Grand Vizier of Krar

by W. John Tucker

  Some of the group then proceeded to draw the cargo across, piece by piece, while the others busied themselves unpacking and checking the equipment and supplies that landed on the east side.

  As Blan edged across the ledge her foot slipped. She had to use the rope ladder to haul herself up again. This was a minor mishap and not very dangerous, yet Telko caught his breath. In that moment it struck him just how much he loved Blan. He had come to Arctequa reluctantly but still the proud prince of a proud nation; adored by his people and especially its young women; seemingly destined for a bright, though predictable, future in his seaside domain. He could not imagine then how such infinite love would sweep him away and change his life forever. He loved Blan more than himself. He knew that he could never live without her. He knew that he was prepared to die for her. As she steadied herself against the cliff her eyes quickly sought his and found them. Her smile told him all he needed to know; she was his. If only destiny would give them the time together that they craved.

  When everything they needed was assembled on the east side of the river in the shadow of the hill, Blan led the way to a small opening in the steep hillside. It was hidden amongst a jumble of large rocks, presumably split or fallen from above. Last time, Blan had come out from this opening; she had not entered this way. It was more difficult to find from the outside than she had thought, and it was much smaller than she remembered. Last time, she had been anxious and exhausted; any exit to sunlight might have seemed bigger than it was.

  “We must not upset the ape-bears who live in the cavern,” she warned the group when they had all assembled near the tunnel entrance. “Leave all your weapons just inside the tunnel; don’t take them down to the cavern. I will go first; Telko not far behind. The rest of you follow us to the entrance of the cavern, then sit on the floor and try to look peaceful. Telko and I will call you over to the sky ship one by one. Walk slowly and make no sudden movements.” She did not really think that the orbears would be frightened of the Akrinans, or wish to harm them. However, she felt that her advice was sensible. She believed that it was important to show good manners and respect for the orbear matriarch and her people.

  There was some muttering among the men when Blan described the orbears. Walking unarmed into a cave full of large bear-like creatures was not a comfortable thought.

  “If the ape-bears attack, they will attack Blan and me first,” Telko joked. “If that happens, I give you all permission to run for your lives; no need to stay around to defend us.”

  Partly shamed and partly humoured, the men stopped grumbling.

  “If the creatures are your friends then they are our friends too, however big and fierce they look,” one man joked. He was the one who had led the last group over the mountains and had been responsible for collecting and destroying all the directions left behind by Arnapa. Unfortunately for him, this particularly short man spun around just as Blan had moved closer to him. His face became buried in Blan’s breasts as she towered over him. He wilted back in embarrassment.

  “I’m not fierce at all,” Blan laughed, pretending to misunderstand his comment, and gently patted the man’s shoulder. Everyone else roared with laughter. The short man quickly recovered and laughed along with the others, grateful to be saved from embarrassment by Blan’s joke. However, he had to admit to himself that, though it was by accident, he did not regret coming into contact with this young lady. It was not so much her figure that he admired, warm and shapely though she was to his eyes (and face), but rather something about her that made him want to protect her. He could not explain it to himself any more than that. He was content that the incident had made him feel a little bit closer to her than before. On such small things the progression of destiny is often based.

  16

  Telko left two men to guard the equipment on the bank of Pitpet Brook. The others crawled through the small entrance into the cave tunnel. They had not gone far before the passage became broader and everybody could move more freely; even Telko could walk upright without risk to his head.

  Once her eyes adjusted to the light, Blan saw that it was a very different matter going down into the hill than it had been coming out. When she had last come this way, there had been just one path leading steadily upward. Other paths would join it but always from further back in the hill, so there was never any serious question about which path to follow. However, going down into the hill, the passage would frequently divide and, to confuse matters further, almost all of these byways led downward. At each fork in the way, Blan had to search her memory to choose the one which seemed most familiar. Sometimes, when the look of the place failed to help her decide which way to go, she would close her eyes and let her ears seek out the faintest nuance of sound that might instruct her. She had excellent recall, but choosing between these unfamiliar paths in the shaky light of a small lantern stretched it to the limit.

  She eventually came to a place where the passage divided into two very similar branches. There was nothing to choose between them. It was so deep in the hill that the noises of the jungle had become absolutely quiet, even for Blan’s exceptional hearing powers, and yet it was far enough from the orbears’ cavern to be beyond either light or sound from that direction. She had not even noticed this branch when she had come this way before, so she had no recollection of it at all. It would have been of no consequence to her then anyway because her aim was to go up. Now she had a lantern but no way of choosing.

  “I don’t remember this junction,” she whispered to Telko when he caught up with her. “We will have to try out each passage. It will delay us.” She did not yet want to raise her biggest concern: that she had made a mistake somewhere higher up the tunnel and that they had consequently followed the wrong path entirely since then.

  “We will need to brief the men about what we propose to do,” Telko said.

  They sat down and waited for the others, now stretched out along the passage behind, each within sight of the lantern held by the next, and all linked by a rope for additional safety.

  Dark eyes were watching them from further down one of the passages.

