The Delian Cycle

Chapter seven-1

Chapter seven

The Star Lords intervene“Hey! Jock!” a coarse voice shouted. “Here’s some poor devil crawled outta the jungle!”

I opened my eyes. I knew where I was. A wooden palisade crowned with skulls. Thatched huts. The smoke from cooking-pot fires. A coffle of black slaves being herded to the beach and the waiting canoes of the Kroomen. Moored in midstream, on a brown and stinking flood, was a brig. The place stank. Oh, yes, I knew where I was.

The harsh sunlight blazed yellow, stinging my eyes.

I do not believe it necessary or even wise to speak of the next few years. I was able to ship out from the slave factory, nauseatingly aboard the slaver brig, and then in some fashion resume my old life. Promotion to post rank still eluded me; but now I did not care. I hungered for Kregen. I bore the Savanti no ill will. I recognized their essential goodness and I acknowledged that I did not understand all the answers to my questions. I failed to comprehend why they had refused to treat Delia — my Delia! Delia of Delphond, Delia of the Blue Mountains — how many nights I stood by the quarterdeck rail and stared up at the stars and ever and ever my eyes sought that red star that was Antares, and there, I knew, lay all of hope or happiness I wanted in all the universe.

I knew what had happened to me. I had been flung out of Paradise.

Paradise. I had found my heaven and had been debarred from entering.

After my life of hardship and struggle Aphrasöe was Paradise.

Now that I have lived so long and have visited Earth many times, always, in some strange way it seems, during times of stress or crisis, I can speak more calmly of my feelings then. So that you may better understand the kind of man I am now, speaking into your little recording apparatus, I should say that on Earth I have amassed a considerable fortune over the years in the normal course of business investment. Had I possessed a hundred times that sum in those days when I once more walked the quarterdeck and plunged into the battlesmoke on Earth I would have given it all, over and over, to be returned once more to Kregen of Antares.

When Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund voted me a fifty pound sword of honor I grasped the gaudy thing with its gilt and its seed pearls and I longed to feel once again the firm grip of a Savanti sword in my fist.

I do not believe it possible for anyone of Earth to imagine my state of mind as I thought of the crimson and emerald suns of Kregen, of the seven moons glowing in the night sky against those constellations so alien to Earth and yet so familiar to me. The tortured regrets impelled me to a strange step, for I obtained a scorpion and kept the thing in a cage. I would stare at its ugliness for many minutes on end, and hope that some familiar drowsiness would overtake me. The thing was cursed at by the men when we had to clear for action, and as bulkheads and cabin partitions were removed and struck down, I would have my pet scorpion sent down with the rest.

The Peninsular War opened and I was appointed first lieutenant aboard Roscommon, a leaky old tub of a seventy-four whose captain was one of the famous mad captains of the Navy List. Clearly, before me lay a career as a lieutenant until my hairs were gray and I was at last discarded on half pay to rot on the beach. Except that — my hair would not turn gray for a thousand years.

We carried out a number of interesting operations, interesting only in that they provided a strong anodyne for the ache in my soul. We took a French eighty gun ship and were thereby cheered. I heard the officers remarking on the astounding ferocity of my conduct during the boarding. I did not care. After the battle, drained of emotion, I stood on the quarterdeck, gripping the rail, and as always my eyes lifted to the heavens. Alpha Scorpii blazed its mocking ruby fires into my eyes.

Was that a hint of blueness limning Antares? Was that a blue shape leering down on me? The shape of a scorpion?

I reached up my arms.

I heard a cry from the quartermaster, and the midshipman of the watch yelled to the master’s mate. I ignored them. The blueness grew. It was. It was!

I reached out and felt that blueness expand and take my consciousness into itself and I shouted, loudly and exultantly: “Kregen!” And: “Delia — Delia of Delphond, my Delia of the Blue Mountains! I return, I return!”

I opened my eyes on a sandy beach with the sound of great waves.

Sick despair clogged my mind. Standing up, I looked around upon a vast heaving sea, a sandy beach, a line of bushes inland and beyond that a prairie vast and wide, extending to the farthest horizon.

The gravity — the sun — the suns! — the feel of the air — yes. Yes, this was the world of Kregen beneath Antares. But — but where was the city? Where the River Aph? Where was Aphrasöe, the City of the Savanti, the Swinging City?

My eyes adjusted quickly to the warm pink sunshine; but I could not see what I wanted to see. I hammered a fist into the sand. Where could I be on the surface of an unknown world? Was I in Loh, that continent of mysteries and veils and hidden walled gardens? Or in Gah, that pathetic semblance of a man’s sick dreams where women were chained to bedposts? There were Havilfar and Turismond, continents of which I knew nothing — and there were the other continents and the nine islands and all the seas between.

How I cursed my inadequate knowledge of Kregen!

A shadow fleeted between me and that great bloated red sun. I saw a scarlet feathered bird, with golden feathers about its neck and head, its black legs extended with wicked claws wide, its broad wings stiff and stately as it wheeled in hunting circles above me. I stood up and shook my fist at the Gdoinye. It uttered a harsh croak. After a time of surveillance it began to wheel higher and higher with a lazily powerful wingstroke. When it was but a dot in the sky I heard along the beach a sudden shrill chopped-off cry. A woman’s cry.

