And my Delia of the Blue Mountains had braved these terrors and these dangers in order once more to clasp me in her arms!
No wonder the sailors of the outer oceans would sail all the weary way around by the Cyphren Sea past Donengil and up the skeleton coasts to enter the inner sea via the Dam of Days. For besides the dangers of The Stratemsk there lay ahead of us the unknown perils of the Hostile Territories.
We had safely negotiated the first passes and left the peaks on either hand and Delia had the control levers thrust full to maximum when she touched my arm and pointed.
“Look, Dray—"
The gorgeous scarlet and golden accipiter with those deadly talons extended flew above our heads, turning in lazy hunting circles. I knew it. Messenger or observer of the Star Lords, the Gdoinye croaked a harsh challenging call—either that, a challenge, or a farewell—and swung away. I did not think that any corth or zizil or other flying monster would seek to attack that blazing raptor of the Star Lords.
We waited out the flying time, eating and drinking sparingly as the dwaburs unreeled below us. The air remained thin and cold, for Delia would not dip down into the shrouded valleys for warmth for the iridescent shapes of the xi circled there, seeking their prey in the humid jungles beneath.
Gradually the high peaks passed away over our shoulders. Slowly the whole convulsed mass of The Stratemsk with its shining silver spears thrusting into dazzlement above dropped away behind us, but it would be days before those high peaks fell below the horizon. And slowly and gradually I came to thinking that we had successfully surmounted—or threaded our way through—the first great obstacle.
And then the impiters struck.
They swooped in a wide-winged onslaught from a distant ledge, swirling about us in a monstrous beating of wings. They tried to pluck us from the sky. Massive talons extended like the claws of some Earthly power excavator. Raucous croakings of their fanged mouths from which the forked tongues emerged in a constant licking were designed to frighten us into frozen immobility. The airboat rocked. The impiters were wild and savage, but I protected Delia of Delphond and my wildness and savagery met and mastered theirs.
My long sword whirled, thick with blood. And Seg's arrows flew as fast as he could draw back the string and loose. In truth, he dispatched far more than did I, although I was forced to tackle those posing the greater threat as they sought to impale us with their whip-barbed tails or rend us with their claws or snatch us up in their gape-jaws.
Massive they were, the impiters, giants of the air, and yet they cavorted in the empty levels with the speed and agility of an Earthly falcon. My sword arm bunched with muscle and I struck and struck and still they came. Now the airboat faltered, it dipped, dropped, fell away.
“She won't respond!” shouted Delia.
Thelda was screaming away and impeding me in my work as she sought to throw herself into my arms. I knocked her back into the bottom of the airboat and yelled at Delia.
“Grab her, Delia! She'll have her head taken off if she sticks it out here!"
Arrows spurted from Seg's bow. My sword lopped and slashed. The impiters continued to attack as the airboat sank lower. There was no chance of my seeing where we were falling; every straining effort had to be bent on to picking the next flying beast, sensing his line of attack, guessing whether he would strike with his jaws or flick himself over to lash with that deadly barbed tail. I saw a tail strike into the wood of the rail, splintering it. The barbs did not hold; some muscular mechanism seemed to fold them in the instant the impiter knew it had missed its stroke. I hacked the tail off.
How long that insane aerial battle went on I do not know. Now my chest was crisscrossed by red welts where the barbed tails had struck, and blood—my blood—slicked down my belly and thighs. But I battled on. I could stand up and brace myself against the movement of the airboat. My long sea training gave me at least that advantage. But Seg, too, stuck to his task, loosing arrows as though from some fabled machine-crossbow of the ancient men of the sunrise.
Trees abruptly swooshed past and a branch almost accomplished what the impiters had failed to do. I ducked and just managed to get the long sword's swing to intersect neatly with an impiter's jaw. He screeched and spun away and then—suddenly, miraculously, enormously—we were surrounded by a vindictively smothering swarm of tiny pink and yellow bodies. Tiny birds! Thousands of them.
Tiny pink and yellow birds with shrill cheeping cries were hurling themselves at the massive impiters, were darting in to sink their long sharp beaks into tender spots, where wings met body, at the juncture of tail, into the glaring, bloodshot eyes. The impiters went mad. I threw the long sword down—it had served me well but all my arms-training could not prevent me from doing what I had to do the quickest way I knew. I seized Delia and thrust her hard under a heaping pile of silks and leathers. I shouted.
