Diadem from the Stars

by Clayton, Jo;

  The hands dissolved and she fell, tumbling over and over through the air while wind whipped her hair back away from her face, a natural wind born out of her plunge downward toward the distant earth. She smiled, remembering nestling in the hawk’s brain—a hundred years ago, it seemed—and then felt a little sad to be ending the tale of her adventure here.

  Then the diadem chimed a single piercing note, drifting through the air like a floating spark. Her fall slowed. Her feet dipped until she was upright, drifting downward more and more slowly until she touched the ground as gently as a falling leaf.

  A stone came flying out of the darkness and crashed into her shoulder. She gasped. A second stone flew past, just missing her head. A low animal growl rumbled from a dozen throats and filled the still night air with menace. More stones came and the growl grew louder as the medwey gathered courage. A rock hit her leg. Another struck her shoulder.

  The driving urge to life that had impelled her through the traumatic occurrences of the past months flared once again and sent her fleeing blindly into the darkness. She stumbled and went down again and again as her feet hooked into unseen obstacles, scrambling up each time, her breathing sobbing in her ears as the howls of her tormenters jerked her onto her feet and away from the mob.

  She heard a new sound ahead, the plaintive mewling of irritated sesmatwe. They loomed up like pale shadows as she rounded a boulder and moved from the shadow under the trees. Stavver caught her as she staggered to a stop.

  “Leyta.” Khateyat patted her shoulder. “Here.” She held out a leather-wrapped bundle. “Good journey and may the rest of your life be blessed.” She touched Aleytys’s cheek. “My daughter.”

  Stavver pulled himself up on the riding pad. “Get mounted,” he said impatiently. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Aleytys nodded and swung up on the sesmat, balancing carefully so that she wouldn’t wake the baby.

  “Here, Leyta, put this around your shoulder.” Khateyat handed her a folded piece of leather. “A babysling.”

  “Thanks, Khatya.” She slipped the strap over one shoulder and settled the baby on the opposite hip. Khateyat put a hand on her knee. “I’ve told Stavver how to go.” A howl came from the trees and she went on hastily. “R’nenawatalawa bless you.”

  Stavver gave an impatient exclamation and rode off. As Aleytys kneed her mount forward, she called, “I wish you really were my mother.” She kicked her heels into the sesmat’s side and plunged into the darkness after Stavver.

  12

  Stavver jabbed at the fire. “Another day probably,” he grunted.

  “Ahi, at last.” Aleytys stretched and yawned. “It’s been a long journey for me. You think we’ll have to wait long for your friends?”

  “Depends on who answers.” He stared at her across the fire, frowning slightly as she bent over her sleeping baby. “Stop fussing with the kid and come here.”

  She lifted her head and smiled sleepily at him. “No.”

  Jumping up, he strode around the fire and pulled her to her feet. “You weren’t so reluctant before.”

  She eyed him calmly. “I was already pregnant then. I don’t want to have your baby, Stavver.” She pulled back against his hold, quietly trying to free herself. “I’m tired, thief. We have to get up early.”

  He caught her by the nape of her neck, his long wiry fingers closing around her heavy braids. With his free hand he caressed her face, then her breasts. Feeling her response, he bent his head and kissed her eyes lightly, then her mouth … until Aleytys broke free, breathing hard. “No,” she said. “I meant it, thief.” When he reached for her again, she slapped his hands away. “Don’t be a fool. You know what happens to people around me.”

  He grunted and shrugged. “Have it your way.”

  “Yes. I will.” She moved calmly away and settled herself in her blankets. “You better get what sleep you can.”

  He snorted and sauntered into the darkness.

  Aleytys lay back and closed her eyes.

  Later that night out of the blackness of sleep a pinpoint of light opened into a strange, frightening image. Aleytys stirred and muttered incoherently in the grip of the dream. His nerves on alert, Stavver whipped up and looked around, then saw Aleytys twisting about in the blanket and muttering. He reached out to wake her, then pulled his hand back and waited for the dream to stop.

  In the viewscreen, mile on mile of rippling prairie flowed past like wrinkled tissue paper. The sensory fibers that were twisted into long feelers growing out of the orange pompoms on the side of his head twitched erratically as Sensai increased the magnification gradually, watching the world turn slowly under the ship.

