Comfortably she fell asleep within the circle of puhlets, their long hair and body heat warming better than the machines of the wagons.
Not long after that, she was again half-wakened, as arms picked her up and carried her outside. “Dray-Gon?” she asked in a small hoarse voice. “Yes,” he whispered back, “I’m taking you to a better place.”
His voice sounded funny, and she wanted to ask where a better place was, but she couldn’t think clearly. She passed out. From time to time she wakened, and sensed she was riding on a horshet, with someone behind holding her on. She tried to orient that with her memories of descending into a crater, and she was sick. “I want to go back and sleep with the puhlets,” she said in a mumbling way, “I feel cold.”
“Tsk, tsk,” he said, “that’s too bad, princess, but from now on, you don’t get what you want.”
This time she recognized his voice. It wasn’t Dray-Gon! She opened her mouth to scream, but a hard, gloved hand clamped down over her mouth, shutting off her cries. “Don’t struggle, princess! We’re riding on a rim, and any resistance on your part will have us both falling over, and remember how that horshet screamed. I’m taking you back to the wagons.” He laughed in an exhilarated way. “This black land was an unexpected miracle! Every day I’ve waited for my chance to do this, but I couldn’t get to you as long as you were locked in that wagon! Princess, you are going to make me the richest man in all of Upper and Lower El Dorraine!”
7
The Rage of Mark-Kan
Before the first sun cracked the sky with color, Dray-Gon was up and dressed, and breaking camp. Tossing orders right and left. “Prepare a hearty breakfast,” he said to Arth-Rin, who was chief cook today, “for I want the princess to eat well before we set off again.” He thought he would let her sleep until the last possible moment, and ordered the men to work as quietly as possible, leaving her tent until last.
It was then he saw Doctor Benlon hurrying to him, almost at a run. “Captain,” he called out as he came, “I checked the tent of the princess, and she isn’t there!”
“What do you mean, she isn’t there?” Dray-Gon quickly scanned his eyes about. It wasn’t necessary for her to sneak off for privacy to do some intimate thing, her tent was fully equipped to take care of her needs.
“She’s gone, Dray-Gon,” said Benlon as he neared. “Even the blanket I covered her with.”
“By the Gods! Do you suppose she wandered off, delirious?”
Benlon shook his head. “No, she wouldn’t be delirious now. The last time I checked on her, she was sleeping on the floor with four puhlets, and seemed quite normal. No fever, not too cold.”
During this, Raykin had been checking over the horshets. “Dray-Gon, six of our horshets are missing, and I had to round these up. It seems someone deliberately unhitched them, and forced them to scatter!”
“Who isn’t here?” barked Dray-Gon, turning about in a circle to discover for himself who was missing. As familiar as he was with the men he had been traveling with for so many days, it took only a few seconds to know. Mark-Kan! He swore to himself. “Arth-Rin, Raykin, saddle three horshets, we’re going after them!” He turned to Benlon. “Set the tents up again, and wait for us here. No doubt Mark-Kan has headed back toward the wagons, since he took enough horshets to pull one.” Dray-Gon stuffed into his belt one of the laser beam weapons, and told Arth-Rin and Raykin to do the same.
“Why did he take the princess?” asked Benlon, bewildered-appearing.
“What do you think? If he turns her over to the outlaws, she’ll be worth a king’s ransom. And do you know what else, since Mark-Kan is one of our men, the Uppers will think we were all in the plot! And the war the king tried to prevent by distracting us with this fool trip will begin!”
“Then we will all go, to save the princess, to stop the war!” cried out Benlon, and behind him all the men shouted they were willing, eager…say the word.
To Dray-Gon’s reasoning, three men would travel faster than nineteen, and someone had to stay and care for the extra horshets and round them up, and see they didn’t wander away. “Don’t worry…we have the weapons, Mark-Kan doesn’t have any!”
He didn’t speak of the ring of wagon keys that were missing.
In another few minutes, the three men left, carrying with them a light supply of food and wine.
Alone in her wagon, bound hand and foot, but not gagged, Sharita tossed and squirmed, trying to wiggle out of the ropes that held her.
