Serpent's Silver (13 page)

“Come on, hurry it up!”

That Bemode sounded ugly. Probably he was a mean man, given the chance. Better not anger him. She tried to shut off all other thoughts except getting down.

“Look at those legs!” Bemode exclaimed.

She had forgotten what she was wearing! This silken dress exposed everything from below. But what could she do? If she tried to stay up in the tree, they would fire a crossbow bolt into her. She gritted her teeth and continued climbing down, though she felt the gaze of the two men almost physically on her moving legs. It was as if slime were coating them.

Sooner than she had expected, the right gauntlet swung her out on a limb and dropped her the short remaining distance. The men stood as if mesmerized, their eyes round, their mouths open. Because of her legs? In other circumstances she would have taken that as a compliment. As it was, she was disgusted, but didn’t dare say so.

“You see that, Corry? She must be part houcat! I thought she’d fall.”

“That would’ve been a waste!” Corry said.

Bemode dismounted. “Bring me that sword, woman!”

Heln transferred the sword from her left gauntlet to her right. The gauntlets did not feel as if they wanted to relinquish it. According to Kelvin, they made the wearer a master swordsman. But could they do that even for a woman?

“Help my father,” she said.

“We’ll help him when we get help. We’ve got chains all ready for him. Haven’t we, Corry?”

Heln saw that there was a length of heavy chain fastened to Bemode’s saddle. As she watched he unfastened it and the chain dropped to the ground.

“You are going to chain my father?”

“Have to. King’s orders. But maybe not the same for you, if you cooperate. Your sword.”

Cooperate? She hardly needed to guess what that meant. She remembered the first time she had been raped.

Corry dismounted. “Don’t be rough, Bemode. The king wouldn’t like it. He doesn’t want her badly marked. Worse yet, Melbah wouldn’t like it.”

“Melbah’s not going to get it.”

“Still—”

“Pity,” Bemode said, evidently daunted by the thought of Melbah’s ire. “Still, we can make her say it’s all right. Then—”

The sword in the gauntlet lifted without Heln quite willing it. A sudden determination came to her. A determination that if she could not be in charge she would at least be on her way to get St. Helens some help. He was, after all, in his predicament because of her. As for what these two planned for her—she wanted no part of it.

Bemode reached out to take the sword. “Give me that!”

Whereupon she would be weaponless, and largely helpless to resist them. “No!” she said. The sword darted at Bemode’s face, pulling back before touching it.

“Well, I’ll be a cuckold!” Bemode said. He whipped out his own blade and made a swipe with it. As he did, the gauntlet feinted, twisted her wrist, and Bemode’s blade rebounded. Not only rebounded, but flew away with great force. The sword lit in some bushes and left Bemode standing with open mouth.

Corry reached for the sword sheathed at his hip. He paused, eyeing the tip of Heln’s blade that was suddenly at his throat. Suddenly his mind was no longer on the sight of bare legs, but on bare steel.

“You,” Heln said to Bemode. “Get that chain and drag it to this tree!”

Bemode did as instructed, looking worriedly at Corry. His horse neighed: it was almost a laugh.

“All right, stand with your back against the tree!” she snapped. “You, Corry, stand next to him.” It was the way she thought a man would have talked.

The men obeyed. Keeping her eyes on them while they eyed her blade, she took the end of the chain and circled the tree several times. Bemode looked as though he wanted to make a sudden move, but always the gauntlet guided the point of the sword to bear on his left eye and he reconsidered. Now what? Oh, yes, there was a lock at one end. She drew the two ends together and locked the chain. Then she stepped out in front of them.

“I’m going for help now. If your help arrives before mine, my father is not to be chained. His wound is to be cared for and he is to be rested and fed. If this is not done, your king and your Melbah will answer to the Roundear of Prophecy himself!” What was she saying? This seemed crazy! It was almost as if the gauntlets were making her speak!

Corry and Bemode looked at each other. Bemode swallowed. They might disagree, but they were not in a position to argue.

“And one other thing.” Her gloves stuck the sword point down into the ground. “When my father revives he will want his sword. Take good care of it; it’s a gift from your king.”

Amazed at what she was doing, Heln mounted Corry’s horse and the all-knowing gauntlets took expert charge of the reins. She thought she would remember the way to the border, but she doubted that she would have to. With her wishes firmly in mind, the gauntlets could be relied upon to do the rest.