  Aleytys cried out, repelled by the hairy monstrosity that she felt staring down on her.

  Ocean. Mountains. Plains again. A lake like a splash of blue dye. Sensai tapped the screen. “There, that’s where he went in. The ship’s on the bottom of that lake, dead.”

  Mok’tekii clicked his nipper claw. “Hai, koeiyi Sensayi, the diadem is activated. The ship may be dead, but the thief isn’t.” His nostrils wrinkled and waved with worry.

  Chiisayii clattered into the room, dragging a trolley with piles of boiled tamago and slices of shimsi arranged in intricate patterns on a hexagonal amber tray. The Third waited in silence for the others to notice his presence.

  Sensai cut off the screen. “Waii, the thing we feared. But it won’t be long now before we have it again.” He swung his body around and moved for the food.

  Aleytys shuddered as the light clicked off, then grew quiet when sleep took her again.

  Stavver watched her face smooth out. “Over,” he muttered. He shoved the blanket back and knelt beside her, shaking her awake.

  “Wha … Stavver? I thought I told you …” She rubbed her hand across her face and pushed herself up. “What do you want?”

  “You were dreaming. I know those dreams of yours. What did you see?”

  “Ahai, my friend, if I dreamed true it’s bad news for us. I saw the ones you call RMoahl hounds. They’re up there now, up above Jaydugar.” She pointed at the starlit sky above them. “They know where your ship is and they smell the diadem.”

  He settled back on his heels. “So that’s how they do it Damn. How much longer till dawn?”

  Aleytys shrugged. “An hour, hour and a half.”

  “No use wasting more time. Get up. We’ll leave now.”

  13

  Aleytys thrust her fingers under the sling-strap to ease the ache. Although it was still quite dark down in the ravine, up above the rim was blood red as Horli poked her head up. Aleytys shifted wearily on the uncomfortable leather, knocking a fretful cry from Sharl as his sling bounced against her hip. “Hush, baby,” she said softly, wiggling her hand into the enveloping folds of leather to touch him reassuringly.

  Ahead of her, his outline fuzzy in the red-tinted gloom, Stavver rode steadily on without speaking or looking back. Aleytys made a face at him, then relaxed. She patted the mare, uncomfortably aware that the sesmat was tiring. The spring had gone out of her stride. Aleytys bent over and stroked the shaggy neck, the clumped coarse whorls of fur damp and sticky under her fingers.

  “Stavver,” she called impatiently. His head turned briefly. “Stavver, can’t we stop a little?”

  “No.” His voice floated back, cool and definite. She glared at the thin stubborn back.

  “I’m hungry,” she yelled. “Are you so scared of those a’finit spiders you don’t dare wait even to eat? Ahai! I’m hungry!”

  “No.”

  With an angry shrug of her shoulders, Aleytys banged her heels into the sesmat’s flanks. The tired animal lengthened her stride for a few paces, then slowed to a jolting trot. Sighing, Aleytys pulled the mare back to her loping walk.

  The narrow track began to slant more steeply until her thighs ached from the effort it took to hold herself on the back of the sesmat. When the crack widened and flattened, Aleytys sighed with relief. She shifted the sling-strap a
gain and grimaced as her empty stomach rumbled briefly. She glanced at Stavver’s back and shrugged. No use bothering him, she thought. She shifted on the leather, putting her weight on one side to ease the ache in her buttocks. In a few moments she shifted back again, then reached up under her headcloth and dug strong fingers into the stiff muscles knotted at the back of her neck. She arched her back to stretch the ache out of it.

  Far ahead, down a sharp slope, the black rock walls snapped open against a background of red-tinted steam.

  The tired sesmat stepped on one of the round stones cluttering the path, going to her knees as it turned under her foot. Aleytys jolted forward on the hairy neck, then, as the sesmat heaved up again, bumped her nose on the mare’s coarse neck hair. She wrapped her fingers in the hair and pushed upright again.

  A short lance whistled past her head and clattered on the far wall, knocking some loose rocks into a small slide that rolled past the mare’s forefeet. Aleytys jerked back, startled, then cried out when a line of pain cut across her head as a lance twitched her headcloth away.

