Gods of Green Mountain (33 page)

"What do you know about that?" asked Sharita in a shocked whisper.

Mark-Kan laughed wildly, apparently too intoxicated to think clearly. Then he bent over to kiss her. Using all her strength, Sharita thrust her head forward, butting her forehead forcefully against Mark-Kan's mouth. He screamed out as blood and teeth flew from his bleeding lips. Now furiously enraged, cursing and yelling obscenities, he began to beat her, with his fists, with slaps against one side of her face and then the other. Then he seized a handful of her hair, and smashed his fist against her jaw so her head jerked backward, and almost she lost consciousness. She willed herself to stay awake, to protect herself. He said, "I don't want to ugly you up too much, princess," and then he was surveying what damage he had already inflicted, "or else it won't be any pleasure making love to you." It was then he tore off her nightgown.

Wary as a wild animal at bay, the princess cringed on the bed, drawing her knees, shielding her nudity with her bound arms, as one of her eyes began to swell. Mark-Kan began taking off his own clothes. When he had finished, he came toward her, smiling a big, drunken, confident grin. She waited until he was positioned just right, and then came up with both knees directly into his groin. He screamed and fell backward, rolling to the floor, writhing in agony. Sharita threw herself off the bed, and began to inch her way toward a drawer where she knew a knife was. Somehow she opened that drawer; her fumbling, trembling hands found the knife, and holding the weapon clenched between her knees, she started sawing at the ropes that bound her wrists together. Frantically fast she worked, careless as she moved her arms back and forth, with her eyes on Mark-Kan, so the knife cut her flesh as well as the ropes.

"By the Gods, this time I might just well kill you, princess!" Mark-Kan gasped as he began to recover. He tried to stand straight, but couldn't. Doubled over in a crouch, he came at her again. Wild with fear, Sharita sawed at the ropes as Mark-Kan lurched forward and fell on her.

She screamed and then he screamed!

Suddenly blood was everywhere! Warm, sticky--she was bathed in it. The terrible weight of Mark-Kan lay heavy on her. As she struggled to wiggle from beneath him, he gave a gurgling groan, and rolled off to heavily sigh. It was then she saw what she had done. The knife held tightly between her knees had plunged up to the hilt in Mark-Kan's abdomen, and in trying to wiggle free, she had screwed in the knife even farther. She doubled over and began to retch. She had killed a man! A horrible, obscene man, but still a human being! For a long time she cried.

Her hands were still bound; her ankles still lashed together, and she was naked lying beside a naked dead man, with her knife in his belly. Closing her eyes, she grasped the bloody knife handle and tugged it free. It made a sucking, sickening noise as it came free, a sound she would never forget. A slow ooze of blood followed the blade's departure. Dazed, disoriented, in pain, she automatically wiped the blade on his clothes on the floor, and started sawing at her wrist ropes again.

When she was finally free, she staggered to her feet and into the small bath where she washed off Mark-Kan's blood in the shower, crying all the while. The battered face she saw in the mirror wasn't hers. It belonged to some horrible ugly woman, all red and swollen, with puffed-out bleeding lips, one eye entirely closed. Sobbing, she dressed, keeping her eyes averted from the dead man. "I have to see this through to the end," she told herself, "and go alone back to the black lands."

Thoughts came of her father, her mother, of Dray-Gon and what Mark-Kan had said about Ron Ka plotting with his son.

Then she remembered that faint suggestion that Mark-Kan knew what had happened at Bari-Bar.

The three rode over the black crusty earth less carefully than when they had entered, and on reaching the white sands, they used the whips on the racing horshets, something they had never done before. The terrified animals tried to run faster, but it wasn't easy, for their hooves dug deep into the loose sand.

Dray-Gon was far ahead of Arth-Rin and Raykin, and it was he who saw her first, heading away from the wagons. He drew his horshet in so abruptly, it reared high, almost throwing him off. "Sharita?" he asked, a tight knot coming in his throat when he saw her condition.

She stared at him with dead eyes, her face all bruised and swollen, and her hair still glued together with blood the shower had failed to remove. "I killed him," she said tonelessly. "I just finished burying him in the sand."

"You killed Mark-Kan?" Dray-Gon asked incredulously, scanning his eyes down over her body. "Did he hurt you?"

"He beat me," she answered without any inflection, as if it didn't matter.

"Anything else?" he asked, not meaning just the injuries he saw.

"That's when I killed him," she said simply, not looking at him, but into space. "Here are the keys Mark-Kan stole," she said, putting in his hand the key ring.

"Ah, Sharita, I don't believe that! He's twice your size! How could you kill him?" Automatically he hitched the ring of the keys to his belt.

She turned her eyes on him, one almost closed shut. "He was going to use me, then turn me over to the outlaws to hold for ransom, so I kicked him with my knees and found a knife and sawed at the ropes while he groaned and writhed on the floor. I had the knife gripped between my knees when he came at me again, and he tripped and fell--right on the knife. His blood went all over me." Her face crumpled pitifully. "Now my wagon, which was so nice and clean, is covered with blood. I didn't want to leave him in there, so I dragged him out by his feet." Then she began sobbing again.

Arth-Rin and Raykin had reached them in time to hear most of her story. Solemnly, compassionately they watched as Dray-Gon sprang down from his horshet and went to lift the collapsing princess from hers. He held her for a moment tight in his embrace, despite the two men who were watching, and stroked her hair, speaking in the soft, soothing way he had spoken to her before. "It's all right, Sharita. You told me Mark-Kan watched you all the time, and I ignored that, so it was my fault. I should have kept you better guarded--though I never suspected he would try anything like this. Why, I grew up knowing him..." He tilted up her battered, swollen face and kissed her bruises, her puffed-up eye, and her cut and still-bleeding lips. She stared at him in a dazed way, hardly feeling anything. Then he placed her on his horshet, and mounted to ride behind her, as Raykin lashed together all six of the horshets Mark Kan had stolen.

