Ardor on Aros (16 page)

Someone finally remembered to mention the Law, but not until she had extended a finger and said, “Enough of these…calisthenics! I defy you to—”

“Stop!” Which was a nice rule they had; at any time during the proceedings anyone could bark “Stop!” and the speaker, no matter who, shut up or a mistrial was called. Looking surprised and if possible even angrier, Solah shut up. She and her father glared to my left. The voice had come from the Artisans.

“We act like the barbarians the Jadiriyah has accused this man of being,” the aged voice said. “Will no one so say, not even the Master of the Guild of Warriors of Brynda? Then I do: the Jadiriyah has challenged. The choice of tests is up to Hank Ardor.”

True, and no one could disagree, and they all looked at me in silence, waiting for me to state my terms. And I stood there fingering my medallion, and then I had it.

“First, our trial will take place in the Market Square,” I said, “where there are no walls and no question of chicanery.”
And a lot bigger audience,
I thought. “At the fifth hour of morning. I will perform a few feats, simple in America, and I will not ask the Jadiriyah,” and here I bowed as respectfully as I spoke; I’d been a skunk long enough, “to best any of them, but only to duplicate, precisely, each.”

The Guildmaster nodded. “Do you agree?” he asked his daughter.

Naturally she had no choice. Naturally she agreed. I was released into the custody of Stro Fentris—who was not, indeed, wearing the stripe on his tunic hem.

It was a
lovely
day in Brynda on Aros. Pale little clouds nudged each other like pressed marshallows in that weirdly-lighted sky. All about the Market Square and in the windows of every surrounding building people nudged each other for viewing room.

I had asked that Pro Thoris and Dejah be released: denied. I had asked to visit them: denied. I had also decided on a dramatic entry, and waited until the Jadiriyah appeared, amid great oohing and aahing, in the circle of onlookers. She was on a platform once used for hawking wares—people, mostly—in the city’s younger days and preserved because Arones preserve things just as Americans do. She wore bra and trunks of brilliant green, a long band of yellow cloth falling from the hip band of the trunks to the ground between her feet. A piece of matching yellow was caught in the right side of her bra and went up over her left shoulder, to flutter behind her past the extraordinarily well-filled seat of her trunks. And of course she wore her ring, with her mass of black hair drawn back and bound with several slender fillets of gold.

She looked around. “Well? Where is the so-called sorcerer of America? Must we all wait in the sun for his appearance?” And thus she won the first point, and the first laughs.

Standing beside be, Stro Fentris’ son raised an arm, and Pope Borgia saw it and swooped down from his perch atop a tall building. He landed beside the girl, amid a lot of crowd noises, strutted about, then sprang again into the air.

“I shall fetch my master,” he squawked, and persuading the swell-headed little monster to say that had been the hardest part of the plan—so far. Naturally all eyes followed his brilliant green flight as he few away, screeching “Master, Master, the girl you rescued from Vardor slavery waits!”

His flight, as planned, was away from me. Stro and his son and a couple of others and I, all hooded as were many of the crowd against the sun, had got ourselves into the center of the press, about ten feet from the platform. It was a tight-pressed crowd. But inasmuch as all of us wore vast amounts of padding to make us a little group of overfed watches, there was plenty of room. The padding piled up at my feet; I doffed my cloak and squatted and jumped, before the crowd could start filling up the space.

It was a near thing. I came within an ace of missing the platform. But since the Jadiriyah, like everyone else, was watching the aerial antics of the supposedly-searching parrot, I recovered without much notice being taken—and incidentally made her jump a foot and squeal to boot. Neither was missed by the crowd.

I bowed to her. She lifted her chin and gave me a go-to-hell look, and then damned if we didn’t’ have to stand there in the sun while a Stentor read every word of yesterday’s proceedings. Listening, realizing the whole business had not been at all tampered with, I began to forget the sun. It was mighty favorable to my cause, letting everyone hear all that, and letting it build me up while weighing heavier and heavier on Solah’s handsome shoulders.

Then it began.

“I call to note that my bird and I converse, and assume that that is a feat the Jadiriyah cannot hope to match—therefore I will not allow it to be considered,” I said, grandstanding again. “And I believe both of us are weary of movement games, which the Jadiriyah has rightly termed ‘calisthenics.’ Nor will I ask her to attack and slay three Vardors, as I did in defending the caravan a few days ago—or to attack and slay two, as when I rescued the naked Jadiriyah from the two whose captive she was on the desert—that night I graciously returned to her her ring of power.”

She gritted her teeth.

