Delia of Vallia Read online

  Delia’s hand lifted to her right shoulder. Her hand, unblemished by a single ring, snapped forward.

  The terchick crossed the lessening distance to the first charging man in a blurred streak of steel. The little throwing knife, sharply-pointed, cunningly balanced, left Delia’s hand and sped through empty air and pierced through the right eye of the flutsman. The steel skewered on into his brain. He gyrated for a few foolish moments before he fell down.

  The last one barely hesitated — if he hesitated at all — before Tandu’s swords went through him and chopped him, both together.

  Dalki said, “You always were greedy, Father. I was about to loose — I could have shot you.”

  Tandu roared, and wiped one of his swords in the sand. “My hide would have turned your shot, Dalki!”

  “Well, Father, and mayhap. Next time, allow me to get a look in.”

  Delia refused to feel faint. After all, what were six dead men more or less in this world of suffering? She was well aware that flutsmen had kissed their families good-bye long before they took up the aerial reiving trade, and the only folk to mourn them would be the members of their own marauding band.

  Still, once upon a time, under a certain moon, each one of them had had a mother...

  For the sake of Pansi and Nath the Jokester, Delia felt no incongruity in wishing that those mothers had never conceived, or had miscarried, or had drowned their babes in infancy...

  And, even that was no good. Had it not been these flutsmen, then it would have been others... You couldn’t solve all your problems by killing. That had been tried. It worked for a time; but in the long run you simply finished up with nobody.

  “Majestrix?”

  She had not spoken; bluff old Tandu was wily enough to know when to jolly even an empress along.

  Dalki said: “If ever it was needed to be proved, which it never was and never will be, by Djan, then the queen is a true queen of the Djangs!”

  On that, Delia felt it time to gather up the totrixes, make a check, and mount up. Tandu, having come from Djanduin to teach Valkans to fly flutduins had never been a true mercenary, had never become a paktun. Similarly, Dalki was no paktun. They started to mount up.

  Understanding this, Delia sighed and then laughed.

  “Make a check first. See what these flutsmen have on them that is interesting to us. And, if they have gold, it is ours. Is not this so?”

  “Yes, majestrix—”

  “Tandu! Now hearken. You and Dalki may call me ‘my lady’ as well as this tiresome majestrix. You know that.”

  “Quidang, my lady!”

  With that settled, the corpses rifled — they turned up nothing of interest and six leather bags totaling a hundred and twenty-one gold pieces, two hundred and thirty-five silver pieces and not a copper ob among them — the two Djangs and their queen set the totrixes in motion. They walked the animals, husbanding them, and so took their way out of the Ochre Limits.

  As they rode Delia pondered. Portents in what had happened alarmed her. Affairs, in her half-brother’s kovnate province of Vindelka, were quite clearly not running smoothly.

  Flutsmen? Paid guards who attacked unfortunate women?

  One would think this was some wild and barbaric land instead of civilized Vallia!

  Of course, much of Vallia’s civilization had been stripped away during the Time of Troubles, and even now the country was not fully restored. But in Vindelka? She grew a trifle warm at the thought of some of the words she would use when she met Vomanus.

  When they reached the river she was again forcefully reminded that this latter-day Empire of Vallia was not the same as the Vallia into which she had been born. She could not plunge in and go for a good long cleansing swim. Jaws and claws... When she was a young girl the rivers had been made safe. Well, as in the case of the prowling leems and other savage animals, one day the rivers and the land would be made safe again.

  Reaching a pleasant glade above the riverbank, they camped and cooked a meal. The men brought up as much water as they could in every container that could be pressed into service, and the queen gave herself a thoroughly good wash. Trusting in the glowing radiance of Zim and Genodras, the twin suns, she washed her hair. Some of the scents and unguents that poor Pansi would have used had been smashed in the crash of the airboat; enough remained for her to perfume her hair — subtly — and to make herself feel a little more like Delia. Despite all the titles she had had hung about her, she tended to think of herself just as Delia. Some of her titles she loved; others she was ambivalent about, and a few — a very few — she could not summon up enthusiasm for. She was too sensitive of what they meant actively to despise any one of the collection.

