Fires of Scorpio [Dray Prescot #29] Read online

  The leems leaped. In that instant I dropped the priest and switched the girl around behind me. I drew the thraxter. The sword cleared scabbard—and the leems hauled up in midair, choked on broad silver chains and collars about their necks.

  They crashed to the floor and were up in an instant, howling, spitting, all a bristle of fang and claw.

  I glared at them. Foul beasts! They'd come sniffing around the chunkrah herds to cut out a straying animal and chew her up for their dinner. The priest tried to run.

  I twisted the sword about and let him see the point and he cowered back, shaking.

  “They are death—death, you fool!"

  “Aye! Your death for certain."

  He slobbered.

  The leems were chained one each side. The sweep of their claws at the ends of the chains practically met along the center-line. There was no way past them while they slashed at anything that approached them there, and while there was probably a wheel and ratchet mechanism for drawing the chains back taut, there was certainly no time now to find it and put it into operation.

  There was no way back through the fires and the enraged worshippers, and there seemed no way ahead.

  The chief priest fell to his knees, wailing. I lifted the child higher on my arm. The leems snarled and slavered, the foam frothing upon them. Their hides hung loose and matted, slimed in filth. The sickly light fluttered as the fires at our backs sucked air past and made the shrunken torch-light waver and fleer.

  With the child to protect, the sword would not serve here. The blade snicked back into the scabbard. The torch was a greasy, poor affair, not one of the great torches of Kregen. But it would do its duty. It must.

  The leems leaped against their chains, snarling, and fell back. I pushed the child more securely—yet again!—into the crook of my arm. I kicked the priest. And I thrust the torch ahead. The flame sizzled hair. The nearest leem yowled, desperate to get at me and tear out my throat and sink his fangs into me.

  “Back, you misbegotten creature!” I yelled, incensed.

  The torch thrust again, burning him about the muzzle. He shrank back. My own back was to his mate; now, with a single step forward, I dare not step back.

  Shaking his head from side to side to avoid the flame, the leem tried to burst past that fiery barrier and get at me. The torch thrust and withdrew, flicking him with fire. His frenzy mounted, as did my own fury, so that we were just two enraged beasts, fronting each other.

  Each step must be judged and taken carefully. The floor, which was in reality the underside of the old ship's deck, was rotten in places, treacherous with splinters. And there was the priest to kick ahead, like a cringing, mewling football. The leems’ chains rattled. Their roars shook the timbers of the ship. The girl child continued to cry, turning her flushed and tear-streaked face into my shoulder against the brown robe. I held her gently—gently and yet with a grip of iron. After all this, I would not lose her.

  A dozen paces, and the torch a mere sickly waft of flickering flame and greasy smoke, and we were through.

  I hurled the torch at the leem, who yowled and cringed away and the brand struck the far bulkhead and scattered in a pyre of dying sparks.

  Ahead shone a small ragged opening of light.

  The danger of the leems passed, the priest appeared to regain some of his senses. He stood up when I kicked him and hauled him by the scruff of the neck.

  “You are a dead man, unbeliever, defiler—"

  “Shut that claptrap! And keep moving."

  The roaring at our backs increased as we pressed on for those last few steps. The waft of smoke drew ahead gossamer-like, and the priest choked on a lungful, so that I laughed at his discomfiture. We must have presented a strange spectacle, half-demented with fear, stinking with leem-stench, half-burned, rushing through the decaying hulk of an upturned ship.

  Up to this time the priest appeared to have forgotten he wore a sword belted to his waist. Or, if he had not forgotten, he had made no attempt to draw the weapon.

  As I pushed up toward the jagged opening where the rim had long since fallen away and the planks had begun their last rotting decay into powder, the priest bethought himself of his sword. No doubt, at the same time, he bethought himself of his own congregation, that he was the chief priest, and of his own proper manhood.

  For whatever reason it may have been, he chose that moment, as I bent to peer out of the opening, to draw and essay the task of chopping off my head.

  The thraxter whispered its tiny chuckle of metal against metal as it hissed from the scabbard.

