"You tell me first," she asked after a while. "Who the King's ass are you?"
Darc chuckled - a funny sound, because he shuddered as he did so.
"Truth is stranger than fiction," he said. "Once I was a rich man, nine hundred years ago. I fell sick, they froze me down before I died. Lord Damon found me, and they brought me back to life. After that, it's just one mess after another... maybe this is all just a bad dream."
Shara smiled at him; she was fond of confidence games, but rarely got the chance to play them with others.
"Oh yeah? Then where do I fit into your nightmare?"
"If all this is just a dream... then I guess you're a dream image of my last wife. You have her temper, but you're more beautiful than she ever was."
Looking away, she replied: "If I was dreaming this, you would be... a witchdoctor or a holy fool... No, I just don't know."
"Nonsense," he muttered. And yet - to most people in this world, that was exactly who he was. It annoyed him, especially because it came from her. A silent determination filled him, to show this world just what he was capable of.
A wink of light from outside caught their attention. Shara's reaction was swift and determined: she tore off her cloak and quenched the campfire with it. The cave went pitch dark and cold.
"What are you doing?"
"Quiet!" Shara whispered. "They mustn't find us!"
They watched the dark outside, but saw nothing more - the tiny light had just flared up for a moment, far away, then vanished.
"We must move," Shara said. "In daylight, they can find us. We must flee now."
Mindlessly, she stood up and stumbled toward the cave opening. Darc got to his feet and grabbed her from behind. They wrestled in the dark, and fell into the hot ashes of the campfire. Shara screamed, and tumbled away from the ashes. Darc held on to her, though she kept fighting.
"Listen, Shara! It's in the middle of the night, you can't see a thing, and there are snakes in the desert -"
"King's shit!" she protested. "I'd rather be bitten by snakes than taken by Lepers!"
A scraping noise suddenly came from outside the cave - and they both froze still. Something was sniffing at the cave entrance, scraping its nails - or claws - against the rocks. Darc and Shara had no knives. From the gravel, Darc dug up a heavy stone for a weapon. A few moments later, a black shape appeared in the cave opening. It could be anything - to Darc, its ragged outline indicated a rat, the size of a lion. The creature poked its dark head into the opening.
Darc stood up, trembling, and hurled the rock at the intruder. It hit the creature in the eye with a heavy, wet thud - it screeched horribly, and darted away with a rustling of bushes and rocks.
Shara whispered a prayer, her first sincere one in a long, long time: "Kristos, save me..."
Darc used his head: they couldn't light a fire, but they needed to shut out the "things", so he had to block the cave opening. He took a stick from the campfire ashes, and felt his way through the narrow cave. Shara listened as she heard him carry and push minor boulders and rocks to the opening. In a while, he had built a crude barricade covering almost half of the entrance. It also kept some of the cold outside.
"There," he gasped, "that ought to be enough. Now I have to ask you to share bed with me."
"No! Don't you touch me!"
"That's not what I meant - never on an empty stomach. I just want to keep from freezing my ass off. Right?"
Shara consented; they wrapped themselves together in her cloak, and Darc folded into a pillow - carefully, since he didn't want to damage the hidden things inside. Even fully clothed, Shara's curvy body felt soft and warm against his lanky, tall one. She was tense at first, prepared for an assault; but as the minutes passed, she relaxed somewhat in his arms.
"Did you ever spend a night like this with your last wife?" she asked.
They couldn't even see each other - only feel each other's breath, smell each other's stale sweat.
"No. She often wanted to drag me into the wilderness, and I always refused. I wanted to study nature in safety... not be out in it, where it would try to eat me."
Shara giggled, forgetting her anxiety for a moment.
She stroked his cheek, and said softly: "Please be quiet now. I'm so tired."
They slept.
PROLOGUE TO BOOK 2
BEFORE THE END OF 940 AFTER MONRO, THE REBIRTH OF MANKIND HAD BEGUN.
