The Delian Cycle

Chapter six

Chapter six

Testing time in ParadiseMuch I was learning about the planet Kregen as it swung beneath its emerald and crimson suns, and this I feel would best be related when occasion arises, for I must speak of many wild and terrible things and deeds, for which to find a name is difficult. I would stand on the balcony of Maspero’s house when the twin suns had gone from the sky and stare upward. Kregen has seven moons, the largest almost twice the size of our own, the smallest a hurtling speck of light low over the landscape. Beneath the seven moons of Kregen I brooded long on the girl Delia of the Blue Mountains.

Maspero was continuing to run his long series of tests on me. I had passed the first by successfully arriving at the city; and he still found amusement that I had enjoyed that voyage down the River Aph. I gathered that many had failed to arrive; they had been defeated by the very conditions that had delighted me.

He carried out what I now realize to be a comprehensive analysis of my brain wave patterns. I began to gather the impression that all was not well.

A great deal of my time was spent indulging in the sports of the Savanti. I have spoken of their uniformly powerful physique and their aptitude for all manner of sport. All I can say is that I did not disgrace myself. I could usually manage to find that extra inch, that last spurt, that final explosive thrust that would bring me victory. They were all hollow victories, of course; for until I was accepted as one of the Savanti, and there were other applicants as I well knew, my life would be incomplete.

When I questioned Maspero about Delia — as I now called her to myself without any self-consciousness — he was unusually evasive. I saw her occasionally, for she had been quartered on the other side of the city, and she still hobbled about on her twisted leg. She refused to tell me where she came from, whether by her own design or by express orders of the Savanti I did not know. There was no government that I could determine; a kind of benevolent anarchy prevailed demanding that when a task needed to be done there would always be willing volunteers. Myself I helped gather crops, work in the paper mills, sweep and clean. Whatever chained Delia’s confidences was a force I did not as yet know. And Maspero would shake his head when I questioned him.

When I demanded to know why she had not been cured of her crippled leg, which the Savanti could so easily do, he replied to the effect that she was not one who had, like myself, been called.

“Do you mean because she has not taken the journey down the River Aph?”

“No, no, Dray.” He spread his hands helplessly. “She is not as far as we can tell one of the people we need to fulfill our destiny. She came here uninvited.”

“But you can cure her.”

“Maybe.”

He would say no more. A chill gripped me. Was this the canker in the bud that I had suspected and then put aside from me as an unworthy thought?

Strangely enough I had never mentioned the glorious scarlet and golden bird to Maspero. Just how the subject came up was trifling; but as soon as I told him that I had seen the raptor he turned with a quick motion to face me, his eyes fierce, his whole body tense. I was surprised.

“The Gdoinye!” He wiped his forehead. “Why you, Dray?” He whispered the words. “My tests indicate that you are not what we expected. You do not scan aright, and my tests refute all that I know, of you and your ways.”

“The dove was from the city?”

“Yes. It was necessary.”

I was forcibly reminded how little I knew of the Savanti.

Maspero went out, to confer with his associates, I had no doubt. When he returned his expression was graver than at any time I had known him.

“There may be a chance for you yet, Dray. We do not wish to lose you. If we are to fulfill our mission — and you do not yet understand what that is, despite what you have learned, we must have men of your stamp.”

We ate our evening meal in a heavy atmosphere as the moons of Kregen spun past overhead in all their different phases. There were five on view tonight. I munched palines and studied Maspero. He remained withdrawn. At last he raised his head.

“The Gdoinye comes from the Star Lords, the Everoinye. Do not ask me of them, Dray, for I cannot tell you.”

I did not ask.

I sensed the chill. I knew that in some way unknown to myself I had failed. I felt the first faint onset of regret.

“What will you do?” I asked.

He moved his hand. “No matter that the Star Lords have an interest in you. That has been known before. It is in your brain patterns. Dray—” He did not go on. At last he said: “Are you happy here, Dray?”

“More happy than I have ever been in my life — with perhaps the exception of when I was very young with my mother and father. But I do not think that applies in this situation.”

He shook his head. “I am doing all I can, Dray. I want you to become one of the Savanti, to belong to the city, to join us in what we must do, when you understand fully what that is. It is not easy.”

“Maspero,” I said. “This is Paradise for me.”

“Happy Swinging,” he said, and went toward his own apartments in his house.

