Golden Scorpio [Dray Prescot #18]

by Alan Burt Akers

  Delia said in a voice that almost but not quite trembled: “There is that bird again—"

  “Aye ... A Bird of Ill Omen. Delia—I have promised to tell you why I am sometimes dragged away from you when all I want is to stay with you. Not like now, when it is sensible for you to go with the children. But, the other times—"

  “I remember them, I remember them all. They were horrible."

  What was horrible to me in that moment, as well as the enforced absences I made at the orders of the Everoinye, the Star Lords, was that Delia could see the bird. I knew Drak my eldest son had seen it, and I had lied to him and said the bird was not there. But the Star Lords did not reveal their powers to many. I feared and hated the idea of my Delia being caught up in the schemes of superhuman unknown and unknowable beings who demanded so much from me without explanation.

  “The bird is connected with your—disappearances."

  “Yes. And the Scorpion."

  “On the field of the Crimson Missals, when you said you did not want to go to Hyrklana—and I went there—and—"

  I tried to make a laugh and failed. “I'd be sorry, now, if I hadn't gone to Hyrklana and fought in the Jikhorkdun of Huringa. Then we would not have Tilly and Oby and Naghan the Gnat and Balass the Hawk as friends."

  “And where they are now, Opaz knows."

  “We will fetch them back, if they wish to come."

  “I think they will make their way back here, to Valka, for they are true Valkans now—"

  “And what a sorry mess Valka and Vallia are in!"

  The scarlet and golden bird circled, watching us. I shook my fist at it, and it continued on, indifferent.

  “And when the shanks attacked that little village of Panashti, on the island of Lower Kairfowen, and you fell from the gate and we carried you to a hut. It was all a confusion. The walls and huts were burning. Those terrible Leem Lovers were breaking in—the walls came down and the smoke blew. We fought. Oh, Dray! You should have seen Drak. He was like a young zhantil. You would have been proud."

  Drak had grown up since then, become a man, a prince, a Krozair of Zy. His life had not been easy. Now Delia poured out all the wonder and the hidden-away hurt, the bewilderments she had felt over the years of our life together.

  “I had gone to see you in the hut and—and you were not there! Only your armor and your weapons. I feared, then, remembering the other times, Jynaratha, over the Shrouded Sea—and then, even your weapons were gone. We fought as hard as we could and then Tom and Vangar came and we were saved. Drak was suddenly aware. Men looked to him. He and I, between us—and there was Turko and Naghan and Balass and all the others. There was such a lot of shouting and confusion. It was given out that you had gone to punish the shanks. Men believed. We were able to leave Panashti without any suspicion that you had died being voiced. Later, it was suggested—but you know—and, anyway, you have gone before to visit other lands, as all men know."

  “Twenty-one years,” I said, and I shivered.

  The Star Lords had banished me to Earth for twenty-one long and miserable years because I had defied them.

  Delia put her hand on my arm.

  “And then you disappeared from the voller as we flew to Aphrasöe—that was mysterious and terrible—"

  “The Scorpion,” I said. “I will tell you why I sometimes have to go away, and why I have decided to resist in different ways that do not mean I go back to—go away for twenty-one years."

  She looked at me and a wary look warned me.

  “Back to—where?"

  I did not reply.

  “Back to the Great Plains of Segesthes? To your Clansmen?"

  It would have been only a little difficult to lie. I shook my head.

  “But where, my heart, where? Tell me—"

  “If I do tell you, you will believe, I think, for I love you enough to know that—but it will be hard."

  She looked at me, and I knew my stupid remark had not only been unnecessary, it showed her how tangled up I was.

  The wind blew the red and white flags of Valka out in a fluttering panoply. We would leave them flying when we deserted this beautiful place. For a time they would convince those rasts below we still resisted them. The red and white of Valka...

  Among the treshes fluttering from the flagstaffs someone had hoisted my own old battle flag, the yellow cross on the scarlet field, that battle flag fighting men call Old Superb.

  I wondered then if I could bear to leave that behind.

  What I did know and with sharp agony, was that if I defied the Star Lords who had brought me to Kregen I would leave more than a flag behind me when I was ejected with contempt from this exotic and cruel world.

