Lin Carter - The City Outside the World (10 page)

They plodded on, and every foot seemed like a mile, and every minute like an hour. Somehow they kept going.

At last they reached the foot of the plateau, which proved to be no illusion after all. Here they would have fallen to the ground to sleep where they fell, but Ryker drove them on with oaths and blows and curses.

He was made of granite, but even granite can crack and crumble. For a little while longer, though, he held strong.

He drove them into the mouth of a deep, narrow ravine, and made them follow it. They stumbled along on numb legs, dazed and mindless, like men who walked in their sleep. Between the tall, towering walls the ravine twisted and turned, but at its end the solid rock of the plateau was worn away in strata which could be climbed, although not easily.

It was like ascending a staircase built for giants, but they made it to the top of the plateau. And here he allowed them to rest and to make camp. Here he felt safe—safe enough, at any rate. He knew that the desert hawks would be following them. But he also knew there was no way for Zarouk's warriors to tell which of the ten thousand ravines into which the edge of the plateau was cloven was the one they had followed.

And from the edge of the cliff wall, by daylight, he could see for many miles, and spot the raiders on their trail.

He did not let Valarda make a fire. Fire can be seen far off in the black gloom of a Martian night. So they munched dry bread and devoured cold meat, huddled in

their fur cloaks for warmth. They had each two mouthfuls of cold wine from the leather bottles, and it was Valarda who served them.

Ryker was bone weary by now, and so tired that his brain felt numb and dead as if his skull were stuffed with cotton, but he drove himself a bit further. There were two prisoners to tend to, and both were very dangerous and deadly enemies. But, after all, they too were men.

So he unbound their hands and stood by, his palms resting on his gun butts, watching while Zarouk and the aged priest chafed the blood back to their stiff limbs. He permitted them to relieve themselves a little ways from camp, then herded them back with the others, and bound their hands again, and their ankles, too, this time, and wrapped them in their cloaks for sleep.

Probably, he should have killed them or left them at the foot of the cliff to die in the night, but it was not in him to murder men in cold blood. So, cursing himself for his weakness, he let them live a while longer.

Then he slept. There was no strength left in him to stand guard all night. And, anyway, the wine had made him woozy and more than a little drunk. And he would need every atom of his strength to go on tomorrow.

He slept like a dead man. The deep, bottomless sleep of absolute exhaustion. And there were no dreams this time.

He had done all that a man could do. He had taken every precaution that was possible for a man of his fiber. The two captives he made sleep apart, with the others between them, to reduce the possibility that they might crawl together in the darkness and work each other's bonds free.

He had no fear of this. Zarouk and Dmu Dran were only men, and probably far wearier than he. They, too, would sleep deeply—as deeply as he.

Which is why he awoke sometime after sunrise, as

tonished to find his guns gone and his wrists tied behind him with leather thongs.

Ryker rolled over onto his back and peered around him with a cold horror in his heart and a sinking feeling deep in his guts at what he would see.

But instead of what he had feared, quite a different sight met his eyes.

"Surprised, scum?" Zarouk asked, in a voice like iron scraping against iron. "No man can trust a
zhaggua.
Now you have learned the truth of it, fool!"

Ryker stared. Valarda and Melandron and the boy Kiki were nowhere to be seen. They were gone. Gone, too, were their sleeping furs, and all the gear. And the food and drink they had carried off from the caravan encampment, and the weapons, too.

He rolled onto one side and sat up, painfully and stiffly, unable to believe the evidence of his senses.

The holsters strapped to his thighs were empty. They had taken his guns.

And then it came to him that one other thing was gone from him as well, an old, familiar weight he had worn over his heart for so long that he had become accustomed to the weight of it, and hardly felt it any more.

Now the very absence of that weight reminded him of it.

The ancient black seal he had carried in a little leather bag suspended about his throat by a thong was missing!

Bag, seal and thong they had stolen.

And left him here to die.

His heart contracted, became a cold, hard lump within his breast. And something within him died then. Something he had begun to feel for the girl with the golden eyes . . . something that was more than mere lust or mere desire . . . something that had begun in a hungry want-

ing, but had grown and flowered into something that was very close to love.

Dead, now, that emotion. Burnt to ashes in the fires of the fierce, hating fury that woke within him.

Zarouk saw it in the hard mask of his face and the deadly coldness of his slitted eyes, and laughed to see it. The old priest who lay across from him, hooded eyes fixed on nothing, must have felt it too, but said nothing. His heart was so charged with the venom of hatred there was no room for more.

Sometime in the night while he had lain in that deathlike sleep of utter weariness—or in the first light of dawn, perhaps—they had quietly awakened—Valarda and her old grandsire and the naked imp of a boy.

Stealthily and furtively, they had crept upon Ryker and thieved from him his power guns and the thing that lay above upon his heart in the little leather bag.

Then, gently and carefully, so as not to waken him, they had bound his wrists together so that he was helpless. Then they had gathered up their furs, and all the food and drink there was left, and stole away like the thieves they were.

Or maybe they hadn't been so gentle and so careful with him, after all. Maybe they hadn't feared of waking him before they were done with their treachery and betrayal.
Maybe they hadn 't had to fear, because of the drug Valarda had slipped into the wine she served him the night before.

For, from the vile, oily taste on his tongue, and the little hot red throb of pain behind his eyes, Ryker guessed that he had been drugged. He had been drugged once before, while those he thought were friends had robbed him and left him to die, and he remembered the effects of it well.

A thirst for vengeance came into him then, like a cold black poison in his blood.