  Blan heard a strange noise. Telko could hear nothing.

  “There it is again,” Blan whispered, now sure. She went into one of the passages and listened. Then she went into the other passage.

  “We must follow the passage on the right,” she said, softly laughing.

  “What have you heard? How do you know?” Telko asked.

  “My girlfriends,” Blan said cryptically as she set off again down the passage on the right. “Follow me! You will see for yourself.”

  Telko, utterly bemused, shrugged his shoulders and followed her.

  *

  Telko was stunned when he caught up with Blan and saw the sky ship in the distance across the cavern floor. He had never seen anything so strange. It seemed to him like a giant pearl, two dozen paces wide and standing three fathomes off the ground.

  “Blan, you’re not thinking of moving that are you?” he asked, eyes wide.

  “I want to look underneath,” Blan insisted. “We need only lift it a little bit, so I can slip under.”

  Telko was amazed and troubled at the same time. “It must have the weight of a small ship. It looks to be made of metal. How can we possibly lift it?” Then, after a pause for thought, he added more cheerfully, “Would it not be easier to cut an opening?”

  “Believe me, it is very light, easier to lift than to cut, as you will find out,” Blan replied, “but I must first clear the way with my ape-bear friends. Follow me very slowly and keep well behind until we are accepted. Make sure the men sit here until we call them across. When they come they should do so one-by-one. I suspect that the ape-bears would be suspicious of humans moving around in what might seem to be a hunting pack. As a species we are not always well-behaved toward other creatures.”

  “Huh! Rarely well behaved, I would say,” Telko agreed.

  As soon as Blan was twenty paces ahead of him, Telko saw rapid mo
vement out of the corner of his eye. Two athletic brown creatures, each the size of an average human, yet seemingly much stronger and quicker, rushed out from a thicket of trees and danced excitedly around Blan. She reached out to them and the three of them hugged together like dear friends. Telko’s initial alarm evaporated. A broad smile broke out across his face as he shook his head in wonder.

  17

  Ooggah had watched many humans pass up and down the river since she had been a baby orbear clinging to her mother’s back more than sixty years ago. Some she had seen before, like the pale woman with the dark hair and dark eyes whom she had seen last night and who seemed to lead this expedition. Most passed only once and never returned, or became lost or taken by tigers or snakes or consumed by the biting fish in the river. Ooggah usually paid little attention to humans except to teach her people to stay away from that dangerous and treacherous species.

  Only one human had ever impressed Ooggah enough to take back to meet her family, to teach her children and grandchildren the difference between a good human and the usual, untrustworthy ones. She was delighted that the blushing golden-haired girl had decided to come back so soon. Her granddaughters would be especially pleased. They had been grunting and whimpering about their human friend ever since they first met her.

  It was anyone’s guess how the terrible forces that afflicted Earth thirty millennia before had permitted the merging of orang-utans with bears to produce the race of orbears. In most ways orbears resembled orang-utans, even being more human-like than orang-utans, but they could achieve the size and power of the largest bears. Furthermore, they were as intelligent as humans but, unlike most humans, lacked both ambition and the capacity for animosity. They would defend themselves, if necessary, but were otherwise content with their humble lives. Most avoided contact with humans, and had none. However, Ooggah’s domain bordered the more open woodlands and the clearings where humans lived, so she had become accustomed to humans passing through her territory.

  Ooggah now considered how she would react if Gold-hair, as she thought of Blan, brought too many of these strangers into the cave. Gold-hair and the tall man in her canoe were clearly in love, so Ooggah would not worry about that man if Gold-hair vouched for him. As far as the others were concerned, Ooggah decided to wait and see how things developed. She knew that Gold-hair had been impressed by the cave’s mirror-pod and would want to see it again.

  Ooggah’s mother had told her many stories in the language of rhythmic grunting and musical whimpering that orbears used for intellectual communication. She had said that the mirror-pod had been there when orbears first took up residence in the cave and it had not been touched since. Ooggah had never dared to break with tradition by touching the mirror-pod, but she supposed that it would be alright for someone like Gold-hair who seemed to know about mirror-pods. Besides, despite sharing the characteristic lack of ambition common to her people, Ooggah did have a secret wish to know what lay underneath the mirror-pod. After all, it might have a bearing on the safety of her people.

  *

  Ooggah had sent her grandson out to report back on the humans’ movements. He had looked down from the edge of the great rock and reported that Gold-hair had found the entrance again. Good boy! He had done his job like a fully adult orbear.

  Ooggah knew that her grandson had fancied Gold-hair when she had arrived the first time. She had told him that he could not hope to have any ambitions in that regard. Orbears and humans do not mix in that way, she told him. Fortunately, he had since found a girlfriend orbear from another family two leagues eastward.

  Ooggah’s two granddaughters could not contain their excitement in expectation of the arrival of Gold-hair, so Ooggah had sent them up the tunnel to make sure that Gold-hair found the right passage down. “Lead her by sound,” she said in her musical tones. “Gold-hair has very good hearing for a human, but keep well away from the other humans.”