“Seg! Cover yourself up—grab that idiot Thelda! Hurry!"
We cowered there, the four of us beneath silks and furs, as we let a myriad tiny birds harass and torture the mighty impiters into ignoble retreat. We could hear the sounds of that strife clear across the broad valley into which we had descended. The screechings and the shriekings persisted for some time and then gradually faded and I was able to poke a cautious head out from our cover to see the last of the flying monsters circling aloft with heavy wingbeats as the tiny dots of the little pink and yellow birds clustered thickly about.
Thelda was shaking all over and sobbing hysterically.
That was a normal reaction and I thought nothing of it. Seg tried to comfort her, but she wiped her eyes and turned a shoulder on him. Across that smooth skin lay a vivid weal.
“Well,” said my Delia. “I shall always have a soft spot in my heart for those little birds. What were they, anyway?"
No one knew their name; none of us had ever heard of them. There is much to know of Kregen, and much that I tell you now I picked up later—but to spoil the effect of those thousands of little birds with their vindictive feud with the impiters is something I cannot do. We were shaken, bruised, cut—but alive.
After inspection, Delia pronounced the airboat as unusable.
Whether from a blow from the impiters or from an inherent failure we didn't know. What we did know was that from here on in we must walk if we wished to reach Port Tavetus.
All across the western skyline and extending out of sight to north and south stretched the colossal mass of The Stratemsk.
Before us lay a valley, and then open country with the glint of rivers and the clumping of trees amid the grasses.
“We walk,” I said.
Thelda had recovered and we had drunk and eaten. Now she made a face. “I never did like walking. It's so unladylike."
Our preparations at the beginning were ambitious.
Thelda insisted on our bringing with us a mass of equipment she said was, “Absolutely vital."
I threw a handsome silver-mounted mirror into the grass.
“Sheer lumber, Thelda. If you want to preen—use a pool."
She started to argue and Delia started to try to persuade her, but I just said, “If you want to bring all that junk you must carry it yourself."
That settled that.
We took long swords, bows and arrows, daggers and knives. We took sleeping equipment. We took what food I thought we would need before we got into our stride and could hunt what would be necessary. We took water bottles, large canteens of Sanurkazz leather, which is the best tanned and treated of the inner sea although perhaps not as fine, in the manner of tooling, as that of Magdag—Zair rot them!
On Delia's suggestion we buried all the treasures—the gold and jewels, the luxury trappings. If ever we passed this way again we might retrieve them, and if some unknown warrior stalking this way found the marker he would be suddenly rich, and good luck to him. As for footwear, we took every item we had, for although I prefer to walk barefooted, the others were mindful of the discomforts of the way—Seg must be used to hunti
ng barefoot over his mountains of Erthyrdrin, and Delia, I knew from the time we had escaped from the roof-garden of the Princess Natema and had spent a wonderful time on the Plains of Segesthes, could cope adequately without shoes. No, it was a way of saying we thought Thelda would not keep up with us without shoes.
Poor Thelda!
Poor Seg!
He perfectly resigned himself to carrying her, if needs be.
I must admit that I had not a care in the world. We had landed safely. We had arms and food, we were fit, and we had a continent to explore. Vallia would be there when we got there. I was in no hurry to reach that mysterious, potent, terrible island empire and face the emperor-father of the girl I wanted to marry. The future would take care of itself; only the here and now mattered—for was not Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond, walking so lightly and freely at my side?
* * *
Chapter Nine
Into the Hostile Territories
Delia sang.
As we marched along Delia sang.
My chest itched.
As soon as Thelda had recovered herself and seen the weals crisscrossing my chest she had cooed and pursed up her fat lips and gone off to pick some brilliantly-mauve wild flowers which she bashed and mixed into a paste. Delia had wondered across and bent down and looked closely at the flowers and at Thelda's intensely absorbed face as she pounded and stirred, and had smiled slantingly at me, and gone off, humming.