  Tandu was fussing.

  Delia eyed him.

  He started to bang the fire out. “If we leave now, my lady, we will reach Mellinsmot before nightfall.”

  “Excellent! Then we leave now.”

  As the twin suns slid down the sky, and the western horizon smoked into jade and ruby flames, it was pleasant to jog along the riverbank, in the sweetness of the late afternoon and early evening, and see ahead the lights of the town waiting to welcome them.

  Jogging along, Delia thought of her husband. There was no particular reason not to think of him, and the time of day made no difference, for she thought of him at any time, as, he had told her, he thought of her. Each had to go one way, for a space, until all the dangers were past. Then they would be together and not let anyone or anything part them again, ever...

  Riding jolting along on a saddle animal all day, biting on sand and dust, fighting off murderous flutsmen, trying to keep clean and get enough to eat, all this took a toll, drained a girl, set a dull fatigue into her bones so that the prospect of bath and bed pleased her far more than they would ordinarily. Just to wash herself clean, eat a gargantuan supper, and then stretch out and go to sleep!

  Marvelous!

  Of course, one vital ingredient would be missing tonight; but then he was so often away she had fashioned a life for herself that, half of a full life though it might be, had, perforce, to suffice. He felt exactly the same way.

  In the last of the light as the totrixes quickened their six feet, some of the pleasure of the evening waned.

  They reached an avenue of tended trees; considerable cultivation had been passed in the gloaming and now they approached the northwest gate of Mellinsmot. The gates stood half-closed and a handful of travelers scurried through, dimly seen figures, to hasten away into the gathering darkness. The people were leaving Mellinsmot and heading along the beaten path by the river.

  Tandu offered no comment.

  Delia swiveled in the saddle. “Odd,” she said. “Folk usually enter a town at night, not leave it.”

  “Going back to their holdings, my lady,” ventured Dalki.

  “Probably.”

  The brick archway echoed their totrix’s hooves, and the guard detail would be springing out to challenge them—

  There were no guards on the gate of Mellinsmot.

  “Odder and odder,” said Delia.

  Tandu loosened one of his swords, and brought his bow forward, holding it half-drawn, arrow nocked in the practiced archer’s grip. Delia brought her own bow up. Dalki, at her back, followed the example of his father and the queen.

  Echoes rustled from the brick walls. The streaming radiance of the suns was almost gone. Shadows, plum-colored, bruised with darkness, fell about them.

  “The Feathered Risslaca is a comfortable inn, my lady, so I have been told.” Tandu did not turn to face Delia as he spoke. Beyond the next edge of twin shadows might lie danger. Tandu kept his gaze darting about, taking in everything, watching for the first suspicious movement. By now they all knew something was wrong in the town of Mellinsmot.

  “Or,” went on Tandu, “perhaps my lady would sooner go straight to Strom Dogan’s villa, here?”

  When the strom, who held this town and surrounding lands, his stromnate, at the hands of Kov Vomanus
of Vindelka, understood that he was to host the empress, lavish hospitality would be immediately forthcoming. Delia, looking about at the deserted streets, the boarded-up windows, wondered.

  A dog slunk away into the enveloping shadows. His tail dangled between his legs. Dalki rode with his head screwed back, alertly scanning every window, every shadowed doorway.

  “D’you smell it?” demanded Delia.

  “Aye, my lady.” Tandu’s broad face lifted. “By Djan! Like intestines left out in the suns.”

  Delia made a face.

  “Apt, if unpleasant, Tandu.”

  The way lay ahead through a crossing, where the houses stood back. One side of the road lay swathed in blackness; the other was mildewed with a ghostly glow of fading red and green. A door opened and a lozenge of yellow light burst across the beaten way. A voice screamed.

