by Lin Carter
The men stood silent, glancing at each other. It was a slow, agonizing death the priest had named. The green, flaming chemical that lights the demon-frighting lamps falls drop by searing drop upon the writhing naked body of the condemned. These were rough, hard men, and they loathed Valarda’s kind with an ancient loathing. But more than a few turned pale or looked away.
Houm, however, smiled and licked his thick lips.
And then the world changed with a crash.
From nowhere a needle of incandescence flared. It sizzled before the very booted toes of Prince Zarouk, searing a black, smoking line between the desert chieftain and his captives. Almost before the fire-needle vanished, a voice from above rang out, hard and sharp as the crack of a whip.
“Nobody moves!”
A hundred eyes searched the upper works of the citadel and found him on the ledge.
Ryker with his guns out and ready, and the deadly fury of hell naked in his cold, ice-colored eyes.
They put a league of dust-desert between them and the dead city before Ryker dared let them slow their stride.
The lopers they had taken were their own, but were well rested from Houm’s delay in the city, where he had evidently arrived earlier than convenient for Zarouk to meet him at their prearranged rendezvous. There were doubtless faster slidars to be found among the caravan beasts, but they were accustomed to these brutes.
They had ridden fast and hard and almost without words, not even words of thanks for the rescue Ryker had so brilliantly pulled off. But as they had mounted into the saddles back there in the courtyard, ringed about by silent men with eyes that spoke their hatred for them, Valarda had lifted her golden eyes to those of the Earthling for one long, searching look. Tears glistened in her silky lashes, and her soft red mouth had been tender, vulnerable, trembling with emotion.
He had grinned, saying nothing. Sometimes words can be unspoken, and yet heard clearly, and maybe this was one of those times.
For a bit of extra life insurance, Ryker suggested they lake the long-legged desert prince with them, and also his pet priest, whose name turned out to be Dmu Dran. These two he had commanded bound with the same leathern thongs as had bound the wrists of the girl, the boy, and the old man.
The boy Kiki did the tying. And he did it with a vengeance, pulling the tough thongs tight and tighter still, even as Zarouk’s henchmen had pulled them tight.
The old priest, sunk in apathy, his withered mask of a face dull eyed and vacant, did not wince—perhaps the lad had gone easy on his bonds. But Kiki had tied the desert prince tight indeed. Zarouk had not winced, either, and the tight-lipped silence and the curious dignity—even a sort of majesty—with which the maurauder accepted this sudden and unexpected reversal of fate won him Ryker’s grudging but unspoken respect.
But if his tongue was silent, his eyes were eloquent and spoke volumes. They burned with hellfire, those amber eyes, and were as quick and alert and deadly as a snake’s.
This is a bad man to have for your enemy, thought Ryker to himself, sourly, cursing the day he had ever gotten himself mixed up in this stinking mess. But if he hadn’t, he would never have found Valarda … never have seen her dance … never have gazed deep into those unforgettable eyes of fluid gold ….
Still, Zarouk would make a deadly foe, he knew. The man was all fire and pride and ambition, stretched tight as a trigger and thirsty for blood. An unsettling, explosive amalgam of religious fanatic and something of the megalomaniac, he decided. Ryker didn’t know just how he knew it, but he hadn’t kept alive this long without being able to read men at a glance.
And he was seldom wrong. Not about men like Zarouk.
This was the sort of man who would follow you across the wide world, if you earned his hate. He would track you to the very doorstep of hell, to have his revenge.
So maybe it was best to have him at your side, Ryker had decided. Then, if his men break their sworn oath, and follow, or lay ambush, or attack, you can at least have the pleasure of taking him down to hell with you, with a yard of sword steel through his guts before you get the same through yours.
He hadn’t thought to bring Houm along as well. He judged that the shrewd, greedy little merchant could be tempted and hired to flirt with danger for gold, but probably didn’t give a damn for vengeance or religion or much of anything else, except perhaps the fat, giggling boy he kept as a pet.