After the long, tiresome journey back to the wagons, Mark-Kan had thrown her heedlessly on her own bed, and then left to eat and quench his thirst with the large supply of food and wine left in another wagon. In an hour or so, he lurched back, staggering to her bedside and staring down at her, reeking of wine, his pupils wide and unfocused as he sat on the bed and reached for her.
Quickly squirming out of his reach, Sharita thrust her bound legs forward, aiming at his most vulnerable area, but he dodged her kick just in time, and slapped her so viciously her vision blurred! “Now hear this, princess,” he began in a slurred voice, “right now you are no king’s brat! You are just another woman. During all of this trip, you have never looked at me one time, like I wasn’t good enough. Well, I am every bit as good as Dray-Gon any day! My father is a bakaret just like his, and if you had treated me nicer, maybe you wouldn’t be in the position you are in now. When I’ve finished with you, I am driving this wagon back to the borderlands, and turning you over to the outlaws. And then I am staying just long enough to collect my share of the ransom.” His drunken laughter sounded dry and throaty, terrifying, as once more he reached for her. This time she didn’t move, only waited. “This is nice,” he purred, “but don’t you have anything to say?” Asking as he leaned above to stroke her hair, a wild tumbled mess, before his hand moved lower, to her throat. “I think you are an animal, a beast! I hope Dray-Gon slits your throat!” she said coldly arrogant, disregarding his insulting caresses.
He sneered: “Do you think he loves you, princess? Dray-Gon has a servant girl he gives his love to; you he uses to get to the throne. He and his father plotted all this very carefully: make a lot of trouble, make the king think a civil war was inevitable, and he would marry you off to Dray-Gon so the lowerlands would be appeased with one of their own as your husband. Your mother wasn’t a true native of Bari-Bar, all her ancestors were Uppers! Anybody can grow rich farming in Bari-Bar—or they could, until they all died…so mysteriously.”
“What do you know about that?” asked Sharita in a shocked whisper.
Mark-Kan laughed wildly, apparently too intoxicated to think clearly. Then he bent over to kiss her. Using all her strength, Sharita thrust her head forward, butting her forehead forcefully against Mark-Kan’s mouth. He screamed out as blood and teeth flew from his bleeding lips. Now furiously enraged, cursing and yelling obscenities, he began to beat her, with his fists, with slaps against one side of her face and then the other. Then he seized a handful of her hair, and smashed his fist against her jaw so her head jerked backward, and almost she lost consciousness. She willed herself to stay awake, to protect herself. He said, “I don’t want to ugly you up too much, princess,” and then he was surveying what damage he had already inflicted, “or else it won’t be any pleasure making love to you.” It was then he tore off her nightgown.
Wary as a wild animal at bay, the princess cringed on the bed, drawing her knees, shielding her nudity with her bound arms, as one of her eyes began to swell. Mark-Kan began taking off his own clothes. When he had finished, he came toward her, smiling a big, drunken, confident grin. She waited until he was positioned just right, and then came up with both knees directly into his groin. He screamed and fell backward, rolling to the floor, writhing in agony. Sharita threw herself off the bed, and began to inch her way toward a drawer where she knew a knife was. Somehow she opened that drawer; her fumbling, trembling hands found the knife, and holding the weapon clenched between her knees, she started sawing at the ropes t
hat bound her wrists together. Frantically fast she worked, careless as she moved her arms back and forth, with her eyes on Mark-Kan, so the knife cut her flesh as well as the ropes.
“By the Gods, this time I might just well kill you, princess!” Mark-Kan gasped as he began to recover. He tried to stand straight, but couldn’t. Doubled over in a crouch, he came at her again. Wild with fear, Sharita sawed at the ropes as Mark-Kan lurched forward and fell on her.
She screamed and then he screamed!
Suddenly blood was everywhere! Warm, sticky—she was bathed in it. The terrible weight of Mark-Kan lay heavy on her. As she struggled to wiggle from beneath him, he gave a gurgling groan, and rolled off to heavily sigh. It was then she saw what she had done. The knife held tightly between her knees had plunged up to the hilt in Mark-Kan’s abdomen, and in trying to wiggle free, she had screwed in the knife even farther. She doubled over and began to retch. She had killed a man! A horrible, obscene man, but still a human being! For a long time she cried.