  Clutching the babysling in her arms, she dived off the sesmat’s back and pushed herself behind a pile of boulders, hitting the ground before the last lance clanged against the stone. She grunted as pain shot up from an ankle twisted at a bad angle under her crouching body. She eased it along until she could rub it while she moved to peer around the rocks at the backtrail.

  Sharl started to howl, frightened by the sudden roughness that snatched him from his comfortable sleep. Patting the leather bundle nervously, she tried to steady her own nerves, helped by the fact that the trail was empty each time she looked. She rocked Sharl against her breast, whispering soft, soothing words. As she calmed herself, the baby quieted, dropping into a deep sleep. She slipped the sling-strap off her shoulder and tucked the leather bundle behind a huge boulder.

  Wincing as her bruised ankle knocked against the rocks, Aleytys crawled around the rocks so that she could get a better view of the trail.

  “Ahai!” she whispered, dismayed. Five men were walking toward her, taking their time, wide grins on faces absolutely certain of her. She knew them all. Her arms began to tremble. “Myawo,” she whispered tensely. “Where is he?”

  Still on hands and knees, she crawled back a little and looked the other way down the trail. “Stavver,” she muttered. “And where the hell is he?” The ravine wall bulged out so that all she could see was glittering gray rock. “Khas!” She looked back at the five men. With a fierce pride she stood up, tossed her hair back over her shoulders, and limped out to the middle of the trail, her back to the approaching men.

  Stavver was standing farther down, his sesmat dead at his feet. A short lance menaced his throat while another poked him in the small of his back. Aleytys swallowed and glanced over her shoulder. The five men behind her were spreading in a narrow arc, a feral grin on each of the coarse faces.

  Sliding her hands up and down her upper arms, she swung her head to the right and then to the left. The side walls rose too steeply, offering no way out. She whipped her head back, facing the group around Stavver. Myawo grinned at her as he stepped from behind them.

  Breathing faster, pride draining away as panic jarred through her, Aleytys wheeled and darted at the five men. She managed a few running steps, then floundered to a halt as three lanceheads stabbed at her.

  Slowly, step by step, she began backing. Five mouths stretched in animal grins, teeth glinting whitely in the red-brown faces; five pairs of shallow animal eyes focused on her with hot anticipation. The medwey drove her back step by step toward Myawo, forcing each reluctant retreat with short jabs of the lances. Clutching at her hair in an agony of fear and frustration, she was herded backward, step-jab, step-jab. “Ah, Madar …” she groaned. “Help me.…”

  A cluster of sweet pure notes chimed into the tensely throbbing air. Aleytys gasped and crashed to her knees. Afraid before, she was almost paralyzed now. “Now …” The word was a long-drawn-out wail.

  A single high note shivered and slid down scale to a basso growl. The five men slowed grotesquely into a ghastly parody of human movement. Then they weren’t moving at all, they were hanging poised in midstride. Aleytys swallowed painfully and tried to stand up. It was oddly hard to move, like wading in half-set gelatin. Then her hands moved. She watched them flutter like moon-moths. “No,” she whispered. She felt a shudder run along her bones as her lips didn’t move and the sound echoed only inside her skull.

  Helplessly she watched the flitting hands slow and fasten around one of the lances, pulling it from the medwey’s stiff fingers. She watched out of the eyeholes in her skull with tears sliding down a face set stiff as a mask.

  The butterfly hands on the end of the thin arms pushed steadily at the medwey’s chest with the point of the lance. Like sewing leather, she thought wildly. Push in, pull out … pop … pop … again and again … and then five men were dead.

  They didn’t even know it yet. Caught in the time-spell, they hung and wouldn’t fall. The lancehead had no blood on it; there was no time for the blood to fall. Prisoner in her head, she watched the thin brown fingers open and the lance hang motionless in the air as her touch left it. She watched the slow dance of the walls past her eyes, walls painted a flickering amber, as her body turned and moved to the other group of men.

