Ardor on Aros (4 page)

I learned very soon what I
should
have done, and I expect you’ve already thought of it. I should have kept the cloak intact (expect for the bandage I’d sliced and ripped out of it). It was long, and voluminous, and would have made me a sort of Bedouin burnūs, and I could have used it a as cover at night. But we of Earth have this thing about undergarments, and binding up our groins—shorts and briefs and even undershirts, in addition to all the female stuff. All totally unnecessary, most of the time, but I’m a briefs fan; I don’t like swinging around loose.

Too, I admit I was not thinking too coherently just then. I was on an alien planet, in a cave, with a dead body for company. I did the first thing I half-thought of, which turned out to be a mistake.

Kro Kodres’ water had been in a canteen attached to the saddle of his stolen mount. A quick test told me that his knapsack, well-made of one piece of leather, was watertight. That became my water sack. I dropped in the ring for Jadiriyah; it seemed the safest place. The few silver coins I tucked into the warm nook of my homemade shorts. Sooner or later, I’d probably need money. The fork and other tools I discarded.

He was chunkier, and I was taller.

I had to bore a new hole in his baldric to cinch the belt lower. That way the sword swung low on my right hip, for a fast crossdraw.

Perhaps I looked superbly exotic and heroic, like Frazetta or Jones artwork. Perhaps, in my black-and-white diaper made of a dead man’s cloak, I looked more like a desipient clown. But I had clothes, and weapons I understood, and a little meat and several days’ water, and a destination. I knew in which direction Kro Kodres’ city of Brynda lay, and I knew where he’d left the girl Jadiriyah. First (the) Jadiriyah, then Brynda. I set out across the plain in my secondhand boots, chin high and eyes clear. It was going to be a long hike. After parking the girl, Kro Kodres had ridden many miles at a gallop, leading his pursuers away from her.

The orange alien sun beat down.

I walked for three days, hoping I had things straight and was heading in the right direction. I still couldn’t see anything ahead but yellow plain becoming yellow sky, and I’m sure it was some sort of miracle that I found the pen. The gold Cross pen; Dr. Blakey’s. It was twinkling in the dust, and it had his initials on it—sort of:
BDF

Reversed, just like me. Why?

I slung it around my neck on one of several rawhide thongs from Kro Kodres’ pack. I plodded on. No, I’ll relieve you of wondering; I didn’t see that stupid parrot—then. All I found was yellow plain streaming out to merge into yellow sky, with boulders and clouds scattered here and there. I ate the last collop of my meat the evening of the second day, and by the following noon I was beginning to think of Kro Kodres. I hadn’t buried him—why hadn’t I broken another taboo and brought him along?

—Or part of him?

That charming and unwonted thought made me sick, and I dry-heaved for awhile, trudging on, deciding I wouldn’t have been able to eat the poor bugger anyhow.

The short sword had gotten a good deal heavier. So had the knapsack containing my water supply, although it was only half-full now. I learned my first lesson about what I should have done with that cloak very quickly: the baldric chafed my bare skin. I made some adjustments, to pad the strap, looking even more makeshift and clownish. Lesson number two I learned that first night: I longed for the whole cloak to cover up with. I’d have been better off traveling at night and sleeping by day, stopping to curl up in the shadow of some big rock. There were quite a few, and some where house-size. I know and admit now what I
should
have done, about several matters. I just didn’t think about them at the time. I’m afraid I’m just not John Carter.

You have a choice: you can stick with me, a reasonably tough incompetent, with admittedly more pluck than sense, or you can just forget it and go back to the supermen-heroes. I’m not an antihero, at least.

For three days I saw no sigh of life. For three nights I slept in the dust—it wasn’t quite as cold as the cave, but it tried.

Late in the second day I learned why a plain like this is called a “trackless” waste; lord knows I was leaving tracks your Aunt Nellie could follow, by touch. But that afternoon a breeze came up. It was lovely—for awhile. Then it gained strength, and next I knew I could see absolutely nothing in the insane swirl of choking yellow dust. Squatting down right in the middle of it, I soaked my torn “mantle” with water and tied it around my face. Then I staggered on, remembering I’d been heading directly for a collection of sever close-set boulders. I kept my eyes closed; they were no good in that dust storm anyhow, except for collecting dust.

I ran into the boulders—literally—and fell among them, again, literally. I lay there and kept my eyes shut and tried to keep breathing we, used air. It lasted a long time. Perhaps two or three hours; I had no watch; then.

It died, fortunately, before I did, leaving me covered with dust. Covered. I spanked off about a ton of it, leaving only a truckload or so. I considered washing it off, but I was afraid to. I might have a far more pressing need for my scantling supply of water, and if I found Jadiriyah I’d have to share it. I walked on, ignoring the sun’s bloody setting, and kept on through the cooler night until I collapsed. I slept until the sun nudged me awake.

