Fliers of Antares Read online

  The air was warm — very warm. Even as I scrabbled around with those damned bells of Beng-Kishi clamoring in my skull the heat increased with throat-drying speed. I managed to get an eye unglued and peered about on a scene of terror and panic. The rumblings of hell shook the ground. Sulfur stank.

  An exquisite girl with long lithe legs ran toward me, screaming. Her clothes were on fire. Her hair blazed terribly. She was apim; soon she would be a burned corpse.

  I jumped for her, knocked her down, smashed at the burning clothes, ripping off the coarse gray dress, smothering the blazing hair. She screamed and screamed.

  Around me people were running and screaming. Some were on fire. Some had pitchers of water which were soon expended. They ran from a village of mud huts with wooden roofs, and the roofs blazed to the sky. I followed the streaked tracks of the smoke and looked into the sky.

  Up there, towering over the world, poured the mouth of hell.

  Fire. Fire and flame. Fire and destruction. Burning and smoking and roaring, the volcano pumped out its fiery breath and its destructive vomit and smothered the village in terror and horror. Huge, that volcano, towering, high, and cone-sided, and the lava ran down swiftly in glowing orange and red spuming gouts over everything in its path.

  Evilly swirling in wide writhing tentacles from a violent smoky orange through a snarling ruby-red to a pure fiery white, the lava raged downslope and through the village. The heat grew. The noise battered as the lava poured and slipped over the steep edge of an embankment to fall into the blue and placid waters of a lake. Trees burned before they fell to be consumed utterly. The waters roiled near the shore and the waves spread out in wide ripples so that the placid surface grew congested and turbulent in a wide and swiftly growing circle.

  Terraces of neat agriculture had been hacked in alternating wide and narrow steps down the flanks of the low surrounding hills. But the monster of fire poured down over everything, and a village was dying and a people was being destroyed — and, as usual, Dray Prescot was there, naked and disoriented, expected to select the right person to save.

  The girl was burned, but she was still alive and she would live.

  I bent to her.

  “Muruaa!” she moaned. “Muruaa!”

  “On your feet, girl, and run! Past the slide and into the lake! Move!”

  She saw my face and she flinched, all burned and naked and in pain. But she staggered to her feet and ran off. I had taken stock of the situation as I saw it. The village was doomed. But below, down the steep slope, lay a sizable town, neatly mud walled and wooden roofed, in a cleft between the low, terraced hills. I could look down and see the peaked roofs of sturm-wood, and the mud-brick walls, the enclosures, and the little backyard chimneys smoking with preparations for one of the many daytime meals of Kregen. The suns were rising in the sky, and they blazed through a crown of smoke. The land lay lit in ghastly orange and lurid vermilion from the fires of the volcano.

  The fugitives from the outlying village vanished below. Some staggered, burned; others crawled; but one or two young men lifted the old folk, and in a bunch they disappeared below the brick-wall of a terrace. The girl whose clothes I had wrenched off and whose blazing hair I had put out ran with them. I stood alone.

  If I refused to imperil my life? It was the Earth of my birth for me, then, and no mistake.

  So, like the puppet I swore I would someday cease from being, I ran. One day, please Zair, I would cut the strings that held me puppet-slave to the Everoinye.

  As I ran I studied the landscape. There is much to be learned from the landscape of a people. Here there was no wide aa. I know that is the volcanologists’ term. Also I have walked over the uneven lumpy lava fields below Etna, which the locals call sciara, and shuddered at what they hide. But here the ground was fertile and the crops grew lushly, vine and gregarian, paline and many another luxurious plant of Kregen. So the last eruption must have occurred more than, say, a hundred years ago. These people might not know what to do — or what to try to do.

  Down in the town the panic was atrocious. Men and women ran from their houses with bundles wobbling on their heads. Calsanys were being prodded along with sticks. Babies were crying. Girls were carrying out cloths with bits of household furniture sticking out, candlesticks, frying pans, grinders, samphron-oil lamps, anything they had thought to snatch up in their panic.

  Sulfur and brimstone choked in the air. The congested rumblings and explosions of the volcano battered at reason.