“Those are warriors’ feats, and bouncing about from this location to that, whether it’s from here to the Guild Headquarters or to Itza, are merely sorcerer’s—I mean sorceresses, we are led by men where I come from—tricks of—calisthenics. So.” I turned a little, gazing about at those many, many faces, and at the many, many faceless sun-cowls. I wore a little less than she: white trunks (in which I hoped to have a fly made; god, what a barbarous oversight!) and soft low boots and my “medallion.”

“I also have no wish to tax either the Jadiriyah or the great but hot people of Brynda,” I said, smiling, which won me a few smiles and a chuckle or two and a little more sympathetic audience. “Thus this will be a short test of our skills. I admit in advance that the Jadiriyah undoubtedly possesses
skills
I do not, just as I have some powers she might find…difficult.” With a smile at her. But there was a little noise, a murmur, and it was time for business.

“I CALL FOR MY WAND OF POWER!” I shouted, and then bellowed out, “MISSISSIPPI, KENTUCKY, LOS ANGELES, CINECITTA, AND RUMPELSTILSKIN!”

And down came Pope Borgia with my pen—or rather, Dr. Blakey’s pen, that lovely golden smear-proof ball-point he had sent here ahead of me—not knowing the sorcerous use to be made of it.

I was the challenged, and seemed to be in charge, so I called a fellow up out of the audience to examine the slender pen. His neighbors had to thrust him forward, of course, but he examined the “golden wand” with care and handed it back with a shrug. I asked for a public noticeboard, which is a strip of carefully prepare white hide stretched taut on a wooden frame. It is used, obviously, for the purpose of hanging up notices in public. Good tidings and bad, proclamations, promotions, news from Itza, the like.

While everyone wondered what I was about I screwed out the pen’s point—it is easy to do with one hand, and I thank the Cross people for that! Had it been one of those click-top pens my man from the audience certainly would have discovered that fact—and the point. The small bit of wax I’d put on the joint last night prevented his turning it by accident. It came off very easily, as I took the pen from him.

I stepped up to the “easel” and, with a flourish and a little muttering, printed a message: “On this day the Jadiriyah of Brynda was defeated by Hank Ardor, Sorcerer of America, as befits the relation of a man and a maid.”

I stepped back, had the Stentor read it aloud (a lot of those people were too far back to read—and many of them couldn’t read anyhow). There were some hoots and snorts, and some laughter and some head-wagging: some male Yeahhhs! at the sentiment of my brief message. I popped the pen into Pope Borgia’s beak. He took off to flap his circuitous course to a gentleman from the Street of Artisans who waited several blocks away.

I bowed to the audience and to my opponent. Then I turned and reversed the noticeboard. I gestured, bowed again, and stepped back.

Thank god! I had not been
sure
she couldn’t write with her finger or something. But the look on her face told me I had triumphed.

She tried: “This is a test of
sorcery?
”

I shrugged. “Produce your wand,” I said, “and write. Or any other instrument—although not, of course, a quill and ink!” And I grinned, and got a few more laughs.

She looked fulminous—and regal; she had some control, after all. “The power,” she said in a loud voice, “lay in the instrument, not in the wielder! I admit I cannot duplicate this so-called feat without having in my hand the same instrument.”

“No fair,” someone called, and someone else shouted “he wins, he wins!” and still another very male voice bellowed “Can she write at all?” and even her partisans couldn’t help laughing.

I turned about, frowning. “The power is NOT in the instrument,” I told them and her, “as we shall see. Perhaps I have won this test, and perhaps I have not. But I shall deny my beautiful opponent no opportunity to prove…ah, female superiority.”

I shouted for Pope Borgia. He returned—oh, his flapping back and forth was a great addition to the circus, let me tell you. Anyhow back he came with the pen, only slightly altered: its cartridge was removed, its barrel stuffed with clay with a drop of silver on top, so that it would appear to be solid. A hell of a way to treat a superb writing instrument, but—rectifiable, I hoped, and certainly necessary. I handed it to the gentleman from the audience. He examined it with care and pronounced it to be the same, and unchanged. Yes, the wax was back around the seam. I handed it to the Jadiriyah.

She turned it over and over, eyeing it, and at last grasped her ring and did some closed-eyed muttering. Then she stepped bravely up to the blank easel and, after several seconds of valiant endeavoring, left it as blank as before, save for a few scratches. Ah, the noise from our onlookers was
lovely!
Beethoven or Rosza never sounded more beautiful to my ears.

Her fear was something she could not mask, or perhaps she forgot; it was there in her eyes and ath the white edges of her mouth. She examined the pen, discovered the wax seam with a sudden smile of triumph, and had it open in a trice. She held the two pieces high: “It’s HOLLOW! Trickery!”

