Prince of Scorpio (8 page)

Snow lay everywhere in a thick, pale pink blanket through which the dark firs thrust like withered fingers of a buried army of crones.

A hundred yards off lay the crumpled shape of an airboat.

My task lay before me.

The wind cut into my naked hide and I knew that if I did not find clothes and food very quickly I could give up all hopes and ideas of finding my Delia again.

The airboat had landed badly and her petal shape had been grotesquely twisted. From the small aft cabin I dragged out four bodies. These men were Vallians. Under the heavy ponsho fleeces they wore the buff coats and the long black boots I knew so well. Selecting the body of the largest, I stripped him and donned his gear. The warmth of the ponsho skin struck in most gratefully and I shivered in reciprocal delight. Now I could attend to the two men still alive. Unconscious, they breathed stertorously; but an examination convinced me they were not seriously injured. These two men, then, were the reason I had been returned to Kregen.

The airboat had crashed through spiky fir trees to come to rest in a V-shaped valley between peaks. Up there the snow and ice glistened uglily. The thought occurred to me that we were stranded in The Stratemsk, a fate of almost certain disaster. The Stratemsk, although not the greatest range of mountains upon Kregen, are so vast, so tall, so hostile, that the imagination shrinks from their contemplation. Downslope a panorama spread out where the valley ended, and between craggy outcrops the snow could not smooth or render less sinister a glacier began, vanishing below cloud. That, then, was our way out.

A cry brought my attention back to the flier. One of the men had crawled to the shattered opening. His face glared out on me more white, more stark, than the snow and the dark fir trees.

“What happened? Where are we? Who are you?” The voice carried that habitual ring of authority, so that I knew I was in the presence of a man accustomed to command, a high dignitary, a man of power.

“You crashed. We are in the mountains. I am Dray Prescot.”

He moved back as I approached, and before I reached the opening the second man crawled out. He was younger, handsome, his brown hair a fairer tint than the normal Vallian, although nowise of that outrageous chestnut glory of my Delia’s hair.

“Dray Prescot?”

The older man pushed through quickly and the younger was, perforce, thrust aside. The elder wriggled as he crawled out onto the snow, and turning his head spoke in a low voice to the younger. He stood up, and swayed, and I was at his side, supporting him.

“You’d best rest easy, dom. You’ve had a tidy whack.”

He drew himself up, although still clutching my arm for support. Blood had dried along the clean-shaven upper edge of his beard, frozen, glittering coldly.

“I am Naghan Furtway, Kov of Falinur, and this is my nephew, Jenbar. You address me as Kov, and my nephew as Tyr. Is that understood?”

I held him and I looked into his eyes. I knew those eyes of old, I had seen their like many times in the faces of men accustomed to absolute power. Corrupt, sadistic, merciless, yes; but the eyes of men accustomed to moving the strings of this world, as they manipulate those of Earth. The friendly name of dom — the nearest equivalent in English is mate, and in American, pal — had affronted him.

It was necessary to put our relationship on its proper footing instantly, and now I cursed that my stay on Earth had loosened my tongue. For these men were Vallians, and I had given them my real name. I should have remained Drak, Strom of Valka. So I simply said: “Very good, Kov. We must collect what things are necessary and travel as far downslope as is possible before nightfall.”

He grunted. “Quite so.” He turned to his nephew. “Jenbar — do you feel fit enough to walk?”

“I do not!” Jenbar spat out, with a curse.

Naghan Furtway, Kov of Falinur, merely looked at the young man, and then pushed past back into the shattered cabin. I had buried the naked body of the man I had stripped, and if Furtway bothered to notice he probably assumed the disappearance had been caused by the unfortunate man being flung out as the flier crashed. He began taking ponsho skins from the dead bodies.

Jenbar studied me.

“Koter Prescot,” he said, at last, and his voice betrayed his weakness. “I ask you to pardon my ill-temper. But I think you will understand it when you see our condition, and good men dead. I thank you for your assistance. I will try to walk bravely.”

I warmed to him then, responding to his frankness. I, too, would have been in a filthy temper had my airboat crashed in these surroundings.

