Part 1
Valkyrie From The Void
By BASIL WELLS
Staggering under the blasting heat of a great ringed sun, she fought only to cross her savage slimy world. The lithe Priestess Ylda knew not that her goal lay, bright and shining, a thousand light-years away.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Hardan Synn reined in his graceful golden-furred _maar_ as he reached the rim of the river's low bluff. He was uncomfortable, for the _vurth_-padded garments that covered his naked body were growing dry, but tied to his huge hornless saddle were three fat Dryland birds. He would eat well tonight.
The rough fare of cereals and preserved fish had palled. Five years of roaming the blistering plains and mountains with sun-hardened prospectors and hunters had given Hardan Synn a taste for Dryland flesh. So it was that he quitted the camp when the day's trek was done and rode out in search of game.
The maar's long black ears cupped forward, searching the source of some discordant sound. Hardan's keen green eyes snapped back to the reality of the camp sprawling half-in, half-out of the muddy bluish river.
Men were fighting, fists and clubs smashing into the down-furred flesh of their fellows. The sound of their enraged bellowing and the shrill screams of pain and agony grew louder even as he forced his maar down the steep path to the bluff's base.
"Nitka Porn again," Hardan Synn spat out savagely as the blue dust swirled about him. "Always he seeks to stir up trouble among the _sarifs_."
His sun-darkened face was a gaunt mask as he neared the river, but his slitted green eyes were hot with growing rage. He could not leave the eighty great wagons with their cargos of two hundred Wetlanders and their meager supplies for so short a time as a _turev_ of the water dial without trouble arising.
Hardan sprang off his mount and elbowed his way into the thick of the melee, his broad hard shoulders tossing soggy-padded men aside. His hard fists smashed one scowling-faced Wetlander's nose, and then he was through into the rude square formed by the inner ring of six-wheeled wagons.
"Nitka Porn!" he shouted, his voice a knife-thrust of sound above the tumult.
The fighting men separated slowly, some weaving on their legs unsteadily, bleeding, and others kneeling and groaning. A half-dozen, most of them wearing the short green capes of the nobles' personal servants, sprawled limply in their own reddish-brown blood.
From one of these unmoving bodies a huge-bodied man, his brutal jaws masked by a bush of fiery red whiskers and his broad nose segmented by a sword-cut's diagonal scar, rose. Half his protective shell of faded blue cloth stuffed with vurth was ripped away from his shoulder and chest. Great muscles knotted there in his swiftly dehydrating pink flesh. He snarled at Hardan.
"The Drylander arrives," he jeered, and laughed.
From the hard-packed blue clay of the camping place he picked an arm-long stake of wood. He waved it derisively at Hardan.
"Watch him shiver," he roared. "When he is well beaten I will drive him from the camp. Then I will lead."
Hardan's stomach knotted--and then dissolved into a glowing spot of fire. His fingers bit into the leather handles of his twin short swords. He had no eyes for the grinning minority clustered about Nitka Porn. Nor did he see the puzzled empty faces of the other trekkers, the slow-minded plodding sarifs caught in this bloody trailside struggle.
"You stand alone against us all," snarled Nitka Porn, swaggering forward, his muddy green eyes slitted watchfully. "The Consars are dead, swimming in their fine wagon tanks for the last time. Their wagons and riding maars are ours now."
Hardan caught his breath on that. This was disaster!
"Fools," he said, his voice loud and sharp, "you know the price of any rebellion. The Consars will track you down. For many it will be the crushing death."
Even as he spoke his eyes never left those of the red-whiskered killer he fronted. In a moment the giant sarif would charge forward, his club swinging and the long curved sword of a dead lord in his other hand.
Hardan sprang to meet him, swords bared and gleaming. Perhaps with the death of Nitka Porn the revolt would collapse....
The stake caught him squarely on the shoulder. His left-hand sword dropped, tripping him. He caught himself, warded off a whistling slash of the huge curved blade of the sarif, and leaped backward. His left shoulder was numbed, his arm dangling limp as a blasted _netho_ leaf in the noonday sun.
Hardan's sword darted in and out, flickering in the brazen sunlight. Blades clashed, slithered apart and the good steel rang clear as bells tinkling. Blood leaked through the pierced blue cloth of the sarif's vurth-padded garment in a half-dozen places.