Now Thelda had splattered the mauve paste all over my fiery chest, saying: “This will do you the world of good, Dray! It's an old Vallian remedy and wonderfully efficacious. Why, these little vilmy flowers will have your poor dear chest healed in no time!” The confounded paste was irritating and fretting me like a hive of bees fastened to my chest.
And Delia marched on at the head of our little caravan and sang.
She sang wonderfully. Gay, rollicking airs that sped our feet over the grass, sad little laments that made me, for one, think back on all the great times and powerful men I had known who were now no more, silly little catch-phrase songs in which we all joined—Thelda with a self-important air of consciousness of the effect she was creating, Seg with a most powerful and musical tenor that truly delighted me, and me with my own wild and savage bellowings that always made Thelda jump and Delia sing on superbly.
But that damn chest itched until I could stand it no more.
“May the Black Chunkrah take it!” I yelled. I ripped the whole sticky mauve plastery mass off and flung it into the grass and jumped on it “My chest's on fire!"
“Really, Dray!” sighed Thelda, sorely tried by my ingratitude. “You must persevere. You must give it time to work its healing magic."
“Healing magic nothing!” I shouted at her. “You try it! You stick it on your own imposing chest and see what it feels like!"
"Dray Prescot!"
“We-ell—"
The tinkling of a stream a short distance off by a line of salitas trees gave me the excuse not to exhibit further my sullen disgrace. I ran across and dived in and if all the monsters from the fabulous book called the Legends of Spitz and His Enchanted Sword that had been popular at the time I'd spent in Zenicce had started for me with gnashing jaws and talons I'd have scrubbed that confounded chest of mine clean first. Since Delia and I had taken that baptism by immersion in the sacred pool on the River Zelph in distant Aphrasöe—distant! No one knew where Aphrasöe, the City of the Savanti, was located!—we seemed to have picked up the valuable attribute of not only remaining healthy and with a promised life span of a thousand years but also of recovering with remarkable rapidity from wounds. We never seemed to get sick.
I rejoined them and I heard Delia, in a musing kind of voice, talking about a little blue flower she had picked.
“How pretty it is, Seg! See the petals, and the stamens, and the curious little silverish shape on each petal, like a heart—"
Thelda said “Oh!” and put a hand to her mouth.
“You are not well, Thelda?” inquired Seg, most anxiously.
“Oh! How silly—Oh, Dray, what you must think of me!"
“Now I've got rid of that debased paste from my chest I don't think anything,” I said. I saw Delia's face, all glowing and glorious and I knew Something Was Up—
“Oh, Dray!” wailed Thelda. “What I picked was not vilmy at all! It didn't have the silver heart—I forgot! It was fallimy, that we use to scour cisterns clean—and I put it on your chest! Oh, Dray!"
I looked at her.
She put her hands over her face and started to sob, so I had to yell at her: “You silly girl—it doesn't matter! I'm not mortally wounded—oh, for the sweet sake of Zim-Zair, stop that infernal racket!"
“Say—say you—will forgive—me! I'm so—so stupid!"
“Now, now, Thelda!” said Delia, rather more sharply than I expected.
Seg tried to put his arm around the lady companion's shoulders, but somehow she eluded him and the next moment she was up against my abused chest and snuggling up to me, crying: “I am such a silly girl, dear Dray! What you must think of me—but—"
“Thelda!"
Delia hefted her pack and nodded at Seg.
“It's time we marched!"
I couldn't have agreed more. I managed to tuck Thelda somewhere around my left hip bone—she clung on—and started off after the other two.
Oh, how my Delia had joyed in all that! She was no white-skinned flaccid lump of lard who would lie back motionlessly. She was lithe and vibrant, a sprite, alive, full of mockery and yet absolutely dedicated and honest and fearless in our love. We had met and loved and we formed the perfect whole, meeting on all levels, profound and ethereal—no, there is no woman in two worlds like my Delia of the Blue Mountains.
The country closed in soon after that into a series of knobby rounded hills through which we followed the bank of the stream. Thick vegetation choked the hills but we found animal tracks beside the river and made good progress, always on the alert for the makers of these trails. Insects tended to be a nuisance, but Delia found a herb of pale and delicate green which, when she had crushed it and made a clear syrupy liquid seemed to my eyes a better proposition than poor Thelda's thick mauve paste. With this smeared over our faces and bodies the insects left us severely alone; I quite liked the scent of it.