And there is where Ryker made the worst mistake of his life.
They got a league and a little more into the northern parts of the Merope before the lopers died beneath them. They had been given a slow-acting poison, probably the night before. Maybe Houm figured that Ryker might have his wind up, and would spook easy, or be wary enough to try to make a break for freedom during the night. Or maybe one of his men had fed the poisoned food to the slidars when it became obvious, back in the courtyard, what his plans were.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were afoot now in the Dustlands and would have to walk all the way to wherever it was they were going, with a hundred desert warriors behind them, armed and mounted and hungry for revenge.
So they started walking. There wasn’t anything else to do.
10. The Betrayal
They trudged through the Dustlands of the northern Merope all the rest of that day, putting as much distance between themselves and Zarouk’s desert hawks as could humanly be done.
It was hard going.
The dust was as fine and as soft as talcum powder, and in the light gravity of this world, where an Earthling weighs about one third what he would weigh back home, they raised the dust with every step. It clung to their robes, their furs, it coated their faces and worked its way into eyes and nostrils and the inside of their mouths. And there was nothing they could do about it but endure it.
The desert dust was so soft that men sank to their ankles in it, and, after a time, walking became sheer torture. It was like wading through foot-deep molasses. Every step of the way, the dust dragged against the pull of your muscles, until they ached as if hot needles were thrust into them.
There was no cure for this discomfort, either.
When after a time the old man, Melandron, fell to his knees and could go no further, Ryker knew that he had assumed the leadership of this unlucky expedition, and that from here on all of the hard decisions were up to him.
The old man feebly begged them to leave him and go on without him. Valarda said nothing; she bit her lip and veiled her gold eyes behind shadowy lashes. The boy Kiki was downcast and silent. His mischievous pranks and
merry jests were a thing of the past now, for even his youthful ebullience and supple strength were worn and wearied.
Ryker gruffly bade the old man be silent, ignored his weak struggles, and picked him up in his arms. A flicker came and went swiftly in the eyes of Zarouk. Almost too swiftly for notice, the desert prince resumed his imperturbable, bland expression. But Ryker had seen that flicker, and realized that if he must carry Melandron his hands would not be free to go for his guns, if go for them he must.
He solved both problems easily, by making Zarouk carry the old man! The prince bit his lip, scowled, but did as he was told. Rather than cut his hands free, Ryker had him carry Valarda’s grandsire piggyback.
They trudged on.
There was no water, only a little wine. This he rationed out in grudging sips. It was barely sufficient to wet parched, dust-covered lips, but it would have to do.
The old priest, Dmu Dran, did not weaken and have to be carried, and for this, at least, Ryker was grimly thankful. The priest was an enemy, and, even in the best of times, Ryker bore no love for priests—-Martian or Earthsider—but he wasn’t sure he had it in him to abandon the old man to die the slow death of dehydration.
Thank God he didn’t have to make that decision. For, despite his age and seeming frailty, the fanatic seemed tireless as iron.
The cliffs that were the sides of the great plateau were ever before them, but never seemed to get
any nearer. They danced and wavered in the tired vision of the travelers like some devilish mirage of the waste, and seemed in fact to recede into the distance the closer you came.
Ryker, who had the rudiments of an education, thought
of Tantalus and Ixion and Sisyphus, and of the torments invented for them by the gods. He grinned sourly; Mars could have taught a lesson or two to the Olympians, when it came to dreaming up tortures.
They plodded on, and every foot seemed like a mile, and every minute like an hour. Somehow they kept going.
At last they reached the foot of the plateau, which proved to be no illusion after all. Here they would have fallen to the ground to sleep where they fell, but Ryker drove them on with oaths and blows and curses.
He was made of granite, but even granite can crack and crumble. For a little while longer, though, he held strong.