The later struggles of Darc and his allies in that fateful year were plenty, and many are the stories of them. The common mouth has exaggerated the scope and numbers of those battles and voyages; today they might seem like nothing more than exciting yarns to thrill the hearts of the young.
But for the purpose of understanding the upheavals that released our race from a self-inflicted prison, we must examine all such tales with sober clarity. What truth can be discerned from fiction, and which facts of history remain to this day, proving the truth of a tale? Only by keeping these proven memories alive, civilization can abide.
Your humble narrator, who hides his real name behind the title "Librian", lived his youth through these times. I saw and heard Darc, in the flesh. He was as real as you and I; both less and much more than legend.
And I bear witness, that it was not with weapons that Darc won his greatest triumphs, but with his mind. Cast out in the desolate wastelands, he gave birth to a new beginning, and became the man with a thousand names.
Excerpt from Librian's "Chronicles" (translated from the original language)
Chapter 24
At the earliest light of dawn, Shara woke up Darc; she wanted them to start moving as soon as possible.
Darc showed no enthusiasm, for they were short on water already, and had no food to speak of. In silence, they crawled out of the cave and into the cool desert sands. This early, the landscape was lined with long shadows.
They walked facing away from the point where the wink of light had appeared during the night. Without a compass and no sea in sight, only the sun gave them some directional aid.
And they walked toward the nearest set of cliffs...
The two outlaws trudged onward through the parched, rocky desert. Gravel and sand gathered in Shara's shoes. Darc's shoes were too soft for the rough terrain, and were starting to crack up at the seams. And they went on, as the sun climbed higher and burned hotter. Darc began to feel the first itching of sunburn on his face.
When the sun had climbed to a point directly above the couple, it felt as if the sun burned right through their skulls. Shara had blisters on her feet; her pale face was getting ruddy with sunburn, despite the hood over her head.
They were still far from the high, vertical cliffs, and the few nearby rocks offered very little shadow. Darc was slowly getting dizzier in the sun; he gulped down the last drops in his water bottle, but only felt his thirst increase.
Suddenly he spotted a tiny little lizard, resting on a flat rock right next to him. It scuttled away before he could have a chance of catching it.
"Damn!" he croaked. "Look for signs of a waterhole, Shara."
Her hoarse reply came fast: "How am I supposed to recognize that? My whole life was spent in cities!"
"Don't know... animals, or more plants, or a pit in the ground... something."
"I could always kill you and drink your blood," she said with tired sarcasm.
"Too much iron and salt in it," he retorted, a faint grin on his reddening face. "You'd get sick and die."
A dog-like desert animal - a coyote - appeared about fifty meters from their position. It froze abruptly for a moment, watching them with its round black eyes... then it darted into the underbrush and vanished from sight.
"Let's go there!" Darc said, pointing to the spot the coyote had left. "Animals come to the waterhole in the morning. Has to be there!"
Shara was too exhausted to reply. She staggered after him.
And, just as Darc had guessed, a waterhole did appear fifty meters farther away. At the bottom of a crevice, a little p
ool of brownish water glittered in the shadow of some tall rocks.
Darc and Shara lay down over the waterhole and drank joyously - not even bothering to filter it first. Then they splashed their faces and clothes, and carefully filled up their bottles. They sat down, pulled off their worn shoes and shook out sand and pebbles.
"Shara, maybe we could catch a snake or a lizard to eat -"
"Kristos, no! " she gasped.
Darc turned his head and saw what had upset her. On a clifftop at least a hundred meters away, stood a cloaked and hooded figure facing them. He, or she, was holding a spear with a rag attached to it.
As if to confirm that he had seen them, the figure held up his spear and let the rag flutter in the wind. It was a banner, with a red symbol painted on it. Darc immediately recognized the symbol: a stylized DNA segment, a cut-off double-helix. Without reflection, Darc and Shara understood that the cloaked figure was a Leper - and that he was not alone.
Shara put her shoes back on, her shifting eyes desperately searching for an escape-route. The figure pointed straight at them with his spear, obviously making a signal to others.
