by John Norman
The Beetle drew close, and I could see the mane hairs waving now like the fronds of some marine plant caught in the currents of its underwater world.
“You must resist the Golden Beetle,” I said to Misk.
“I am going to die,” said Misk, “do not begrudge me this pleasure.”
Kusk took a step toward the Beetle.
“You must resist the Golden Beetle to the end!” I cried.
“This is the end,” came from Misk’s translator. “And I have tried. And I am tired now. Forgive me, Tarl Cabot.”
“Is this how our father chooses to die?” asked Al-Ka of Kusk.
“You do not understand, my children,” said Kusk, “what the Golden Beetle means to a Priest-King.”
“I think I understand,” I cried, “but you must resist!”
“Would you have us die working at a hopeless task,” asked Misk, “die like fools deprived of the final Pleasures of the Golden Beetle?”
“Yes!” I cried.
“It is not the way of Priest-Kings,” said Misk.
“Let it be the way of Priest-Kings!” I cried.
Misk seemed to straighten himself, his antennae waved about wildly, every fiber of his body seemed to shiver.
He stood shuddering in the drifting rock dust, amid the crashing of distant rocks. He surveyed the humans gathered about him, the heavy golden hemisphere of the approaching Beetle.
“Drive it away,” came from Misk’s translator.
With a cry of joy I rushed upon the Beetle and Vika and Al-Ka and Ba-Ta and their women joined me and together, kicking and pushing, avoiding the tubular jaws, hurling rocks, we forced away the globe of the Golden Beetle.
We returned to Misk and Kusk who stood together, their antennae touching.
“Take us to the plant of the Muls,” said Misk.
“I will show you,” cried Al-Ka.
Misk turned again to me. “I wish you well, Tarl Cabot, human,” he said.
“Wait,” I said, “I will go with you.”
“You can do nothing to help,” he said. Misk’s antennae inclined toward me. “Go to the surface,” said Misk. “Stand in the wind and see the sky and sun once more.”
I lifted my hands and Misk touched the palms gently with his antennae.
“I wish you well, Misk, Priest-King,” I said.
Misk turned and hurried off, followed by Kusk and the others.
Vika and I were left alone in the crumbling complex. Over our heads it seemed suddenly that, splitting from the hole already there, the entire roof suddenly shattered apart and seemed for a moment to hang there.
I seized Vika, sweeping her into my arms, and fled from the chamber.
With uncanny speed it seemed we almost floated to a tunnel entrance and I looked behind us and saw the ceiling descending with incredible softness, almost like a snowfall of stones.
I sensed the difference in the gravitation of the planet. I wondered how long it would take before it broke apart and scattered in a belt of dust across the solar system, only to bend inward at last and spiral like a falling bird into the gases of the burning sun.
Vika had fainted in my arms.
I rushed onwards through the tunnels, having no clear idea of what to do or where to go.
Then I found myself in the first Nest Complex, where first I had laid eyes on the Nest of Priest-Kings.
Moving as though in a dream, my foot touching the ground only perhaps once in thirty or forty yards, I climbed the circling ramp upward toward the elevator.
But I found only the dark open shaft.
The door had been broken away and there was rubble in the shaft. There were no hanging cables in the shaft and I could see the shattered roof of the elevator some half a hundred feet below.
It seemed I was trapped in the Nest, but then I noted, perhaps fifty yards away, a similar door, though smaller.
With one slow, strange bound I was at the door and threw the switch which was placed at the side of the door.
It opened and I leaped inside and pushed the highest disk on a line of disks mounted inside.
The door closed and the contrivance swiftly sped upward.
When the door opened I found myself once more in the Hall of the Priest-Kings, though the great dome above it was now broken and portions of it had fallen to the floor of the hall.
I had found the elevator, which had originally been used by Parp, whom I had learned, was a physician of Treve, and who had been my host in my first hour in the domain of Priest-Kings. Parp, I recalled, with Kusk, had refused to implant me, and had formed a portion of the underground which had resisted Sarm. When he had first spoken to me I knew now he would have been under the control of Priest-Kings, that his control net would have been activated and his words and actions dictated, at least substantially, from the Scanning Room below, but now the Scanning Room, like most of the Nest, was demolished, and even if it had not been, there were none who would now care to activate his net. Parp would now be his own master.
Vika still lay unconscious in my arms and I had folded her robes about her in order to protect her face and eyes and throat from the rock dust below.
I walked before the throne of Priest-Kings.
“Greetings, Cabot,” said a voice.
I looked up and saw Parp, puffing on his pipe, sitting calmly on the throne.
“You must not stay here,” I said to him, uneasily looking up at the remnants of the dome.
“There is nowhere to go,” said Parp, puffing contentedly on the pipe. He leaned back. A puff of smoke emerged from the pipe but instead of drifting up seemed instead almost immediately to pop apart. “I would have liked to enjoy a last, proper smoke,” said Parp. He looked down at me kindly and in a step or two seemed to float down the steps and stood beside me. He lifted aside the fold of Vika’s robes which I had drawn about her face.
“She is very beautiful,” said Parp, “much like her mother.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I wished that I could have known her better,” said Parp. He smiled at me. “But then I was an unworthy father for such a girl.”
