Savage Scorpio (20 page)
Then it was only the leem and me.
I remember little.
By rights I should have been dead. I have had my memory fortified by the dips in the Sacred Pool; but the memories here jog scarlet and ragged, fading and mocking, tormenting and frightful. The first feral leap could be slid, although one dagger-claw gouged a bloody chunk from my left shoulder. I got on his back. Somehow I held on and the kutcherer went in as far as the tooth of metal would allow. And that was not far enough to reach the leem’s lesser heart, let alone his main heart. I tried to cut his throat and he whirled his interlocked shoulder blades and I spun catapulting off. I caught an ear in my left fist and held on, burning pain dripping down my arm, and was dragged, and felt claws rake all down my side.
The ground smashed at me and the claws drank my blood. But I was clinging to him like a burr, trying to serve him as I had the chavonth. The strength of a leem overtops lesser wildcats; a leem is no chavonth or strigicaw — a leem is a leem!
Sliding and dangling I was aware I slid in blood dabbling his fur. My blood. My blood, hot and red, mingled with some of his.
Again I tried to slit his throat and felt the blade kiss across fur and windpipe. He bucked and I held on, held on, and the world crashed and whirled about me. With the kutcherer reversed and leaning over that fanged wedge-head I brought the tooth of metal down and dragged back, reeling, gasping, and so pierced into one of his eyes. His roars shattered into the hot air. He swerved. He arched his back bucking, contorting, trying to fling me off. All the time he hissed and screeched and foam flew. The stink of him broke with fetid strength into my nostrils. Fur and sweat and blood all mixed together. Somehow there was strength enough to hold on. Muscles bursting, lungs afire, pain scorching, body hammered and beaten, somehow, somehow I held on.
I sawed the blade across his throat. We rolled. His weight near crushed me. Half suffocated I wrenched violently aside. A claw came from nowhere and razored half an ear away.
His claws scraped again; but I held myself in, clinging, limpet-like, shaking, gripping his fur, grabbing him anywhere, hauling our rolling bodies together, fast locked in a grip of death.
Over and over we rolled. His hisses and spittings shocked frightfully into my ears, through my head, drumming and howling like condemned spirits. But I held on and sawed and slashed and stabbed — stabbing was useless, useless with that tooth of metal halting the clean inward drive of the blade.
His struggles grew ever more vigorous, gaining in power and viciousness despite the loss of an eye as I felt my own strength waning. My left hand, daubed with blood, slipped. I grasped desperately at his stinking fur. The blood oozed through my fingers and I felt the fur slide away as a man slides his fingers down the neck of a chicken. I gasped and heaved back. I was rolling over and over and the leem was high in the air before me, pouncing, leaping, soaring through the air in that long superb leap of the leem.
He landed on his four front paws and that cruel wedge head split wide and the gaping maw opened and closed and the bright fangs crunched around my left arm.
I hardly noticed the pain for the fury that filled me.
If I was to die then I’d be dying a fool!
The kutcherer stabbed forward and up. The point shattered through his remaining eye. His screeches racketed in maniacal howlings. The stink of blood and sweat bathed me in a stench that mingled with his pungent leem smell. I could not feel my left arm. He opened his jaws to screech and I jerked free, and fell, and tried to stand up. The world was going up and down in hideous waves. He swiped at me — one swipe of those paws and my head would burst asunder like a rotten fruit — I ducked and the knife stabbed and hacked. I backed away. Crouched over, panting, drenched in blood, half-crazed, half-ruined, I backed away. He could not see. But he could smell. I could barely stand. I backed, seeking an opening. He followed, blindly. I slashed again, leaping in. I opened his throat. The dark blood pumped out, gushing, shining and viscous, welling in a red stream over his bedabbled ochre fur.
I staggered and fell. I could not move. He lifted his paws, blindly, slashing out. He advanced. Somehow strength fountained from somewhere, with the blood leaching from me, and I slashed again with the hooked knife and his screech sounded as though it echoed up from Cottmer’s Caverns.
The ground struck hard under my knees. I tried to stand and could not. My head hung down. I caught a single horrific glimpse of my own left arm — of what had been my left arm. The skin and flesh had been stripped off in his fangs. The pink and white of bone gleamed through, with the blood bubbling; it was a skeletal arm, and the hand hung askew and mangled, broken into an obscene lump. I could feel nothing.
