Scarborough Fair and Other Stories (18 page)

Overhead the orchid-hued fronds and leaves of the forest frothed above her, fanning her as the breeze passed through them. At eye level were trees with familiar looking leaves shaped like two tiny bat wings stuck together at the tops with the wings fanning out on either side. Lovely little red berries festooned the trees giving them a cheery look.

And then suddenly they were passing beneath a stone archway, and the warriors, as she thought of them, were transferring her to other, gentler hands. She was deposited upon a table of some sort and carried deeper into the building. Her bearers were not masked but veiled in violet that matched the ground cover she had seen near the crash site. They seemed to be both male and female and spoke in murmurs.

She was carried into a room containing many stone slabs, like altars, with other people on tables laying atop them, their bodies clothed in tattered and bloodied robes and draperies.

Some of the bodies lay very still.

Some were screaming.

And two of her attendants pulled out long wicked looking knives and plunged them toward her -- space suit. From the corner of her eye she saw the splints and bandages, and realized that they were only removing her clothing to examine her wounds.

Or were they?

As the equipment was being arranged, the nurses, as she now thought of them, pushed her back down onto the table and the doctor, as she now thought of
him
, began touching her inappropriately in the area more or less covered by her ruined Glennsday panties. “What's he doing?” she asked them but no one answered. “I'm sure Space Corps insurance will NOT cover this procedure, whatever it is!” she threatened, but to no avail. These were aliens, after all, despite their humanoid appearance and behavior.

The doctor looked up suddenly and jerked his thumb in the air and before Victoria could do so much as scream they held her aloft, high over their heads. At least they were good enough to support her injured leg as they did so but she could feel the physician's prying fingers lightly tickling her behind through the fabric and holes of her ruined undies. Then suddenly, he let forth a cry that sounded like “Tonda Roga!”

And the others all responded, “Tonda Roga? Tonda Roga!”

And all of them began genuflecting and moaning the same name at the top of their lungs.

“No, no,” she said, pointing to herself as they lowered her gently to the table. “Victoria. Victoria Fredericks.”

But they failed to heed her words, though they stopped genuflecting finally and bustled about with a gleeful energy that seemed misplaced in a hospital. They busily splinted her leg, gave her a soothing drink that eased the pain, and draped her in first a violet veil then in many other layers of rich apparel that she privately considered a little overdone.

“Thank you too much, I'm sure, but if you could just send up a smoke signal or something to hail my ship, that would be plenty of gratitude,” she said modestly, adding, “ I really have no need for all of these things. They'll catch on the equipment back at the ship.”

But no one was paying any attention. The ones who weren't backing away from her slab, still genuflecting, had moved on to the next patients. Puzzled she watched while the medical staff first disrobed the patients and fingered and muttered over their underwear, which was at least as disreputable as hers had become. Only then did anybody treat anybody.

“Is this whole hospital staffed with perverts or what?” she asked, the pain making her impatient and not too prone to consider the reasonableness of what appeared to be local folkways. “My stars, the malpractice suits around here must be astronomical.”

To her surprise, one of the masked figures, she thought it was the same one who had tickled her--fancy--while examining her undies--turned to her and said, “Not at all, Tonda Roga.”

Victoria gasped. “You speak English!”

“Naturally. Oxford Space Academy actually.”

“But--but--”

“You are surprised I speak your language? You see, the priestly class is the aristocracy on our world. Healing and prophecy go together--”

Victoria observed where his fingers were walking across the groin of his current patient, a groin clad in a tattered garment that resembled a pair of shorts. “But not exactly hand in hand?” she asked with a brave, knowing little smile.

“Please, none of your earthling prudery, my dear. I am both Chief Physician and High Priest on my world. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is %^&**(+@#.”

“That's a toughie,” she said. “Okay if I just call you Doc or maybe Reverend?”