In truth, our surroundings were unpleasant in the extreme, and if we were caught out here by nightfall, desperately dangerous. The airboat might provide some shelter, and I fancied we might manage a fire with tree wood, but I preferred to make the effort to reach lower altitudes before dark.

“Oolie Opaz!” exclaimed Jenbar. “What a miserable business!”

His expression warned me that there might be more than a mere curse in his intentions; for I had once seen the long lines of chanting men and women, garishly clad and strung with blossoms, winding in and out of the streets of Pomdermam, the capital of the nation of Tomboram on the island of Pandahem. “Oolie Opaz! Oolie Opaz! Oolie Opaz!” they would chant, singing and swaying, hour after hour the same metronomic hypnotic words, swinging up and down the scale, changing key, on and on maddeningly. This hypnotic chanting held power. It sucked a man in, singing, until his eyeballs rolled up and he drifted away to a white and empty state of which philosophers and mystics talk.

I contented myself with a nod to the ponsho fleeces.

“Best to dress yourself warmly, Tyr Jenbar. The way will be long and hard.” Then, because he was young and there was in him a steely inner strength I could perceive, I added: “I know you will march well, but I will be here to help you if necessary.”

He looked downslope. His features hardened and a ridge jumped into life along his jaw, for he was clean-shaven. His face held a strong damn-you-to-hell look, and I guessed that ferocity was not for me, perhaps not even for the fates that had flung him here, but for the hostility of the way we must tread.

He chuckled. “It will be a task for Tyr Nath! But we will win through, Koter Prescot. We of Falinur always win through to our desires in the end!”

“So be it,” I said, and busied myself in making what small preparations we could.

So we set off, the three of us, and, in truth, had I not been with them, hurled there across the gulf of four hundred light-years by the inscrutable purposes of the Star Lords, they would not have survived. I fancied the Star Lords had brought me to Kregen this time, for this business bore all the hallmarks of their handiwork, and not that of the Savanti.

We struggled through waist-high snow, which glittered with the frosting colors of jade and crimson as the twin suns struck through from a sky of purple and indigo. We reached the end of the valley, after many halts, and there stretching below us lay the beginning of the glacier, a tumbled confused mass, with the clouds drifting above it, obscuring the panorama beyond.

I am no man to love fir trees, for they look thin and harsh and dispiriting; I am a man who loves the wide-leaved expansive openhearted trees of the south. Fir trees are valuable for spars, and other artifacts, but here I welcomed their presence as clear proof we were below the tree line. As soon as possible we must reach below the snow-line.

“We will slide,” I said.

They did not argue. They had become stupefied — puggled is the old word for it — and they meekly accepted my dictates. I spread the ponsho fleeces. We lay upon them, belted together, and I pushed off — and we went.

We went!

It was a mad helter-skelter of a ride, a wild swooping rush of icy-cold wind and the hiss of the ice and jouncing bouncing and the desperate booted thrusting to avoid debris and the moraines that built up as side glaciers joined the main stem. Four times I had to haul us painfully to a halt, against the scraped sides, so that we might not crash full tilt into the low pile of rocks. Then we had to slip and slide over the obstacles, find a fresh glide path, and so down once more on the skins and take off with a breathless swooshing. My face was numb. Ice smothered me and I had to brush the crisp glassy crystals from my eyelids. The cold continued to cut intensely, and our very progress intensified its freezing grip.

We had taken rapiers and daggers — for very few men, and they either fools or protected in other ways, travel Kregen unarmed — and with a dagger in each hand I was in some measure able to control and direct our descent. I thrust the daggers angling downward, and by varying the pressures from side to side could both slow and steer us. But it was exhausting work and I sweated a little, which is excruciatingly unpleasant in such cold temperatures.

We plunged boldly into the clouds.

“Have a care, Koter Prescot!” Furtway’s words were weak. The cold was numbing him through to the marrow. If he was to survive we must get down — and get down fast.

The rate of descent was slowed by the daggers. We left a wide swathe of ice chips spilling across the glacier after us. If we hit a rock now. . .

The clouds thinned, thickened, whereat I thrust hard with the daggers, thinned again and then we were through them and almost on the lip of the glacier.

I lunged sideways, plunging both daggers over onto the right. We swirled in a great fanning of ice chips and for an instant I thought we would skate right off the ponsho fleeces.