  She faced the men around Stavver. Thin brown fingers reached smoothly out and plucked a knife from a belt, slashed one-two-three through the other throats, and then swung to Myawo, the other faces flowing past, caught smiling triumphantly, unchanging over the new mouths carved into the stiff, resisting flesh of their necks. “No,” she shrieked to the thing moving her. “Please, no.” She struggled against the hold on her body. “Please. Don’t destroy these people. Don’t. The others are dead and he can’t hurt me … or you. Whoever you are, hear me, I beg you. The zabyn need him or they are destroyed. Please.…”

  The body she rode stepped back, past Myawo, back farther … one step … two.… Then the low hum that thrummed just on the edge of awareness squealed up again to a high shrill keening. Abruptly the knife hilt was cold against her fingers and she could feel the Warming breeze brushing against her face.

  With a low moan, she opened her hand, letting the knife clatter onto the ground. Behind her, she could hear another clatter and a series of dull thuds. Knees folding under her, she crumpled down, rocking back and forth, her arms wrapped around her head.

  Stavver grunted. Edging around the pool of blood leaking from the slashed throats, he stopped beside Myawo. “Why the hell’d she leave you alive?”

  Myawo grunted and stepped back from the thief, eyeing him warily, hand curled around the hilt of the knife stuck in his belt. Nostrils flaring, he backed away without a word.

  Aleytys looked up. “Stavver!” she called sharply. “Leave him alone.” She closed her eyes a minute, then turned her heavy head to Myawo. “Go away, will you? I promised Khateyat.… Ahai, Khem-sko, do you know how close you were to dying? Go away and leave us alone. I don’t know if I can hold again.”

  As Myawo hesitated, eyes glittering wildly, Aleytys groaned, “Ay-mi, man, are you such a fool? Even without this …” She slapped a hand against her head. “Even without the magic, Stavver could take you out. Look at him. Don’t you see how he’d like it?”

  Stavver grinned at Myawo, lifting the knife he’d scooped up from the blood-pool.

  Sullenly Myawo circled around the tumbled bodies and trudged up the trail, disappearing around the bend.

  Stavver turned the knife over in his hands, lips tightening as the blade glinted cleanly in Horli’s light. He glanced at the pools of blood and back at the polished knife. “How the hell do you do it?” he muttered.

  Aleytys turned her horrified gaze from body to body to body. Sick and shocked to the depths of her being, she closed her eyes and beat her fists slowly and steadily on her thighs with tears dripping over her contorted face.

  Stavver shrugged his shoulders, vaguely irritated
at such excessive reaction. Kicking a small rock, he watched it bounce off a pile of boulders and thud meatily into one of the bodies sprawled on the track, face thrust into a great puddle of blood that was trickling muddily downhill.

  Small black bugs were already buzzing noisily around, crawling over the bodies and crouching in blissful greed at the edges of the congealing blood-pools, sucking tubes thrust deep in the steaming liquid. The sweet musty smell of too much blood grew nauseating. He backed away to find Aleytys’s eyes fixed on him.

  “I couldn’t help it.” She swallowed and rubbed the back of her hand across her burning eyes.

  He smiled and tapped her on the head. “Poor little cat, you’ve had a hard time.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned back against his hand. “I feel horrible. I almost wish I was dead. Stavver.…”

  “You don’t mean that, Leyta.”

  “Stavver.…”

  “What?”

  “I’m cursed. You better leave me.”

  “Now, I know you don’t mean that.” He chuckled. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.” He shook his head and ran his fingers under her eyes, wiping away the tears. “Get the kid. What did you do with him?”

  “Sharli!” Aleytys jumped to her feet. “Ahai, I forgot Sharl.” She ran back up the trail, shivering as she passed the huddled bodies. Hastily she knelt and folded back the flaps of the babysling, to find Sharl lying curled up inside, sucking peacefully on his fist. With a weak laugh that trembled on the dry side of relief, she ducked her head and slid the strap onto her shoulder, settling it against her neck. As smoothly as she could, she stood up. The baby grunted sleepily, wiggled himself comfortably against her hip, and went calmly back to sleep.

  As Aleytys walked back downhill to Stavver, a storm of black bugs whirred around her, diving at her legs, crawling on the wide leather trousers. She looked down.

  The leather was stained and crusted with patches of blood. With a gulp, she stuck out a moccasin and examined the soft leather. It was soggy with blood. Her mouth twitched and her stomach knotted. “A good thing I haven’t had anything to eat.”