by Lin Carter
And so they went along from day to day. The going was less difficult now, at least for M’Cord. For now that Thaklar’s broken leg was mended, they took turns in the saddle while the other walked along before their plodding mount It was not much easier for Thaklar, plodding through the foot-deep dust, than it had been for the Earthsider. Despite the fact that the Dragon Hawk warrior had been accustomed to these conditions from birth, he found it equally tough going afoot. Except when he is on one of the rock plateaux, a Martian rides on slidarback from preference.
But Thaklar knew he must exercise the limb in order to regain the full use of it. It still pained him when he put Ms full weight upon it, and the muscles of Ms leg ached abominably from the labor, but he strode along, dragging through the dust of the interminable waste, grimlipped and uncomplaining.
Except, that is, when the leg gave out suddenly, pitching him into the rolling dust.
On one such occasion he fell with a grunt of pain and lay without moving. M’Cord, riding the slidar, thought he had struck his head on a rock and perhaps injured himself. So the Earthman climbed stiffly out of the saddle and went over to see what he could do.
He never got there.
Suddenly, to one side, sand gushed skyward in whirling plumes. An ear-piercing hiss as of escaping steam split the air. It was dusk—the sudden day-to-night transformation that falls so swiftly on Mars, where the atmosphere is too ratified to support such gradations of light as twilight and sunset and the slow deepening of shadows. The far, cold disk of the sun dipped beneath the mountainous horizon, and the sky darkened from dusky purple to jet black in seconds. By the faint light—for neither of the twin moons of Mars shed enough reflected light to be more than dimly half visible in the gloom—M’Cord could not at once make out the cause of this inexplicable dust geyser.
Then a leaping, snarling thing sprang into view—lithe and supple as a panther, with a panther’s lashing, whiplike tail, but clad in dully gleaming scales and with the blunt, wedge-shaped skull of a reptile. He knew it in the first blurred glimpse, for it was a sandcat, one of the most dreaded of the predators of the Martian desert country. The creature hollows out its lair beneath the sand, using almost human cunning to tamp the dust into packed-earth walls, then roofs over the narrow entrance with a sandy crust. Therein, like one of Earth’s trap-door spiders, the sandcat waits for its prey.
Huger than a kodiak bear, faster than a cheetah, the
Martian sandcat is terror incarnate. It strikes like lightning and its ferocity is unparalleled.
And M’Cord had left his gunbelt looped across the saddlehorn.
For the smallest fraction of a second the charging sandcat paused—hesitating between its choice of three dinners. There was the fallen man in the dust, and the man who stood erect with empty hands, and the frightened slidar, which screeched and reared around, mad little parrot eyes rolling in mindless fear.
Then it flew at M’Cord like an avalanche, bowling him over, one hideous birdlike claw ripping open his leg from hip to knee. It flung him aside as a child knocks a rag-doll flying, then wheeled in roiling sand—and pounced!
But that brief moment in which it had hesitated between its choice of prey proved to be the beast’s undoing. For just as it whirled and sprang upon the stunned and sprawling Earthman, the dark night was split asunder by a blinding noontide glare. A lance of pure blue-white brilliance sprang from the power gun in Thaklar’s hand and struck the squalling, scaly fury between the shoulders.
Half stunned from the blow that had felled him, M’Cord lay facedown in the dry, impalpable dust. The flash of the power bolt dazzled his eyes. He blinked through vibrant yellowish-green afterimages at the huge body that lay, twitching spasmodically, kicking up dust with its hind legs. Dazed, he could not quite comprehend what had happened. Thaklar had not been rendered unconscious by his fall, but had lain there in a silent and wordless fury at the failure of his leg, rigid in hate of his own feebleness. An old hand at survival in the dustlands, his fingers were never far from the butt of his gun, even in sleep.