“Maspero,” I called after him. “The girl. Delia of the Blue Mountains. Will you make her well?”

But he did not answer. He went out and the door closed softly.

On the following evening I saw the crippled girl at one of the parties that could be found all over the city. Always there were singing and laughing and dancing, formal entertainments, musical contests, poetic seminars, art displays, a whole gamut of real vivid life. Anything the heart desired could be found in the Swinging City. Perhaps twenty people circulated in the relaxed atmosphere of this quiet party given by Golda, the flame-haired beauty with the bold eyes and the lush figure, a woman with whom I had spent a number of pleasant evenings. She greeted me bearing a book, a thick tome of many pages and thin paper, and she smiled tilting her cheek for me to kiss that smooth rosy skin.

“You’ll love this one, Dray. It was published in Marlimor, a reasonably civilized city some long way off in another of the seven continents and nine islands, and its legends are really most beautiful.”

“Thank you, Golda. You are very kind.”

She laughed, holding out the book. Her gown of some silvery lamé glistened. I wore my usual simple white shirt and trousers and was barefoot. My hair had been, as I had promised myself aboard the leaf boat, cut to a neat shoulder length and, in honor of Golda’s party, I wore a jeweled fillet in my hair, one of the many presents I had received from friends in the city, among the trophies I had won.

“You were telling me about Gah,” said Maspero, walking up with a wine goblet for me. He drank from his own.

Again Golda laughed; but this time a different note crept into her deep voice. “Gah is really an offense in men’s nostrils, Maspero, my dear. They delight so in their primitiveness.”

Gah was one of the seven continents of Kregen, one where slavery was an established institution, where, so the men claimed, a woman’s highest ambition was to be chained up and grovel at a man’s feet, to be stripped, to be loaded with symbols of servitude. They even had iron bars at the foot of their beds where a woman might be shackled, naked, to shiver all night. The men claimed this made the girls love them.

“That sort of behavior appeals to some men,” said Maspero. He was looking at me as he spoke.

“It’s really sick,” said Golda.

“They claim it is a deep significant truth, this need of a woman to be subjugated by a man, and dates right back to our primitive past when we were cavemen.”

I said: “But we no longer tear flesh from our kill and eat it smoking and raw. We no longer believe that the wind brings babies. Thunder and lightning and storm and flood are no longer mysterious gods with malevolent designs on us. Individuals are individuals. The human spirit festers and grows cankerous and corrupt if one individual enslaves another, whatever the s*x, whatever specious arguments about sexuality may be instanced.”

Golda nodded. Maspero said: “You are right, Dray, where a civilized people is concerned. But, in Gah, the women subscribe also to this barbaric code.”

“More fools them,” said Golda. And then, quickly: “No — that is not what I really mean. A man and a woman are alike yet different. So very many men are frightened clean through at the thought of a woman. They overreact. They have no conception in Gah of how a woman is — what she is as a person.”

Maspero chuckled. “I’ve always said that women were people as well.”

We talked on, about the latest fashions that had, in some mysterious way, reached Aphrasöe from the outside world. The city contained a pitifully few people to lead a planet. Everyone was needed. Maspero, later on, told me that he was now beginning to feel that I would be really the right fiber — as he put it — one of the privileged few who could shoulder the responsibilities of the Savanti. It would be hard, he said. “Don’t think the life will be easy; for you will be worked harder than you have ever worked in your life before—” He held up a hand. “Oh, I know of what you have told me of the conditions aboard your seventy-fours. But you will look back to those days and think them paradise compared with what you, as a Savanti, will have to undergo.”

“Aphrasöe is Paradise,” I said simply, meaning it.

Then Delia of Delphond hobbled across, her face as twisted as her leg at the effort of walking, her gasps loud and separate, a series of explosive blasts of pain.

I frowned.

Frowning was easy, habitual.

“And in Paradise,” I asked Maspero, “what of—?”

“I cannot talk about it, Dray, so please do not ask me.”

To have spoken at that moment to Delia would have been a mistake.

As the party was breaking up and the guests were calling “Happy Swinging!” to one another and leaping out into space aboard their swingers, I found Delia and, without a word, put my hand beneath her armpit and so helped her along toward the landing platform where Maspero stood talking gaily with Golda. Delia, after a single angry wrench, allowed me to assist her. She did not speak and I guessed her contempt for her own condition, and her furious resentment of me chained her tongue.