He drove them into the mouth of a deep, narrow ravine, and made them follow it. They stumbled along on numb legs, dazed and mindless, like men who walked in their sleep. Between the tall, towering walls the ravine twisted and turned, but at its end the solid rock of the plateau was worn away in strata which could be climbed, although not easily.
It was like ascending a staircase built for giants, but they made it to the top of the plateau. And here he allowed them to rest and to make camp. Here he felt safe—safe enough, at any rate. He knew that the desert hawks would be following them. But he also knew there was no way for Zarouk’s warriors to tell which of the ten thousand ravines into which the edge of the plateau was cloven was the one they had followed.
And from the edge of the cliff wall, by daylight, he could see for many miles, and spot the raiders on their trail.
He did not let Valarda make a fire. Fire can be seen far off in the black gloom of a Martian night. So they munched dry bread and devoured cold meat, huddled in
their fur cloaks for warmth. They had each two mouthfuls of cold wine from the leather bottles, and it was Valarda who served them.
Ryker was bone weary by now, and so tired that his brain felt numb and dead as if his skull were stuffed with cotton, but he drove himself a bit further. There were two prisoners to tend to, and both were very dangerous and deadly enemies. But, after all, they too were men.
So he unbound their hands and stood by, his palms resting on his gun butts, watching while Zarouk and the aged priest chafed the blood back to their stiff limbs. He permitted them to relieve themselves a little ways from camp, then herded them back with the others, and bound their hands again, and their ankles, too, this time, and wrapped them in their cloaks for sleep.
Probably, he should have killed them or left them at the foot of the cliff to die in the night, but it was not in him to murder men in cold blood. So, cursing himself for his weakness, he let them live a while longer.
Then he slept. There was no strength left in him to stand guard all night. And, anyway, the wine had made him woozy and more than a little drunk. And he would need every atom of his strength to go on tomorrow.
He slept like a dead man. The deep, bottomless sleep of absolute exhaustion. And there were no dreams this time.
He had done all that a man could do. He had taken every precaution that was possible for a man of his fiber. The two captives he made sleep apart, with the others between them, to reduce the possibility that they might crawl together in the darkness and work each other’s bonds free.
He had no fear of this. Zarouk and Dmu Dran were only men, and probably far wearier than he. They, too, would sleep deeply—as deeply as he.
Which is why he awoke sometime after sunrise, as
tonished to find his guns gone and his wrists tied behind him with leather thongs.
Ryker rolled over onto his back and peered around him with a cold horror in his heart and a sinking feeling deep in his guts at what he would see.
But instead of what he had feared, quite a different sight met his eyes.
“Surprised, scum?” Zarouk asked, in a voice like iron scraping against iron. “No man can trust a zhaggua. Now you have learned the truth of it, fool!”
Ryker stared. Valarda and Melandron and the boy Kiki were nowhere to be seen. They were gone. Gone, too, were their sleeping furs, and all the gear. And the food and drink they had carried off from the caravan encampment, and the weapons, too.
He rolled onto one side and sat up, painfully and stiffly, unable to believe the evidence of his senses.
The holsters strapped to his thighs were empty. They had taken his guns.
And then it came to him that one other thing was gone from him as well, an old, familiar weight he had worn over his heart for so long that he had become accustomed to the weight of it, and hardly felt it any more.
Now the very absence of that weight reminded him of it.
The ancient black seal he had carried in a little leather bag suspended about his throat by a thong was missing!
Bag, seal and thong they had stolen.
And left him here to die.
His heart contracted, became a cold, hard lump within his breast. And something within him died then. Something he had begun to feel for the girl with the golden eyes … something that was more than mere lust or mere desire … something that had begun in a hungry want-ing, but had grown and flowered into something that was very close to love.
Dead, now, that emotion. Burnt to ashes in the fires of the fierce, hating fury that woke within him.
Zarouk saw it in the hard mask of his face and the deadly coldness of his slitted eyes, and laughed to see it. The old priest who lay across from him, hooded eyes fixed on nothing, must have felt it too, but said nothing. His heart was so charged with the venom of hatred there was no room for more.