His arm was tingling with reviving life. Through a red mist of hate Hardan fought with a cool machine-like series of lightning-swift lunges that ripped the sarif's skin into myriad reddish-brown furrows. Hatred was there, yes, but so controlled that it added strength to his sword arm and length to his blade.
The long curved sword flipped abruptly away into the faceless mass of the ringed trekkers. Nitka Porn pawed at his dripping knuckles, his mouth squared, his eyes bulging. He lunged backward, the men parting before his blind rush. And Hardan followed, his eyes hot.
"Kill him.... Mika, Garnd.... Don't let him.... No.... Mercy!" begged the great coward, his hands before his face.
Hardan poised his keen blade for the death thrust.
"No," he swore angrily, "by Ung Roth, I have not the heart for killing this foul _bladt_."
He rammed the sword into the clay. His fists swung hard, all the unleashed loathing and disgust of weeks past in their calculated blows, and Nitka Porn went down emptily, to quiver and lie still.
Hardan retrieved his swords, wiping the stains off on the unconscious hulk's ribboned cloth. He faced the sullen Wetlanders.
"I take over again," he announced. "Back to Aba we go. It's but two days' trek. There the guilty will be punished before I guide you to Lake Gron."
* * * * *
Dandu Mot, a gray-maned sarif, stepped forward. "No," he said simply. "We will not go back. The innocent would die with the guilty. And our children and women would be driven out of the settlement stripped of even our poor store of tools and food."
Hardan frowned. Dandu Mot was right. The justice of the Consars on the frontier was severe. They would make of this revolt a lesson for all that might follow along the arid dusty way from Wetland to Wetland. Even he, as guide and leader of the wagon train, might be killed.
The old man came closer, his faded green eyes pleading.
"We did not wish to revolt," he said. "It was Nitka Porn and his men who murdered the Consars. Perhaps beyond the Malsalm Range other Wetlands lie...."
His voice trailed off. Hardan's eyes swept over the oddly assorted throng of sarifs and craftsmen, poor oppressed men seeking a new and freer life beyond the Drylands. Could he see these sad-faced women made widows needlessly? And what of the young ones, their soft pelts as yet devoid of the scantiest of silky fur?
"I must yield," he said soberly. "And beyond the eastern uplands there does lie a sea. Only one Wetlander has ever looked upon it--Jaff Ka!" He paused. "By the grace of Ung Roth and Zo Aldan we may win through."
"There are Drylanders?"
Hardan nodded. "Drylanders who hide in watered valleys and war on all who venture there. Strange monsters, demons of Thog Molog, so say the Drylanders, lurk in the darkness to kill. And winged _soraps_ that carry off half-grown children and woolly bladts."
"You know the way?"
"I have ridden across the Plateau of Fire to the Plains of Niid, Dandu Mot, but never to the Bitter Sea. But Jaff Ka told me the way."
"So let it be," said the old sarif, stroking his blistered cheek thoughtfully. "And, if we die in the Drylands--we at least die free!"
He turned to his followers. "Seize the followers of Nitka Porn and bind them. Tonight we will try them."
Swords and knives flashed. Clubs smashed and battered, and a moment later seven groaning men were led away. Four others of the red-bearded sarif's followers would walk no more, anywhere.
Hardan turned sharply on his heel and headed for the two wagons of the priests of Ung Roth Ka. His dehydrated body cried out for a soaking in the built-in tank in the wagon's middle. Only by frequent immersions and water-soaked outer shells of cloth could the Wetlanders endure the arid wastelands for more than a few hours.
A line of wounded, bruised men were already at the wagon, the two priests in their hooded orange cloaks attending to their hurts. And with the priests worked their gentle-faced wives, the priestesses of Zo Aldan Ra, the god's beloved mate. Hardan's blood pounded fast as he caught a glimpse of the white-robed novice, Ylda Rusla, bearing a steaming basin of water in her dainty hands.
"Hardan!" cried the girl, her soft green eyes lighting up, "you escaped death! You will take us back to Tarn--to safety?"
The frontiersman smiled down at the lithe full-breasted woman facing him. Even the soggy vurth-padded garments and the coarse white robe could not conceal the perfection of her body and face.
He shook his head.
