Lin Carter - The City Outside the World (6 page)

Miraculously, he was unharmed. The tough, insulated synthetic of his thermal suit had been built to keep in his bodyheat. It had never been designed to resist the terrible, razory claws of the
slioth
or its distant cousin, the dreaded sandcat of the Dustlands. But it was strong enough to keep those steely hooks from his flesh, although the fabric was slit open from neck to waist.

The lizard reared up, hissed like a steam whistle, and reached for them with three of its mailed limbs. Blood thundering in his ears like pounding surf, Ryker fumbled with numb, clumsy fingers for the gun which lay holstered against his thigh.

He half-drew it, and then, suddenly, the girl was in his arms, all of her cool, sweetly-rounded nakedness pressed against his own bared torso, her slim arms locked around his neck, making his draw awkward.

He cursed in harsh, senseless gutturals, swivelled to one side, and fired as the huge reptile loomed up, casting its black shadow over them.

In the inky gloom, the bolt of electric flame was brighter than many suns.

The cliff dragon was armored in leathery hide, and mailed with tough overlapping plates of horny chitin, like a lobster's shell. But the gun was set for a needle beam, and the sizzling ray lasered through the body of the beast and spurted from its back—bright, diffuse flame intermixed with gobbets of meat and thick, splattering gore.

The
slioth
squalled deafeningly. It fell backwards off

the ledge and, a moment later, they heard it thud against the rock-strewn slopes below.

The blaze of afterimages wavered before his eyes, blotting out everything but the pale, wide-eyed face the girl lifted to his. Where-the soft roundness of her tender breast was pressed against his bare skin, he felt the thudding of her heart, and she felt his own heartbeat like an echo of hers.

She trembled in his arms, and he soothed her with strong, rough hands that were curiously gentle.

And then he kissed her, a tender probing kiss that went on and on as if their lips had grown together into one mouth. And she did not draw away until they both had to breathe.

She withdrew her body from his own then, and went into the cave, not looking at him, and left him there, stiffly leaning against the cliff, his chest and arms and mouth still tingling with the warmth of her and with the sweetness of her.

The boy and the old man stood, both naked, both saying nothing, both staring with wide, frightened eyes. The reek of burnt dragon meat was thick and sour on the dry, cold air.

He holstered his gun and stooped, entering the cave again. Valarda was curled up in her blankets, her back turned towards him so that he could not see her face.

No one said anything.

Ryker returned to his fur cloak and pretended to sleep.

But he lay awake for hours staring into the green-lit gloom, remembering the silken softness of her body against his own, and the honey sweetness of her mouth under his kiss.

II

The Caravan Road

6. The Oasis Town

dawn had lit
the cave-roof with its pale luminance before Ryker got back to sleep, and when at last the others roused him it was near midday.

He went out to check on their lopers, and was surprised to find them unmolested. They had tethered the beasts at the foot of the cliff wall of the mesa, some distance up a narrow ravine where they could feed on the rock lichens and podweed. The
slioth
had not investigated the ravine, apparently.

As for the cliff dragon, its body was gone. Either the bolt from Ryker's power gun had not slain it outright, and it had dragged itself off to its lair, or its fellow scavengers had carried it away to feast in private.

Ryker thought it likely the beast had limped away on its own. Such reptiles are notoriously hard to kill, having brains so small it takes them hours to realize they are dead—an old hunting joke—and two hearts.

Nobody spoke over breakfast. And there was utterly no reference made to last night. It was as if none of it had even happened. Valarda did not meet his eyes, and served his meal with a cool reserve.

Ryker was just as glad. The embrace, the kiss, they had been one of those things and meant nothing. And he was in a surly, taciturn mood and felt little like conversation. The little imp, Kiki, however, had a twinkle of mischief in his green eyes as the boy demurely asked how he had slept.

They rode on that day, due west, following the curve of the meridian.

There had been some discussion about this, but not much. The girl informed him that they wished to reach the oasis of Yhakhah, where it was their intention to join a caravan traveling north.

This oasis town—actually, little more than a more-or-less permanent camp—stood at the northernmost terminus of the old waterway called Nilosyrtis, at the southern tip of the Casius Plateau. Now, it was the most logical place to go from where they were, perhaps; but Ryker still wondered why Valarda wished to venture into those parts. No matter what she had said to him, it simply could not be true that they wanted to travel north from that point. For north lay nothing: the barren cliff wall of the Casius, the bleak and uninhabited tableland itself, and then endless leagues of empty desert which stretched clear to the pole.

There was no city or encampment of the People north of Yhakhah. So where was she going?

There was more to all of this than met the eye, he knew. But he was in this, now, up to his neck. And there wasn't much else for him to do but go along, if only for the ride.

All that day they skirted the soaring cliff wall of the great mesa, riding west, carrying as much food and water as they could store. From time to time, Ryker eyed it curiously. The mesa meant something to Valarda and her old grandsire—if that is all he was. The Earthling recalled the curious emotion with which they had viewed it the previous evening. They had seemed—what?—appalled?, crestfallen?, saddened?

Now, why should that be? The mesa of Alcyonius Nodus was as it had ever been, a barren tableland of dead, sterile rock. And it had been thus for millions of years, surely, or anyway since the great oceans of prehistoric

Mars
began to dry up. Once, perhaps , it had been a broad and fertile island, against whose cliffy shores the lost oceans had burst in shattering spray. But that was long
ago.

They rode west, then north awhile until the mighty wall of the great pleateau darkened the horizon to the north. Reaching the foot of the plateau, they skirted it, riding west until sundown, and slept that night in the mouth of one of the innumerable ravines into which the cliffs of Casius were cloven.