Her hands were still bound; her ankles still lashed together, and she was naked lying beside a naked dead man, with her knife in his belly. Closing her eyes, she grasped the bloody knife handle and tugged it free. It made a sucking, sickening noise as it came free, a sound she would never forget. A slow ooze of blood followed the blade’s departure. Dazed, disoriented, in pain, she automatically wiped the blade on his clothes on the floor, and started sawing at her wrist ropes again.
When she was finally free, she staggered to her feet and into the small bath where she washed off Mark-Kan’s blood in the shower, crying all the while. The battered face she saw in the mirror wasn’t hers. It belonged to some horrible ugly woman, all red and swollen, with puffed-out bleeding lips, one eye entirely closed. Sobbing, she dressed, keeping her eyes averted from the dead man. “I have to see this through to the end,” she told herself, “and go alone back to the black lands.”
Thoughts came of her father, her mother, of Dray-Gon and what Mark-Kan had said about Ron Ka plotting with his son.
Then she remembered that faint suggestion that Mark-Kan knew what had happened at Bari-Bar.
The three rode over the black crusty earth less carefully than when they had entered, and on reaching the white sands, they used the whips on the racing horshets, something they had never done before. The terrified animals tried to run faster, but it wasn’t easy, for their hooves dug deep into the loose sand.
Dray-Gon was far ahead of Arth-Rin and Raykin, and it was he who saw her first, heading away from the wagons. He drew his horshet in so abruptly, it reared high, almost throwing him off. “Sharita?” he asked, a tight knot coming in his throat when he saw her condition.
She stared at him with dead eyes, her face all bruised and swollen, and her hair still glued together with blood the shower had failed to remove. “I killed him,” she said tonelessly. “I just finished burying him in the sand.”
“You killed Mark-Kan?” Dray-Gon asked incredulously, scanning his eyes down over her body. “Did he hurt you?”
“He beat me,” she answered without any inflection, as if it didn’t matter.
“Anything else?” he asked, not meaning just the injuries he saw.
“That’s when I killed him,” she said simply, not looking at him, but into space. “Here are the keys Mark-Kan stole,” she said, putting in his hand the key ring.
“Ah, Sharita, I don’t believe that! He’s twice your size! How could you kill him?” Automatically he hitched the ring of the keys to his belt.
She turned her eyes on him, one almost closed shut. “He was going to use me, then turn me over to the outlaws to hold for ransom, so I kicked him with my knees and found a knife and sawed at the ropes while he groaned and writhed on the floor. I had the knife gripped between my knees when he came at me again, and he tripped and fell—right on the knife. His blood went all over me.” Her face crumpled pitifully. “Now my wagon, which was so nice and clean, is covered with blood. I didn’t want to leave him in there, so I dragged him out by his feet.” Then she began sobbing again.
Arth-Rin and Raykin had reached them in time to hear most of her story. Solemnly, compassionately they watched as Dray-Gon sprang down from his horshet and went to lift the collapsing princess from hers. He held her for a moment tight in his embrace, despite the two men who were watching, and stroked her hair, speaking in the soft, soothing way he had spoken to her before. “It’s all right, Sharita. You told me Mark-Kan watched you all the time, and I ignored that, so it was my fault. I should have kept you better guarded—though I never suspected he would try anything like this. Why, I grew up knowing him…” He tilted up her battered, swollen face and kissed her bruises, her puffed-up eye, and her cut and still-bleeding lips. She stared at him in a dazed way, hardly feeling anything. Then he placed her on his horshet, and mounted to ride behind her, as Raykin lashed together all six of the horshets Mark Kan had stolen.
“Come on, we’re going back to the others,” he said to Arth-Rin and Raykin. As they headed back to the black pit where the others waited, he comforted the princess. “Soon as Doctor Benlon sees you, he’ll treat you with the pufar ash healer, and soon you’ll be beautiful again. He didn’t really hurt you, did he? I mean, he didn’t…?”