  I grabbed a young man whose face showed stark fear. He was babbling incoherently, so I kicked him away and grabbed another man who swung at me, uglily, a stux thrusting forward. He bore a vosk-hide satchel over his shoulder and nothing else, and I suspected he had seized his chance to loot a neighbor’s house.

  “Listen, dom, and I will not kill you,” I told him.

  He reacted stupidly. He tried to stick me with the spear.

  I took it away from him and poked the point into his sweating belly.

  “Who is the chief man of the town, dom? Tell me his name and where I may hope to find him, or your tripes will spill into the road.”

  He yelled, but he gabbled out what I wanted to know.

  “Lart Lykon, the Elten! But he has fled—”

  I shook him.

  “Toward the jetties — a boat — for the sake of Kuerden the Merciless!”

  I threw him from me. Useless to work on these people one at a time. Whatever the Star Lords were up to here, I scarcely thought it had been the saving of that first girl upon the higher slopes where the lava ran and would have engulfed her if she had not burned to death first. Everything was happening with enormous speed. I burst through a packed rabble wailing and clamoring at the jetty. A few boats lay there, small open double-ended craft, and a number had already pushed off. It was perfectly clear that the boats could not carry all the people of the town. It was equally and horribly clear that the lava pouring down so swiftly toward them would fill the narrow valley in which the town huddled, fill the green slot and cover the houses, rise up the terraced hills, pouring all the time through and over the town and into the lake. To jump into the water and swim would help only if one could outrace the lava. This is what many were doing; but soon the water grew too hot for them, so that they boiled.

  I found Lart Lykon, the Elten. He was a large, raw-boned man with a hectoring voice, hooded eyes, a massive beard, and golden rings about his fingers and bracelets upon his arms. He wore only a gray shirt and a pair of blue trousers. I took him by the shoulder as he pushed a woman aside and went to step into a boat. He had guards, tough men with stuxes who shouted at me to let the Elten alone, and who thrust at me. I took the first stux and hit the fellow over the head with it. Ash was now falling, raining down in white-hot droplets that stung as they hit flesh. People were screaming everywhere. Yet we were penned into this tiny space of the jetties between the lake-wall and the town.

  “Elten,” I said, shouting into his ear. “By all you hold holy, you will not run away. There is a way to defeat Muruaa!”

  “It cannot be done,” he gasped, his eyes rolling. “Muruaa will eat us all, burn us alive!”

  Another guard, panicking, tried to thrust his stux into my back, so that I was forced to turn, my left hand grasping the Elten by the shoulder, and take the stux away from the guard. He looked a mean, low-browed fellow — well, maybe I do him an injustice — but I thrust back hard intending to frighten him away. But the press of people forced him on to the stux. He writhed like a fish on a harpoon, and lurched away.

  I turned my face on the other guards.

  They were relatively primitive people, at least in their relationship with authority. They understood what my face told them long before they heard what I bellowed out.

  I lifted my voice and I shouted.

  “Listen to me! It is useless to run away. You must do what I say, at once, for if you do not, then you will all be killed, and I along with you.”

  I dragged up
the Elten of the town, and hung him up in the air so that his heels dangled.

  “Your Elten will confirm what I say! You must go up past the flanks of the lava flow, behind the houses, along the terraces, back above the town, below the village. You must carry cloths, wetted, over your heads. You must take picks and shovels, and you will do as I bid you. If you do not you will all surely be killed!”

  There followed a wild argument; but I held the stux against the side of Lart Lykon, the Elten, and I pressed the cruel and broad head into the swell of his belly. “Tell them to obey, Lykon, or your tripes spill into the dirt!”

  He squeaked and then managed a shout as I set him back on his feet.

  “Do as this wild leem says! There is a chance! I know, for in my grandfather’s time Muruaa showed his anger and the people placated him by sacrifice—”

  “You great nurdling onker!” I roared. I shook him so that he rattled internally.

  “You will dig a gap in the side of the flow, where it has cooled a little. It will be hard. But if you do it the fire will flow a new way — the way you must know — over the cliff and into the lake beyond the village.”