"Come on, we're going back to the others," he said to Arth-Rin and Raykin. As they headed back to the black pit where the others waited, he comforted the princess. "Soon as Doctor Benlon sees you, he'll treat you with the pufar ash healer, and soon you'll be beautiful again. He didn't really hurt you, did he? I mean, he didn't...?"

"If you're trying to ask if he raped me, no, he didn't. He was drunk and naked when he fell on top of me and killed himself." She turned and tried to see what he was thinking. "If he had succeeded, would it have mattered? What would you have done?"

"I would have gone back and dug him up, and killed him again!" he said with so much vehemence, it sounded believable.

Sharita kept looking at him. She tried to push back all the insidious suspicions about Dray-Gon and his father: the contrived threats of civil war to be used as a form of blackmail to force her father to give her to a man in marriage she might not have otherwise wanted...

Into the Green Canyon

I
t was the next morning, early, before they again broke camp and rode up and out of the black crater, for Benlon ordered the princess to bed on her return, gave her a sedative, and treated her wounds. When she awakened, her cuts had healed, and her swollen face and eye were normal-appearing again, and hunger growled her stomach. The nineteen men had stood and cheered when she made her appearance at their dinner table, all of them looking at her with a new respect.

This time as they traveled on through the eerie, creepy black land, she rode directly behind Dray-Gon, and behind her was Arth-Rin. Sharita felt well enough to give this alien terrain her full attention. She presumed at some ancient time a fire must have ravished this land, and she looked pityingly at the bleak skeleton trees that raised begging stone arms toward the sky. They rode past giant black onyx boulders that glittered like faceted jewels, and several of the men left their horshets long enough to fill their pockets with smaller pieces of this black rock. For five nights they slept uncomfortably in a succession of frigid cold crater bottoms.

On the fifth morning, Sharita awakened, startled to hear all the commotion outside her tent. The inky blackness of night was barely dimming, the first sun's rays just beginning to peek over the crater rim, and too sleepy to question the movements outside of her tent, she closed her eyes and sank into sleep again.

Voices came loud into her dreams, excited and dashing madly about--noise that she tried to shut out so she could sleep just a bit longer. She told herself she was only dreaming, and there was nothing to be afraid of, for Dray-Gon pitched his tent directly opposite hers, so close he had said he could hear her breathing--though she doubted that--unless she snored, and she didn't believe that either.

Finally she could feign sleep no longer, or pretend the commotion was but a dream, and she hurried out of the tent fully dressed, for they all slept that way now, to keep warmer, to be ready to move instantly, without wasting time. The young men were scattered all over the crater, searching in a frantic way. "What has happened?" she called out to the nearest one.

"The animals!" he yelled back. "Princess, the puhlets, and the horshets--they have all disappeared, every one!"

"Where could they go?" she called out again. Her question was answered with a perplexed shrug. "The Gods only know!" came his answer.

The loss of the animals was an overwhelming catastrophe! First they were forced to abandon the comfortable, homelike wagons, now their only means of transportation, except for their legs, was gone. All their supplies were stacked on the ground, waiting to be strapped on the supply horshets. Without the animals, the Green Mountain would never be reached! And from where she stood, in the black bottom of nowhere, Sharita couldn't even see the Mountain.

She looked around for Dray-Gon, but all the men were so distant, she couldn't tell one from another in their alike uniforms, grown black and sooty from the loose black particles that where everywhere. She was as grimy as any of them.

It was Ral-Bar, from the province of Shal-Bretta, who found the high crack in the face of the black rock, three giant steps up from the bottom. "Look here," he called back to the three men closest. "There's a tunnel going through to somewhere, and there's evidence on the floor that the animals went this way."

The three men behind him scampered up to his level and followed Ral-Bar inside the long, dark, cavernous tunnel. It was darker than a thousand moonless, starless nights inside of that crater pocket. So Dray-Gon pulled out his pocket illuminator and beamed it on the ground, as did the others. He felt the black rock, different here than on the crusty top surface. Here it was as hard as crystal, and his hand came away clean. But they had to step carefully, for the tunnel was pitted, dropping off sharply when least expected. There was green mold on some of the rocks that reeked unpleasantly. As quickly as they dared and considered safe, the four men followed the animal tracks, not permitting themselves to think of the inevitable results if the animals were permanently lost.

Suddenly there was light ahead, and Arth-Rin laughed. Raykin swore when he twisted his ankle from stepping on a stone that turned. Out of the blackened tunnel they came into the open day. High above them was the rosy sky of very early morning; there was no wind, for they were in a canyon between high, towering dark walls. The ground beneath their feet was surprisingly padded and soft. Blue-green grass beneath their boots! Imagine that! It had been so long since they had seen grass--since they had walked on anything so plush and yielding--and cool! The four men looked at each other and then laughed happily. Well! some good fortune, at last! The Gods were smiling upon them!

And there before them were the puhlets and horshets, munching contentedly in the long valley nestled between the lofty enclosing walls. A different kind of green sprouting grew here and there, some even projecting from crevices in the black canyon rock face, growing a green that was very familiar to all of them. Tiny greenish-yellow melons clung to the rosy stems. Pufars growing here, of all places! Right away, Arth-Rin split open a melon and began to eat, while Dray-Gon set off with Raykin to examine the valley, and where it might possibly lead. "It's headed in the right direction," commented Dray-Gon, "arrowed straight at the Green Mountain."

"Sure," said Raykin. "It is headed where we want to go--but suppose it rains? One of those gully washers--this looks like a dry river bottom--and down would come a river, right on us!"