Savage Scorpio (22 page)

And then — noises, the clatter of disturbed rock, voices, cheerful and excited now the danger of the trail was passed, relieved and yet tensely expectant voices — the noises and the voices echoed from the cave entrance.

So close to victory I was not prepared to be beaten.

There was no time to dive into the water. I sank down painfully behind a screen of rocks and, truthfully, that small respite felt wonderful.

Men and women entered the cave. They did not see either the zorca or myself. They were absorbed in the reasons why they had ventured here through perils that were to them novel and ghastly and out of all the previous experience of their worlds.

Events jerked ahead, I heard and saw in snatches; what I record is far too continuous a narrative. The single searing lump of agony that was me suffered there in hiding among the rocks.

There were eight people — as customary. Four tutors and four aspirants, four fine young people who would one day be Savapims and work for the great plan of improvement for Kregen.

There were two women and two men. They wore the Savanti hunting leathers and carried Savanti swords and they were upstanding, stalwart, brilliant people, picked, chosen, of the elite to be.

One of the tutors was Maspero. Maspero, he who had been my own tutor; from the concealment of the rocks I watched and I longed to reach out the hand of friendship, to hear him greet me, to hear again “Happy Swinging!” But I remained dumb and silent, hidden in my rocks, for I was not the Dray Prescot that Maspero had known. Too much had passed and I had learned more, even, I think, than Maspero could teach.

The four aspirants stripped off their clothes and waded down the stone steps. They remained submerged for the time they could hold their breaths, and when they emerged they were transformed, irradiated, made glorious in the name of the Savanti nal Aphrasöe.

I swallowed down hard. The scene kept flickering and blurring, the stone walls swooping sickeningly. I heard what they said, their awed exclamations, the expression of the realization that they were each possessed of a thousand years of life. They talked animatedly, donning their clothes for the journey back down the River Zelph to the Swinging City.

Listening I picked out the scraps of conversation that held meaning for me and I wished them away. My life was ebbing. The leem had worked cruelly upon me. I have fought leems; this time I had been unlucky as well as stupid. So I listened, hearing some things clearly, and one said: “And they were all dispatched, Harding?”

“Yes,” agreed the tutor called Harding, a lean, competent man who looked as hard as his name. “They all profaned the Sacred Pool. Vanti, as is his duty, banished them all back to the places from whence they came.”

“Why did they risk so much?” The fair-haired girl had been merely pretty before her immersion. “They say a Wizard of Loh was among their number. Yet the Wizards, you teach us, fear the Savanti—”

“They have cause.” Maspero smiled, gesturing. He looked exactly the same as I remembered him, the same dark curly hair, the same air of vivacity, the sense of completeness as a person. “As to why they came, it is always the same story. They hear of a miracle cure. But, this time, they did not even seek our permission.” He looked about at the ribboned reflections of the cave, the milky-white liquid shooting shards of colored light against the groined arches. He took a sharp breath. “There is an old story you will be told concerning a man you must know of. A man who — I had an affection for him — a man who failed the tests.”

“He would have been a Savapim?” The aspirant questioned, hanging on Maspero’s words.

. “Yes. But in his nature were darker depths — yet my affection for him remained. He was ejected.”

“Vanti. . . ?” said the dark full-faced man with the features of a Roman emperor.

“Yes.” Maspero gestured for them to descend from the lip of the Pool and make their way to the exit. The only sound I could hear for a space was my own hoarse breathing and the spurting clicking of their sandals on the rocks. All that I saw jumped and leaped, like a reflection in a racing stream, and the bands of fire about my head, constricting about my body, searing that shattered arm, crushed in, agonizing, choking, deadly. “Yes. Vanti ejected him as was his duty. But he was not with these people who so recently profaned this shrine, as I had expected, knowing him, to be. They were banished. They left their air-boats and all their belongings. We have them now. Safely. Soon, I believe, we shall find out more about them, for this is a serious business, unique. As to where they came from—” He stopped there, and laughed in that old wry manner.

Harding drew his sword in preparation for the return. “Yes. Wherever it was, they are back there now.” And he, too, laughed with the others.

