Golden Torc - 2 (18 page)

Aiken shook his golliwog head. "Back in the good old Milieu, I'd of said, 'What a way to go.' But you wouldn't believe what was rattling around in that poor bastard's skull. A genuine fate worse than death! He just can't keep cutting it with those crazy broads!"

Stein said, "Too bad you don't give lessons."

"Aiken Drum!" came the mental and vocal command of the Lord of Swords. "You are required to demonstrate your power before the King and the nobility and populace of Muriah."

"Oh-oh. I'm on." The trickster looked up at Stein, serious for once. "If they nail me out there, Mayvar will bring you to the place where Sukey's hidden."

"Go stick it to 'em, kid," the Viking told him. "Be pleased, Awful Majesties, to accept the homage of the gold-torc human Aiken Drum, sponsored Candidate of the Venerable Mayvar Kingmaker, President of the Guild of Farsensors." Aiken rode up on the black charger to pay his devoirs. The plaudits were nearly as wild as those that had greeted the Battlemaster. Nodonn himself stood at the foot of the stairs with Tagan and the Marshal of Sport, his head bared and an expression of benignity on his glowing face. When the cheers had completely died away, he said:

"Aiken Drum-your Venerable Patron has acquainted us with your considerable metapsychic talents. But these are not the qualities we seek to assess tonight as we weigh your candidacy. Instead, we would test the fundamental attributes that must characterize those of our battleworthy company-courage, resolution, intelligence. Demonstrate these as you meet the antagonist I have chosen for you... His name, according to the sages of Goriah, is Phobosuchus. Most of his kind have been extinct for nearly fifty million years. But a few survive as living fossils in the regions south of my city, in the vast estuaries of the River Laar where the long-necked sea monsters come to bask and breed. By my mind's power I have subdued and transported him here to try your skill. But I charge you, Aiken Drum, to remember our conventions of sport! You may use no overt mental force in your combat with Phobosuchus-only bodily strength, bravery, and natural cunning. Violate our precepts and the massed scorn of this noble company will annihilate you."

A low-pitched sound swept over the crowd. Conflicting farspoken sentiments eddied around the little figure in the golden armor: some hostile, some mocking or fearful, but others... I'll be damned, Aiken thought. I think most of them want me to win!

Nodonn's admonitions having ended, the King signaled that the contest should begin. With one hand Aiken raised his pennoned lance, saluting first the royal box and then the mob of spectators. With the other hand, as he spurred his chaliko around to face the center of the arena, he repeated to the Battlemaster the finger gesture depicted on his banner.

There was a great cheer. A heavily barred doorway beside the animal pens swung wide, revealing a dark cavelike opening.

Nodonn cried out in simultaneous vocal and mental command:

"Phobosuchus, come forth!"

A dragon raced into the arena, then stopped in the middle of the field to gape its jaws and give a hiss like an erupting fumarole.

The spectators responded with screams of awe and frenzied applause for the novelty, the like of which had never before been seen in the arena of Muriah. Phobosuchus was a monstrous crocodilian. Its skull measured two meters in length and the teeth in the bluish-gray mouth were the size of large bananas. At rest, and watching the approach of Aiken's black charger with a sardonic catlike eye, Phobosuchus squatted on the sand with bowed legs; the body was at least fifteen meters long, the dorsal surface armored with ridged bony scutes. The whimsy of the Battlemaster had augmented the natural pale-green and black banded pattern of the beast with painted designs of his own heraldic colors, rose-red and gold.

Infuriated by the mob's screeching, the bright lights, and the painful mental goad that Nodonn's coercive faculty had just administered, Phobosuchus sought whom it might devour. It lashed its serrated tail, releasing a noxious blast of musk from its cloacal glands. Then it hoisted its huge body high off the ground and started running toward the most likely target at a brisk gallop.

The pioneer "Scottish" planet of Dalriada where Aiken Drum had been nurtured had no native crocodilians, nor had the ecology engineers deemed that particular reptile order a suitable addition to the local biota. And so Aiken really hadn't the foggiest notion of the type of creature that was charging toward him. He decided that it had to be a dragon. A dragon that could run like a racehorse and was thoroughly pissed. Game etiquette decreed that he meet the oncoming monster with bold resolution. He took a firm grip on his lance and thumped spurred heels upon his mount's wide shoulders...... and quite forgot to hold onto its mind.