Sometime in the night while he had lain in that deathlike sleep of utter weariness—or in the first light of dawn, perhaps—they had quietly awakened—Valarda and her old grandsire and the naked imp of a boy.
Stealthily and furtively, they had crept upon Ryker and thieved from him his power guns and the thing that lay above upon his heart in the little leather bag.
Then, gently and carefully, so as not to waken him, they had bound his wrists together so that he was helpless. Then they had gathered up their furs, and all the food and drink there was left, and stole away like the thieves they were.
Or maybe they hadn’t been so gentle and so careful with him, after all. Maybe they hadn’t feared of waking him before they were done with their treachery and betrayal. Maybe they hadn ‘t had to fear, because of the drug Valarda had slipped into the wine she served him the night before.
For, from the vile, oily taste on his tongue, and the little hot red throb of pain behind his eyes, Ryker guessed that he had been drugged. He had been drugged once before, while those he thought were friends had robbed him and left him to die, and he remembered the effects of it well.
A thirst for vengeance came into him then, like a cold black poison in his blood.
Those who had betrayed him that time before had left him to die, like this—bound and helpless for the first cliff dragon or sandcat who came near, hunting meat.
But he had fooled them.
He had endured. He had clung tenaciously to life with an iron grip. And he had lived. Lived to hunt them down, those three, one by one, though half a world lay between them.
And he had taken his revenge, slowly, one at a time, enjoying it. Afterwards, he had not liked remembering what he had done, but he did not regret the doing of it. For a man pays his debts, every last debt, or he is something less than a man.
Staring at the empty day with hard, slitted eyes, Ryker knew that he would pay this debt, too. On the boy; on the old man; and—yes—even on the girl. The girl he had been very near to loving… .
“If you’re done feeling sorry for yourself, F’yagh,” said Zarouk quietly, “roll over here beside me. There is a knife slid down my boot, but as my hands are tied I cannot reach it. Maybe you can. If so, cut me free, and I will free your hands, and the priest’s
.”
“You’ll slit my throat first, and you know it,” grunted Ryker.
Prince Zarouk shrugged. “Why should I bother? We’ll all die here—of thirst, or of the fangs of the first beast that comes this way. Unless you cut me free.”
“You’ll blood your knife in me the moment your hands are free, because you hate my guts.”
The prince looked at him. “I have no love for you, scum of the F’yagha. But there are those whom I hate more than you. You know the truth of that, because you
hate them too—the friends you rescued from the mob back in Yeolarn, who betrayed you here while you slept, and stole away like thieves in the night, leaving you to die. You hate them, too, more than you hate Zarouk, who has done you no particular hurt.”
Ryker said nothing. He could not deny the truth of what Zarouk said, but swallowing it left a bitter taste.
“Come, man, fight for life, don’t lie there pitying yourself!” the prince said levelly. “I would be a fool to slay you now, even if I could. When the beasts come—as they will come, unless my laggardly men get here first— we’ll have a better chance at living longer, two strong men to stand against them. The priest is nothing, you know that, half-mad, and old and feeble. I cannot fight the dragons of the cliffs alone, armed only with a slim knife. But the two of us, together, we might live. To be revenged someday on those who left us here.”
Ryker sighed, knowing he was a damned fool, and rolled over to where the desert-hawk sat, and began fumbling for the knife thrust down into his boot. He found it after a time, and inched it out. Then, with numb fingers and aching wrists, he sawed clumsily at the thongs that bound Zarouk’s hands—sawing at the flesh of those hands, as often as not, although the prince neither winced nor cried out at the pain of it.
After a long while, Zarouk was free. He chafed his wrists until the circulation began to return, then got up and went over to where Dmu Dran lay, and cut his bonds.
Then he strode over to where Ryker lay in a huddle and stood looking down at him, smiling slightly, fingering the knife.