The following day they caught their first glimpse of the broad Nilosyrtis. Once this canal had been amighty river, perhaps, flowing down into the lowlands from the mountainous heights of Casius, and watering the Old City which stood at the northern extremity of that huge peninsula now called Syrtis Major. Now it was only a level plain covered with knee-high vegetation, weirdly blue.

When Mars began to dry up as the free water vapor in its atmosphere escaped in ever-dwindling amounts into space, the crust of the planet had shrunk and cracked, forming a network of long, geometrical lesions in the surface. Into these titanic ravines the shrinking oceans, or what was left of them, had drained. And over succeeding ages the Martian vegetation, adapting to ever-dwindling supplies of moisture, had taken root along these fissures, forming thick belts of hardy growths whose root systems delved down for miles into the pockets of moisture trapped within the bowels of the planet.

It was these broad strips of fertile vegetation the Earth astronomers had mistaken for artificial waterways. Only some of them, like Nilosyrtis, had once been the beds of primordial rivers, and only a very few showed any signs of having been engineered by human hands. While it was now thought that a few of the old canals had actually been

"mined'' for water with immense rigs which had probably resembled the oil wells of Texas and Oklahoma, most of them were natural phenomena, and none of them bore even the slightest resemblance to the super Venetian canals which had webbed the planet from pole to pole in the imagination of Earthsider astronomers and fiction writers two centuries ago.

But here there was, truly, a source of water. For the low, rubbery, bright blue plants were a tough and hardy species whose leathery leaves and stems stored precious moisture hoisted drop by drop from whatever was left of the lost oceans at the planet's core. Here was both food and drink for man and beast, and a safe road they could follow to Yhakhah.

They rode into the old town at sundown and took rooms at an inn whose walls had already been ancient before the glaciers retreated from Europe, or the English Channel was born, or the first man made friends with the first dog.

There were a dozen of these oasis towns scattered over the face of Mars, and here all enmity was held in strict abeyance. Clan war or tribal feud or private vengeance were unknown. For towns such as Yhakhah were under Water Truce; here all men were as brothers banded togeth- = er against a universal enemy, which was grim and hostile Nature herself. Here even the
F'yagha
could come without fear of danger. Here even the priests who had hunted Valarda would be powerless to harm her. (And Ryker wondered if they were still hunting her—and now him.)

And here she masked her eyes again, before they entered the town.

Ryker wished he knew more about the folklore of the People. Perhaps golden eyes, which he knew to be rare, were thought unlucky, or a stigma of witchcraft. Crossed

eyes were once so regarded back on Earth, centuries ago, he knew—the origin of the "Evil Eye" of legend.

At any rate, she masked her own as they came riding into Yhakhah.

It was old, that town. The low wall around it, and parts of the buildings, showed that originally it had been built of huge blocks of the pale golden marble mined from the
worn,
low hills of Mars. The tooth of Time does not bite deep upon such dense stone, and they rode through pillared gates and down a long arcade of marble columns that hud stood a million years or more, and still looked new and fresh, as if carried hither from the quarries only yesterday.

But the buildings had worn less well, and many of their walls had fallen and been patched together with the clay brick the Martians somehow manufacture on a desert world where water is more precious than rubies, and a lot scarcer. They were low roofed, the buildings, hunched and blear windowed, built every which way, in a tangle of meandering, narrow streets and dark alleys choked with refuse.

It was not pretty. But the patina of age had mellowed it and softened its harsh lines and enriched the dim colors of it, until in a way it was beautiful, in the way a very old woman can be beautiful: it had character.

The dim gold of the ancient marble, the dusty red-brown of the brickwork, the tawny lucency of the horn-paned windows, blended with the rich umber of the beaten soil, and the copper and ochre of the Dustlands that ringed it in.

Two, perhaps three, caravans were assembling in Yhakhah when they rode in under an evening sky of dusky crimson, or were resting here for the next leg of a long, slow journey that might carry them halfway around this world. The wineshops were roaring with song and odor-

ous with cooked meats; drunken men lounged about or brawled or jested, lean, rangy men, caravan guards for the most part, half outlaw, with the look of wolves about them.

Slatternly oasis women loitered in doorways, or called hoarse, obscene invitations from windows. Naked urchins played in the streets or stood, sucking dirty thumbs, staring owlishly as they rode by.

Ryker had donned a hooded cloak, drawn close to hide his inches and his face. In a pinch he could pass for a warrior of the People. He had done it before and played the part now to perfection, swaggering when he had dismounted in the innyard, hooking his thumbs in his leather belt, which was worn over the kaftanlike cloak, drawn close to conceal the thermalsuit which would have revealed him at a glance as an Outworlder. Earthsiders could come and go with impunity here, true, but there was no point in calling attention to themselves. There might be eyes, even here, alert for a dancing girl, an old man and a child, who were accompanied by an Earthman.

Four of the first inns they tried were filled to capacity, but the fifth could house them. The surly innkeeper grudgingly informed Melandron one attic room was free. They must all sleep together, but they had done it before, in the cave, and could do it now.

Again, Ryker could not help but notice how Valarda held herself aloof, like a princess, and let her grandsire engage a room for them, and hire an oasis woman to prepare and serve their meals. He wondered about it to himself. On Mars, as in the desert countries back on Earth, youth abases itself before age. And if old Melandron was indeed her grandfather, as she had said he was, it should have been Valarda who performed these tasks, while the

old man sunned himself in the yard, accepting wine with dignity.

But she treated him more like a retainer, and he deferred in her as he would to a queen.

They were weary from the long day's journey, and said little; and besides, the old witch of an oasis woman was there, cooking the meat over a hibachilike pot suspended ovcr a pan of green chemical fire, and it would not do to discuss their business before a stranger.