we pick glossy purple fruits which the watermills crush into fragrant oil — and after Encar waddled Erdgar, fat and out of breath, with a problem on the supply of shaped and seasoned knees for the new ships he was building down in Valkanium’s dockyards.
“Erdgar,” I said. “There is a journey I must make. I shall need your best-found ship.
“Aye, she is fleet and well-found and might venture into the Southern Ocean, if needs be.”
This was a neat way of asking me my destination. The breeze blew on that high terrace of Esser Rarioch and the scent of yellow mushk, clustered with bees in its shelter, smelled very sweet. My friends were relaxing after the day’s toil; soon we would go down to the great hall to eat and drink and sing the old songs — and the new, aye, the new! — and life was exceedingly good.
“Zenicce,” I told Erdgar. “I will go to Strombor.”
This, as it seemed to me, was a cunning plan, for I might thus be able to detour the gales that prevented me from reaching Vallia. And I had a hunger to see Strombor again.
“Strombor! The devils of Esztercari drove out the good folk of Strombor! There was a story that they had in their turn been driven out. I pray the invisible twins it is so.”
Tharu drained his glass. “Many of us were born of parents who escaped from Strombor.”
My surprise was complete.
It made sense. Valka lies about a hundred and fifty dwaburs southwest of Zenicce. And the Stromboramin were likely to stick together in the urgency of their departure in the few ships available to them in those days of horror.
While Erdgar the Shipwright wheezed and fussed over
One warm and pinkly-golden evening as the Maiden with the Many Smiles and She of the Veils floated together in the sky I walked for a space on the canal bank, sunk in thought. The glorious pink and golden evening turned blue with a lambent refulgence of blueness I recognized with a savage surge of feeling. I looked up. Against the starshot sky with those two moons of Kregen floating so serenely I saw the luminescent blue outline of a gigantic scorpion. This was the sign! This scorpion with arrogantly upflung tail was the sign that in some way either brought me or indicated I was to be brought to Kregen. I had seen this phantom sky scorpion on Earth. Now I was seeing it on Kregen!
The old familiar blueness enveloped me and I was falling and twisting with the blueness roaring in my head — and I did not struggle, I did not shout my defiance, I merely waited for what the destiny of the scorpion would bring me.
CHAPTER SIX
It is not my intention to speak freely or to go into details of my life here on this planet of my birth. Although I usually returned to some crisis or other and I spent some exhilarating years here, to put it mildly, my chief interest and absorbing passions were ever fixed on the planet of Kregen orbiting Antares in the constellation of Scorpio four hundred light-years away.
Often I would stand and gaze into the starry sky, hoping and praying that the lambent-blue form of the ghostly scorpion would once more summon me, naked and unarmed, and pitch me headlong into bloody and violent adventure. The man whose name I do not mention who held my growing fortune in trust for me served me faithfully and well, and his descendants after him. He was always pleased to see me and asked no questions I could not answer. He and his sons knew of this habit of mine of looking up at the stars, but they passed no comment. I know they understood I was not as ordinary mortals. I found myself in Paris during the July days of 1830.
There was a time loop involved here; I had had the word from the Gdoinye as to that. I did not understand what was involved then; and even today, the mechanics of time distortion remain vague. I had spent more Terrestrial-span years on Kregen than there were between my first arrival there floating down the River Aph to Aphrasoe, the Swinging City, to meet the Savanti in 1805, and 1830. Caught up in the excitements of the dismissal of Charles X and the installation of Louis Phillipe, I played a part. Only after the seventh of August, however, was I free and able to walk alone by the Seine. The blue lambency caught me up swiftly, and the scorpion drew me willingly across the parsecs, hurtling through the empty dark to resume my destiny upon Kregen under the Suns of Scorpio. Even before I opened my eyes I knew I landed in a part of Kregen I had never visited before. The cold cut in like scalping knives.
As usual, I was unarmed, naked, left entirely to my own resources. I felt free, overjoyed, triumphant, profoundly thankful.
What, I wondered, was the emergency that had brought me back this time?
Whatever it might be I would deal with it as fast as I could and then, ascertaining just where I had been flung on this terrifying if beautiful world of Kregen, make my way to Vallia, march into Vondium, and confront the Emperor, demand from him his daughter in marriage. Yes, I had hesitated and hung back long enough. Only the gift of a thousand years of life had made what I had done possible. But my patience had run out. By Zim-Zair! No matter if the Emperor was belittled in the eyes of his daughter, and thereby I ran the risk of hurting her feelings — I had absolutely no fears that I would lose her love, as she knew she would never lose mine. I would take that risk and inflict that amount of pain on my beloved, believing sincerely that she would understand I moved not only for my own pleasure and greed and pride, but also for her sake as well.
I opened my eyes.
I shivered.
Snow lay everywhere in a thick, pale pink blanket through which the dark firs thrust like withered fingers of a buried army of crones.
A hundred yards off lay the crumpled shape of an airboat.
My task lay before me.
The wind cut into my naked hide and I knew that if I did not find clothes and food very quickly I could give up all hopes and ideas of finding my Delia again.
The airboat had landed badly and her petal shape had been grotesquely twisted. From the small aft cabin I dragged out four bodies. These men were Vallians. Under the heavy ponsho fleeces they wore the buff coats and the long black boots I knew so well. Selecting the body of the largest, I stripped him and donned his gear. The warmth of the ponsho skin struck in most gratefully and I shivered in reciprocal delight. Now I could attend to the two men still alive. Unconscious, they breathed stertorously; but an examination convinced me they were not seriously injured. These two men, then, were the reason I had been returned to Kregen.
The airboat had crashed through spiky fir trees to come to rest in a V-shaped valley between peaks. Up there the snow and ice glistened uglily. The thought occurred to me that we were stranded in The Stratemsk, a fate of almost certain disaster. The Stratemsk, although not the greatest range of mountains upon Kregen, are so vast, so tall, so hostile, that the imagination shrinks from their contemplation. Downslope a panorama spread out where the valley ended, and between craggy outcrops the snow could not smooth or render less sinister a glacier began, vanishing below cloud. That, then, was our way out.
A cry brought my attention back to the flier. One of the men had crawled to the shattered opening. His face glared out on me more white, more stark, than the snow and the dark fir trees.
“What happened? Where are we? Who are you?” The voice carried that habitual ring of authority, so that I