"We go into the Malsalm Range," he told her, "and beyond."
"Not even to Lake Gron!" Ylda's face was ghastly. "But, I must--surely you could send me back."
"Sorry," Hardan muttered, "but you cannot leave us now. The wagon train must disappear--as though the Drylanders had attacked and destroyed it."
* * * * *
The girl's eyes flamed. "I command you to take me back to Aba!" Her foot stamped down imperiously.
"Ylda, believe me, I would if it were possible. But the lives of us all depend on absolute secrecy. No word of this train must ever reach the Consars of Tarn."
Ylda's small chin lifted and she turned her back, the hot water slopping down across her robe. She headed blindly back toward the wagons. Hardan shrugged, an empty pit in his middle. Any hope that he might win the beautiful novice from her devotion to Zo Aldan Ra was gone now.
He hurried past the wagons and down the blue clay slope to the fresh waters of the Gron River. For the moment he wanted no conversation with the priestly healers of the wagon train--or anyone else....
II
His body soaked luxuriously in the shady pool beyond a looming jut of reddish granite. Were his lungs drinking in the moist richness of the Upper Sea, the vurth-maintained mistiness above the true seas of Osar, he might have thought he was back in Tarn.
The Wetlands of Tarn were a handful of islands and a narrow thirty-mile-wide strip of foggy tropical plains and forests along the true sea of Tarn. Over the sea and back over the mainland extended the upper sea, a false sea of floating aerophyte growth, tenuous and frothy as spun threads of silvery moonbeams; yet capable of retaining a vast amount of moisture and warmth.
For almost a mile it extended upward, its delicate tendrils touching the restless sea and the fertile moistness of the land alike to draw life from them. It offered no resistance to the passage of men or ships; yet it shielded them from the harshness of the vast ringed sun of Osar.
And here four million Wetlanders lived and built their dank massive-walled cities. Half of them were Tarns, ruled by the Council of Consars, and across the vastness of the Tarn Sea four other smaller kingdoms fought and squabbled over their narrow strips of vurth-shielded Wetland.
The land was overcrowded and so it came about that a few hardy adventurers pushed out into the Drylands. At first they followed the rivers, their bodies slowly toughening to the actinic rays of the direct sunlight, and later they struck out into the unknown dryness of grassy plains and deserts. They fought the huge apish Drylanders and ate the hairless horned ulfo of the plains and the woolly bladts of the barren hills.... And they found Lake Gron, where a large central island offered new homes for thousands of impoverished Consars and their sarifs.
So it was that endless series of wagon trains, drawn by domesticated Dryland beasts, maars and ulfos, pushed up the Aba River, and the Gron River beyond the dam at Aba, to the upland lake. And the hardy men of the frontier guided them--even as Earthmen ten centuries before, and a thousand light-years distant, had guided their effete Eastern countrymen into the Rockies and beyond....
Hardan stirred at last and climbed, refreshed, from his pool. Darkness had come and a dozen fires blazed merrily within the ringed double walls of the roofed wagons. He gathered up his weapons and clothing, wearing only the thin inner jerkin and trunks against the dryness of the night air, and went to the wagons.
Before dawn the wheels were rumbling and grinding up over the rock-strewn ridge above the river headed out into the eastern grasslands. The sleeping tanks, where the Wetlanders slept on moist elevated pads of vurth, were full and the spare water tanks were loaded as well. A dry trek of three, possibly four, days lay ahead of them before they could reach the eastward branching of the Aba River.
Hardan and three of the young sarifs stayed behind as the train moved away, readying the ten oldest wagons and the discarded equipment for the fire that was to help cover their tracks. Later parties of Wetlanders would find the ashes of wagons and the fire-blasted skeletons of men beside the trail and presume this had been a massacre by the apish barbarians of the plains.
"I wish the council of sarifs had ordered the death of Nitka Porn last night," said a blocky young sarif uneasily. "If they escape during the night there will be trouble."
Hardan touched his torch to the wagon they approached. The others were already ablaze. Together they swung into the saddles of their snorting maars. Only then did he speak.
"Yes, Malth Jed," he agreed. "It seemed to me that the council feared Nitka's wrath even though he was a prisoner. For that reason I advised Dandu Mot to double the guard."