He regarded her girlish confusion with less dignity than he had previously displayed. “Of course, Tonda Roga. My name, being the highest on the planet, is naturally of the old tongue, virtually unpronouncable to all but the priesthood. In time, I hope you may even come to call me--but never mind.” He readjusted his visage into a stern expression once more. “You are the Tonda Roga. You may be an off-worlder, but you must not look askance at our perfectly normal diagnostic function I am performing.”

“What diagnostic function?” she asked, returning determindedly to the subject after being lost, for a time, contemplating the invitation in his eyes to call him -- what? Sweetheart?

He returned her to reality. “Why, reading the holes in this patient's unga gao roga of course. It is our chief form of divination and diagnosis.”

“Excuse me?”

“The sacred undergarments. Not so sacred as your own, of course, but nonetheless very holy indeed.”

“You mean my undies aren't just full of holes, they're holy too here? I don't want to be ethnocentric or anything, doctor, but that sounds like something out you'd hear at Callahan's Saloon.”

“Not at all. On our world, we believe that the knowledge of character, the future, health, everything, can be read from the condition of that garment which covers the seat of passion, the outlets of the innermost being, the very foundation upon which one balances oneself throughout much of life.”

“Is that so?” she asked petulantly, for she was very groggy from the pain medicine.

“It is. How else would we know you were the Tonda Roga?”

“That just shoes you how silly it is. I'm not Tonda anybody. I'm Victoria Fredericks, Space Cadet, serial number 00111001.”

“Not to us. To us you are the Tonda Roga, the chosen one. It's all right there on your knickers. You can read for yourself if you don't believe me.”

“So what's this Tonda Roga chosen to do anyway?” she asked. She decided to pass on the knickers-reading part. She thought it was dumb and besides, he had already done it and he was the expert, wasn't he?

“Save the world as we know it, of course.”

“Well, you're safe there then, aren't you, since I already did that.”

The eyes over the top of the mask-- kind of cute eyes, really, she'd never seen that shade of reddish brown in an eye color before and it was a little like being looked at through infra red-- looked momentarily confused. “I beg your pardon.”

“I said I'm way ahead of you. I saved your world this morning, I guess it was, just before I came here. Didn't your warriors tell you? They found me at the crash site.”

“They mentioned something about how you fell from the sky but--”

“I blew up the Hasslebad ship that was threatening your planet, only I got knocked dirtside by the debris.”

“I had no idea.”

“I told the warriors. They seemed to understand.”

He shook his head. “They understand emotional messages but of everyone on the planet, I'm the only one who understands your language, I'm afraid. That's why I hope I can explain to you the meaning of it all.”

“What all?”

“What you must do to save us, beautiful one.”

“I told you I--”

“Okay, save us again then. It is foretold that the Tonda Roga will come and we shall know her by her
unga rao
roga
and she alone will possess the skill to brave the underworld and the dragons thereof and repair the World Wide Warning Web.”

“Bet you can't say that fast,” she said, giggling from the pain soothing drink.

“There'll be a great feast tonight and we'll have a procession leading you to the entrance to the underworld.”

“But I can't walk on this leg!”

“I thought a Space Cadet never says can't,” he scolded, shaking a finger at her.

“How do you know what a Space Cadet does and doesn't do?”

“I attended the Academy as a student, before the web was broken. My family is wealthy and aristocratic and I am considered a very good catch--” he added with eyebrows raised to indicate he was waiting for a response from her that indicated she cared about such unprofessional things. To her surprise, portions of her that had recently been a party to the reading of her
unga rao roga
indicated that she did indeed care. She hoped he wasn't really gross when he took his veil off. “But my mother insisted I get an education first. I came home just as the web was breaking.”

“What is this web thing?” she asked, determinedly all business.

“It is the mandala grid that protects the planet from the attentions of those who would harm us, such as the Hasslebads. It conceals us in the invisible protection that kept us safe all through time.”

“But now it doesn't?”

“Correct.”

“Well, then, I don't want to sound critical, but if it's so important, and you're such a leader here, why didn't you fix it yourself?”