  Now Ooggah watched as Gold-hair approached with the sisters. Gold-hair’s man was slowly following and the other humans were gathering to sit near the tunnel. Ooggah was very pleased that Gold-hair seemed to understand how to do these things. She was a good human.

  Gold-hair waved to Ooggah and did a little bow. Her man followed her example, albeit more hesitantly. That was another positive sign. Gold-hair pointed to the mirror-pod and then to the humans near the tunnel. She made a number of other hand signals which Ooggah guessed meant that Gold-hair wanted to bring the humans over to help lift the mirror-pod. That was just fine with Ooggah. She called her granddaughters to her, got up and led them away about twenty paces and then sat down again. Then she told Gold-hair in musical tones that she could do as she had asked. Of course, Gold-hair would not understand her words, no human was intelligent enough to master orbear language, but Gold-hair was a cut above the rest and would understand what Ooggah meant. The rest of the family were already a hundred paces further away, well out of trouble. Ooggah had told them to keep away unless she called for them.

  18

  Blan felt that she understood the signals that the orbear matriarch was making. She felt elated that the creature also seemed to understand what she, Blan, wanted to do. Somehow, from the moment of her first meeting with the matriarch, Blan had felt that this would happen, that the matriarch would understand her and approve. Blan, accustomed to putting her faith in science rather than feelings, wondered if this was what her mother had meant when she spoke of intuition.

  When Blan had previously experienced feelings like this, feelings of intuition, they had usually proved to be very reliable, but she had difficulty deciding when to trust them and when not to trust them. She understood that her feelings were sometimes the result of the unconscious evaluation of information too complex for her conscious mind to deal with all at once, her mind perhaps not even aware that it had absorbed that information. That could be reliable intuition, she thought. However, she also knew that her feelings were sometimes influenced by her emotional needs. That was not reliable intuition: wishful thinking at best or, worse still, becoming someone’s dupe. She knew she was capable of wishful thinking, and she still felt the shame of having been duped by Borckren’s spies at Slave Island in that terrible incident which led to the tragic murder of poor Prannette who had been so devoted to finding Kwannette, her older sister. Just thinking about Prannette brought a tear to Blan’s eye and renewed her resolve to find Kwannette, see that she was free and well provided for, and tell her about her sister’s long quest to find her.

  After indicating to the orbear girls that they should wait for her, Blan took Telko across the gangway onto the upper floor of the sky ship. They collected thirty-two loose panels of skyhull, a dozen suitable for paddles in the waterwheel that Blan proposed to build and another twenty to take with them to Austra Castle. Telko was amazed at how light they were and he wondered if perhaps his men might be able to lift the sky ship after all. As for the visual effects, the reverse mirror images he saw in the glossy surface of the ship, and the apparent transparency of the hull from within the ship, he just had to wonder at it and defer further thought on the matter. Although he had an enquiring mind, he knew that this was beyond him and he was happy to wait until Blan had more to say about it.

  One-by-one the other sixteen men walked over and gathered around the sky ship. The shipwrights among them tested the weight of the loose skysheets and then calculated the approximate weight of the whole vessel. Agreeing that it should be possible for them all to lift it, they lined up on one side which was on slightly higher ground than the other. The plan was to lift this side high enough for Blan to slip underneath. The bottom half of the ship was one and a half fathomes deep and yet only the underlying ground could be seen from the upper chamber, the bottom chamber appearing to be empty space. Blan wanted to see what was really there.

  After cautiously touching the outside of the sky ship, the men all laid their hands on it and waited for Telko’s call to push up.

  The vessel did not move with th
e first push. Either something was holding it in place or it was much heavier than they had expected on the basis of the weight of the loose skyhull panels.

  They used all their strength for the second push, but they managed to raise the vessel just a few fingers before having to lower it again. There was definitely something heavy inside.

  Next, they tried some boards of skyhull piled on top of each other to form a fulcrum and another, longer board as a lever.

  “This is like the balance between Black Knight and the Free Alliance, a fulcrum of power,” Blan said jokingly.

  “I think you are the fulcrum of power, Blan,” Telko replied with a smile.

  Some of the men gritted their teeth, expecting their lever to break at any moment. It did not break. However, they could still only raise the sky ship a quarter fathome, not enough for Blan to risk slipping underneath with the assurance of returning safely. With the help of a lantern, she saw that there was a large opening at the bottom of the ship, but its lip was no more than a hand span above the ground, far too little for anyone to squeeze through.

  They lowered the sky ship and they all sat down to rest. Blan wondered if this was to be the disappointing end of her quest. Racking her brain to think of another way to raise the sky ship, she looked up to see the matriarch slowly sidling toward her with two of the larger adults from her family. The three orbears paused before ceremonially laying their hands all at once on the side of the sky ship. Telko and his men, understanding what was happening, sprang to their feet and joined in.

  With the help of the orbears’ mighty muscles the side of the vessel was raised a full fathome, leaving Blan plenty of room to slip under the lip of the opening in the bottom.

  She did not need a lantern. There was light inside, even when the vessel was lowered again.