“And this man,” asked an aspirant “This man of whom you speak and who failed.”

“I often wonder,” said Maspero, “far more often than I should, just what has become of him on Kregen.”

The remark sounded strange.

“If we fail,” said the aspirant with the close-cropped hair and the fighter’s face. “If we are ejected . . .”

They walked toward the cave entrance. I understood that of the aspirants one was Italian, one French, one German, and one, the hard-looking girl with straight dark hair bound with a fillet and a lean muscular body, might not be from Earth or Kregen at all.

The last I heard was Maspero saying, not lightly but with a grave resonance of meaning in his voice: “I do not think you will be called on to face the temptation that destroyed the man — the man for whom I cherish still an affection — the man of whom I speak.”

When they had gone I tried to rouse myself to crawl out and drop into the water. I imagined myself crawling. I did not move. I could not move. My muscles locked. Sweat started out on my forehead and along my limbs — all three of them. I strained. If I did not reach the pool . . . Every last ounce of will power left must be summoned. Sheer muscular power was long since passed. Only by a last enormous effort of will could I drag myself over the harsh stones to the water’s edge.

I moved.

Creaking like unoiled leather, my body answered the savage commands I imposed. I moved. Like a half-crushed beetle I crawled out of the rocks. A smear of blood followed in a trail where wounds opened. The whole world of Kregen revolved, inside and outside my skull. If I were to go staggering down to the Black Spider Caves of Gratz I would go down, as ever, clawing and fighting and struggling like a maniac every last inch of the way.

Slowly, laboriously, agonizingly, the water came nearer.

The liquid moved gently with spiraling wisps of vapor rising from the surface, like heating milk. The refulgent blueness of the place pressed down more strongly. I gasped. I do not know what my face looked like; and I am glad I do not know.

The rocky edge scraped under my chest. I leaned over the Sacred Pool of Baptism and I drew a deep shuddery breath and gave thanks I had at last reached its miraculous healing powers.

My friends had reached here and the emperor had been cured. Maspero had said so. The tutors had laughed — why had they laughed? If I have given some semblance of a continuous narrative to my experiences here then that is purely illusory. Everything reached me in chopped-up segments, distracting, dazzling, obscure. My head expanded and contracted with pain. My arm — no, I prefer to forget that, for all the numbing effects of the journey wore off as I trembled on the edge of the pool, trying to find the energy for one last agonized dragging of my body over the stone lip to topple over and into a blessed surcease from agony.

Why did I hesitate? Why did I not make that final effort and plunge to resurrection?

And then — and then! For, of course, I realized almost too late why I hesitated, why those tutors had laughed. My friends had all bathed here with the emperor and they had all been banished, every last one, back to whence they came.

They had been ejected and returned to their homes on Kregen.

If I dropped into the Sacred Pool as I so ardently wished, then I, Dray Prescot, of Kregen and of
Earth
— I would — as I had been once before, so I would inevitably be again — I would be ejected and sent hurtling across the dark spaces between the stars back to Earth where I had been born.

If I achieved the healing and surcease I craved I would be flung headlong back to Earth.

But, if I did not recuperate, if I were not healed, I would die.

To go back to Earth, flung there by the agent of the Savanti, this Vanti whose monstrous bulk moved in the pool, must mean a banishment that might last a thousand years. For in that case the Star Lords would not have banished me and therefore in their distant way might have no further interest in me. So cruelly beset by pain and indecision and torment was I that the thought seemed natural; later I questioned that assumption.

There were two evils, and I must make a decision. The decision was made for me, of course. I dare not allow myself to die. Delia — I would be of no use to Delia if I were dead and wandering like a wraith through the echoing vastnesses of Cottmer’s Caverns.

So I must live to fight another day and take my chances of ever returning to Kregen.

Perhaps, I thought, maundering, raging with fever, delirious, out of my head — I remember it all in flashes and spurts and jolting savage impressions of pain and horror and urgency — perhaps it would be better for me just to die, after all, just to let slip rather than live out a thousand years of meaningless life on Earth.