“Because only a Tonda Roga can do so.” He replied, sounding mildly shocked.

He wasn't the only one
“A
Tonda Roga?” she asked. “I thought it was
the
Tonda Roga and I, Victoria Fredericks, Space Cadet, am she. The one you've been waiting on.”

“Sort of,” he replied.

“Sort of what?” she demanded with some of the pique those of her hair color are known for.

“We couldn't wait
quite
that long, you see. Long enough for you to maybe show up some day, maybe not. So there've--er--been others.”

“And they couldn't do it?”

“Evidently not,” he said, shrugging.

She didn't like that shrug. “What do you mean by that? Don't you know?”

“Not exactly. They
never returned.
”

She took a deep breath. “Oh, it's one of those is it? A Class 3 situation.” She remembered that from her manual as something very grave indeed, though she couldn't recall the exact text at the moment. No doubt because of the pain medication. “In that case, I'll require a few things from my vessel. Can someone please take me back there now?”

“That won't be necessary,” he said, and motioned for another attendant. They carried her between them to another large stone clad hall, and she saw her ship sitting in the middle of it, very much the worse for wear.

She did hope her little bag was still untouched. She described it to the doctor and he said to one of the warriors, “The Tonda Roga requires her magic bag. Enter her steed and fetch it forth.”

Trembling, the warrior did as he was told and after a few false tries, during which he emerged with the broken communicator, a spare space helmet, and a half dozen replicated bowls of jello, he brought her bag. She drew from it a carving knife and then said, “I need a branch from those trees with the funny leaves and the red berries.”

“You mean the holly trees?” the doctor asked. “They're a mutation on the same tree you have on earth.”

“We didn't have any trees around the Space Port,” she said sadly.

“How deprived you were!” he said.

“Yes, but though we had no natural surroundings, we had the glory of Space Port in our very air and of course, we had love. My Mom used to buy me the most beautiful underwear. You'd have loved it.”

“Ah, yes,” he said dreamily. “I feel quite sure of that.”

The holly boughs were duly fetched and, using her Space Corps Knife with the five thousand attachments, she cleverly fashioned a sturdy cane to help her walk into the danger she must face.

Then about three hundred scantily clad handmaidens paraded into the hall and carried her
and
her cane away on their shoulders. She was taken to a chamber where she was tenderly washed, oiled, buffed and polished, groomed and perfumed before being reclad in some rather beautiful lace and more gossamer soft veiling that flowed into a diaphanous garment revealing more than it concealed.

Dreamily, she fingered the material. “This is lovely. Where is it from?” she asked, but the girls didn't speak English and her universal translator had been broken in the crash. Fortunately, despite the filmy nature of her outfit, it did have a handy pocket for her Space Corps knife.

She heard the drums just as the polish on her toenails dried. Pulsing, primal rhthyms throbbed through the sultry night carrying the heady scent of nocturnal blossoms.

The maidens bore her from the hall out into a huge garden-courtyard ablaze with torches. The smoke from them wrapped everything in cinnamon scented gauze, giving it an otherworldly feeling, which was not surprising, Victoria thought, considering she
was
on another world.

The night-blooming flowers were draped over everything, swags and garlands of them, all purest white, all smelling like a really exclusive perfume shop back on earth.

A double line of simple, quaint natives, all drumming, dancing and singing their charming indigenous songs, opened before the procession. At the end of the human corridor, flowers and fire arched dramatically over a solitary figure. Toward this man the maidens bore Victoria Fredericks, whose heart was now beating with danger, excitement and another, less familiar feeling, one she couldn't remember having in all the years since she had finally gotten to know all too well every single guy aboard her spacecraft.

Finally, the maidens set her down at the feet of the man. She languished there for a moment, staring up at him through the cinnamony smoke. He was the best looking thing she'd ever seen, and looked aboslutely human, without funny nose wrinkles or strange ears or bald head or anything. Well, his hair
was
sort of a pale lavender, but that could have been the lighting and besides, it was one of her favorite colors.