  The bird volplaned away, turning in a gentle glide, and the suns sheened a brilliance along his feathers. I wondered what Delia would do, what say, if the Gdoinye slanted back to us and spoke to me. The messenger of the Everoinye usually insulted me—well, we understood each other's tempers in that. But I did not want to risk what Delia might say if the bird did speak to us. I wanted to move us along. I wanted—what I wanted was just about anything than having to go through this.

  The quick, intuitive empathy between Delia and myself has always given me a trembling feeling of possessing beauty beyond price. Always, I stress that we call each other ‘My Delia’ and ‘My Dray’ and the togetherness is complete, unshakeable, unremarked on save as I speak this record, and yet that possession is mutual, not a diseased obsession of property, one or the other. We are two people, two rounded persons, and yet together we are more than a single rounded one, more than merely one and one, more than two; and through all this rapturous spectrum of feeling, the dark hollow secret I carried dragged at me, tearing at me, and I knew that Delia sensed that apartness and grieved.

  So, with that empathy between us, I was not surprised when she began to speak in a low, serious voice, as we stood there in the radiance of the Suns of Scorpio. But her voice faltered, hesitated, her face was half-averted, and those brown eyes did not regard me with that same old brave look I knew and loved. All my primeval instincts flared into my thick old skull. Her mouth trembled as she spoke and yet she controlled herself, and I saw the way her hand fingered the brooch upon her breast and fell away and so crept up again. I felt the blood in my head.

  “You have watched performances of Sooten and Her Twelve Suitors, I know.” She would not look at me. “The story is old, as old as Kregen itself. An abandoned wife is prey. There are many men whose minds dwell on their opportunities, whose desires, whose hands—” She stopped speaking, unable to go on.

  Sooten, as you know, is a legend of Kregen that parallels in emotional depth the brave Earthly story of Penelope, wife to Odysseus, mother of Telemachus. Like Penelope, Sooten kept her suitors at bay. I sensed that Delia was trying to feel her way to telling me things I had best learn at first hand, if at all, and my mind went back to what I had heard, posing as Jak Jakhan, in the Baths of the Nine called the Bower of the Scented Lotus in Vondium. There those oafs had nudged and winked and repeated tales of the notorious affairs of the Princess Majestrix of Vallia. The rubbish had passed from my mind as the cess pits are emptied and purified with that remarkable concoction made from the little blue fallimy flower. And, chained in a prison cell, I had heard other salacious stories.

  In the many rich pantheons of Kregen there stands the archetypal figure of the seducer, suave, groomed, glib-tongued. He knows well how to comfort and feed the vanity of women and this Quergey the Murgey is charmingly versed in the ways of breaking down the defenses of wives who, for whatever reason, are estranged from their husbands. I should add that I give this contemptible figure a name that is not his own, his real name being much contumed over Kregen, and I choose to use this alias. Perhaps, one day, his own name and not his use name will be revealed. Odysseus was gone for twenty years. I had been gone many times, and once for twenty-one whole years. As I looked at Delia I understood that many men had essayed her, and I knew they had failed. Her
own inner spirit and strengths would not fail her, and although she knew my opinion of the sin of pride, in this case her own pride would rise and she would draw her virtue from our love. Her strength would not fail no matter that I was absent, gone, removed. What we meant to each other remained steadfast despite my seeming rejection of her, leaving her distraught and abandoned and prey to the scum who batten on unhappy women.

  One of Quergey the Murgey's favorite techniques is to practice the sympathy routine, offering help and a firm shoulder on which to lean and cry, and so lead on, subtly, delicately, to the fulfillment of his desires. He feeds the anguished ego with words the woman craves to hear. Delia would see through all that. But she felt she must try to make the oafish, foolish, thoughtless Dray Prescot understand the load she bore. And, understanding, my anguish for her agony almost destroyed me—almost, for my Delia of the Blue Mountains was with me now and no matter what happened we would be together in ways of love far beyond the comprehension of mere mortal flesh and blood.