I fell forward from my knees onto my face. The dust stung into my face, smeared and slicked with sweat and blood. The kutcherer, a mere mass of shining blood, dropped into the stained grass. I tried to lift my head. If this was the end then I’d husk out a last Hai Jikai and so take my last voyage down to the Ice Floes of Sicce.
The will forced me up. There was no physical strength in this thing. The will, the driving force of spirit — I was on my knees, my head dangling, feeling blindly about for the knife.
The leem crouched before me. He was not yet dead. It is extraordinarily hard to slay a leem. His hearts pumped blood out through the ragged gaping rents in his hide, from the slashes in his throat. His punctured eyes streamed ichor. His ochre fur sheened with spilled blood. And his cruel mouth dribbled blood that belonged to me.
With that dark effort at which I have long ceased to marvel, I forced myself to stand. My legs shook. My knees quivered. Wavering, reeling, gasping with wide-open mouth for air, laboring, I stood up. I grasped the knife again. I did not recall finding it in the grass and picking it up. The handle was as fouled with blood as the blade. And the metal tooth was gone, snapped off, wrenched away.
And so, more falling than leaping, more toppling helplessly forward than thrusting, I fell onto the leem and drove the knife home into his main heart.
He thrashed. He quivered in the last frenzy before death. His hind legs caught me and knocked me head over heels. I smashed into the dirt and rolled and a bony skeletal object, loosely articulated with a few threads of gristle, wrapped about by a few shreds of flesh and skin, flapped about me as I rolled and I realized that ghastly blood-spraying flailing skeletal thing was my left arm.
The bones of my arm clashed with the bones of my ribs, exposed, showing through the cut and lacerated flesh of my body.
The darkness that was beyond the darkness of Notor Zan flowed over me. I felt — I felt nothing.
I saw the leem. He lay awash in his own blood.
Stupidly, I collapsed onto the dirt.
So I lay there, and my head sank down to the dusty blood-caked grass, and I slept.
Shadow
That I speak to you in these tapes is proof I did not die.
How close to death I drew I do not know. By my immersion in the Sacred Pool of Baptism my body had been endowed with remarkable powers of recuperation and recovery from injury. But my left arm had been stripped away, mangled, practically wrenched from the socket, destroyed. That would not be repaired. It might not kill me; it would never be a sound left arm again.
Someone was shouting at me. The leem fight brought back ghosts.
“By Kaidun! D’you want the glass eye and brass sword of Beng Thrax to do it all for you! Go in, you coys, you hulus. Go in and fight for the Ruby Drang!”
For the Ruby Drang! Aye! I would fight for the Ruby Drang.
And, another voice, leading on the war hosts: “For Vallia! Valka! Valka!”
And, again, yet another voice, shrilling over the war trumpets and the heart-pulsing pounding of ten thousand voves: “Felschraung! Felschraung and Longuelm! Zorcander! Zorcander!”
And, too, the voices bellowing joyfully: “For Djan! For Notor Prescot and for Djanduin!”
The surf-roar of a hundred ghostly voices beat about me, roaring in my head. Visions passed before my eyes. Flames shot up, smoke billowed, the horrendous sounds of combat flowered in my head. Demands were being made upon me. Urgent decisions were called for. There was no time for rest. Rest was a sin.
“For the Kroveres of Iztar!”
I groaned. The weight was too much. I was a mere mortal man and could not support the load. The voices, the demands, the urgency, beat and battered at me, and I moaned and rolled over and so, stupidly, sat up.
The last phantasmal voice roared, proud, defiant, ready to challenge a world: “For Zair! Krozair! Krozair!”
I opened my eyes and winced, shuddering, and so looked about wearily, and remembered.
I had not bled to death.
My left arm pained. The amazement that that was all it did must be pushed aside. A mere string or two of sinew, broken splintered bones, a few scraps of red meat — that was all there was hanging from my shattered shoulder.
What the hell Delia would say I shuddered to think.
My thoughts were not even as clear as that. It is a surmise from later. The disgusting remnants of my arm must be bound up and the gaping cavity in my side staunched, and I ripped away at the tatters of the flaxen tunic to make a sling and pads.