The black chaliko gave a ringing scream of fear and threw him. It fled for its life to the opposite end of the arena while the young man in the golden glass armor scrambled to his feet, snatched up his lance, and took to his heels with Phobosuchus in pleased pursuit.

After a silent beat of stunned horror, the spectators began a hilarious riot of cheering. The heavens added to the noise with a fanfaronade of thunder, which inspired the crocodile to bellow in response. It did this with its mouth closed, chasing Aiken up one side of the arena and down the other while clowns, referees, animal handlers, manure shovelers, Tanu knights in spiky jeweled armor, and dignified officials tumbled over one another and leaped or levitated into the front-row seats, trying to escape the racing monster.

As he approached the stairway to the royal box, where Nodonn, Tagan, and the other high-ranking observers stood like a collection of huge carved-gemstone chessmen, Aiken suddenly changed course. He streaked in a flat curve for the center of the arena with Phobosuchus two or three meters behind and beginning to get a trifle winded. Aiken thrust the butt of his lance ahead of him, sank it deeply into the sand, and went hand over hand up it in a fluid pole vault that sent him arcing through the air like a golden missile. He landed a monster's length to one side of Phobosuchus. The creature hesitated, then shied at the lance and its banner, which still quivered, embedded in the earth.

Phobosuchus halted, belly to the ground. It swung its awesome gape toward the golden manikin dancing around its flank. Aiken dashed toward the rear end of the great crocodile before it could shift its bulk and finally attained its blind spot. Skipping lightly as an autumn leaf, he ran along the knobbed and enameled expanse of the animal's back, keeping his balance like a logrolling champ while the reptile writhed and spun in an effort to discover what this peculiar prey was up to now. Abruptly, the crocodilian froze. The crowd drew a collective breath. Aiken flung himself prone onto the gaudy cobbled hide and clung to a pair of scutes with a death-grip. Phobosuchus exploded into a fit of bucking and twisting, furious to dislodge the human pest that adhered to its back. Its jaws clashed with a noise of rending timbers; it bounced and squirmed and flung its three-ton body about with the agility of a basilisk, trying in vain to claw Aiken off with the black scimitars that tipped its feet. The reptile's tail churned up clouds of dust that momentarily hid both dragon and golden sticktight; but when the beast finally paused to rest, Aiken was still in position, lying on his armored stomach between two lines of scutes just aft of the front legs.

Phobosuchus lowered itself to its belly again and hissed exasperation. As the mouth, approximately as long as Aiken's body, closed, the trickster suddenly sprang to his feet and dashed up the neck, between the eyes, and down the length of the prostrate skull to leap off the tip of the snout. The monster watched in a kind of stunned fascination as Aiken sprinted for his lance and wrenched it out of the ground. He came running back to retrace his madcap route up the reptile's head and onto its shoulders, purple banner streaming raggedly above his dusty golden helm.

"A kill! A kill!" trumpeted the crowd.

Phobosuchus bellowed in despair. The jaws opened and the huge skull tilted above Aiken like the span of a nightmare drawbridge. Lance at the ready, the little man looked into the dragon's upside-down eyes. Aiken's farsense showed him the structure of the skull beneath the thick, ornamented hide-the two parietal openings behind the eyesockets. Aiken chose the right fenestra, plunged his lance in, and immediately leapt from the creature's back and retreated to a safe distance. Once again Phobosuchus erupted into a paroxysm of thrashing, and this lasted for some time because dragons do not die easily. But at last the great body lay jerking in the dust and Aiken plucked the shattered lance with its ruined pennon from the bleeding brain. He walked very slowly to the royal stairway.

There was King Thagdal waiting for him. And the Queen, smiling, and off at one side the Battlemaster, aloof and glorious. And there was also a tall stooped figure in a plum-colored robe who cleaned his dusty armor with a gesture of her hand and gave him a fresh ensign, violet plumes, and a cloak like the spangled purple-black of the twilight sky to wear as he stood before the King.

Three times the Marshal had to cry: "Pray silence for the accolade of His Awful Majesty!" At last, the spectators were still.

The Lord of Swords stepped to the side of the sovereign and held out a scabbard, from which Thagdal drew an amethystine sword. Holding the blade in one hand and the golden hilt in the other, the King poised the weapon in front of the face of the shining youth.