That third evening I found Jadiriyah.

But the Vardors found her first.

Toward sunset I was plodding hungrily along, and for fully an hour I watched a moving dust cloud. I had no idea how far away it was, or what was causing it. It had a definite matrix, and trailed only a slowly-settling wake. That made me decide it was a moving something or someone, rather than another big wind. After an hour or so (?) it seemed to serve toward me. I measured the distance to my goal: a collection of rocks marked by a couple of Cadillac-sized boulders set close together like stone lovers. I speeded up. They were hours away. Then I realized the dust cloud and I shared the same goal.

The dust cloud kept rolling, ghostlike. I could hear the pounding of hooves. Then the cloud was on the opposite side of the cluster of rocks, and I could see only its tenuous upper portions. It reached the rocks long before I did; the rocks where I was supposed to find Jadiriyah.

It was as if I were listening to an invisible radio—with earplugs. The sound was in my head, not in the air. I saw flickering images, too, and they were only in my head. I kept moving wearily, tuned in to the weird drama. In stress, she was broadcasting desperately.

I heard a thought, but it was garbled—it isn’t Kro Kodres! The thought was deliberately damped; these riders are not friends! I slide in between the biggest boulders, which are about three feet apart. I draw my sword. My heart is like thunder in my chest; my breasts heave and I am suddenly wet with perspiration. I fill my left hand with dagger-hilt.

They pound up and stop ten or so paces away in a great cloud of swirling xanthic dust, and we all wait for it to dissipate. I see them.

(I saw them through
her
mind:
she
recognized them. I didn’t. They weren’t horses, and their riders weren’t Kro Kodres’ people. They were enough to bring on the jimjams.)

The horse-sized beasts were a dark grayish blue, like some earthly cats. Their heads resembled foxes far more than cats or horses, with long thin snouts and entirely too many teeth. They had no manes. Their ears were floppy and their tails stubby, though equipped with the usual whisk broom ends big animals need to swat flies. [Yes, there are. God was just as overgenerous with flies on Ardor as he was on Earth. An obvious error in the Grand Design.] The beasties’ feet were huge, splayed for desert travel, and yellow, for no good reason other than decor. Foot fetishists, maybe. Oh, one other thing about those feet: there were six of them. Something for a fetishist to get his teeth into!

The riders were blue-gray, rather than gray-blue like their mounts. Hairless, as I learned, although when I first saw them, through
her
eyes, they wore long white robes with cowls, like Arab burnūses. Their noses were huge and broad, resembling a gorilla’s more than anything, with long-slitted nostrils. The mouths: gashes, hardly any lip at all. The teeth: human enough, a little animalish. Yellow eyes, with hazel irises and tiny pupils. They were set very deep. Not as differ as the green men and other creatures we’ve all read about , but different enough, I assure you. They were not quite human; they were very alien; they were staring at her with those deepset, teeny-tiny black pupils. She was a lonesome, scared female.

Besides, they were eight feet tall, give or take a few centimeters.

They were boots beneath those loose-sleeved robes—boots obviously made from the beasts they rode (slooks, of course). A shortish bow was slung on the back of each rider, with arrows on his saddle. Each wore a sword girded on with a thick sash. The robes were white; the sash of one was orange, the other’s an eye-rending chartreuse.

“Put down your steel, Kang-she,” the thought came, murkily, relayed. “We have bows and need to come no closer.”

I shake my head. They look at each other, white cowls twisting ghostily in the twilight.
Twilight is bloody red, on bloody Aros.
One of them unlimbers his bow. The other argues, with a lot of gesticulating.

“I am Jadiriyah of Brynda,” I say, “and decsire only to be allowed to go in peach, unless you offer aid. I have nothing of value, not even a mount.”

You’re right: She should’ve told them Daddy and Hubby and forty thousand knights of the Table Round were just over yonder. She probably would have, too, if she’d thought of it! These were Vardors, the not-quite-human nomads who’d attacked Kro Kodres. They’d rather raid and fight and slay and rape than eat or sleep. They’d hardly offer aid to each other, much less her; she was a she of the Kang race, and the races were natural enemies, theirs and Kro Kodres’. As to giving her a ride—sure they would! Straight to hell, or to Vardor slavery, which is about the same difference.

I began to bounce forward, seven-league-boots style. I had done very little of it in my three days’ traveling. True, it eats up the distance. But despite the fact that I could leap
far,
I was still jumping. Just how long do you think you’d last if you tried to make a journey by
jumping?
Whether you could spring three feet or thirty wouldn’t make much difference. You’d still wear yourself out, and need a lot of two commodities I didn’t have in addition to rest: food and water.