Shara surrendered to her lifelong conditioning - she panicked and ran away from the sight of the Leper. Darc ran after the hysterical woman. Having longer legs and pants instead of a long wide skirt, he caught up with her after a short distance.
"Stop running," he gasped. "We must stop and talk to them!"
Shara ignored him, rambling on through the terrain. After a brief mindless flight, she inevitably had to stumble - a root caught her left foot. She fell with a scream, legs bruised but not broken.
Darc helped her up, but she struggled to continue her escape. "Run," she droned, "we must run, run -"
"Jesus! Calm down! At least give me a chance to see where we're going -"
They both stopped dead. A multitude of Leper banners billowed up from behind bushes and rocks. Darc and Shara stood surrounded by a narrowing circle of hooded pursuers. The figure on the clifftop was still pointing them out, following their every movement; there was no point in hiding down.
"Let's head for that flat rock," Darc said.
With Shara leaning on him, they stumbled up a nearby slope of rock that jutted up over the sand. From there, no escape was possible - only a last stand. Darc had no idea of what to do next, but he knew that fighting was out of the question. The upright spears and banners rapidly closed in on them, and more cloaked figures showed themselves among the bushes and cactuses.
Shara was paralyzed, like a hunted animal caught in a dead end. Darc saw first dozens of figures, then about a hundred of them - all wearing sand-colored cloaks - an army of Lepers, silently approaching its prey.
Within minutes, the cloaked Lepers had the slope tightly surrounded. Among them, one tall figure wore armor pieces on his chest and shoulders, decorated with the double-helix symbol; he appeared to be the leader, and carried a laser rifle on his back.
The leader walked up to the base of the slope - he was leaning slightly to his left, as if something weighed him down - and stopped. The Leper crowd seemed disciplined in his presence, more like an army than a mob.
The leader figure pointed his spear at the trapped fugitives, and shouted: "Look at them, my children!"
To his surprise, Darc understood the leader's slurry voice rather well - the dialect the man was speaking resembled English even more than that of Castilia.
"See how they tremble - these ugly, evil creatures! It was their sins who made us what we are!" The leader's voice was full of righteous anger, and the Lepers roared their raging support. "Yes, they are ugly!" he confirmed. "Pretty on the outside, but ugly on the inside!"
The Lepers waved their spears, roaring again.
"But we are not like them - are we?" he asked rhetorically.
"NO!" the cloaked figures shouted as one.
"So let them see how beautiful we are on the inside!" The leader tore off his hood and glared up at Darc and Shara. "See us!"
Shara shrieked, and looked away. Darc couldn't help but gaze at the sight. The leader slurred because some of his front teeth were jutting out of his mouth - but that wasn't all. The entire left side of his face was healthy - but his right eye bulged, bloated and bloodshot, out of its sore socket.
The skin around his right eye was stretched by huge lumps on his bald skull and right cheek. The leader held up his left arm to the sun - a hand like an oversized claw. Two of the left hand's fingers were twice as long as the others.
Darc had never before seen such a misshapen man, neither in this age or his own. It took him a few seconds to understand that the leader's deformities were real. He was shaken - yet this sight could not have prepared him for the next shock. As he watched, unable to move, the other Lepers pulled off their hoods and exposed faces and hands to the sun.
Darc made an involuntary yelp.
A line-up of deformed men and women glowered at him, eyes full of unforgiving reproach; a hate that nearly matched their hideousness, eyes saying: We hate you as you must hate us!
Every one of them, including the leader, had the double-helix symbol tattooed onto the forehead - or both foreheads, in one case. Darc was stunned numb, not even able to feel ordinary fear - it was too much at once.
From the mass of faces, he only managed to take in brief glimpses of horror: faces with the ears and noses placed wrong, or drawn out like half-molten wax figures.
Faces pockmarked by brown teeth, sticking out of the skin like a barber's nightmare.
A man with empty, black eye-sockets, and absolutely no lower jaw - just a quivering, boneless lip which pulled his tongue down into an everlasting grimace.