  That belief is not rooted in religion or mysticism of a mundane kind—and that is not a contradiction in terms—is not understood by the seducers of the world. The meretricious creeds that condone the acts of Quergey the Murgey offer cheap substitutes for reality, like the evil creed of Lem the Silver Leem, and claim their reality is of life when it is of death.

  The scarlet and golden bird circled, watching us.

  My wife must understand that my absences were forced on me and not of my own free will. The idea that she would fail to grasp my ludicrous story of a world with one sun and one moon and only apims for people appeared to do her a most injurious injustice. Was she not Delia? Of course she would understand, and in understanding, gain strength to repel with the contempt they deserved all those moist-mouthed, hypocritical well-wishers, the suitors infected by the poison of Quergey the Murgey. She looked up at me and her chin lifted. She looked marvelous.

  “Yes, my heart. There are stories. I beg you—do not un-sheath your Krozair longsword against those little people. They do not merit that worth of attention."

  “You are with me, Delia.” I spoke most soberly. “That is all I want."

  “And all the rest,” she whispered, and leaned toward me and the Gdoinye flew down and hawked out a coarse barking cry. She glanced up, and said: “These absences—you will tell me. But there are puzzles, sorely troubling, in the times. Time seems unreal.” She spoke in a reflective way now, the storm over, searching for knowledge, remembering our partings.

  The messenger and spy of the Star Lords hovered over us.

  Delia eyed the Gdoinye with a speculative eye. “You made yourself Strom of Valka when—"

  “I was made, my love,” I corrected, mildly.

  “Yes. You were Fetched to be Drak na Valka. And that happened—it must have happened—when you and I, and Seg and Thelda were marching through the hostile territories. I have thought about this. I have thought that I spent but one day apart after we met, whilst you were off in Segesthes and your Clansmen, or at least, so it seems. A person cannot be in two places at once, can they?” Here she moved a little way away, pensive, troubled and struggling with her thoughts. “Also, you are King of Djanduin and when did that happen?” She looked at me, and caught that luscious lower lip between her teeth. “And will you say you were Fetched to be King of Djanduin?"

  “No.” I spoke with humility and with anger. “No. I own I set out to make myself King of Djanduin. But I changed along the way. It was a long and wearisome wait through the seasons."

  “So,” she said, and sparked up. “So the sorcerer is very powerful. I do not think even a Wizard of Loh could match what I suspect."

  “That is true—if you suspect truth. That, I do not know."

  The Gdoinye angled closer, ruffling his feathers, slanting down toward us.

  “And does this great bird come to take you away from me again?"

  At my troubled look Delia gave me no time to answer. She whipped up the crossbow to hand, one we had taken from the voller. It was ready spanned. She triggered the nut, the bow clanked, the bolt sped.

  I gaped.

  I felt the chill. What would happen now?

  Delia, my Delia of Delphond, had loosed at the Gdoinye!

  What thunder would roll from the heavens? What lightnings spit down and split the castle walls? What hailstones might lash us to a bloody froth? I let out a yell and rushed for Delia, swept her up into my arms, pressing her head against my chest. I glared up madly. The bird circled and the bolt whickered up and in my heightened state I followed the cast with raking eyes. Delia had shot true. The bolt would hit...

  So fast it all happened, so fast, pelting fleeter than a zorca over the plains. A voice hammered against the brightness of the day.

  “Fool! Onker! Have you learned no lessons, Dray Prescot?"

  And a stunning flash of blue fire illuminated the sky, washed over the stone walls, burst in thunder about my ears. The bolt burst asunder, limned by blue fire, smashed and broken, falling away, twisting, dropping.

  Even then, I knew no other eyes but those of Delia and my own would have seen that coruscating display of power.

  For a heartbeat, for a single heartbeat, I thought the blue smash of fire destroyed the crossbow bolt alone. And then I knew differently, knew better—I, Dray Prescot, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, knew I had another lesson to learn.

  Blueness coiled around us.

  “Dray!"

  The radiance twined grasping tentacles around us—between us. I felt the old hateful sensations of falling. Delia was no longer clasped in my arms. I glared up, my whole body and mind wracked with hatred. Up there, blazing against the sky, drowning out the refulgence of Zim and Genodras, the enormous bloated form of the ghostly Scorpion glowered down on me.

