Alan Akers - Warrior of Scorpio

“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 Aphrasoe — distant! No one knew where Aphrasoe, 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 companions 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.