“Delia and I,” I said to Maspero, “are engaged to take a boating trip downriver tomorrow. I notice my old leaf boat is still moored at your jetty.”

Golda laughed with her tinkly shiver of amusement. She looked with a very kindly eye on Delia. “Surely you don’t have to prove anything, Dray? If only Delia could be—” And then she caught Maspero’s eye and stopped and my heart warmed toward Golda. There was much I did not yet understand, not least what was the real mission of the Savanti with all their powers on a savage planet like Kregen.

I kissed Golda on the cheek and bowed quietly to Delia, who looked at me with an expression quite amazing, compounded of bafflement, annoyance, pique and — could that be amused affection? For me, plain Dray Prescot hot from the reeking battlesmoke swathing the bloody quarterdecks of my life on Earth?

That she might not meet me at the jetty was an outcome I was prepared to meet when it came. But she was there, dressed in a plain green tunic and short skirt, with silver slippers — one piteously twisted — on her feet and a reed bag in her hand filled with goodies like a flask of wine and fresh bread and palines.

“Lahal, Dray Prescot.”

“Lahal, Delia of the Blue Mountains.”

Maspero watched us cast off. I had provided a pair of oars and I pulled with that old familiar rhythm. “I thought you might care to see the vineyards this morning,” I said, loudly, for Maspero’s benefit. I headed downstream.

“Remberee!” called Maspero.

Delia turned to face him from the sternsheets and, together, we called back: “Remberee, Maspero!”

I suddenly shivered in the warm pink sunshine of Antares.

We did not see the vineyards. I circled back along the extreme edge of the lake, and the green sun, which because of its own orbital movement around the red sun rose and set with an independent cycle, cast a deeper glow upon the waters.

I entered the mouth of the River Zelph.

We had not spoken much. She had told me when I asked that her accident had resulted in a fall from an animal — she called it a zorca and I gathered it was a kind of horse — some two years ago. She had no explanation of how she had come to the City of Savanti. When I mentioned the three men, now dead, in the yellow robes, her brow furrowed in puzzlement. “My father,” she said, “moved worlds to find a cure for me.”

Waiting until we were far enough up the river to be out of range of prying eyes I pulled in for the bank. Here we ate our lunch — and very good it was, to sit in my old leaf boat under the emerald and crimson suns of Antares with a girl who intrigued me and tugged at me and yet who regarded me as merely a warrior; to quaff rich ruby wine and to eat freshly-baked bread and nibble scented cheese and to chew on the ever-luscious palines.

Upon the bank I threw off my white shirt and trousers and donned my hunting leathers that I had earlier concealed beneath a fold of blanket in the bottom of my craft. The soft leather encircled my waist and was drawn up through my legs and looped, the whole being held in position with a wide black leather belt, its gold buckle a trophy won in the arena. My leather baldric went over my shoulder so that the Savanti sword hung at my left side. On my left arm the strong leather straps were belted up. I had also brought with me a pair of leather Savanti hunting gloves, flexible yet strong, thonging to the wrist, and these I now drew on. The leather Savanti hunting boots would remain in my boat until we were forced to walk; I do not like wearing footwear aboard a boat, even though I had been forced to do so when walking the quarterdeck.

The only item of equipment not belonging to a Savanti hunting accouterment was the dagger. Of course, it was of the city; but it was cold steel; it did not possess that miraculous power of stunning without killing. Many times had I saved my own life, and killed quickly, with a knife or dagger in my left hand — I understood that in the old days such a weapon was called a main gauche — in the melee of boarding or storming. It would serve me again now in what I purposed.

Delia cried out in surprise when she saw me, but instantly recovered her habitual poise. Mockingly, she called out: “And who are you hunting today, Dray Prescot? Surely not me?”

Had I been of a more insensitive character I would have felt a fool, dressed up like an i***t; as it was I was too well aware of what lay ahead to allow petty distractions to deflect me.

“We will go now,” I said, and settled in the boat and took up the oars and gave way.

If Delia felt any fears at being alone with a man in a boat she did not show them. I believe she had already sized up some, at least, of the character of the Savanti, and knew that the behavior of the people of Gah, for instance, would not be tolerated in the city. Outside, yes, within the precincts of others’ cities, yes, for what they did was for the nonce their business. And, too, in her own Delphond a lazy afternoon’s pulling on the river with a man meant exactly no more and no less than what the two involved wished.