“You are a very good and brave man,” I said.
“I am small and ugly and weak,” he said, “and fit to be despised by such a daughter.”
“I think now,” I said, “she would not despise you.”
He smiled and replaced the fold of the garment over her face.
“Do not tell her that I saw her,” he said. “Let her forget Parp, the fool.”
In a bound, almost like a small balloon, he floated up, and twisting about, reseated himself in the throne. He pounded on the arms once and the movement almost thrust him up off the throne.
“Why have you returned here?” I asked.
“To sit once more upon the throne of Priest-Kings,” said Parp, chuckling.
“But way?” I asked.
“Perhaps vanity,” said Parp. “Perhaps memory.” Then he chuckled again and his eyes, twinkling, looked down at me.
“But I also like to think,” he said, “it may be because this is the most comfortable chair in the entire Sardar.”
I laughed.
I looked up at him. “You are from Earth, are you not?” I asked.
“Long, long ago,” he said. “I never did get used to that business of sitting on the floor.” He chuckled again. “My knees were too stiff.”
“You were English,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, smiling.
“Brought here on one of the voyages of Acquisition?”
“Of course,” he said.
Parp regarded his pipe with annoyance. It had gone out. He began to pinch some tobacco from the pouch he wore at his belt.
“How long ago?” I asked.
He began to try to stuff the tobacco into the bowl of the pipe. Given the gravitational alteration this was no easy task. “Do you know of these things?” asked Parp, without looking up.
“I know of the Stabilisation Serums,” I said.
Parp glanced up from the pipe, holding his thumb over the bowl to prevent the tobacco from floating out of it, and smiled. “Three centuries,” he said, and then returned his attention to the pipe.
He was trying to thrust more tobacco into it but was having difficulty because the tiny brown particles tended to lie loosely about a quarter of an inch above the bowl. At last he wadded enough in for the pressure to hold it tight and, using the silver lighter, sucked a stream of flame into the bowl.
“Where did you get tobacco and a pipe?” I asked, for I knew of none such on Gor.
“As you might imagine,” said Parp, “I have acquired the habit originally on Earth and, since, I have returned to Earth several times as an Agent of the Priest-Kings, I have had the opportunity to indulge it. On the other hand, in the last few years, I have grown my own tobacco below in the Nest under lamps.”
The floor buckled under my feet and I changed my position. The throne tilted and then fell back into place again.
Parp seemed more concerned with his pipe, which seemed again in danger of going out, than he did with the world that was crumbling about him.
At last he seemed to get the pipe under control.
“Did you know,” he asked, “that Vika was the female Mul who drove away the Golden Beetles when Sarm sent them against the forces of Misk?”
“No,” I said, “I did not know.”
“A fine, brave girl,” said Parp.
“I know,” I said. “She is truly a great and beautiful woman.”
It seemed to please Parp that I had said this.
“Yes,” he said, “I believe she is.” And he added, rather sadly I thought, “And such was her mother.”
Vika stirred in my arms.
“Quick,” said Parp, who seemed suddenly afraid, “take her from the chamber before she regains consciousness. She must not see me!”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because,” said Parp, “she despises me and I could not endure her contempt.”
“I think not,” I said.
“Go,” he begged, “go!”
“Show me the way,” I said.
Hurriedly Parp knocked the ashes and sparks from his pipe against the arm of the throne. The ashes and unused tobacco seemed to hang in the air like smoke and then drift apart. Parp thrust the pipe in his pouch. He seemed to float down to the floor and, touching one sandalled foot to the ground only every twenty yards or so, began to leave the chamber in slow dreamlike bounds. “Follow me,” he called after him.
Vika in my arms I followed the bounding body of Parp, whose robes seemed to lift and flutter softly about him as he almost floated down the tunnel before me.
Soon we had reached a steel portal and Parp threw back a switch and it rolled upward.
Outside I saw the two snow larls turn to face the portal. They were unchained.
Parp’s eyes widened in horror. “I thought they would be gone,” he said. “Earlier I freed them from the inside in order that they might not die chained.”
He threw the switch again and the portal began to roll down but one of the larls with a wild roar threw himself towards it and got half his body and one long, raking clawed paw under it. We leaped back as the clawed paw swept towards us. the portal struck the animal’s back and, frightened it reared up, forcing the portal up, twisting it in the frame. The larl backed away but the portal, in spite of Parp’s efforts, now refused to close.
“You were kind,” I said.
“I was a fool,” said Parp. “Always the fool!”
“You could not have know,” I said.
Vika’s hang went to the folds of the robe and I could feel her squirm to regain her feet.
I set her down and Parp turned away, covering his face with his robe.
I stood at the portal, sword drawn, to defend it against the larls should they attempt to enter.
Vika now stood on her feet, a bit behind me, taking in at a glance the jammed door and the two unchained larls without. Then she saw the figure of Parp and cried out with a tiny gasp, and looked back again at the larls, and then to the figure.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her put out her hand gently and approach Parp. She pulled aside the folds of his robe and I saw her touch his face which seemed filled with tears.
“Father!” she wept.
