Fliers of Antares

But I held it fast and shouted, “By Makki-Grodno’s diseased left armpit! Tell me straight, you nurdling yetch!”

“A year, Prescot.” The bird stretched those gorgeous pinions wide and with a spring he was airborne.

“A single year. Then you may — for a space only — imagine yourself a free man.” Then, with what I can only describe as a derisive howl, the raptor winged away into the blue, a scarlet and golden splash of color that rose and darkened into a black blot and so vanished in the suns-glow. I lowered the bow.

Damned uppity bird!

Sinkie had cried when I bid her and her husband, Ortyg Coper, who was now Regent for the King of Djanduin, Remberee.

Yet she could have no knowledge of what dangers and what terrors I would face upon the beautiful hostile face of Kregen.

No manifestation of a blue scorpion arose before my eyes, no blue radiance engulfed me to suck me into emptiness. Remember, it was a full ten years since I had last experienced the summons of the scorpion. Then the Star Lords had clearly missed their target in time, although they had found it in space, for they had dumped me down by the inn and the crossroads after the time I should have been there. We had heard that one of the leemsheads had been hung up in chains on the tree; so all was explained about what I had seen — the repaired roof, the different season. But perhaps the Star Lords were waiting for my violent protestations, which they assumed I must make with such vehement anger. Perhaps if they transmitted me during my burst of rage they were, in some way unknown to me, dislocated in their calculations.

Certainly, I had defeated their purposes before this.

Could it be that a mere mortal man might thwart the Everoinye not merely in an underhand way, as I had done, but in a straight contest of wills? I thought it hardly likely.

“Why do you wait, you puissant Star Lords?” I bellowed out, there beneath the tamiyan trees, perched so ridiculously in my broken-down voller in the land of Yanthur. “Where is your powerful and venomous blue scorpion?”

I thought then to look to see if by chance the white dove of the Savanti might not be circling overhead, watching me, and watching the Gdoinye of the Star Lords, too.

But I saw nothing of the white dove of the Savanti.

This was becoming ludicrous. I had been learning a little of the fliers and their idiosyncrasies. Ever since the time Delia had told me to move the silver boxes so as to bring our runaway flier to the plains of Segesthes I had been fascinated by all vollers. I held the Air Service of Vallia in great esteem. So I thought it prudent before I girded myself up for a long trek to see if I might not be able to fiddle about with the cantankerous voller and get it into the air again.

I stood up in the small two-place flier and rested my hands on the wooden-framed hull. It was a shallow, petal-shaped craft, with a small windshield and a pit filled with flying furs and silks. I was putting my leg over the side to crawl out on a branch of the tamiyan trees, when the blueness came down with such speed and force that I gasped. I felt a giant rushing wind and I struggled for breath. I shouted something, anything, I know not what, and went pitching out and down.

One thing I recall; I hit my head on something extraordinarily hard. So it was that with the bells of Beng-Kishi ringing in my skull and the hovering presence of Notor Zan about me that I was pitched headlong into the next adventurous task I must fulfill for the Star Lords.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Muruaa speaks

Stark naked, weaponless, and with a thump on the head that left me dizzy and half senseless, I struggled to open my eyes to find out where on Kregen I had been flung.

I could hear shrieking and screaming.

That was normal enough.

Also I could hear a strange hissing sizzling, as though a thousand giant vosk steaks fried upon Notor Kanli’s forge.

That was odd.

Someone crashed into me and knocked me flat.

The air was warm — very warm. Even as I scrabbled around with those damned bells of Beng-Kishi clamoring in my skull the heat increased with throat-drying speed. I managed to get an eye unglued and peered about on a scene of terror and panic. The rumblings of hell shook the ground. Sulfur stank. An exquisite girl with long lithe legs ran toward me, screaming. Her clothes were on fire. Her hair blazed terribly. She was apim; soon she would be a burned corpse.

I jumped for her, knocked her down, smashed at the burning clothes, ripping off the coarse gray dress, smothering the blazing hair. She screamed and screamed.

Around me people were running and screaming. Some were on fire. Some had pitchers of water which were soon expended. They ran from a village of mud huts with wooden roofs, and the roofs blazed to the sky. I followed the streaked tracks of the smoke and looked into the sky. Up there, towering over the world, poured the mouth of hell.

Fire. Fire and flame. Fire and destruction. Burning and smoking and roaring, the volcano pumped out its fiery breath and its destructive vomit and smothered the village in terror and horror. Huge, that volcano, towering, high, and cone-sided, and the lava ran down swiftly in glowing orange and red spuming gouts over everything in its path.

Evilly swirling in wide writhing tentacles from a violent smoky orange through a snarling ruby-red to a pure fiery white, the lava raged downslope and through the village. The heat grew. The noise battered as the lava poured and slipped over the steep edge of an embankment to fall into the blue and placid waters of a lake. Trees burned before they fell to be consumed utterly. The waters roiled near the shore and the waves spread out in wide ripples so that the placid surface grew congested and turbulent in a wide and swiftly growing circle.

Terraces of neat agriculture had been hacked in alternating wide and narrow steps down the flanks of the low surrounding hills. But the monster of fire poured down over everything, and a village was dying and a people was being destroyed — and, as usual, Dray Prescot was there, naked and disoriented, expected to select the right person to save.

The girl was burned, but she was still alive and she would live.

I bent to her.

“Muruaa!” she moaned. “Muruaa!”

“On your feet, girl, and run! Past the slide and into the lake! Move! ”

She saw my face and she flinched, all burned and naked and in pain. But she staggered to her feet and ran off. I had taken stock of the situation as I saw it. The village was doomed. But below, down the steep slope, lay a sizable town, neatly mud walled and wooden roofed, in a cleft between the low, terraced hills. I could look down and see the peaked roofs of sturm-wood, and the mud-brick walls, the enclosures, and the little backyard chimneys smoking with preparations for one of the many daytime meals of Kregen. The suns were rising in the sky, and they blazed through a crown of smoke. The land lay lit in ghastly orange and lurid vermilion from the fires of the volcano. The fugitives from the outlying village vanished below. Some staggered, burned; others crawled; but one or two young men lifted the old folk, and in a bunch they disappeared below the brick-wall of a terrace. The girl whose clothes I had wrenched off and whose blazing hair I had put out ran with them. I stood alone.

If I refused to imperil my life? It was the Earth of my birth for me, then, and no mistake. So, like the puppet I swore I would someday cease from being, I ran. One day, please Zair, I would cut the strings that held me puppet- slave to the Everoinye.

As I ran I studied the landscape. There is much to be learned from the landscape of a people. Here there was no wide aa. I know that is the volcanologists’ term. Also I have walked over the uneven lumpy lava fields below Etna, which the locals call sciara, and shuddered at what they hide. But here the ground was fertile and the crops