  The priest was no fighting man. I simply moved—sideways and down and around, the child shielded away—moved so that the priest's blow, delivered with a panting, ferocious, desperate force, struck the timbers. The sword hit and stuck and he could not pull it free. He struggled with the thing, tugging on the hilt, and then he cast a look at me, such a look as would freeze the marrow in his own bones.

  I said: “Tell me, why should I not slay you now?"

  He blinked and swallowed, still tugging at the sword stuck fast in the timber. “You brought me here from the temple for some other reason than to kill me."

  “So I did,” I said, as though suddenly remembering. “So I did. Now get through the hole—Bratch!"

  He jumped at that savage word of command, and hitched his robes up and swung a leg over the rotted opening. I gave him a push and he let out a yell and toppled away out of sight.

  The last of the sun's radiance fell past the hole, deeply emerald and darkest ruby, twinned sky colors eternally orbiting each other, in love and in hate. Well, this night I'd have to skip and jump before I was free of the brown and silvers. I took a quick look back, past the waft of smoke and the leem's area. Their racket kept up. It would take time for the Leem Lovers to draw back the chains. Time to be moving before they rushed out onto the beach to cut us off.

  A glint halfway up the bulkhead took my eye as I put my foot on the splintered coaming of the hole. I stopped and looked. The last of the suns, breaking for a moment free of cloudbanks low on the horizon and flooding the world with a rusty patina, pierced through the opening. The light fell on the three steel tines of a trident, still embedded in the wood.

  The leems were screaming and snarling, which indicated they were being drawn back on their chains; the chief priest was probably running like a drunk over the sands to escape by now; the child was crying harder and was soaking wet; the debased followers of an evil cult were after my blood and no doubt some of them were already out on the beach ... I stepped away from the hole, crossed to the bulkhead and reaching up wrenched out that narrow three-tined trident.

  Then, and only then, I made for the hole and leaped through.

  As I had expected, the chief priest was running for it. He was a dark flapping shape against the sunset glow. My foot kicked something hard in the sands. It was the silver mask discarded by the priest. I picked it up, musing. Shouts lifted past the entranceway to the hull. Time to go. The chief priest had escaped. That was his good fortune. I'd not risk the child's life chasing him—let alone my own.

  We set off together, the girl child and I, up the beach toward the trees.

  I carried the trident in my right hand, hefting it from time to time. Around the haft, just below the three long narrow and cruel tines, a ribbon of brown had been tied, a silken ribbon of brown with silver fringes.

  Once we'd reached the shelter of the trees one problem would have been put behind us, and another and more colorful would face us. I'd not pitch our luck too high, and so did not venture too far into the trees. The jungle remained sparse at the sand's edge. There would be no point in going back to find the man and woman I'd left tied up. For one thing, their comrades, backtracking my movements, would have discovered them by now; and, two, they would have no idea, I judged, from which village the girl sacrifice came.

  She sniffled and snuffled. I was loathe to keep her quiet with a hand over her mouth; but after I'd cleaned her up and
she'd found a piece of sticky sweet goo in a pocket, she quietened. Cleaning her up did not present a difficult task, not in a forest where there were a myriad different leaves. As they say, in a forest of Kregen you can find a leaf to suit every purpose. They are not far wrong.

  The suns at last sank and the sky changed from a sea of rust to an ocean of darkness shot with the stars of Kregen. Soon Kregen's first moon, the Maiden with the Many Smiles, would rise and then her fuzzy pink light would provide illumination enough.

  When the second and third moons, the Twins, rose, the light would sparkle most pleasantly—if you were going for a stroll in some pleasure-section of a city, say. If you were trying to escape from enemies, you might not relish such prodigious quantities of light during the night time.

  Making the most of the small time of darkness before the Maiden with the Many Smiles rose, I hurried along the beach, skirting the trees. The coolness had not come with the going of the suns; the air sweltered.