Once more the country opened out and now we could see distant mountains—mere knobs on the ground compared with The Stratemsk; but nonetheless for that mountains through which we must find a way, walking. Numerous species of wild deer roamed the plains and I sighed for a fleet zorca between my knees. As it was Seg did some crafty stalking and with a single arrow provided us with our supper. We selected carefully-chosen campsites, for the horrific stories of the Hostile Territories, although so far nowhere borne out in what we had encountered, still rang in our minds. And so we proceeded across the land toward the far-off mountains. Twice we saw smoke rising from distant elevations in the plain, but these places we avoided.
Who—or what—lived here we did not know and had no desire to make their acquaintance.
An earnest of the wisdom of that decision came on a morning when the twin suns of Scorpio flamed into the sky and threw slanting sunshine gloriously through fluffed and meandering clouds above. We broke camp and strapped up and set off. The trail we were following dipped through a defile and so, naturally, we detoured that, clambering over scrubby hillsides and around thorn-ivy bushes. Ambushes are no places to take the girl one loves.
“Look—” said Seg in a low voice.
Ahead of us, in a crevice in the hillside that trended down to the defile below, something glittered. We approached with the silent tread of the hunter—Seg's learned in his mountains of Erthyrdrin and mine with my Clansmen in Segesthes.
Two dead bodies lay there. They were not men. Neither, for that matter, were they members of any of the races of half-men of Kregen with which I was at that time acquainted, Fristle, Och, Rapa, Chulik, Sorzart, or other—and my comp
anions had never met these people before. Of medium height, they possessed two legs and two arms. Their faces reminded me of the hunting dogs of some of the clans that roamed the Great Plains of Segesthes, but there was a considerable admixture of the leem there, too. I was struck by the vast forward-thrusting lower jaw and the dewlaps that hung down. Mind you, the bodies were decomposing and the flies—they get everywhere—were busy. The girls moved back, out of range of the stink, but Seg and I were professionals and we knew what we had to find out.
Weapons first: Short thrusting swords like the short swords of my Clansmen. Long and slender lances with many-barbed tips. Tomahawk-like axes. Knives. Metal: From the mixture of steel and bronze, we judged these people to be in much the same area of development as the people of the inner sea where steel would be used if it could be come by, and bronze if not. Armor: Practically nonexistent, consisting of leather arm-guards, a leather cap, and a leather breastplate with strips of some pretty hard substance stitched into it. Seg thought this was a bone or a horn of some kind. Clothes: Minimal, breechclouts as worn all over Kregen, with a padding vest beneath the breastplate. No shoes or sandals. Accouterments: The usual leather belts and pouches.
Then we both looked at what had killed these beast-men.
From the face of each one protruded a long arrow. An exceptionally long arrow. Working carefully with his knife Seg got the arrows out. He gave a grunt and lifted the points for my inspection. They were not the steel piles I would have expected.
“Flint,” Seg said. His tanned face screwed up. “Seems I have relations around here."
He did a few quick flip-overs of his outstretched fingers, measuring the shaft, and then he whistled.
“They're from a master-bow.” I knew that the esoteric of toxophily dominated much of Seg's life. Various grades of bow each had its name, every part, every action, every function, had its name and its ranking. The necessity of this was obvious. Seg, during our time together, had taught me much of the longbow, as I had swapped details with him of the compound bow of my Clansmen and the crossbow I had introduced to my old vosk-skulls. He had built himself a number of longbows, none, of course, from Yerthyr wood, and we had shot together in friendly rivalry. As was to be expected, at first he had outshot me by a margin. Then, as I got the hang of the longbow and mastered the transition from the compound reflex bow with which I was thoroughly familiar, as I have mentioned, I gave him a run for his money. They say you must start to train a longbowman by beginning with his grandfather. Once the society exists, however, and a man like myself with a lot of time to devote to the practice of arms is dropped into it, with the necessary requirements of an archer already existing, a great bowman may be made of him—as I had demonstrated on the Plains of Segesthes.
Warrior of Scorpio [Dray Prescot #3] Page 9