heard a croaking voice call.

The zorca riders had had enough. What should have been a nice leisurely killing and plundering had turned into a bloodbath. With wild and baffled shrieks they rode off. We avoided their last Parthian discharges as the bolts thunked into the ground. If they stood off, we had bows enough to give them a spirited return to their shooting.

Often these days I am forced to smile when reading the ill-informed and ignorant usage of words when Earthmen speak of barbaric weapons. How often one reads that arrows are “fired” in combat. I have used flint and steel to fire a musket, and a percussion cap to fire a pistol, and have fired a high-velocity rifle many and many a time-I have even used a lighted match wound around a linstock to fire a thirty-two pounder in the pitching gundeck of a three-decker-but in all this smoke and flame I have never “fired” an arrow. One does not “fire” bow and arrows. Except, perhaps, if you allow that term to those occasions when we clansmen set blazing rags to our shafts and used them to set fire to the wagons and the roofs of our foemen, as we did that wild day in the Pass of Trampled Leaves.

The half-vove rider had freed his rapier. He looked at me with curiosity all over his bronzed, keen face, with the black eyes and the cropped hair beneath the steel cap, and he sized me up as I sized him up. Lithe and strong, he rode well, and I had seen his swordplay-with the last exception of those neck-bones, and they can be lubbers at letting a blade free-and he handled himself superbly well.

He rode over.

He passed me with an intent, anxious look on his face, bent to the palanquin.

“Great-Aunt Shusha! Are you all right?”

The old head in its wide flat hat poked out again. This time more of the old woman appeared, I saw she carried a dinky little dagger in her gloved right hand. Her face was old-old-and lined and pouched with the record of her years; but her eyes were lively enough, bright and malicious on her nephew.

“Don’t prattle so, young Varden! Of course I’m all right! You don’t think I’d let myself be fretted by a miserable bunch of scallywags like these pesky clansmen, do you?”

She was thrashing about now in attempting to alight, and men ran to let down the steps of the palanquin from its height, slung between two calsanys. She stepped down, small, incredibly vital, dressed in a powder blue gown that had scarlet stitching threaded all over it like sunshine on water.

“Great-Aunt Shusha!” The young man, whom I knew now to be the Prince Varden Wanek of the House of Eward, protested in mock horror and despair. “You mustn’t keep tiring yourself.”

“Tush and bottlecock! And you haven’t even said Lahal to this young man-” She peered up at me with her faded eyes. “Look at him, walking about half-naked, and killing men as easily as I push a needle through a tapestry.” She hobbled over to me. “Lahal, young man, and thank you for what you have done. And, it minds me-”

She broke off, and Varden leaped from his high saddle and caught her to support her. “The color-the color! It reminds me so vividly…”

“Lahal, my lady,” I said. I made my voice as gentle as I could; but it still came out in the old forbidding growl.

Varden, holding his great aunt, stared at me. His eyes were frank on mine. “Lahal, Jikai,” he said. “I own to a fault, it was remiss of me, not to thank you seemly. But my great-aunt-she is aged-”

She tapped his bronzed hand with her gloved finger. “That is enough of that, you young razzle-dazzle, insulting me. I’m no older than I should be.”

I knew that on Kregen men and women could look forward, if they were not killed or fell sick, to a life considerably longer than that on Earth, and this old lady, I judged, must be nearer two hundred than one hundred years old.

All this time I had not smiled. “Lahal, Prince Varden Wanek of Eward. I am Dray Prescot.”

“Lahal, Dray Prescot.”

“You did not see Dray Prescot save your hide, did you, nephew?” She explained how I had thrown my ax to save Varden as the man about to kill me charged. “It was true Jikai,” she finished, a trifle breathlessly.

“I had my Hikdar, my lady,” I said, holding up the dagger. She chuckled and coughed. “As I had my little Deldar.”

I looked, and, it was true, the dagger was a terchick. A shout of surprise brought our attention back to the scene around us. Delia of the Blue Mountains walked down the little slope toward us. Clad in the scarlet breechclout and with the white furs swinging, swinging in time to the sway of her lithe body, her long lissom legs very splendid in the suns’ light, she brought a gasp of awe and wonder to the lips of the men. I caught my breath. She was magnificent.

After the introductions were made it only remained for us to ride back to the city with the Eward caravan. It had been to fetch Great-Aunt Shusha from her annual pilgrimage to the hot springs of Benga Deste. Benga, I should hasten to say, is the Kregish word most corresponding to “saint” in English. Beng is the male form and Benga the female, the suffix letter “a” playing a similar part in Kregish as it does in Italian.

I cannot explain why; but when I asked my habitual question of fresh acquaintances on this occasion I felt a taut sense of expectancy. A vague look came over Great-Aunt Shusha’s wrinkled face.

“Aphrasoe? The City of the Savanti? It seems I have heard of such a place, once; but it is long ago, so long ago and my poor head cannot remember.”