  A figure fell out of the door, was hurled out, for the violence of its movement sent up a swirl of dust in the half-light. The figure tottered forward, twirled about with flailing arms and as the door slammed shut fell to lie sprawled in the dust.

  Delia nudged her totrix forward.

  “Caution, my lady!”

  Tandu was there, before her, dismounting to bend over the dark sprawled figure. He twitched away a corner of the raggedy blanket that concealed the figure’s face.

  He jumped back. He jumped back a clear three feet, and stood, frozen.

  Delia looked down.

  The face had been that of a young girl. No doubt it had been comely, with smiling eyes and smooth cheeks. Now that face was smothered in suppurating sores. The stink broke up as fresh sores burst, to run in greenish pus.

  “The Affliction of the Sores of Combabbry!”

  Dalki said, his voice high, “Do not touch her, my lady!”

  “No.” Delia’s voice shook despite all she could do to hold herself steady. “This explains all. Mellinsmot is a town of contagion and death!”

  Chapter four

  Affliction

  Serried in rows beneath the gilded ceiling of Strom Dogan’s Great Hall the suppurating sufferers lay festering in their sores. Twin white half-moons shone beside Delia’s mouth; to disappear instantly as she smiled at the person for whom she ministered. Pus, vomit, blood, excrement, filth and muck — all were as one to Delia. She bathed foreheads in the approved stiffly starched yellow romantic way; she scraped the muck off the floor and scrubbed the strom’s boards clean.

  He, Strom Dogan nal Mellin, having cowered away in his topmost tower with his family, too frightened to risk contamination even in the short distance out of the town, had been hauled out of it by the empress.

  The hauling had been done by Tandu.

  “You will give orders to your people, and you will help, Dogan.” Delia had spoken in such a way that Dogan’s chattering teeth had almost splintered in his frenzy.

  Then: “Tandu — you have my permission to pull the strom out by his ears.”

  “Quidang, my lady!”

  So — Strom Dogan and his people had, unwillingly and fearfully, been pressed to assist the empress. The Empress of Vallia ordered, organized, controlled. She also wiped up filth and scrubbed floors.

  Sickness — the very idea of sickness nauseated her.

  When, as a young girl, she had been thrown by a zorca, her immediate reactions had been of fury at herself for so lamentable a display. The second thought had been one of surprise that her zorca, so brave and patient, a marvelous saddle animal, should have thrown her at all. But it was accidental.

  Only then — as the third reaction — had she discovered the injury to her leg. She had been made a cripple. She dragged one leg after her like a stamped-on crab.

  Getting over that, as her only way of phrasing it to herself, had involved a secret visit to the Swinging City of Aphrasöe arranged by her father the emperor, and then a surreptitious dip in the Sacred Pool of Baptism of the River Zelph arranged by the wild and savage clansman who was to become her husband. So she knew about these things.

  The stink in the strom’s Great Hall was prodigious.

  Sweet Ibroi was burned by the bushel. Water was continually sluiced down over the floor, to be swept away in foaming sheets of brown and yellow and green. Sometimes the water swept away red — when someone’s sores burst past all enduring. All the anti-pollutants available were used. How the contagion spread even the needlemen could not swear to. Better not to touch a sufferer. Better not to breathe too close to the air he or she had breathed. But, after that, what gods or demons hurled the sickness from one poor wight to the next?

  Pungent ibroi, a capital disinfectant much used to wash down slaves’ quarters when Vallia dealt in slaves, before the present emperor outlawed slavery, was consumed in vast quantities. At least, along with its sweet-smelling fellow it freshened the atmosphere.

  Strom Dogan, a bag of lard in Delia’s private opinion, quivered and shook. His wife, the Stromni, was made of sterner stuff. Her fears were for her family. These, Delia excused from caring for the sick on the understanding they would roll bandages. The town was dying. Someone had to care for the sick.

  If that person happened to be the empress — well, and wasn’t that one reason she was empress at all?

  “But, majestrix — your poor hands!”

  “Do not worry about my hands, Stromni. They are used to hard work.”