As she walked her horse past her onetime kidnappers, Corry said to Bemode: “You, you fly-blown idiot, you had to tell her to bring the sword!”

“Well, if you hadn’t been so busy looking up her dress, you’d have told me not to!” Bemode retorted.

Heln almost smiled. Maybe that dress had done her some good, after all.

Chapter 13

Prisoners

JOHN KNIGHT LAY ON the straw-filled mattress and watched as Gerta, his flopear attendant, ladled his soup. Miraculously his injured hand and broken finger had healed perfectly, as though treated by Earth’s best surgeons. It had to be partially magic, he thought ruefully. He who had always declared that there was no such thing, even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary—he owed his recovery to magic!

That reminded him of Charlain, his pointear wife, now his widow of the other frame. Wonderful Charlain! She had believed in magic, and now he knew she had been correct. He had a fine son and daughter by her. If only he hadn’t had to leave her! But her life would have been put in peril had he stayed longer, and he couldn’t tolerate that, so he had left. He had done so with deep and continuing regret, but had never doubted the need for it. He could not return to her as long as the fate of Queen Zoanna was unknown, and as long as Charlain’s second husband, Hal Hackleberry, lived. Hackleberry was a good man, and so John meant never to return to that frame.

Gerta handed him the beautifully wrought silver bowl and exquisitely designed spoon. He took them, marveling again at how well his hand worked. He also admired the moving picture on the bowl; when the spoon approached it, the face on the bowl smiled. This seemed to be an actual change in the image, not a mere illusion. What phenomenal artisans these folk were! He sipped at the broth, really appreciating its rich chicurk flavor.

Gerta smiled down at him. Such big ears, covering the sides of her face like the ears of a puppy. Such gentle eyes, such a sweet face, albeit with a large slash mouth. About three feet tall and a little bit too wide, she was his picture of a female gnome.

“You want bread?”

“Thank you, Gerta. Yes. Please.”

He watched her cross the room, its walls of unbroken stone, its interior that of a neat, clean cottage. She sawed him a hunk of bread from a loaf, using a large toothed knife. The handle was decorated, he saw.

“Gerta, would you bring the knife?”

She brought it, handing it trustingly to him along with a thick piece of bread. He bit into the crust, enjoying its rough oat texture and caraway-seed taste with a hint of pizza crust. The handle of the knife was in the form of a silver serpent, the tail expanding into the blade. When he touched the end of the handle, the eyes of the serpent moved to follow his motion. He knew this was just the magic of the sculpture, but it was eerie. How did they manage to animate their carved figures?

“You call yourselves the serpent people, Gerta?”

“That is true, John Knight.”

But others would call them flopears, inevitably. He considered his outstanding luck. Injured, floating down a river toward the great incredible falls that seemed to drop into blackest, star-filled space. It had been coming closer and closer, that falls, and he had been paddling to save his life. Then the water and the raft and himself falling, then floating, then… here. It was a different world, a different existence from either the Earth he had originated on or the world that was inhabited by pointed-ear people who considered round-eared people strange. He had found himself on the raft on a different river, singing birds all around. He had realized that something, some force, had taken him and brought him here. Some atomic force such as had been released by the artillery shell that had transported him and a few of his men into a near fairyland of pointy-eared people and magic. It had somehow, someway, happened. That hole, that flaw in reality, The Flaw, had somehow brought him here.

He thought again of Zoanna, the red-haired queen of Rud who had bewitched him with a magic well known on Earth: the magic of sex appeal. He thought of how evil she had been, how she had killed and destroyed good folk without conscience, and been in almost every way a terrible monster. But he had been slow to appreciate that side of her, being fascinated by the single facet she showed to him alone: her beauty and her desire for him. How foolishly flattered he had been, how possessed by lust for her body—a lust she encouraged and freely obliged. He had willfully blotted out the evidence of her true nature for an unconscionably long period; he was ashamed to remember it now.

He had tried to destroy her in the end, even as his remarkable son Kelvin, by lovely Charlain, was fighting to free the kingdom from her. He felt he had destroyed her, and yet he was not certain. At least he had tried! It did not make up for his long sojourn on the wrong side, but it was better than nothing. He still owed that frame, he felt, though he had no idea how he could ever make it up. It was all far away now, in another existence, and perhaps best forgotten.