A girl ran toward me along the beach.

It could only be Delia.

With a great shout of joy I ran toward her.

The devil might take me if I cared where in the whole world of Kregen I was if I could have Delia of the Blue Mountains at my side.

A group of riders burst from the dunes beyond Delia. They rode strange beasts, extremely short-coupled with four long narrow legs poising their bodies more hands high than any horse had any right to be. Each had a single curled horn rising from its forehead. The men wore high helmets of blazing gold. They were clad in purplish-colored jerkins studded with brass nails, a color made into vivid bruise-shine by the light. They carried weapons. And they were gaining on Delia far faster than I could reach her.

She, like myself, was completely naked.

The air in my lungs scorched like fire. I bounded in fantastic leaps, my Earthly muscles scorning the pull of gravity. Once before I had let all my Earthly muscle-power leap out in defense of this girl; now my bounds were truly of fantastic distance. Sand sheeted away at each footstep. But the riders gained on Delia, and now I could see they were not men, although possessing two arms and two legs, for their faces were like nothing so much as the big tabby cat’s bewhiskered face I remembered from home. Their slit eyes blazed. I shouted, and then saved my breath for running.

Delia flung both arms up as her foot caught in some driftwood discarded on the beach and she fell. I heard her scream: “Dray Prescot!”

A rider leaned one furred arm down and caught her up around the waist, flicked her over to lie face down across his saddle. I lunged forward like a demented man. I could not lose her after all, not now, not so soon after finding her again!

The lead rider reined up, those enormously long legs of his mount spindling with muscled power. Sand cascaded, his mount slid backward, then, with a snickering shrill, it had regained its balance. But in those few vital moments I had reached a stirrup. I grasped the booted foot and jerked and pulled as though I could tear the thing’s leg clean off.

He screamed and something thwacked down on my shoulders. I glared up. Delia moaned. The rider threw away his crop in fury and drew a long curved sword and lifted it high. I reached up, took his elbow between my fingers, twisted, and heard thebones grind and snap. The thing shrieked again.

Delia’s eyes opened; horror clouded them. “Behind you—”

I whirled and ducked and the curved sword sliced air. Now they were all about me. Swords lifted in a net of steel. I reached again for him whose arm I had mangled. He let out a keening shriek and hauled desperately at his mount’s reins. The beast reared, throwing me off. Ducking a swiping sword, silently, I leaped again. I was on the thing’s haunches, and so short were they that I half hung over nothingness with my left arm clamped around the rider’s waist and my right dragging his head back in that arrogant golden helmet. I heard his neck snap and cast him from me. I slid forward into the saddle, seized the reins and kicked my heels into the flanks of the beast. It shivered and snorted and bounded forward.

Then the world spun around in a blaze of sparks and I saw the sand rising up toward me and, for only a fractional moment of time, felt the hardness of the sandy ground smash all along my face.

They must have left me for dead.

When I recovered, sick and groggy, and looked about, the beach was silent and deserted and only the pitiful humped shape of the dead beast, and the sprawled rider beyond, told of the tragedy that had unfolded here.

At the instant of my success, on the point of escape, I had had my mount shot from under me. The weapon still protruded from the poor thing’s flank. It was an eight-foot long spear, the head fashioned from bronze and heavy although not particularly sharp. It was an unhandy weapon.

Beneath the rider — I subsequently learned that these feline-like semi-humans were called Fristles — I found his curved scimitar-like sword. Despite his broken elbow he had retained grasp of his sword hilt. When I had flung him from the high saddle he had fallen so that the point of the blade had entered his stomach with the hilt jammed against the ground. That blade had gone clean through his body and the stained point protruded eight inches past his backbone. The blood was blackened and caked and a few flies — for they exist everywhere — rose as I approached.

I turned him over with my foot, freed his hand from the hilt, put a foot on his body and dragged the sword clear. I cleaned it thoroughly with the sand all about me. I was not thinking at all clearly. I did not care to use this creature’s clothes, so I cut up the purple leather and fashioned myself a breechclout after the fashion of Savanti hunting leathers; and I cut from his tunic enough to wind about my left arm. His boots fit me well enough. I slung the sword over my shoulder, its scabbard suspended from a leather baldric, and I felt that when I ran across these cat-people again I would kill very many of them before they could once again wrest Delia of Delphond from me.

The sound of hooves would be muffled to a succession of steady thumps in the sand. At the sound I drew the sword and turned to face the rider who approached. The wind blew grains of sand across the hoof prints; there had been no chance of tracking those who had taken Delia.

“Lahal,” the rider called when he was fairly up with me. “Lahal, Jikai.”

“Lahal,” I likewise replied. I had learned what Jikai could mean in the various inflexions put upon the word. It could mean simply “Kill!” It could mean “Warrior” or “A noble feat of arms” or a number of other related concepts, to do with honor and pride and warrior-status and, inevitably, slaying. It had been used in admiration by Delia of the Blue Mountains, as it had been used by her as a command. I studied the stranger, as I said: “Lahal, Jikai.”