"There was light from the fires last night," argued Malth Jed. "Why wait for daylight to slice their necks?"
"I do not believe all Porn's followers are prisoners," Hardan said grimly. "They may hope to free Nitka Porn and recapture the wagon train. Any delay would help that plot."
"Fools," grunted Malth Jed shortly. "The red-bearded one would turn on them even as he turned on the Consars."
By this time the other two sarifs had joined them on the rim of the bluff above the river. The wagons blazed up brightly, their sun-dried wood and cloth burning fiercely. With the morning sun only a smoking huddle of ashes and twisted metal would remain.
Hardan reined away from the bluff. They made too perfect targets against the illumination of the fire. But suddenly he arrested the little party's advance with a hiss of warning.
* * * * *
From the pale darkness before them the sound of distant shouts and shrieks came to them. The caravan was being attacked--or the outlaw sarifs had been freed!
"Spread out," Hardan commanded tensely, "as we reach the wagons. That way we will present a poorer target."
He dug his heels into the maar's sleek sides and they galloped forward along the rutted broad track of the wagon train.
The fighting had ended by the time they traversed the half mile gap that lay between them. The wagons were halted in a jumbled confused S-shaped tangle in the growing dawn. Only a sullen silence greeted them, but they saw dark movement against the slant-roofed bulk of the wagons.
"Hold!" warned Hardan. "Let me ride forward. It may be a trap."
And then, from a clump of wagons further along the snaking train, a maar and rider pounded out into the grasslands and headed in their direction. A man shouted something, and a confused chorus of yells answered him. After the lone rider a dozen other mounted men raced.
"It's a woman!" Malth Jed grunted, his bow ready in his thick fingers. "The white-robed novice of Zo Aldan Ra."
"Then they've overcome Dandu Mot and freed the red-bearded one," Hardan muttered, readying his own weapons.
The girl rode swiftly closer. The four riders went to meet her, their swords loosened in their sheaths and their spears in their hands. Only Malth Jed relied on his heavy hunting bow as a weapon; the others preferred throwing spears and swords.
"Hardan!" shrieked Ylda, "behind you!"
The frontiersman twisted in his saddle, a throwing spear grazed his vurth-padded shoulder, and he found himself facing the hate-twisted features of the two sarifs who had accompanied him. The strength of Nitka Porn in the wagon train must have been considerable, he thought ruefully, as he crossed swords with the lanky sarif on his left.
The sarif was no swordsman, the cowardly spear had been his only hope, and even as he turned his terrified eyes briefly toward his fellow an arrow bristled from the other sarif's throat. He shrieked and hurled his sword at Hardan even as he dug his heels into the maar's flanks. He went racing away, blood streaming from his sword-pierced upper arm.
Malth Jed reined closer. "Wound you?" Hardan shook his head.
"They killed Dandu Mot--many others--one of the holy healers who rebuked them--and now they loot the wagons." The girl's lips quivered as she spoke breathlessly.
"I guess you get your wish now, Ylda Rusla," he said grimly. "We ride back to Aba to ask for troops to pursue Nitka Porn."
Further conversation was impossible. The first pursuers, augmented now by a score or more of men on foot, were upon them. Spears and arrows were dropping around them as they wheeled their maars about to escape.
Ylda's maar went down, squealing horribly, a spear in her belly, and the girl was hurled over her mount's head into the tangled coarseness of the yellow ulfo grass. Before Hardan could swing back to scoop the unconscious body of Ylda from the ground their pursuers had reached her and surrounded her.
Hardan rode into them, hewing and slashing with his twin swords, letting his maar move as she willed. Blood splashed and spurted before his maddened blows, and the rebellious sarifs fell back momentarily. Ylda screamed. He saw a sarif on foot hoist the girl's struggling form to a mounted man, a huge-bodied redbeard, and the rider's fist smashing down at the juncture of rounded neck and fragile jaw.
Ylda went limp as Nitka Porn's blow landed and then the outlaw rode away, waving a derisive fist at Hardan across the bulwark of mounted men and attacking sarifs on foot.
He was battling for his life a second later. A spear found his body, and then another. Arrows hailed upward at him, piercing his padded limbs and drawing blood. In a moment he would be over-powered. Yet he fought on, trying to break through the press of rebel sarifs to pursue Ylda's captor.