Those who had betrayed him that time before had left him to die, like this—bound and helpless for the first cliff dragon or sandcat who came near, hunting meat.

But he had fooled them.

He had endured. He had clung tenaciously to life with an iron grip. And he had lived. Lived to hunt them down, those three, one by one, though half a world lay between them.

And he had taken his revenge, slowly, one at a time, enjoying it. Afterwards, he had not liked remembering what he had done, but he did not regret the doing of it. For a man pays his debts, every last debt, or he is something less than a man.

Staring at the empty day with hard, slitted eyes, Ryker knew that he would pay this debt, too. On the boy; on the old man; and—yes—even on the girl. The girl he had been very near to loving. . . .

"If you're done feeling sorry for yourself,
F'yagh,"
said Zarouk quietly, "roll over here beside me. There is a knife slid down my boot, but as my hands are tied I cannot reach it. Maybe you can. If so, cut me free, and I will free your hands, and the priest's."

"You'll slit my throat first, and you know it," grunted Ryker.

Prince Zarouk shrugged. "Why should I bother? We'll all die here—of thirst, or of the fangs of the first beast that comes this way. Unless you cut me free."

"You'll blood your knife in me the moment your hands are free, because you hate my guts."

The prince looked at him. "I have no love for you, scum of the
F'yagha.
But there are those whom I hate more than you. You know the truth of that, because you

hate them too—the friends you rescued from the mob back in Yeolarn, who betrayed you here while you slept, and stole away like thieves in the night, leaving you to die. You hate them, too, more than you hate Zarouk, who has done you no particular hurt."

Ryker said nothing. He could not deny the truth of what Zarouk said, but swallowing it left a bitter taste.

"Come, man, fight for life, don't lie there pitying yourself!" the prince said levelly. "I would be a fool to slay you now, even if I could. When the beasts come—as they
will
come, unless my laggardly men get here first— we'll have a better chance at living longer, two strong men to stand against them. The priest is nothing, you know that, half-mad, and old and feeble. I cannot fight the dragons of the cliffs alone, armed only with a slim knife. But the two of us, together, we might live.
To be revenged someday on those who left us here.''

Ryker sighed, knowing he was a damned fool, and rolled over to where the desert-hawk sat, and began fumbling for the knife thrust down into his boot. He found it after a time, and inched it out. Then, with numb fingers and aching wrists, he sawed clumsily at the thongs that bound Zarouk's hands—sawing at the flesh of those hands, as often as not, although the prince neither winced nor cried out at the pain of it.

After a long while, Zarouk was free. He chafed his wrists until the circulation began to return, then got up and went over to where Dmu Dran lay, and cut his bonds.

Then he strode over to where Ryker lay in a huddle and stood looking down at him, smiling slightly, fingering the knife.

Ryker said nothing. But he gave him look for look, and there was no weakness in his face, no trace of fear.

The prince knelt and cut his hands free. Then he stood

up and put the knife into his sleeve, and went to look over the cliff edge, and searched the desert with narrowed eyes.

As soon as he had rubbed the numbness from his stiff muscles, Ryker came over to where Zarouk stood.

"What now?" he asked.

Zarouk shrugged.

' 'Now we sit down and wait until my men get here,'' he said flatly. "After that, we'll see."

Ryker nodded thoughtfully. Then he found a convenient boulder and sat down. And waited.

To learn whether he was going to live or die.

11. The Lost Nation

After the men
had tired of using the whips on him, they left him hanging there in the chains all night without water. He was half unconscious most of the time; the rest of the time he was a little mad, and would have raved if his longue were not black and swollen from thirst.

With dawn they relented and cut him down, and let the
F'yagh
who was their other captive tend to his cold wounds and lacerated back. Through a blood-dimmed haze Ryker caught glimpses of this man, a white man, an Earthsider, whom he had never seen before and whose name he knew not.

Nor cared. What mattered was that the Earthman gave him
water.
Cool, sweet, blessed water—more wondrous than any wine, more precious than rubies. He drank, and drank, and fell into a doze. And woke to find the man working over him.

He opened the older wounds and cleaned the pus out of them and soothed them with creamy ointments filled with drugs that numbed the pain and drained the poison and held death at bay. Then he shot Ryker full of antibacterials and fever fighters and fed him hot, delicious broth until he fell asleep again. This time it was a wholesome sleep from which, when he woke, he woke refreshed and strengthened and—sane.

Zarouk's men called him the Dok-i-Tar, which was the nearest they could bend their tongues around "doctor." The People have no word in their language for a savant, a

scientist, a man who devotes his life to the gathering of knowledge with a selfless fervor that is almost religious. Such a man, Ryker soon learned, was Eli Herzog, an Israeli by nationality, a Martian by exile, a scientist and philosopher by nature.

He was an old man with a tall brow and a big nose and not much hair. What there was of it was thin and white and silky. His eyes were watery, gentle, wise, filled with humor and wistful dreams, but without illusions.

They were exactly the eyes of another Jewish savant, a man named Einstein, in the famous portrait by Roether which Ryker had seen once, years ago, in the great museum on Luna.

Like that other great mind, Herzog loved humanity as he loved knowledge, but he had no delusions about the sanctity of either. He had been exiled to Mars twenty years before, for so-called political "crimes" back on Earth— during "The Troubles" merely to express an opinion that differed from the official line was defined as criminal.

On Earth, then, Doc Herzog had been a criminal. Here, he was more like a saint. He fell in love with the People and with their ancient ways and traditions. He loved them for their pride and their poverty, their grimly cherished honor, and their refusal to yield one inch before the overwhelming might of Earth and all her millions and her , machines.