  Stromni Elspa shook her head and her soft brown Vallian hair slipped a little from the retaining pins. She could not understand the majesty and might of an empress in these conditions. By Opaz! If she, Stromni Elspa nal Mellin, was empress, she’d get the servants to handle the mess and take herself off into the country very smartly. If her husband had a little more moral fiber, they could have galloped through the infected streets and been clear away by now. They would not have been caught by this domineering woman and forced to act like common servants. The only reason Stromni Elspa tolerated the disgrace lay in the half-comforting thought that she must be storing up favors for herself with the empress.

  Cartloads of little blue flowers were brought in. They trundled in through the open gates. The flowers had been culled from where they grew in weed-like profusion among the cultivations. Dalki rode out with the carts and rode back with them. No one ran away.

  There were two sorts of little blue flowers. One sort possessed a tiny silver heart on each petal. These were vilmy flowers. The others were fallimy flowers.

  From the vilmy flowers was made up a paste that soothed the sores and eased the pains of the sufferers.

  From the fallimy flowers was made up a paste used in the normal way to scour cisterns. Now it scoured and cleansed everything that came into contact with the sickness.

  Delia did not personally inspect every flower petal to make sure. If some soothing ointment paste went onto the floor, not too much harm would be done. If scouring paste was rubbed into a sore — no, that would not do. Delia gave strict — very strict — orders about that.

  Stromni Elspa looked puzzled.

  “But, majestrix! I mean — whoever heard of anyone putting fallimy paste on their body? It would — it would—”

  “It would scour their chest most thoroughly.”

  “Majestrix?”

  “You’d be surprised. And I laughed.”

  At Elspa’s bewildered expression Delia bustled into caring for the next row of patients. If the sores could be kept clean, if the patient could be kept cool, there was a chance of recovery. Much of the sherbet drink, parclear, was consumed. Three days of terrible suffering, with suppurating sores breaking out all over the body, and three days of fighting to contain them and keep the patient cool, and then, if the gods smiled, the worst was over, the crisis past.

  And, anyway, Delia couldn’t explain about the little silver heart on the little blue flower petals. Poor Thelda! She always meant well...

  To think about the past was as fruitless now as to think about the future. All she could do was work and work and go on working. She took this dreadful attack of
pestilence in the town as a personal affront. Detesting every moment of it, fighting nausea, biting down on vomit, she forced herself to care for the sick.

  Tandu made her rest. He did this with such auspicious tact and understanding for a Dwadjang as melted Delia’s heart. It was clear, if she did not let herself rest and sink her abused body down into sleep, then Tandu would feel personally responsible for the consequences. Knowing her Djangs, she was aware that it was not beyond the bounds of probability that, in order to save his Queen of Djanduin, he would personally slay every last sufferer. Then, the queen could rest.

  For some folk, and for Djangs, that was a normal way of thought.

  The dead were burned.

  Covered of faces, with gloved hands, the people dragged out the corpses and piled them up. The smell was not really tolerable; but with Delia, Empress of Vallia, standing so tall and firm, grasping a ghastly limb to help haul, gently pushing a twisted body up onto the pyre, no one could hang back. The strom and Stromni, gagging, took their part. The bodies flopped, some already swollen, some with tongues jutting, some just indescribable lumps of offal.

  The flames licked all clean.

  The bodies melted and ran, sloughing away. Hair frizzled. The corpses crisped.

  When the last were burned, there were more. In the town of Mellinsmot the doctors had been the first to die. Only one needleman remained, and he looked shriveled at the enormity of the catastrophe. As one batch of dead was burned, so another was dragged out. The process deadened the mind and calloused the spirit.

  But the avenging spirits of whatever gods or demons had sent this torment upon the people would not be appeased. Townsfolk huddled in the churches and the temple, and there the Affliction of the Sores of Combabbry sought them out, and consumed them.

  The needleman shook his head helplessly. His face looked like a chunk of indigestible meat after a dog had chewed and rejected it. His eyes lurked in shadowed pits beneath his eyebrows.