He dipped the bread in the soup and sucked at it. “You know, Gerta, I’m nearly well now.”

“Yes, your mind and body both healed.”

“Mind?” What could she know of his tumultuous inner doubts?

“You were mad.”

Had he been? He thought back. Images came to him erratically. As in pictures flickering on a television screen while his mind dozed fitfully, coming awake now and then. Could he make any sense of them? Maybe if he tried to put them into chronological order.

Falling into The Flaw, down, down, eternally. Then, somehow, he wasn’t falling, he was floating, in a sea of stars. Drifting without direction, without orientation. That strangeness penetrating his mind, making it—mad? Stray thoughts: how foolish to travel through this maelstrom without a map. So he had conjured a map, or dreamed it up, and scratched a route on it. A route to Mouvar. That made so little sense, even in his madness, that he laughed and laughed—but nevertheless moved along that marked route, which now was a glowing band in the void ahead. The band became a stream of light or of darkness, and a current carried him along. Until it became too swift, and he spun out or fainted or dropped into another level of madness.

Crawling up a slippery bank. Realizing suddenly that it was actually the muddy shell of a turtle as large as the Galapagos kind. Or larger. But not the tortoise on which the world was supported—wrong mythology. Maybe.

Running, falling, again hurting his sickeningly injured right hand. That hand was mangled horribly, dripping blood, sending pain messages in increasing waves. Trees, brush, rocks. Run, run, run.

Falling, falling, falling. Pain.

Something silver, long. A rope? He reached out his left hand, his working hand.

A loud hissing sound and the rope undulating. Jaws of a serpent, opening wide. A drop of clear venom hanging on a fang and then dropping.

Pain, pain, pain.

Screaming. His own.

Now a flower gently tapping the head of the serpent. A blue-and-pink blossom resembling a cross between a violet and a wild rose. A stubby-fingered hand, holding the stem.

The serpent’s jaws closing. The serpent settling down, sliding away.

Now a face above the hand holding the blossom. Very blue eyes and very large ears like a puppy’s. Gerta’s. She looking down at him, her mouth making a moue and her eyes squeezing. A tear running down her face.

Flower petals touching his forehead, gently, gently stroking. A flower scent a little like a poppy’s, soothing his tired mind, easing the long pain. A puppy with a poppy! Pained laughter. Oblivion, again.

He shook himself mentally. It had been so dreamlike, and yet so real. It was more than a hallucination, or else hallucination could return in memory with entirely too much reality.

This
was really Gerta. This room that was lighted by large phosphorescent toadstools placed all about.
Walls
that were rock, and apparently solid rock. It was like a room in a cave or cavern, but the walls were smooth. Laser construction here? Or magic?

“You wish to eat?” Gerta asked.

“Please.” The language was the same, at least. Strangely, it seemed like other things to vary only slightly from frame to frame. Perhaps not so strange, if it indicated that man had spread out from a common origin and colonized the several frames. Obviously there had been travel between them, because Mouvar had sown his legend among the pointears in Hud, and if those legends were to be believed, Mouvar hadn’t been the first. How could he have predicted the uniting of kingdoms if there were no kingdoms to unite? Roundear and pointear could interbreed; he had proved that. That meant they were closely related species. But these flopears, now—how close were they?

She brought him a robe. It was white and smooth and shiny, and on Earth he would have known it as satin. There were underdrawers of a less shiny material resembling cotton.

He hesitated, a holdover from his Earth life when the sexes were cautious about naked exposure, then rolled out of bed and quickly donned the garments. Gerta, after all, had been his gentle nurse for a length of time he couldn’t begin to estimate. It might have been weeks, though he had only been aware of days. During that time he knew she had aided him in all that was necessary, or else the magic was of a kind that allowed him to heal while suspending all body functions. That seemed unlikely. So though his memories were blurred, he was sure that Gerta had seen all of him, and all his functions.

“I haven’t been up before, have I, Gerta?”

“Yes, you have. With me walking you.”

“I don’t remember.”

“No. The healing clouds as it soothes and rebuilds the mind.”