"Hardan," a terrible voice roared above the shouts of his attackers, "escape.... Outnumbered!"
A spark of sanity remained in his weary brain. And the words of Malth Jed fanned it into life. His swords hissed, carving out a momentary gap, and he sent his maar plunging back the way they had come. He saw Malth Jed, sagging in his saddle, racing before him, and even as he watched a feathered shaft jutted abruptly from between his shoulderblades.
The stocky sarif slumped forward, clinging in his death agony to the saddle, and so they rode away into the growing daylight of the Drylands--a wounded cursing Wetlander and a jouncing bundle of dead sinews and bone that had once been a man....
* * * * *
Two hands of days had passed before Hardan dared leave the sheltered cave beside the Gron River not far from the ashes of the abandoned wagons. The two maars had pastured in a grassy hidden ravine and there too had he buried the stocky body of Malth Jed.
Then he had taken up the trail of the wagons again, and, despite the soreness of his half-healed wounds, come up with them in a matter of three days riding. He found them camped at the Isr River junction.
So now he lay on his belly in the early twilight, peering down into the rough circle of wagons, his eyes searching for the white-robed form of the girl he loved.
At last he saw her with one of the priests and a priestess sitting beside a small cooking fire apart from the others. But she no longer wore the garb of a novice. Instead she wore the green cloak of a Consar over her bulky vurth-stuffed coverings. A moment later he saw that her legs were linked by a short length of chain, riveted to either ankle by a cuff of metal. And across the fire squatted an armed man, a guard.
Hardan was puzzled at her change of garb, but his blood pounded with joy as he saw her apparently unharmed and well-fed. With the coming of darkness he could rescue her, and, Ung Roth willing, the priests and their wives as well.
So he set out looking for a concealed pathway to the river's edge and a thousand feet further downstream came upon a sheer gorge cut into the clay and soft gray rock of the bluff. Down this he lowered himself and in the increasing gloom made his way to the river and submerged.
He swam upstream, silent as a hunting _prel_, his only weapons his two swords. His spear and the excess garments he had left on the little sunken bowl of grass where his maars grazed.
Like a great Dryland Ape of the woodlands he crept up from the water at last, his only shelter the waist-high clumps of ulfo grass that dotted the river's shingly bank. And he won at last inside the carelessly guarded ring of wagons to the small fire where Ylda sat silently and stared into the flames.
From the shelter of a great double-spoked wheel he studied the camp. Well for the fleeing sarifs, he thought, that no raiding party of Drylanders had come to attack. He heard them quarreling and shouting drunkenly, and saw their swords and other weapons heaped carelessly beside the fires as they ate and caroused.
The guard spat impatiently into the fire and ran a dry tongue over his parched lips. Longingly he studied the growing excitement at the center of the encampment. There was nothing to do here, only the priest and priestess discussing the strange healing property of a vegetable mold recently discovered in Tarn. He slapped his hip, cursed roughly, and climbed to his feet.
"Don't stir from the fire," he ordered Ylda fiercely. His tongue poked thirstily at his lips.
The guard swaggered away from the fire toward the curtain-hung rear of the wagon just ahead. This wheeled canvas-and-wood shack had a sagging roof sloping from a central ridge to either end of the box so that a sort of awning covered the low rear entrance. He reached inside and when his arm emerged a basket-woven jar was in his hand, its inner earthware lining containing a sloshing fluid.
Hardan scented the raw reek of alcohol, of _garack_, as he crept closer. The guard's thick lips smacked, he rubbed a rasping fist across his mouth and snorted appreciatively. Then the jar tilted again, gurgled.
The guide sprang, his fingers clamping about the startled throat of the sarif. He squeezed hard, choking back the gasp of terror, and the jug crashed to the hard ground. Then his fist chopped in a short vicious punch to the sarif's neck that felled the man.
He trussed the sarif swiftly with his own filthy brown cape, stuffing a generous handful into the gaping mouth, before he crossed to the fire and squatted in the guard's place.
Ylda came to her feet, hand to her mouth.
"Hardan!" She came toward him jerkily, the chain making her take mincing, careful steps.
"Sit down," he told her. "And warn your friends to keep their places." The priest and the priestess smiled quietly.