M’Cord blinked, half blind and gasping for breath. The cold air was heavy with the bitter metallic stench of ozone and rank with another odor, too. Only afterward did he identify the rank but not unpleasant aroma as the smell of scorched meat.
Thaklar limped over to where the Earthman lay and examined him wordlessly.
M’Cord was unconscious now. He did not even grunt when the native handled his tom body.
The claws of the sandcat had sliced through the tough, durable nioflex of the thermalsuit as if it had been tissue paper. And they had sliced through the flesh that lay beneath the suiting; the Earthman’s leg was slashed from hip to knee. The flesh was laid neatly open as by a surgeon’s trained hand, and the massive bone of the upper leg was raw and bare to the eye. Thaklar probed, his fingers gentle as a woman’s. The femur did not seem to be broken; not even a fracture could the Martian discern.
But M’Cord was losing blood rapidly, in great gouts, welling out upon the trampled sand as from a water main.
Before so terrible a wound, Thaklar’s rude knowledge of the healing arts failed. His hands faltered and fell helplessly to his knees. He squatted by the motionless form of the Earthman, staring down at his unconscious face. His own face was grim and expressionless. His eyes, yellow as the glaring eyes of the sandcat, were unreadable.
But the thoughts which moved behind those eyes were legible:
He saved me from the death of thirst. Now have I not saved him from the jaws of the sandcat? Are not we even, then—one debt erasing the other?
He stared down at M’Cord, eyes fierce and cold as a hawk’s.
And is he not one of the accursed F’yagha, for all that he saved me from the thirst? Have not his kind looted and despoiled the world?’ What more can I do for him, I that know not the healer’s skill? Let him die, then; the swift, merciful death. He sleeps; the death of loss of blood will come upon him as he sleeps; he knows not pain in the last sleep. What can I do, even if / would do more?
The Dragon Hawk warrior brooded there in the dark, under the superb stars. Then he rubbed his eyes as if in weariness.
No; he gave me to drink when I lay half dead from thirst. We were strangers, and he gave me to drink. He owed me nothing, then, nor I him. Now there is surely still a debt, for we are no longer strangers.
M’Cord stirred feebly, rubbed dry, dust-caked lips together, and moaned for water. No muscle in Thaklar’s hard, lean face moved. He took his own canister from his hip, unsealed it, and set the lip against M’Cord’s halfopen mouth.
“Share of my water,” he said in a low, toneless voice, “brother.”
IV. The Road of Millions of Years
After a long time, M’Cord knew that he had awakened and that he was not dead. For surely the dead do not feel pain; and he felt pain.
He blinked open bleared and crusted eyes and looked downward at moving dust. He was bound across the cruppers of the slidar; the rank, musky smell of its flesh was heavy in his nostrils. And there was another smell, too—the smell of decay.
From the hips down, his body was afire. His head throbbed; hi$ ribs ached; his lips and the insides of his mouth were dry and coated with dust. He croaked out something in a broken voice and in a moment the beast halted and Thaklar was at his side, loosening the bonds, helping him down to the desert dust. Water was set to his lips and for a while he thought about nothing but the blissful coolness and wetness of it. He took away the can and wiped his mouth and tried to focus on Thaklar’s face. The yellow eyes were unreadable, the lean, coppery face inscrutable.
“So I’m still alive,” he said inanely.
“You still live,” said the other.
“How … bad is it, then?”
“It is bad, my brother. See for yourself.”
M’Cord made no comment on Thaklar’s use of the word “brother”; he knew what it meant, or what it probably implied. But there were more serious things to think about. He loo
ked down at himself and, after a while, he looked away sickly.
“How long has it been?” he muttered after a while. The desert man told him the number of days. M’Cord licked his lips and tried to think. A man does not live long in the desert unless he knows a thing or two about the body. Thaklar had done the best he knew: he had staunched the wound as much as it could be staunched, and he had wound a tourniquet tightly about M’Cord’s upper thigh between the crotch and the hip, cutting off the circulation.