  Now that the priest had escaped me—and I clutched the trident in my fist—I decided to head eastward. If the girl came from a village to the west, then I'd be unlucky. Wherever she came from, someone would know apart from the priest. Taking him along had been showing off to the gallery, really. And, in the end, he'd given me the slip.

  The sand shushed under my feet, and the girl on my arm, lulled by the motion, at last fell asleep. Her tiredness overcame the excitements and fears. And I still did not know her name.

  The old ship burned splendidly.

  Little though there might be of a Viking funeral in those flames, the thought occurred. Orange light stained the sky. The stars glittered and dimmed—for a space. Dry, that old argenter, dry and tinder for consumption. She burned away and fell into ashes, and so the darkness took her.

  I hurried on with my burden into the shadows.

  Pausing every now and then to take a careful look around and particularly backwards, and seeing nothing of pursuit, we made good our escape—for I tended to regard the girl-child sacrifice as one of the party. Adventure has that effect. I did the looking around and she slept; but it was we who made our escape.

  The beginning of this day had seen me encompassed by jungle, and the end saw me striding along the edge of a jungly forest, skirting the greenery, trudging along in the sand. By the light of the Maiden with the Many Smiles and later of the Twins, I kept going. Tiredness did not touch me. I'd be tired later on. Now I had to find the nearest village or town and see about the sleeping charge the Star Lords had placed into my care.

  An eventful day had passed. Perhaps the excitements had come along in fine style, maybe they clustered thickly around each passing hour, but I didn't regard this as an unusual day for Kregen. Well, not too unusual ... The truly unusual day on Kregen, that world of beauty and terror, is when nothing happens.

  * * *

  Chapter four

  Ashti of the Jungle

  The folk who lived in their scattered villages along the brown rivers running through the jungle might not have advanced so far along the so-called road of civilization as many another peoples of Kregen; but they only tried to kill me once and then, when I'd explained, became very friendly.

  Three villages along we ran into someone who knew my charge. The leaf-roofed, rush-walled houses were round like beehives in this village. The ground was packed hard by equally hard naked feet; to turn into a quagmire when the rains fell. The headman did not wear a bone through his nose; had he done so it would have suited his regal magnificence well.

  A woman wearing a remarkable sarong-like garment of gemmed greeny-blue silk told us the child was probably from the next village. She seemed to recognize something about the cut of the child's jib that must be peculiar to one village out of them all. As for the remarkable garment, artificial though the gems might be and the silk not a true silk, nonetheless, it looked out of place.

  I thanked them, and went on. News of my coming preceded me by this time, and, no doubt, a warning that I meant no one any harm. If they wanted to kill me and do a proper job, that would have been very easy. A few arrows, a few darts, a sudden shower of spears from the undergrowth—they could have done for me. But, with the child on my arm, clearly seeking her mother and bearing no one ill will, no one challenged me after that first time.

  The girl's mother was not at all pleased to see me.

  Her face expressed the utmost consternation. We spoke in the universal Kregish tongue which had been arbitrarily imposed on all of Paz, and she just did not want to know, about the girl, about me, about how I had found the child—whose name, now revealed, was Ashti.

  I did not smile at the remembrance of another Ashti I'd known—known only as an enemy—now dead and buried and tried to be forgot. This Ashti yelled and reached for her mother, with her hands nice and clean and her dress white and clean and a shining clean face. The mother backed away as though skeletal plague hands reached for her.

  “Ashti is your child,” I said. We stood outside her hut with the blue shadows about our feet, the mingled rays of the twin suns falling across the earth of the compound where chickens, dogs, naked children, pigs, led a communal and interesting life of their own.

  “No more. Take her away. Take her back."

  This woman, whose name was Fischili, wore a remarkable garment, sarong-like, of orangey-green silk, and the gems, artificial though they undoubtedly were, gleamed and glistened splendidly.

  So I thought—cautiously—I could see some of the answers.

  “Woman! Fischili! Will you take your child Ashti back into your home?"

  “Man! No!"