An outstretched hand, with a single, blinking eye glaring out of its palm.
An obscene head, with genitals growing on top of its scalp.
Hair growing from a woman's mouth and eyes.
A baby in a woman's pouch, with two fused heads, the two middle eyes fused into a single mass with two pupils.
There was more - numerous other shapes so subtly yet unnaturally distorted, that Darc feared he was going insane. He bit his lip, and tasted blood. No, it was for real. Shara, still silent, looked up again - and screamed and screamed, until Darc slapped her.
The Lepers leered and laughed at them, pointing their fingers and distorted limbs at the couple.
"Look at the ugly woman!"
"Has the sun burned you up?"
The desert echoed with bubbling, scornful laughter; it was perfectly clear that here Darc and Shara were the freaks, and the Lepers were the norm.
"Look at that hair - all white!"
It seemed like the taunting would never end. Darc lowered his gaze, and his face burned with the heat of angry, fearful shame: he remembered a childhood schoolday, when a big, dumb bully teased him for being different, smarter than the bully. And he remembered the first time he talked back to a bigger child.
The fear in his gut turned inside out, and became anger. Damn it, he wasn't going to die being laughed at! He faced the jeering crowd, amazed himself that he dared.
"Shut up!" he yelled at them. "We have done you no wrong!"
The Lepers fell dead silent. These new victims broke the old pattern - whenever banished city-dwellers or stranded aircraft passengers were found by them, all they did was to scream and escape, or kill themselves.
Shara was too dazed to do anything; but if she had, her first move would have been to impale herself on the Leper leader's spear. The leader nodded thoughtfully, grinning with his grotesque set of brown-stained gums: this victim was different.
"You," he boomed, the echo rolling back and forth from the cliffs. "You are a strange intruder!" The leader stepped closer and lowered his voice. "What brings you two here? Speak!"
He made little circles in the air with his claw-like hand as he spoke. "Before we kill you..." - murmurs of disappointment came from his ranks, quickly silenced - "...tell us how you ended up here, why they dropped you off so far from the cities! If it's
a good story," he slurred casually, "we might let you live..." and added loudly: "...long enough to tell it!"
The Lepers roared with laughter. They seemed confident that it would soon be over. Darc understood that he had to speak up, or die for sure... what the hell was he supposed to say? The seconds passed all too quickly.
Those mutants, or whatever they were, seemed as impatient as they were ugly. The leader's healthy eye measured Darc up, and his bloated, red eye glared at Shara's beautiful but sun-scorched, grimy face.
The leader's hatred of city-dwellers told him what ought to be done to her - besides, if the chief didn't, someone else in the tribe would. But his own wives, deformed as they were, would become dangerously jealous. Decisions, decisions...
"Well?" he barked in his loud, slurring voice. "Your time is running out!"
Darc concentrated, let his fear recede behind his natural curiosity. These Lepers had to be human at heart. Their leader had to have a shred of reason in his misshapen head. He looked past the leader's facial deformities, saw his healthy eye - and, with an effort, focused on it.
The leader blinked uncertainly - and then Darc knew. Inspiration came. Darc drank some of his water, and cleared his throat. He touched his chest, and spoke.
"I am a Leper."
The deformed men and women around him understood Darc's statement fairly well - only its meaning confused them. Was he some kind of Leper? Was that why his hair and eyebrows were all white?
Darc pointed at the trembling figure of Shara, who were kneeling at his feet, and added emphatically: " She is a Leper." With a sweeping gesture at the crowd, he declared: " You are Lepers." Before the startled Lepers could react, Darc exclaimed gravely: " All humans are Lepers! All the people in the cities - all of them! - are Lepers! They think they are not, but they are wrong! I can prove it!"
He paused for a breath, gathering courage so that his voice wouldn't quiver. It might be a dream, not real life he was living; and the more he felt it, the more fearless he grew.
An angry voice from the Leper tribe shouted back: " Liar! You are not like us - you are different!"
Yngve, AR - Darc Ages Page 17