  Gropingly, frantically, I reached for Delia. The stones of the ramparts beneath my booted feet scraped harshly. Coldness fell over me like the chill cloak of the grey ones. Delia—she was gone, torn away from me—no! I was being torn away from her as I had so often been dragged away before.

  Hateful memories of those other times when I had been wrenched away from Kregen by this ghostly blue representation of a Scorpion battered at me. I tried to shout, and nothing came save a wheeze. The blueness deepened.

  And that blueness wavered; the Scorpion trembled as though formed of smoke wafted from a campfire, and being blown this way and that by the evening breeze from the high mountains.

  The Scorpion dissolved.

  A flush of crimson light spread across the firmament from starboard, and I switched instinctively to search the larboard side for that welcome glow of yellow gold.

  But the yellow fascinating gold of Zena Iztar did not appear to cheer me and give me comfort and help.

  A vivid acid green jaggled into the sky, hard-edged, sharp, cutting across the blue.

  Voices, as though confined in an echoing cavern shielded miles deep in rock, ghosted across, hollow voices, muffled and echoing, yet clear, distinct, so that I heard. And, hearing, I braced myself, prepared to meet the new challenge and attempt with all the will-power in me to resist. Perhaps—I had been told—perhaps a mental force alone would suffice. I did not know. All I knew was that I must resist and summon myself, the inner me that was plain and simple Dray Prescot, to stand against these superhuman forces.

  “He is mine. I run him, for you are weak and old..."

  The acid voice dripped with power.

  “Not so, Ahrinye! Not so. For we are the Everoinye—” The answering voice boomed, muffled, half-choked, yet deep with the reverberations of habitual authority.

  “You may be Everoinye, but you have forfeited your rights. I am a Star Lord, also. I—” And then the acrid voice screeched into an incoherency that jumbled the passionate words together like the screech of metal against the grinder's wheel. The bitter green light fluctuated wildly.

  This quarrel among the Star Lords affected me and yet I felt a frail confidence that the Everoinye
did not know I could hear them. Their own passionate natures were well hidden, repressed, controlled by the flame of their purpose, that I believed. They were superhuman and therefore would not think as a man would think. They wrangled and I listened, and all the time I watched for the yellow golden flush of light that would herald the arrival of Zena Iztar.

  What they said contorted thought; I could not then comprehend all and it would not be proper to attribute what little I later learned to the Dray Prescot who was the me who listened in such awed and yet defiant fascination.

  The Star Lord called Ahrinye, he of the jagged acid green light and sharp acid voice, showered his youthful contempt upon the elders of the Star Lords. As I braced myself up, ready, hating them all, raging, I yet had time to reflect that the Star Lords in this but followed the same time-consuming course as fragile humanity—except that, I knew, the Everoinye were by thousands of years older than the oldest man who ever lived, on Earth or on Kregen.

  They wrangled over me. Ahrinye wanted to use me with a greater force than hitherto and, I realized, a greater harshness, a lack of even the rudimentary concerns for my skin the Star Lords had shown. Mind you, I did not think they cared for me one jot after I had done their dirty work for them. And then the name spurted from the maze of shrouded talk and I snapped into even more alert listening.

  “Phu-si-Yantong?” said Ahrinye. “Your lordling suffers from him and I would send a summary Gdoinye to settle that."

  “You think you may stand against us, and you know so little. The lordling Prescot has been given a measure of protection against the Wizard—for their puny powers quail even at the thought of the Savanti. And the Shere'affo Iztar meddles—"

  I winced. The viridian green light exploded into whorls of jagged lightning. Enormous thunders crashed about my head. The blue light pulsed and, tiny, creeping, but there, real and penetrating, a golden yellow glow grew low on the horizon.

  And I understood. At the mention of the name of Zena Iztar these puissant and superhuman beings took notice, took cognizance—I could not believe they feared. But they became wary—yes, wary would be the name for the emotions I sensed coiling there in the sky colors coruscating above my head.