"We tender to you this our accolade, and bid you be forever our faithful knight. What name do you choose for your initiation into the noble battle-company of the Tanu?"

Mayvar's mental voice pervaded the arena with its muted tone.

He may not choose his name. I will choose his name at the acceptable time. But that time is not now.

The royal mouth tightened and static stirred the blond tendrils of the King's beard. "I defer to my Venerable Sister, your Patron and Lady. You will retain your human name until that time which she... foresees comes to pass. Receive this sword then, Lord Aiken Drum, and bear it in my service on the Delbaeth Quest."

Grinning, the golliwog accepted the vitredur blade. The Lord of Swords fastened the scabbard and its baldric and the crowd cried, "Slonshal!"

Up in the royal box, Lord Greg-Donnet hung over the rail cheering and scattering crumbs of egg yolk. "Good boy! Good lad! Well done!" He turned to the Craftsmaster, who watched the ceremony below with stony restraint. "Now we know that the lad is brave as well as talented in the metafunctions. Perhaps Mayvar wasn't quite so out of line as we feared, eh, Aluteyn?"

"Stop talking like an ass, Greggy. There's the Shape of Fire. The kid hasn't a chance of taking him."

Greg-Donnet chortled. "You think not? The bookies are giving three hundred to one on him. Or they were, before he polished off the dragon. Can I interest you in a side bet at those odds?"

Down in the arena, Mayvar was embracing her protege. The King and the Battlemaster mounted the stairs to the box, looking unaccountably grim.

"A bet?" Aluteyn Craftsmaster was startled, then thoughtful.

"Oh, no, Greggy. I don't think so. In no way."

"I was afraid of that," sighed the madman. He reached for another egg.

11

THE TRIMARAN FLEW WESTWARD BENEATH THE OUTTHRUSTING arm of Aven, skimming the shallow salt lagoon by virtue of the metapsychic gale Mercy had whistled up when Bryan protested that the day was too calm for sailing.

For what seemed like hours they took turns at the helm.

She sang the oddly familiar Tanu Song, and the red and white sail bellied before them, hiding the distant mainland and the snow-crowned eastern end of the Betic Cordillera. So strange, he thought, exulting in the nearness of her and the speed and the sunshine. So strange to realize that this was Earth. The Dragon Range of Aven, which would one day become the heights of Mallorca, had its lower slopes dark with tame forests and meadows where hipparions and antelopes and mastodons ranged in royal preserves. Those tawny hills, halfshrouded now in haze to starboard, would in six million years be islands named Ibiza and Formentera. (But never again would he race a yacht through azure waves off Punta Roy a, for the Pliocene waters were pale as milk, and so her wild sea-reflecting eyes.) So strange.

The peninsular mass of Balearis rose from thick deposition beds of salt and gypsum and Other sediments that had been laid down during the numerous regressions and inundations of the Mediterranean Basin. Streams flowing southward from Aven carved the minerals into canyons and buttes, spires and hoodoos, striped with pastel colors and sparkling in faerie splendor. .. and all of it would be gone without a trace by the time of the Galactic Milieu, drowned under unimaginable tons of water that would press the very bed of the sea two kilometers deeper and more, making abysses where now the Pliocene shallows glinted in the trimaran's wake. So strange.

After a long time the flats closed in around them and then folded into blinding gypsum dunes shimmering with mirages, among which weathered turrets of igneous rock poked up. There were hills and cliffs. The boat sailed up an eerie long fjord where whiteness gave way to purple and gray-blue, eroded slopes of ancient ash and volcanic scoria, broken cindercones lightly clothed in coniferous forest. The fjord was deep, the water now flowing from some western source. But Mercy's tame wind let them press on, breasting the current, until they emerged at last into an open expanse of saltmarsh, a green and living everglade that seemed to stretch on forever into the misted west.

"This is the Great Brackish Marsh," she told him. "A Spanish river pours in fresh water off the Betics, the high peaks we'll call the Sierra Nevada."

The diminished salinity of the marsh produced an environment much less inimical to life than the shores of the Mediterranean lagoons. Here grasses and sedges and mangroves throve in the shallows and there were many scattered islets with shrubs and hardwoods and swags of flowering vines. Gulls and gaudy pigeons wheeled overhead. Pink-and-black flamingos left off straining crustaceans from the pools and fled with honking cries when the invading trimaran glided by.