I was already gasping. I knew I wouldn’t make it. They were regarding her in silence, their homely, gray faces shadowed and sharp-etched by their cowls.

“You have much of value,” the one still wearing his bow on his back says in a growly voice, and my spine writhes. He laughs. “This idiot would spoil it with an arrow. Not Ard,” he says, thumbing his robed chest. “I am not so stupid as Oth. Put down your weapons. We will share food with you, and perhaps help you on your way, if it does not take us out of ours.”

Our bluffs cross like swords There is no way out. We cannot part in peach, having seen each other. Besides, I am female, on foot, and armed only for close combat, while they have mounts and arrows. I wait, wondering if they will decide to shoot, to come in for me on slookback, or dismount and take me from either side. It makes little difference. I have no place to go and cannot hope to overcome two of them. Kro Kodres has the Ring; Kro Kodres is not coming, although I broadcast, just in case.

They swing down and start in, Oth (“oath”) going around one boulder to come at me from the opposite direction. They will try to take me alive. After all, Ard said, I have much of value. Why am I too weak to slay myself?

I startle Ard by advancing, sword and dagger ready. He blinks at my bravura, raising his own blade. I show him a trick or two, learning quickly that I am better with a sword than he.

These people, I saw in my mind, had barely begun any scientific sword-to-sword defense. Besides, when you’re eight feet tall and about one-third animal, you rely more on size and strength than on brains and dexterity. But just as she started to settle down, smiling, to carve up the monster, she heard the other Vardor behind her. She played the only card she had. Not an ace maybe, but it was at least a queen against that pair of jacks! She charged. Taken aback, he dodged her extended blade, and she rushed past, listening to their echoed cries. For a moment they were so dumbstruck that they stood and stared with open mouths, rather than rushing after her.

Which was when I stumbled and fell sprawling. Lying there gasping, I found I could not rise. I was exhausted. What use would I be to that gutsy girl anyhow, in this condition? I hadn’t even the breath to yell. No, I’d be dead in a moment. I realized what I had to do: lie there. If she escaped—wonderful. If she didn’t—well, they didn’t intend killing her anyhow. I’d have to let then have her, while I tried to get up enough strength to reach those rocks and be of some value. Besides, it was coming on for darkness. They’d use her, then sleep.

And then I’d move on. One hungry, exhausted man against two monsters has to think sensibly, heroic or not, like it or not. Playing Galahad, rushing in as I had been before the fall knocked some sense into me, would have accomplished exactly zero. One dead hero.

Meanwhile she was racing for their mounts. Howling, the Vardors started loping after her. She was going to make it! She had a foot up into the stirrup of Oth’s slook, grasping the big saddle horn with one hand. No go; she had to pause and sheath her sword, and I sweated with her as she grabbed that saddle horn with both hands. She swung up and into the great bucket of a saddle, seized the beast’s reins, and pulled on one of them, telling him to vamoose.

All this I saw through her eyes, and I felt her elation as she could not feel mine: she was going to make it.

She didn’t. What made that miserable gray beasty stop? It was days later that I learned: slooks, too, receive the projected thoughts of the people of Aros. And his master told him to stop and get the hell back. Confused, the slook dug in his forehooves, then his middle set, dragging, as is the way of slooks, the extra long back legs. Very efficient braking mechanism. Her brain registered the report of her ears: hooves drumming after her. Desperately she kicked the animal.

At last he started forward, yielding to physical commands rather than vocal or mental ones: they hurt more. But he had hesitated just long enough, and that pause made a tremendous change in both her life and mine.

Ard was alongside her, at the gallop. Without ever having seen a western movie in his life, he jumped.

She woofed and tried to cling to the reins as his robed body crashed into hers. But Ard’s weight and impact were already toppling her from the saddle, and she released the reins as she—and I, in my mind—felt them start to cut into her/my fingers. She hung onto her sword, hoping she wouldn’t manage to cut herself with it when she

l
  a
    n
      d
        e
          d
            !

My mind felt the jar as hers did. With a heavy impact and a groan, both heightened by Ard’s weight. The monster fell on top.

We do not roll. He merely lies atop me, on my back. His arms are a vise about my waist: pain. I gasp for breath, striving to get at my dagger. The sword is useless in this situation, but perhaps I can stab back…I gain the dagger hilt—and Ard exerts more strength in a lurch. Pain! My head roars. My eyes pop. Pain. I am sure ribs crack. I cannot breathe. Consciousness is failing. My fingers are as if mittened, scrabbling at the hilt of my knife.

Ard releases me! I suck in all the air I can—drag out my dagger—Ard is pushing back from e. He is swinging a blow against the side of my hea—