Delia of Vallia

Chapter one-1

Chapter one

From the Ochre LimitsThe woman prostrate on the desert sand moved with the lax tremble of imminent death under the vulture’s outspread wings. The bird inclined his stiff black wings, circling in the air, and regarded the woman with unhurried patience, awaiting the moment of her death.

She rolled sluggishly onto her side and Rippasch the vulture curved above her, his twin shadows flickering across the sand. The woman opened her eyes.

The bird lifted and the polished beak, sharp and hooked, caught the radiance of the suns and glittered. The woman’s eyes half-closed. Watchfully, Rippasch dropped lower. Now she lay still, sprawled and supine, a last quiver of her limbs signal enough.

The ochre sand stretched to the horizon unbroken except for the line of footprints, faltering as they neared the point where the woman had fallen. The twin suns burned high, red and green, drenching the barren land with heat. The bird flicked his wings and curved in to land on outthrust claws. He c****d his head to one side.

The woman’s arms lay loosely, her left hand across her breasts where torn russet leather revealed tanned skin, her right open at the side of her thigh. That open right hand rested limply on the hilt of a heavy sailor knife. A roll of sand partially covered the broad blade where she had fallen.

No breeze blew to muffle the scratching sound of the vulture’s claws as he strutted toward the woman. His beak pointed. Her eyes remained half open.

Cracks disfigured the softness of her lips and dust stained her face into the semblance of an idol’s death mask. Her breast moved in shallow rhythm, slowing, dying, stilling to quietness. Rippasch fluffed his neck feathers and strutted forward.

The woman remained motionless.

Reassured, Rippasch fluttered out his wings and hopped onto her body. His claws dug into the tanned skin; they did not break through into the flesh or draw blood.

For two heartbeats the vulture poised on the woman’s breast, a black wedge against the sunslight. For two heartbeats only — then his sharp beak darted forward for the feast.

The woman’s left hand struck straight up.

Her fingers closed around the thin and naked neck. Any squawking shriek of fear or astonishment Rippasch might have uttered was mercilessly choked off.

The woman’s right hand closed. The knife glittered once as it swept in a flat lethal s***h.

The vulture’s head flew off.

Instantly, the decapitated body was turned, was twisted upside down. The spurting flood of blood cascaded out in a jutting stream. That warm wet blood splashed over the woman’s face, coursed into her mouth. Greedily, she lapped the blood, swallowing, feeling the moisture wet against her parched skin — wet wet!

She drank greedily, thirstily, gulping the red blood like a savage beast crouched over its prey.

At that moment the woman was a savage beast, ferocious and cunning, skilled in the arts of survival, and she devoured the goodness of the kill her prowess had brought her.

Presently she licked the sailor knife clean. Moisture was so precious not a drop must be wasted. She replaced the knife in its rawhide sheath at her right side, below the main gauche that snugged sweetly against her hip. The matching rapier — plain of hilt and guard, slender and yet not too slender, not a fancy weapon — remained in the scabbard swung on plain steel lockets from her left side. Her waist was narrow and the lesten-hide belt with its silver buckle, dulled from much use, was hauled up to the penultimate slot.

Standing up, she picked the sucked-dry carcass from the sand and shook it. Her hunger was not so great, yet, that she needed to fall upon the raw flesh. But she would, if she had to.

In her present situation she was sorry that she could not husband some of the blood. But that would be the first to go. Moisture was all important. And, again, from her experience she felt regret that the vulture had not chosen to attack her corpse toward evening. She might begin to sweat again, now, and that was sheer waste.

She looked about the hostile horizon.

Her airboat had decided to crash here in the Ochre Limits after a short, sharp and nasty onslaught from beastly flutsmen, murderous slavers who thought they had sighted an easy prey. She had shot three of them with her longbow and skewered a fourth. Poor Pansi had died with a javelin through her throat and big, bluff, laughing Nath the Jokester had died with a barbed spear through his guts. Clearly, the flutsmen wished to take her alive.

After she’d taken the left eye out of the fifth — Nath had dispatched two — the remnants flew off. She’d sent a last shaft after them and taken little comfort and only minimal satisfaction from the shriek of pain from the rearmost.

So, from a wrecked airboat and two dead friends, she had begun to walk out of the desert.

Had anyone asked her if she was afraid she would have told them in her cutting way not to be such a nurdling great fool, and then ignored the question and got on with the job of survival.

If you kept on stirring blood in a bowl you could stop it from congealing; but she had no bowl and the effort would probably have taken more energy than she would lose by drinking all the blood at once and accepting the consequent loss later. She walked carefully, not hurrying, minimizing her movements, wasting nothing of her strength. Normally she walked with a grace that turned heads, not in a voluptuous hip-swinging fashion, but as though she trod moonbeams. Now she went along as though walking a tightrope across the sand.

Since the reiving flutsmen had downed her flier and slain her friends, she had maintained her direction. She knew where she was and within a few miles of just how far she had to walk to reach the river. Otherwise she would have been forced to hide up in the daytime. She c****d a brown eye up. Up there, circling high, a black dot regarded her.