He had even known enough to loosen the tourniquet from time to time. But he knew nothing about the medicines in the kit, and probably would have scorned to use them even had he known. M’Cord lay there and thought about blood poisoning for a while, sweating and sick to the stomach. Then he asked for the kit, for more water, and for a blanket to keep out the dust.
There were powerful, broad-spectrum bactericides in the kit, and an anticlotting agent, and tubes of neomycin IV. M’Cord took three pain-killers and a tablet of caffein concentrate to clear his head. Then he gave himself several injections, starting with twelve cubic centimeters of energol. That was just on this side of the tolerance limit, but it would keep him going for three hours without pain or fatigue. He would pay the price afterward, he knew; but right now he had work to do. The energol spread through him like a cloud of tingling fire: pain dimmed and vanished, he felt sharp and clear and steady. He began to work on the leg.
Thaklar had not cleansed the wound. In the dustlands, one does not wash anything, even a wound, with water. Water is rarer and more precious than blood; more precious even than life. And the whole of the long, hideous gash was crusted with clotted blood and dust. M’Cord cleaned it out with a damp swab made of a rag, then smeared in the neomycin, covered it with gel, and began to sew up the wound as best he could. The shots kept him from feeling anything at all but he knew what he was doing and he had to crush his lips tight and clamp his jaws together to keep from vomiting. The fleshy edges of the gash were purple-black and puffy. He slashed them open with a scalpel and let the pus drain, then swabbed them with the neomycin and sewed them up. From time to time he stopped to rest, and drank a few mouthfuls of precious brandy. He knew he didn’t have much of a chance, but there was nothing else to do but try.
Thaklar had bound the wound shut with strips tom from a blanket, knit tight, holding the ragged edges of the thermalsuit closed as best as could be done. If it hadn’t been for that, there would have been frostbite to contend with.
When he was done, it was nearly nightfall, so they made camp and ate a meal. M’Cord had no appetite but he forced himself to down the meat stew and took more pills. He had several hours of pain-free lucidity left, he knew, before the fever and the raving began, if they were going to begin, and he very much feared they were. He showed Thaklar the different pills and rehearsed him in the few simple acts the other would have to do, once M’Cord was unable to do them himself.
They spoke few words while eating. Finally:
“It is bad, ’Gort.” It was not a question. M’Cord nodded.
“It is bad,” he grunted. “You will have to tie me when the raving starts, or I will wander off in the night. And I will beg you for water; but you must give me only this much a day, up to here,” he said, measuring with his fingers. The other nodded somberly.
“I did the best I could, ’Gort.”
M’Cord nodded. “I know. Thanks.” There was really nothing else to say. For four days and nights the warrior had fed him and cared for him and cleaned him when he soiled himself. There were no words with which to thank a man for such kindness. /
They were midway into the Regio by now. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, Thaklar meant to head north into the Sabaeus. By then M’Cord would be half mad with the fever and would know nothing. A day or two more and he might well be dead. They were both aware of it; they did not discuss it.
There was a strange expression on Thaklar’s face; its bleakness softened. He was trying to say something and it came hard. M’Cord lay there, empty and weary, feeling the numbness and euphoric comfort ebb as the pain began, and waited for him to speak, if he meant to speak. M’Cord didn’t give a damn whether he opened up or not.
Then, finally:
“I have shared water with you; I did it while you slept.”
“I know it, brother,” said M’Cord. Something very much like a smile flickered across the stem features of the other man.
“It is written that a man must not keep secrets from his brother. ’Gort, I would tell you who I am and how I am come to this place, and what I would do.”
M’Cord nodded and waited silently.
When the story came out, it was even stranger than he had thought it would be.
The Dragon Hawk nation are a proud and ancient people. The blood of kings flows in their veins, attenuated by many ages, it is true, but nonetheless royal.