  A fellow put his head out of the hut door, pushing aside the reed curtain. He did not wear a bone through his nose either, but he did sport a pair of wondrous gold earrings; maybe not gold, maybe brass, and maybe they'd turn green in his ears before long; but they, like the woman's dress, looked spontaneously splendid.

  “Go away, man,” he said. “You interrupt my sleep."

  “You heard I was coming. Did not the drums tell you?"

  “We did not know you brought back the dead to us."

  “Ashti is not dead."

  He jumped out and stood next to the woman. He shook a spear in my face. He was wrought up and excited. His skin of that superlative golden-red copper color glowed with sweat. I held Ashti and saw that her skin was much paler than her parents’ but that, I did not doubt, would glow with that coppery-red tint as she grew older.

  “Dead!” he shouted, waving his spear.

  “Go away!” shrieked Fischili.

  Now when I'd taken the spear away from Fischili's man and thrown it into the earth of the compound, and started to shout, a most wicked and selfish thought occurred to me.

  If I did not persuade these two to take their child back, and why they refused was obvious, I'd stand precious little chance of persuading anyone else. The damned Leem Lovers had gone sniffing around and had bought the child. Bought a living human being with tawdry dresses and brass earrings. Well, slavery was a fact of life on parts of Kregen, and we'd do for it one day and banish slavery. But this was different. If the law did not proscribe this act, an act common enough on Earth, then I had no rights at all. The parents had sold the child; ergo, the child was dead.

  And the selfish thought was this: What was I to do with a little girl child if I went hopping and skipping under the Moons of Kregen swinging a damned great longsword?

  What, indeed...?

  Common sense told me that I could easily knock sense into Fischili's man, if not into Fischili herself, and make them take Ashti back. Oh, yes, that would be easy.

  But what would Ashti's life be like after that?

  Far better for me to find her a good home where she was wanted.

  And, of course, I realized where—if the Everoinye left me alone—I could find such a home. I hoped.

  So, instead of doing anything else, I said: “I will go now."

  I turned and walked off. Then, pausing and turning back and shoutin
g so that not only Fischili and her man heard me, I yelled: “I shall care for Ashti. If you try to follow me I shall probably kill you."

  Ashti had stopped crying some time back in our short journey. She did not cry when we left her mother and her—probable—father. I believe little affection had ever existed there. Ashti had been pleased to be back where she recognized faces and places; from now on I would have to see that the faces and places she saw were all friendly.

  Continuing eastward seemed the best bet at the moment, for the jungle folk mentioned a town as being situated on the estuary of a river in that direction. I did not think it would be any town I knew—Mahendrasmot was well over to the west—but I stood a chance of picking up passage in a ship.

  No one appeared to want to change the life-style of these folk who lived in the jungle. They were not primitives. Their style was simple, with quantities of home-made products and a living based on minimal cultivation and maximum hunting and gathering. Mahendrasmot was a steel town, as its name implies, and there was no lack of metal implements among these folk of the jungle, which suggested that iron and steel manufacture might also figure in the town I approached.

  I should perhaps mention that very early on in this jaunt I'd ripped up the brown robes to make a breechclout for myself and a sacklike holdall to carry the two silver masks. With a sword at my waist, Ashti on my left arm and the trident in my right fist, I looked an odd character, I judge, from the expressions on the faces of those people I spoke to.

  There had been some serious trouble with Ashti when I'd wanted to take her dress off to wash it. It was pretty sticky and grubby by that time. She wore nothing else. So, very firmly, and chattering away all the time to her, I got the dress off. We happened to be beside a stream at the time, which seemed the logical place to be if you wanted to wash a dress, and I washed dress and child at the same time. This was just before we reached her own village and was in honor of meeting her parents. Ha!

  Anyway, by the time we reached the town of Hukalad we'd reached an agreement. Ashti could talk well enough; but it was going to take a little time to loosen her tongue into full confidence. I recognized that. Also, at this time I was not an altogether wonderful forager in a jungle. If you don't know what to look for you can starve in a jungle. If you do know, and find the things you seek, you can live like a lord—at least, like a lord of the jungle.