“My daughter,” he said, and took the girl gently in his arms.
“I love you Father,” she said.
And Parp uttered a great sob, his head falling against the shoulder of his daughter.
One of the larls roared, the hunger roar that precedes the roar of the charge.
This was the sound I knew well.
“Stand aside,” said Parp, and I barely knew the voice that spoke.
But I stood aside.
Parp stood framed in the doorway holding that tiny silver lighter with which it seemed I had seen him fumble and light his pipe a thousand times, that small cylinder I had once mistaken for a weapon.
Parp reversed the cylinder and leveled it at the breast of the nearest larl. He turned it suddenly and a jolt of fire that threw him five feet back into the cave leapt from that tiny instrument and the nearest larl suddenly reared, its paws lifted wildly, its fangs bared, its snowy pelt burned black about the hole that had once housed its heart, and then it twisted and fell sprawling from the ledge.
Parp threw the tine tube away.
He looked at me. “Can you strike through to the heart of a larl?” he asked.
With a sword it would be a great blow.
“If I had the opportunity,” I said.
The second larl, enraged, roared and crouched to spring.
“Good,” said Parp, not flinching, “follow me!”
Vika screamed and I cried out for him to stop but Parp dashed forward and threw himself into the jaws of the startled larl and it lifted him its jaws and began to shake him savagely and I was at its feet and thrust my sword behind its ribs plunging it deep into its heart.
The body of Parp, half torn apart, neck and limbs broken, fell from the jaws of the larl.
Vika rushed upon it weeping.
I drew out the sword and thrust it again and again into the heart of the larl until at last it lay still.
I went to stand behind Vika.
Kneeling by the body she turned and looked up at me. “He so feared larls,” she said.
“I have known many brave men,” I said to her, “but none was more brave than Parp of Treve.”
She lowered her head to the torn body, its blood staining the silks she wore.
“We will cover the body with stones,” I said. “And I will cut robes from the pelt of the larl. We have a long way to go and it will be cold.”
She looked up at me and, her eyes filled with tears nodded her agreement.
Chapter Thirty Three
OUT OF THE SARDAR
Vika and I, clad in robes cut from the pelt of the snow larl I had slain, set out for the great black gate in the sombre timber palisade that encircles the Sardar. It was a strange but rapid journey, and as we leaped chasms and seemed almost to swim in the cold air I told myself that Misk and his Priest-Kings and the humans that were engineers in the Nest were losing the battle that would decided whether men and Priest-Kings might, working together, save a world or whether in the end it would be sabotage of Sarm, First Born, that would be triumphant and the world I loved would be scattered into fugitive grains destined for the flaming pyre of the sun.
Whereas it had taken four days for me to climb to the lair of Priest-Kings in the Sardar it was on the morning of the second day that Vika and I sighted the remains of the great gate, fallen, and the palisade, now little more than broken and uprooted timbers.
The speed of our return journey was not due primarily to the fact that we were now on the whole descending, though this helped, but rather to the gravitational reduction which made it possible for me, Vika in my arms, to move with a swift disregard for what, under more normal conditions, would have been at times a
dangerous, tortuous trail. Several times, in fact, I had simply leaped from one portion of the trail to float more than a hundred feet downward to land lightly on another portion of the trail, a point which, on foot, might have been separated by more than five pasangs from the point about from which I had leaped. Sometimes I even neglected the trail altogether and leaped from one cliff to another in improvised short cuts. It was late in the morning of the second day, about the time that we sighted the black gate, that the gravitational reduction reached its maximum.
“It is the end, Cabot,” said Vika.
“Yes,” I said. “I believe so,”
From where Vika and I stood together on the rock trail, now scarcely able to keep our feet on the path, we could see vast crowds, robed in all the caste colours of Gor, clustered outside the remains of the palisade, looking fearfully within. I supposed there might have been men from almost all of Gor’s cities in that frightened, teeming throng. In the front, several deep, in lines that extended as far as I could see in both directions, were the white robes of the Initiates. Even from where we stood I could smell the innumerable fires of their sacrifices, the burning flesh of bosks, smell the heady fumes of the incense they burned in brass censers swinging on chains, hear the repetitious litanies of their pleas, observe their continual prostrations and grovelling by which they sought to make themselves and their petitions pleasing to Priest-Kings.
I swept Vika again to my arms and, half-walking, half-floating, made my way downward toward the ruins of the gate. There was a great should from the crowd when they saw us and then there was enormous quiet and every pair of eyes in that teeming throng was fixed upon us.
It suddenly seemed to me that Vika was a bit heavier than she had been and I told myself that I must be tiring.
I descended with Vika from the trail and, as I floated down to the bottom of a small crevice between the trail and the gate, the bottoms of my sandals stung when I hit the rock. I had apparently slightly misjudged the distance.
The top of the crevice was only about thirty feet away. It should take one leap and a step to clear it, but when I leaped, my leap carried me only about fifteen feet and where my foot scraped the side a pebble, dislodged, bounded downward and I could hear it strike the floor of the crevice. I took another leap, this time putting some effort into it, and cleared the top of the crevice by some ten feet to land between it and the gate.