Thaklar was a High Prince of his people, or had been once. His was an ancient House—ancient even for a race whose princes can often trace their lineage back a million years to the early Pleistocene.
Once—long ago, before the oceans receded and the air thinned and the blue forests and plains died to powdery sand—they were a mighty civilization. From pole to pole the word of the Jamad Tengru, the pope-emperor, was holy law. There were ten nations then, ten mighty clans numbering in the many millions. But then the world began to die; and they to die with it.
As the briny seas shrank, exposing miles of muddy shoreline, the marble seaport cities were left behind to crumble in decay. Vast populations became homeless wanderers as their fields and forests withered into dust. Much was lost in the chaotic ages that followed: the science they had once had from their gods, the wisdom they had preserved over interminable aeons. They became nomads; then barbarians; then little more than savages.
But they were a proud and ancient people, and they were stubborn. They adapted to a dying world; hardship and deprivation toughened them. They survived. And they clung to what little could be preserved of their ancient lore and wisdom.
Scattering far apart, separated by thousands of square miles of deserts that had once been the floors of vanished seas, losing touch with one another, each of the nine nations whose remnants had survived into the twilight of the planet guarded its own hoarded scraps of knowledge. The possession of these fragments of ancient wisdom became hereditary. The guardianship of this knowledge was handed down from father to son through many millennia.
Thus it was with the House of Thaklar.
And there on the desert plain, huddled together for warmth under the frozen stars, the Martian princeling told his secret to the Earthman who had become, so strangely, so unexpectedly, his brother.
“From of old, brother, my House has guarded the secret of the Road of Millions of Years. To us it has been given by the Timeless Ones to guard forever the way to the huatan. You who have read The Book and who know somewhat of our lore, will know, perhaps, what is meant by that word.”
M’Cord regarded him puzzledly. Of course, he knew enough of the Tongue to know that huatan meant “sacred valley.” But he was no scholar; something he knew of the Epics and the Chronicles, but his knowledge was limited to little more than may be gleaned from listening to a bard chant the old songs to a circle of listening nomads around a heat unit under the glittering stars.
The sacred valley …
Something stirred at the back of his mind, some old, half-forgotten scrap of lore. He tried to recall it to memory; but now Thaklar was speaking again. His lean face was grim, his hawk-fierce eyes were bleak with an old hurt.
“To me in my turn was the secret given. The secret my forefathers had guarded from the beginnings of time itself. And from me was it stolen. And by a woman.”
The last word was spat out as if it left a vile taste on his tongue. The Martian brooded, his face cold and hard, hugging his knees somberly.
“Her name was Zerild. She was a Low Clan woman who danced before men for gold. She came to the encampment of my nation
in a caravan of fat merchants, and she danced before us in the starlight, and she was … very beautiful. I desired her as a thirsty man desires water; but she laughed at me and denied me her body. That I might slake my thirst I offered her riches and a place in my House. A place of honor. And still she denied me, and yet again she laughed.”
His head sank upon his broad chest and his face was turned away so that M’Cord could not read his expression. Not that he needed to.
“There was a madness came upon me then. Never have I been a weakling for women; never has Thaklar of the Dragon Hawk nation groveled before the feet of a woman; never have I been a slave to the hunger of my loins. But before the slender body of the woman Zerild I was as one gripped by the spell of an enchanter. I became bereft of reason, of honor. She taunted me, laughing, swaying before me, her eyes like great gems flashing through the silken curtain of her night-black hair. I hungered for her breasts, that were like golden fruit. I was famished for the touch of her … and, in my madness and my folly, I bade her ask of me what she would. She asked of me nothing, she said, but a token that my love for her was stronger than all other loves my heart held. She asked of me the secret the princes of my blood had held sacred from the birth of time. She asked that I reveal to her the way to Ophar the Holy … aiyee, my brother! Would that I had died a coward’s death in that moment, before my lips could open, as they did open, and I could yield to her that which she desired! But I did not die.”