When I beached the boat at the foot of the first rapids and helped Delia ashore she turned a questioning face to me.

“You must go with me, Delia.”

She jerked her head back as I used her name without the rest; but there was no time then to consider what that automatic flinching meant. Certainly, it had to do with my use of her name, not the path on which we now set out.

I had to carry her. She must have guessed at something of what I intended; and I am quite sure she felt no fear, or, feeling it, would allow me to see.

To look back on that wild and harrowing journey up the River Zelph to the cataract and the pool is to marvel at my own foolhardiness. Here I was carrying the most precious object in two worlds, and walking calmly into dangers that would have sent any man screaming in panic, without the protection of the silvery light weapons of the Savanti. I do not remember — I do not want to remember — the number of times I set Delia hastily down and snatched out my sword and met the furious charge of some enraged monster.

There was continuous effort, and cunning, and brute strength. I hacked down the spider-beasts, and the worm-beasts, and all the beetle-beasts that crept and leaped and writhed upon me. I knew that I would get through. I knew that clearly. Delia through it all remained calm, as though in a trance, hobbling along with painful gasps of effort when she could to free me to fight unimpeded. My sword arm did not tire easily. My left hand, wrist and arm were red and running with blood right to the armpit. That cold steel did not stun.

It killed.

They were clever and ferocious, those guardian monsters.

But I was more clever and more ferocious, not because I was in any way intrinsically better than they; but because I guarded Delia of the Blue Mountains.

We reached the little sandy amphitheater among the rocks and plunged into the cave.

I lifted Delia as the pink glow faded and that uncanny blue luminescence grew, and I laughed — I laughed!

Delia could no longer hobble along, and her lips were tightly compressed to keep back her gasps of pain, so I had to carry her into that milky pool. Wisps of vapor curled from the surface. I strode down the wide flight of steps. The liquid lapped my feet, my legs, my chest. I bent my lips to Delia.

“Take a deep breath and hold it. I will bring you out.”

She nodded and her chest swelled against me.

I descended the last few steps and stood with my head beneath that milky liquid that was never simple water and felt once more that lapping mouthlike kissing, that million-fold needle-pricking all over my body. I judged when Delia’s breath would be failing, for she could not remain as long underwater as I could, and then walked back up the steps.

All our garments, my sword, my belt, everything, had melted away. Naked we emerged from the pool, as, naked, we ought to have entered it.

Delia craned her head around and looked up into my eyes.

“I feel—” she said. Then: “Put me down, Dray Prescot.”

Gently I put Delia of Delphond down on the rocky floor.

Her crippled leg was now rounded, firm, as graceful as any leg that had ever existed in any world of the universe. She radiated a glory. She arched her back and breathed in deeply and pushed her glorious hair up and back from beneath and smiled upon me in a dazzlement of wonder.

“Oh, Dray!” she said.

But I was conscious only of her, of her smile, the luminous depths in her eyes; in all the worlds only the face of Delia of the Blue Mountains existed for me; all the rest vanished in an unimportant haze.

“Delia,” I breathed. I trembled uncontrollably.

A voice whispered through the still air.

“Oh, unfortunate is the city! Now must occur that which is ordained—”

Beyond Delia, from the milky pool, a vast body lifted. Liquid ran from smooth skin. Pink flesh showed through the whiteness. The size of the body dwarfed us. Delia gasped and huddled close and I closed both my arms about her and stared up defiantly. And, too, now I could feel a strange sensation within me. If my first dip in the pool of baptism had made a new man of me, then this second baptism had rejuvenated me beyond all reason. If I had felt strong before, now I felt ten times as powerful. I bounded with vigor and health and energy, defiant, savage, exultant.

“The cripple is cured!” I shouted.

“Begone, Dray Prescot!” The voice from that vast body soughed with sorrow. “You would have been acceptable, and sorely do the Savanti need men like yourself! But you have failed! Begone and begone and never Remberee!”

Delia was a naked soft shape in my arms. I bent my head and pressed my lips on hers and she responded with a joyous love that shocked me through and through.

“Begone!”

I felt the blue luminosity crowding close about me. I was slipping away from this world of Kregen. I shouted.

“I will return!”

“If you can,” sighed the voice. “If you can!”