“Jadiriyah—PLEASE—be careful! It is for my hand only, and—“

But about that time she interrupted with a loud squeak, dropping both parts of the pen. As I’d feared the spot of silver was still warm. Not hot, but it had startled her.

Enough; she tried it again and failed and hung her head.

The second test: simple. My carefully-wound pocket watch—though reversed—told me we had consumed fifty-one minutes in test and proceedings reading. I asked the location of the nearest sundial and was told that there was one on the other side of the Square—as I had learned last night. I looked at my opponent.

“Can you control tile, Jadiriyah? Think well before you answer.”

She stared at me. Then she took the bull by the horns: “Of course not!”

“Can you foretell its passage—to the instant?”

She hoisted her chin. She knew damned well no one could do that, and I knew that not even Lalaikah could or ever had. There were water clocks and hourglasses everywhere, and quite a few sundials, but no one operated on any sort of strict time schedule. “And come back for dinner!” Pro Thoris had said—without specifying a time. The dinner hour was the dinner hour; if anyone tried specifying an invitation (“Dinner will be at half after the seventeenth hour,” or the like) others would have thought him unsane. Certainly, time was noted, and recorded, and historians would write that at the fifth hour (counting from sunrise) on the three hundred eighty-sixth day of the City did the Jadiriyah of Brynda meet in contest Sorcerous with the foreigner named Ardor.

It occurred to me that day that water clocks, hourglasses,
and
sundials could be made into alarm clocks, although it’s trickier with sundials. Anyhow, there are not alarm clocks all over Brynda, and elsewhere, too; we did a pretty good business in them before others started making them, elsewhere. My first little factory made me wealthy.

But that’s ahead of the story, and Solah and I stood on the platform that day years ago, and I promised her and the assembled crowd that I would call the precise moment of the hour’s end. Further, I would be advised of it by my amulet, which I held aloft. I let her examine it (carefully; if she’d dropped it I’d have been chin-deep in hot soup). She tapped the crystal and looked at me with fear and respect, and I smiled.

“Call it off, Jadiriyah of Brynda,” I urged in a low, low voice. “Drop charges. Release Pro and Dejah Thoris. You needn’t even concede. Just get out of it. You’ve already lost more respect than most people can build in ten years, and you’re about to lose it all. You’ll still be Jadiriyah, of course, but—we’re about to prove my superiority.”

She stared at me. Her fist closed over the watch. Suddenly fearful, I stepped back and extended my hand so that all could see. She had to place it on my palm then, and though I grasped it with both hands, it apparently did not occur to her that dropping it would break it. There was no such precision machinery on Aros, of course.

“You are so sure—“

“I am,” I muttered. “At precisely the moment the hour ends I will call it—can
you?
Or if we then wait for another hour to pass—will you be able to call its end?”

She looked me up and down. “Will you apologize for your behavior to me on the desert?”

“I have. Privately and publicly.”

“Why did you refuse?”

“You know very damned well, Solah.” There was a lot of muttering by now; we two stood in stage center with our heads close. What, the throng of course wondered, was up?

“I knew both Vardors had ravished you; I
felt
it, through your thoughts. I was too far away to get there in time to stop them; I would have if I could. And if that had happened and you had offered—even though I know nothing of your custom, I’d have been all over you. You know very well you’re one of the best-looking women in the world. First, then, I declined from pure consideration for you. Had I known the ritual words, I’d have added them. And secondly—well, your experience was in my mind so that I
felt
it, including your peaks, and I assume you know how men are. I climaxed too.”

“I see.” She looked me up and down. “You are not ugly, you are a strong and a mighty warrior, and I think you are truthful—honorable. And—you do have the power. Or perhaps it’s the bird, but no matter—the bird obeys you.” She raised her eyes to my eyes, and I received a shock that transcended all the others I’d had since falling into Dr. Blakey’s blasted machine.

“Julansee,” she said. “But—permanently.”

I let that one filter in slowly, and finally, stupidly, unsure, asked her: “Are you talking about marriage?”

The eyes flashed: “Of course! I’ll be no man’s mistress!”

I stood there, full of little needles and suddenly sweating again and aware that I would make some very interesting EKG peaks—if there were such an animal as an electrocardiogram anywhere within a few million million miles of Aros.

It’s power,
I thought.
She’s boss-lady in Brynda. You have some power, and you represent a challenge to her—a long-term one. She wants an alliance. You ain’t ugly, but even if you were a hideous, five-foot leper, she’s willing to make the supreme sacrifice in order to ally the powers—and gain all of it. And when she knows about the pen and the watch and the parrot and whatever else, as she eventually would, then what?