  Uproar, chaos, confusion, but out of them I hammered away at the people. I shook Lart Lykon and brandished the stux at some of his guards who attempted to launch a boat and sail away. When they would not stop I hurled the stux and wounded their Deldar; that brought the others directly back up onto the jetty. I seized another stux from the guard’s stuxcal and I waved it.

  “Forward! Up the slope! Muruaa is merely a pit of fire! And are we not men and women? Dig! Dig! Trap Muruaa’s vile vomit in the lake!”

  The conceit caught them. Anyway, they knew they could not escape. Volcanoes have this nasty habit of forming basins, such as the one in which the town had been slotted, by the collapse of part of the surrounding land in ancient, prehistoric eruptions, and then of filling the basin in the subsequent eruptions. The lake had flowed in to fill any hope of escape: the water boiled near the shore as the stream of lava poured over the town and plunged into the water.

  So we snatched up cloths and hides and I organized a water-carrying chain. We went back up the slope, around the fiery lava flow, and we ventured near the outer cooler edges. We dug. We sweated. We were burned. We died, some of us, who were not nimble enough, or who could not stand the heat. But we chopped a gap in the edge of the flow and, not suddenly, but quickly enough to make us skip out of the way, a fresh tentacle of flaming lava broke through, and swung toward the lake on its new course. The flow would not stop in its destructive travel over the town, but enough would now be channeled away so that the slot would not fill. We could find a safe if hot refuge on the higher terraces.

  The big man with the tawny mane of hair and the whip-marks on his back who had shouted, first, that he would come with me up the mountain of fire, bellowed now that he would go up higher and break a fresh gap.

  “If you desire, Avec,” I said. “But the heat up there is worse even than here.”

  “I care nothing for these cramphs of Orlush. I wish only to spite that yetch Elten Lart.”

  Out of spite, then, he went up the mountain. I went up with him because I was not absolutely sure I had done all I could do to save the people of this town of Orlush. I had no idea where we were on Kregen. The Star Lords had given me the task of saving someone — perhaps the whole damned town — and until I was satisfied that I had done that, I could not rest.

  We were followed by an intrepid band of young men — and some not so young — and we went at the lava flow again. This time the work was immensely more difficult; but we persevered.

  When even I was satisfied, and I had struck blow for blow with Avec, driving great swathing layers of flaming lava away to open a new breach and we were all burned and blistered, I shouted halt. Avec dragged a blackened arm across his sweat-grimed forehead, and he smiled at me.

  “I do not know who you are, dom; but you are a man!”

  “A man like yourself, Avec. I am Dray Prescot.”

  “And I am Avec Brand, Notor of nothing, Elten of emptiness, Strom of onkers.”

  “Aye, Avec!” shouted a sinewy young man whose strength as he slewed burning lava had surprised me. “Aye, by Havil the Green! You are Kov of hulus, also!”

  “And you, Ilter Monicep, are the Vad of boasters!”

  There and then, these two, they would have set to and knocked each other about — there, after the exertions they had so desperately made to save the town.

  One thing said had chilled me.

  Havil the Green!

  Well — I was still in Havilfar.

  But — the Green! It was long and long since I had fought so bitterly for Zairians against Grodnims. Long and long since I had sailed the Eye of the World in my fleet swifter Zorg. Yet, still, even after all these seasons when I had talked and befriended and grown accustomed to the Green — even then, to my shame, the old starchy pride of a Krozair of Zy stiffened me up at the hated name of the Green.

  “There is a great statue of Havil the Green in Huringa,” I said.

  Avec looked at me as though I had made some fatuous remark about the time of day.

  “I have heard of Huringa — have I not, you onker, Ilter?”

  “Huringa?” said Ilter Monicep. We walked down the cut steps in the terrace walls, ready to help up to the higher sanctuary those who needed help. “Huringa? I believe old Naghan the Calsany once said it was a great city in Hyrklana. It was Hyrklana — I think?”

  “Yes, Ilter. In Hyrklana.”