“Hold on!” I yelled, and ice cracked and flaked from my mouth.

We held on. Just short of the lip of the glacier, where it calved and in a great crevasse and a white thunder fell a thousand feet, we skidded and slewed into the side. We hit the scored bank of ice and snow, tumbled out, and so lay exhausted.

“Up!” I said.

They moaned.

“Let me lie, rast,” said Naghan Furtway, Kov of Falinur. “I am tired and would like to rest.”

“If you rest here you will never rise again.”

His eyes were closed and so he did not see my face as I leaned over him. I gripped him beneath the shoulders and stood him up, but his legs buckled and he slid down again. I turned to his nephew.

“Up,” I said. “Now is when you must march like a man.”

He groaned and sat up, and tumbled over sideways.

“Life is sweet and there is much to live for,” he said, the gush of white mist spuming from his lips at each word. “Now I know that, but I cannot feel it. I am done for. Leave me, Koter Prescot. It is soft and comfortable and warm here.”

“It’s as cold as the Ice Floes of Sicce,” I said, “which is where you’ll find yourself if you do not brace up.”

I stared at them. If they died I would have failed the Star Lords, and then I would be flung contemptuously back to Earth. I might rot there for years. I could not face that. These men must be saved, so that I might remain on Kregen and seek my lost love and demand her from her all-powerful father.

The task was extraordinarily difficult and painful, but I got Furtway up on my back, bundled with ponsho fleeces, and buckled him in place. I put my left arm around Jenbar and dragged him up, and so, carrying one and dragging the other, I set off.

There was no ice pick, so I could not probe for crevasses. If we fell, we fell. The cold was biting into my brain now; all I could do was put one foot down in front of the other, thankful for the tall Vallian boots. Socks are known on Kregen, but, like the men of the Foreign Legion, most Kregans have no truck with socks. I would have welcomed a good thick warm pair right now.

The memories I have of that nightmare descent grow vague and more vague. I was aware of the green sun Genodras sinking in an eerie smothering of emerald and jade, and then the world turned into blood as the red sun Zim held for a short space the sole domination of the sky. At this time the overlords of Magdag would gather in their colossal buildings and pray to Grodno, the green-sun deity, for protection and grace. Or so the peoples of the Eye of the World believed; I had witnessed the rites held during an eclipse of the green by the red, and I guessed the overlords did not act as the world suspected.

I was no warmer, but the trees were thickening and the snow — the eternal, damned snow — was petering out in drifts and crunching sheets through which I plunged to feel the hard rocklike ground beneath. The Maiden of the Many Smiles floated up into the night sky among the hosts of stars, and two of the smaller moons hurtled low overhead. In their pinkish light I trudged on. I had no conception of time or distance; all I knew was that I must go downhill. There had been a vague glimpse of a vast hilly plain when we quitted the clouds, cloud-bedappled. Now, as I lifted my head to look up and so out over the plain beneath, I saw that dark expanse beneath the moons spattered and dotted by myriads of specks of light.

Nearer, five hundred yards downslope, a light beamed up, warm and friendly and beckoning. I headed for it, fell against the wooden door, and went on hitting the door until it opened.

Naghan Furtway and I play Jikaida

“You are a strange man, Koter Prescot.”

“Many men have said that, Kov Furtway. And it is true.”

We sat around the plain wooden table in the neat cabin and drank the superlative Kregan tea and warmed ourselves by the fire that crackled and sparked in the hearth, while Bibi, the lady of the house, fussed around us, delighted and yet awed at entertaining a real live kov in her house.

“How were you in the mountains, then, Koter Prescot?” asked Jenbar.

“I was lost. Believe me, I was hoping you were going to rescue me.”

They laughed at that.

Warmth, a good sleep, and now a piping hot meal of roast rolled-vosk-loin and a vegetable-pot, together with chunks torn from a long Kregan loaf and that Kregan tea I had sampled with my clansmen, had revived the three of us.

Bibi’s husband, Genal, was out chopping more wood. They lived well up here in the mountains, with a great store of food put by in the shed protected from snow-leem and deep-frozen by the weather, and Genal could bring in enough ice to be packed and shipped down to the plain to keep him and Bibi in moderate affluence. Genal the Ice, they called him down there.