I was, I think, still reasonably coherent at this time. Later the delirium would seize me. If a fever shook me I’d have to fight that, too. I can recall hauling at the gnutrix and clumsily mounting. I had a filled water bottle. What else there was besides a remnant of an arm in a sling and a mangled side I did not know, do not remember. I started off, kicking the animal along, jolting cruelly in that damned six-legged gait.
The corpse of the leem lay there bathed in shining blood, black and green with flies. I left him without a word, without a parting Jikai, left him to rot.
Although the long-term calendar of Kregen is based to a large extent on the precedence of the red or the green sun through the sky, and the forty-year cycle, plus the orbital movement of the planet itself, these give only the broadest outline to calendar measurements. Most immediate date measurements are made by months of one moon or another. For the journey I must now undertake I fancied I’d need a whole sheaf of months, culled from all the seven moons.
What passed along the way remains hazy. Blurred snatches of memory jag through the mists. I think I met a group of little Ochs, who tut-tutted over my arm and gave me potions. Ochs are funny little puff-chopped folk, with six limbs, the center pair used either as hands or feet. I have been helped before by Ochs, as well as being savagely beaten by them when a slave.
They gave me a piece of clear crystal hung on chains from a circlet they cautioned me to wear on my head. Drunkenly I put the thing on and the crystal hung down before my eyes turning the world into a phantasmagoria as though I peered through the bottom of a bottle. I thanked them — I think I did — giving them a proper Remberee, riding on, lolling in the saddle like a man sodden with dopa and too far gone to fight.
The way proved long and tiresome. Go north, Zena Iztar had said, and I had obeyed. Now I crawled along with an altogether more dreadful reason. Now, despite all, I must win through. Forests, tracks, trees, streams, boulders, defiles. I staggered along, reeling in the saddle. Yes, snatches of it come back to haunt me in nightmares, now. I was growing steadily weaker as the dreadful injuries that surely must have killed any normal man fought against the healing properties my body had acquired from the Savanti.
Of all that painful journey only a few incidents stand out at all clearly. Of them, the most vivid, if not the most evil, wrenching in its violence, occurred as the gnutrix lolloped down a slope toward a stream bowered in trees where I could quench the torturing thirst and soothe my burning lips. My thirst tormented and drove me insatiably.
By this time I must have been pretty far gone. Only the memory of the incident remains, like a child’s picture torn from a book and mounted in a frame, isolate, individual, related to nothing else.
Katakis moved about the stream, making a camp, busy in the familiar tasks of creating a base for the night. To one side the bound slaves, hallmark of the Katakis’ trade, moaned in their winnowed lines of suffering. I stared, sick, almost falling off the gnutrix, glaring madly upon these devils who debarred me from the water. My whole body wracked with cramps, I burned, yet coldness brushed me with ice crystals. Shuddering, reeling in the saddle, I had to face the terrible fact that there was no water for me at this stream, not with the Katakis and their slaving habits in the way. One look at me, the instant summation I was useless as merchandise, and they’d whip up a tail-blade and finish me.
Even now, I believe no single thought occurred to me that this might be a blissful end to all suffering.
Low-browed and with a gap-jawed mouth filled with snaggly teeth is a Kataki. His thick black hair is oiled and curled in a fashion far different from that of the Eye of the World. His eyes are wide-spaced, narrow and cold. Evil, vicious and rapacious, Katakis, slavemasters, man-managers, batteners on human misery. Perhaps the thing that gives a Kataki his greatest pride is his tail, a long sinuous powerful tail to which is strapped a sharp steel blade. So, sickly, I stared down on these vile diffs and I could not summon a single curse.
Jerking the gnutrix away was bewilderingly useless. He scented the water, parched as was I, obstinately thrusting his blunt head toward the inviting stream in the darkling light.
He started off and I sawed the reins and he resisted, disregarding the pain in his mouth for the lure of the water. We picked up speed jolting down toward the stream.
Had I had the use of two arms; had I been even a little stronger, I would have held him. But he ran away with me. So I did the only thing I could do, plunging down to certain death, trying to husk up the last of my voice, to make a good shouting show of it.
“Khirrs!” I shrilled, and my voice wheezed and cracked. “Khirrs all about you!”