But, as it was in the nature of the scorpion to sting the frog, so it is in my nature to struggle and never give in, however foolish that makes me. There had to be a way around this. I tried to grasp onto my whirling thoughts — confusion, a roaring in my head, a drugged empty feeling as though the evil concoctions of the black lotus-flowers of Hodan-Set wafted through my brain — desperately, near despair, I tried to think and reason this out, trying to act in the puffed-up character of the cunning old leem-hunter so many people credit me with being. I am just an ordinary man — oh, yes, I am blessed or cursed with a thousand years of life and I have seen and done much; but I am no superman.

If I — I remember turning and rolling, slowly, agonizingly, over onto my stomach alongside the stone lip of the pool. First things first. If I — cautiously I plucked at the ghastly bundle that wrapped all that was left of my arm. If I — I did not want to disturb that mess. I may have a strong stomach; I do not think I could have withstood the impact of the horror of my own body that must have been revealed. Slowly, cautiously, I inched out over the water, and let the thing dangle down.

The milky fluid closed around my arm. I felt — well, I wondered if I did feel anything through the bite of agony. Then the warm comforting sensation as of a soft mouth kissing me, a million tiny needles pricking my skin, rather, pricking the shreds of skin and fragments of bone. The rags would all be melted away. I waited, feeling the warm glowing sensation increase and expand. I managed to shift around so my shoulder dipped.

If I ventured any more I would fall in. Then it would be Earth for me. . .

Weird, to think I thus hung over a drop of four hundred light years. . .

Presently, in due time, I withdrew my arm.

The arm was whole.

I flexed the muscles. I gripped that iron hand of mine into a fist.

Well!

So I pushed out over the water, gripping the stone lip of the rim with two strong hands, and dipped my head. I dunked my head in and held my breath and all the pains of Kregen flowed and dissolved and washed away as the snows of the Heart Heights of Valka vanish when the full glory of the Suns of Scorpio pours upon them.

When I withdrew, a vast shape moving slowly in the milky waters drew back at the far end of the pool. Vanti. . .

It was not bravado, not pride, not foolishness, that made me stand up and walk away without dipping my side. I knew enough of the powers of the milky liquid in the pool. My side, which was ripped and torn and poking crushed ribs through in a bloody crust, would heal of itself.

Over at the far side the Guardian grew restless. A vast smooth bulk humped beneath the water. Waves of the liquid flowed outwards in smooth rolling rings to luminous reflections. I walked away, a whole man once again, and I will not attempt to speak of my feelings, for they poured in a hot jumbled tide, irrational, thanksgiving, angry, shamed, glorious. I had sinned grievously and I had been reprieved. Now, there was work to be done.

A voice whispered through the still air.

“Oh, unfortunate is the city—”

“You have no powers over me, Vanti!” I bellowed back. “Return to your hole, hide away from me — for I warned you I would return.” Then, I added: “I return in friendship.”

The powers of the Guardian of the Pool could hurl me four hundred light years through space back to Earth. Had done so.

I must be an old vosk-skull, for I turned and cupped my hands and splashed the liquid over me, letting it run down over my body and legs.

Yes, an old onker — for as Zair is my witness, I knelt down and took a long swigging drink.

Foolhardy? Of course! But then, that is me, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor, Krozair of Zy. . .

I stood up, tall and straight once more, a fighting man, ready to face what must come on the wild and beautiful, savage and horrendous world of Kregen.

I licked the last moisture from my lips.

“By Mother Zinzu the Blessed,” I said, wiping my mouth. “I needed that!”

Chapter Seventeen

Gifts from a Savanti nal Aphrasöe

The magnificent black zorca trotted along the path above the waterfall. Proud, high-tempered, a stallion, this zorca was a mount fit for a king. I had formed the impression that he had not been well treated by his Kataki owner. This is no novel thing. Some races on Kregen, as on Earth, care nothing for the suffering of animals, as other races care nothing for the suffering of women and children. For me, the stallion responded nobly, and I think he understood very quickly the difference in attitude between his old master and his new rider.