He thought about that, and he also thought of how very capable he felt on his feet. Gerta handed him a pair of soft slippers with curled toes. As he sat down to put these on he marveled that both slippers were decorated with large buckles, and that the buckles were silver. The designs on the silver changed as his feet entered the slippers. He had given up wondering what the point of such magic was. Art did not need a point.

He stood up, looked around the room, and spotted a door. He was certain he had looked at it for hours on end, but now it was like seeing it for the first time. It, too, had decorated silver panels that changed in their own fashion in their own time.

“I will take you to the workplace, John. You are now quite well. The magic has finished its work.”

He marveled as he followed her. She moved quite fast for someone with such short legs. He felt a kindness toward her, a feeling that he might have had for a younger sister.

They went under stone archways, through some rooms without windows, and finally came out in a large natural amphitheater. Here there were many flop-eared men, wearing pointed caps not unlike Rud stockelcaps, and leather aprons. They were working at individual anvils. The cauldron around which the work centered contained silver in the molten state. The fire burning so brightly beneath the cauldron must, he realized, be of a magical nature to melt silver.

As he watched, one of the flopears walked to the cauldron carrying an armload of silvery, scaly-patterned skin. He turned the skin around in his hands and tossed it into the cauldron. Another flopear on a scaffold stirred the cauldron with a long ladle.

“My God!” John said. He whistled, then could do no better than to repeat his exclamation: “My God!”

The skin was serpentskin, and was purest silver! Shades of dragons with golden scales! Was there nothing that couldn’t be in different existences?

His mind went back, scrabbling frantically for a shred of sanity. High school, science teacher getting his attention: “This article tells how shellfish ingest heavy metal and how the metal migrates to their shells. The flesh of these shellfish is unfit to eat, and the coloration metallic. I suggest you read this and report on it for tomorrow’s class.” John had nodded, sorry that he had thrown the paper wad, and he wanted now to shout back through the years: “Yes, and immortal dragons live on and on for centuries!” Serpents that were as immortal as dragons, ingesting silver instead of gold, the silver migrating through centuries to those brightly shining scales?

A flopear who had been going from anvil to anvil, checking the work, came up to them. He was no taller than Gerta, but his head was larger and he had the facial expression of a harried foreman.

“He healed, Gerta?”

“Yes, healed.”

“Good. He will trade well.”

Gerta squirmed. “I don’t like to think of that, Harlick.”

“No matter. You know the way.”

“Yes.”

John stared at them. “Trade? Me? To others like yourselves?”

“To others like yourself, John.”

“Like me? People like me but with pointed ears?”

“Ears, pointed? No, John. Ears like ears on you mortal folk. Tiny ears low on the sides of your head.” She tried not to show her distaste for this abnormal configuration.

John thought of this as they left the workplace and ambled back the way they had come. On the return he saw that there were many cottages but that the rooms he had been in were in fact inside a cliff. There were other doorways in the cliff, and some round holes that might have been bored by lasers.

“What will happen to me, Gerta? Will I be a slave?”

“I don’t know, John. The roundears have their ways and we have ours. Their king of Hud buys all mortals who are prisoners of flopears if they are healthy. They trade for their own kind. What they do with them, I do not know.”

John Knight pondered that, and was not reassured. It was quite possible that he would be better off remaining with the flopears, if he had any choice in the matter.

*

Kian tried to concentrate on other things than their punishment. He had discovered that he could think for himself without Lonny knowing his thoughts, but if he thought in terms of speaking, she knew them immediately. This was nice to know if they were going to be spending an eternity together. But would they? Would their thoughts and those of the serpent gradually merge, becoming one? Maybe that was what would eventually happen, but maybe it could be slowed, if not stopped. What they had to do, he felt, was concentrate on thinking thoughts that were human. That might enable them to merge while retaining human nature and intellect, instead of descending to serpent level.

John Knight, his father, had talked about were-animals once. He said it was all superstition and invention, but that some people believed in them. On Earth anything might be possible. Wolves and cats and other Earth creatures holding the spirits of humans and changing with them from time to time. Perhaps these stories owed their existence to beings like the flopears. If spirits could exist, and he was inclined now to believe that they might, then why couldn’t there be two apparent species that shared the same spirits? If the serpents were truly immortal ancestors of the flopears, then was it strange that the…