She considered this new Rippasch.

No. Not yet. She still had strength and the blood had revived her. Time yet to cover more distance, get off the sand and onto the gritty dust and rocks, before she need fall down and so take off the head of that insolent creature up there.

Mind you, she said to herself, in the way her husband talked, mind you, the vulture was only being himself and acting out his nature. Rippasch was hungry and thirsty, too. And, he did help to clean up the desert...

The Ochre Limits, uncomfortably thrust between the provinces of Falinur to the north and Vindelka to the south, existed mainly because the soil ran poor and sour. True desert they could hardly be called, although they would kill you from heat and thirst as finally as any of the great deserts of Kregen. The woman walked carefully as the gritty dust beneath her sandals more and more supplanted the shifting sands. She peered under her hand, looking ahead to the horizon.

She was too determined to acknowledge even to herself how much she longed for the first sight of the trees, glimmering in ghost veils through the heat whorls, to herald the river. Firmly though she might push down her feelings, they surfaced, from time to time. Then she had to fix her gaze on the shimmering horizon, and hold herself just so, and put one foot in front of the other, and march, march on.

Boulders showed here and there as she went along, and a few lizards skittered. The water table began to give sustenance to incredibly hardy growths, dusty ochre and umber like the Ochre Limits themselves. This gave her fresh heart. Those plants grew roots long enough to reach down to a Herrelldrin Hell; she’d exhaust herself trying to dig down for water. Best to keep on walking, one foot in front of the other, over and over again.

That Opaz-forsaken river had to be getting nearby now, surely?

A bush of a size to reach to her knees went past as she walked on, and then another on the other side. Soon the ground, hard and dusty, could no longer be called barren. It was still useless for agriculture, fit for the wild creatures of the world. Folk said that only madmen or leem-hunters — and they were by nature mad, too — ever tried to live in the Ochre Limits. Her tanned fingers reached for the hilt of the rapier. Leems were nasty, ill-tempered, eight-legged beasts of ravening destruction and huge appetite. A rapier would be of scant use against a leem...

Scurryings among the bushes caused her to keep her head turning, her eyes alert. And the twin suns sinking down the sky ahead began to dazzle, casting long double shadows from bush and rock. Her mouth was afire. The blood had made her more thirsty than ever. The pebble she picked up to roll around inside the cavern of fire that was her mouth alleviated the problem a little; a little, not much.

Small animals ran away from her now. Tiny, furry little beasts, tiny scaled beasts, tiny naked-skinned beasts, they all ran. On them the larger predators preyed, and on them the bigger, and, finally, the leem preyed on all. One of these fine days, no doubt, there would be a leem hunt on a grand scale. But other things came before that. She found herself wishing that the grand leem hunt had taken place in the past.

Reality supervened. This wild, hostile badlands could not support life enough to maintain many leems. They would be solitary, each with her or his own area, mingling only during the mating season. She was, in all sober truth, unlikely to run across a leem. Should she do so, she’d do more than many and many a leem-hunter did in a season.

The thought occurred to her that she could be walking into a vast loop of the river. If she turned to left or right, to north or south, she might meet the river in an amazingly short time. Resolutely, she thrust the thought from her. She marched on, due west.

This river, the River of Shining Spears, ran from the Blue Mountains south-southeastward into the Great River, called Mother of Waters, She of the Fecundity. It marked off the southwestern edge of the Ochre Limits. The idea of water, sparkling, splashing, wet, tortured her.

The Great River ran on southward in generous loopings, through the capital city, Vondium, and so on into the sea. The river, the canals, the sea — all were wet.

This wonderful island empire of Vallia had seen perilous and terrible times recently. Enemies, overseas and within the island, had sought to topple the country and seize the reins of power. Well, many of those enemies had been dealt with, and those remaining would be dealt with in due time. She could not concern herself with problems of others at this time; survival meant keeping a tenacious hold on the reality about her, the drifting dust, the sloughs of sand, the scattered bushes from which might spring deadly peril.

Seasons ago the idea that reiving flutsmen could wing freely in the skies of Vallia would have been ridiculous. The emperor maintained order in his domains. But since the Time of Troubles and the revolutions and insurrections and invasions, times had changed. The old emperor was dead and the new struggled to hold together the tattered remnants of the people loyal to Vallia, sought to bring back the old days of peace. Much of his time, perforce, was spent overseas hurling back the challenge of enemies, carrying fire and destruction into their homelands, instead of the fair island of Vallia. The emperor of Vallia, who was also King of Djanduin and Strom of Valka and lord of many broad lands, carried within himself a dream of unity. Many people followed him with fanatical loyalty, and many more opposed him for their own advantage.

The woman continued to walk on across the badlands with a determination that would not surprise those who knew her.

Her legs must have dropped off a long time ago, she felt. Weird ideas kept whirling in her head. Leems and water and flutsmen and the state of the country, all muddled up with annoyance that the trip to Delka Ob, capital of the province of Vindelka, had been interrupted. She admitted to herself that she was tired, deathly tired; but, also, she would not admit that fact. As her husband said, tiredness is a sin, particularly for people with work to do.