  So that told me that wherever I was, I was not in Hyrklana. It also told me clearly that wherever I was, was firmly in the backwoods. These were simple country people farming the terraced fields pent between the hills and the lake and the volcano. I wanted to know where I was. A year, the Gdoinye had said. I knew, because for the moment the action was over and I had not been caught up in a blue radiance and whirled back to Earth, that I had done what the Star Lords in their beatific wisdom had sent me here to do.

  “I am a stranger here,” I began.

  Avec laughed, and then winced as burned skin caught him at the edge of his mouth.

  “We know you are a stranger. Where you came from only Opaz the Vile himself may know. We know everyone in Orlush.”

  “Aye, Avec,” mocked Ilter. “And everyone in Orlush knows you!”

  Again I felt a shock of premonitory — what? Not fear, not horror, unease perhaps. Anger certainly.

  Opaz — the Vile?

  Opaz, the invisible embodiment of the dual-spirit, the Invisible Twins, the great and good Opaz? Opaz made manifest by the visible presence of the suns Zim and Genodras the heavens above in Kregen — the suns which in Havilfar are called Far and Havil.

  I couldn’t stop myself. I was exhausted — as were we all — and I was in a foul temper as may be imagined. I had been a king, and now I was a mere puppet dancing to the tune played by superbeings who refused to treat me seriously.

  “Where are we, by the diseased and stinking right eyeball of Makki-Grodno?”

  They stared at me, both of them, shaken by my tone.

  When they saw my face glowering upon them, they were more mightily shaken still.

  Then Avec, with something of a bluster in his voice and manner, said, “Why, in Orlush, of course.”

  Ilter Monicep regarded me with his dark eyes half veiled, and a pucker to his lips. He had recovered from that instinctive panic, that insubstantial terror, that seems to grip people when I glare at them with purpose. He spoke softly, and yet with meaning.

  “You are in Orlush, as this great fambly Avec has said. And Orlush lies in the kingdom of Pwentel, and Pwentel has the great and glorious honor of being part of the Empire of Hamal.” He chuckled harshly. Then he said bitterly, “Not a large or important part, for King Rorton Turmeyr whom men call the Splendid, is a frightened king. And Orlush, as you see, is not a great and famous town, for our Elten, Lart Lykon, is a corrupt bladder of vileness.”

&nb
sp; “You have said it, Ilter, although I shall beat you for calling me a fambly, you clever onker!”

  While I digested this information the people of the town secured themselves on the highest terraces, clustering near the irrigation trenches which poured downslope from tier to tier. There are many degrees in the various peerages of Kregen, and I have not detailed them to you except when necessary. Suffice it to say that an Elten is two ranks lower in the hierarchy than a Strom. And I was in Hamal!

  Something of what the Gdoinye had said made sense now.

  Food had been saved from the disaster and we could eat the portion of the crop that was already ripe. All the rest of the day and the next night we huddled as Muruaa spouted into the air and poured his molten fury down the slopes. In the evening of the third day the fires slackened. Toward the decline of the twin suns — Zim now followed Genodras below the horizon — and with She of the Veils floating smokily between the stars, we saw a cavalcade drop down swiftly through the last level rays of emerald and ruby. It came to rest on the broadest and driest of the terraces encircling a low hill.

  Surrounding a large and ornately decorated voller flew a squadron of mirvols, their riders flamboyant with flying silks and furs, with slanted weapons and the glitter of gems and steel.

  “That will be Strom Nopac, come to find out what has happened,” said Ilter Monicep. From his tone it was perfectly clear he had as little love for Strom Nopac as he had for Elten Lart.

  “Who’d be a Notor?” Avec offered as his contribution to the philosophy of the evening. “It’d worry a man’s guts out.”

  We were eating palines, and precious little else we had had, too, and we leaned in the last of the twin suns’ glow, resting our elbows on a brick wall and looking down the slopes in the gathering dusk. Men moved urgently about down there, and Elten Lart would no doubt be pushing as hard as he could for help and relief in the disaster. The town showed like a patchwork of roofs protruding from the cooling lava.

  Soldiers were climbing the stairs cut in the terrace walls. Zim and Genodras winked from the armor and the weapons.