“If you’re trying to ask if he raped me, no, he didn’t. He was drunk and naked when he fell on top of me and killed himself.” She turned and tried to see what he was thinking. “If he had succeeded, would it have mattered? What would you have done?”
“I would have gone back and dug him up, and killed him again!” he said with so much vehemence, it sounded believable.
Sharita kept looking at him. She tried to push back all the insidious suspicions about Dray-Gon and his father: the contrived threats of civil war to be used as a form of blackmail to force her father to give her to a man in marriage she might not have otherwise wanted…
8
Into the Green Canyon
It was the next morning, early, before they again broke camp and rode up and out of the black crater, for Benlon ordered the princess to bed on her return, gave her a sedative, and treated her wounds. When she awakened, her cuts had healed, and her swollen face and eye were normal-appearing again, and hunger growled her stomach. The nineteen men had stood and cheered when she made her appearance at their dinner table, all of them looking at her with a new respect.
This time as they traveled on through the eerie, creepy black land, she rode directly behind Dray-Gon, and behind her was Arth-Rin. Sharita felt well enough to give this alien terrain her full attention. She presumed at some ancient time a fire must have ravished this land, and she looked pityingly at the bleak skeleton trees that raised begging stone arms toward the sky. They rode past giant black onyx boulders that glittered like faceted jewels, and several of the men left their horshets long enough to fill their pockets with smaller pieces of this black rock. For five nights they slept uncomfortably in a succession of frigid cold crater bottoms.
On the fifth morning, Sharita awakened, startled to hear all the commotion outside her tent. The inky blackness of night was barely dimming, the first sun’s rays just beginning to peek over the crater rim, and too sleepy to question the movements outside of her tent, she closed her eyes and sank into sleep again.
Voices came loud into her dreams, excited and dashing madly about—noise that she tried to shut out so she could sleep just a bit longer. She told herself she was only dreaming, and there was nothing to be afraid of, for Dray-Gon pitched his tent directly opposite hers, so close he had said he could hear her breathing—though she doubted that—unless she snored, and she didn’t believe that either.
Finally she could feign sleep no longer, or pretend the commotion was but a dream, and she hurried out of the tent fully dressed, for they all slept that way now, to keep warmer, to be ready to move instantly, without wasting time. The young men were scattered all over the crater, searching in a frantic way. “What has happened?” she called out to the nearest one.
“Where could they go?” she called out again. Her question was answered with a perplexed shrug. “The Gods only know!” came his answer.
The loss of the animals was an overwhelming catastrophe! First they were forced to abandon the comfortable, homelike wagons, now their only means of transportation, except for their legs, was gone. All their supplies were stacked on the ground, waiting to be strapped on the supply horshets. Without the animals, the Green Mountain would never be reached! And from where she stood, in the black bottom of nowhere, Sharita couldn’t even see the Mountain.
She looked around for Dray-Gon, but all the men were so distant, she couldn’t tell one from another in their alike uniforms, grown black and sooty from the loose black particles that where everywhere. She was as grimy as any of them.
It was Ral-Bar, from the province of Shal-Bretta, who found the high crack in the face of the black rock, three giant steps up from the bottom. “Look here,” he called back to the three men closest. “There’s a tunnel going through to somewhere, and there’s evidence on the floor that the animals went this way.”
The three men behind him scampered up to his level and followed Ral-Bar inside the long, dark, cavernous tunnel. It was darker than a thousand moonless, starless nights inside of that crater pocket. So Dray-Gon pulled out his pocket illuminator and beamed it on the ground, as did the others. He felt the black rock, different here than on the crusty top surface. Here it was as hard as crystal, and his hand came away clean. But they had to step carefully, for the tunnel was pitted, dropping off sharply when least expected. There was green mold on some of the rocks that reeked unpleasantly. As quickly as they dared and considered safe, the four men followed the animal tracks, not permitting themselves to think of the inevitable results if the animals were permanently lost.
Gods of Green Mountain Page 24