Planet of Adventure Omnibus (14 page)

Ahead: a glow
in the sky? A murmur, a sound half-strident, half-harsh. Reith went forward at
a stumbling run. The road raised, twisted over a knoll, Reith stopped, looking
down on a scene as weird and wild as Tschai itself.

The Seminary
of the Female Mystery occupied an irregular flat area surrounded by crags and
cliffs. A massive four-story edifice of stone was built in a ravine, to
straddle a pair of crags. Elsewhere were sheds of timber and wattle, animal
pens and hutches, outbuildings, cribs and racks. Directly below Reith a
platform projected from the hill, with a two-story building to the sides and
the rear.

Gala events
were in progress. Flames from dozens of flambeaux cast red, vermilion and
orange light upon two hundred women who moved back and forth, half-dancing,
half-lurching, in a state of entranced frenzy. They wore black pantaloons,
black boots and were elsewhere naked, with even the hair shaved from their
heads. Many were without breasts, displaying a pair of angry red scars: these
women, the most active, marched and trooped, bodies glistening with sweat and
oil. Others sat on benches slack and dull, resting, or exalted beyond mere
frenzy. Below the platform, in a row of low cages, a dozen naked men stood crouched.
These men produced the harsh chant Reith had heard from the hills. When one
faltered, jets of flame spurted up from the floor beneath him, and he once more
screamed his loudest. The flames were controlled from a keyboard in the front;
here sat a woman dressed completely in black, and it was she who orchestrated
the demoniac uproar.
There,
thought Reith,
but for the bump of a
wagon--there sing I.

A singer
collapsed. Jets of flame only caused him to twitch. He was dragged forth; a bag
of transparent membrane was pulled over his head and tied at the neck; he was
tossed into a rack at the side. Into the cage was thrust another singer: a
strong young man, glaring in hatred. He refused to sing, and suffered the jets
in furious silence. A priestess came forward, blew a waft of smoke into his
face; presently he sang with the rest.

How they
hated men! thought Reith. A troupe of entertainers appeared on the stage-tall
emaciated clown-men with skins bleached white, eyebrows painted high and black.
In horrified fascination Reith watched them cavort and caper and with earnest
zest defile themselves, while the priestesses called out in delight.

When the
clown-men retired a mime appeared: he wore a wig of long blonde hair, a mask
with wide eyes and a smiling red mouth, to simulate a beautiful woman. Reith
thought,
They hate not only men, but love and youth and beauty!

As the mime
expatiated his shocking message, a curtain to the back of the platform drew
back revealing a huge naked cretin, hairy of body and limb, in a state of
intense erotic excitement. He worked to gain entry into a cage of thin glass
rods, but could not puzzle out the working of the latch. In the cage cowered a
girl wearing a gown of thin gauze: the Flower of Cath.

The
androgynous mime finished his curious performance. The singers were instructed
to a new chant, a soft hoarse baying, and the priestesses crowded close around
the platform, intent on the efforts of the fumbling brute.

Reith already
had departed from his vantage. Keeping to the shadows, he circled down around
toward the rear of the platform. He passed a shed where the clown-men rested.
Nearby, a set of pens held two dozen young men, apparently destined to sing.
They were guarded by a wizened old woman with a gun almost as large as herself.

From the
front came a sudden avid murmur. The brute apparently had fumbled open the
latch to the cage. Giving no thought to gallantry, Reith dropped down behind
the old woman, felled her with a blow, ran along the line of pens, throwing
open the doors. The men thrust pell-mell out into the corridor, while the
troupe of clown-men watched in consternation.

“Take the
gun,” Reith told the freed men. “Free the singers.”

He jumped up
into the wings of the platform. The brute had entered the cage and was ripping
the girl’s gauze gown. Reith aimed his gun, sent an explosive needle into the
bulging back. A thwump!--the brute jerked, seemed to puff. He raised on
tiptoes, twisted about and fell dead. Ylin-Ylan the Flower of Cath, looking
around with dazed eyes, saw Reith. He motioned; she stumbled from the cage,
across the platform.

The
priestesses cried out first in fury, then in fear, for certain of the free men,
bringing the gun out on the stage, fired again and again into the audience.
Others released the singers. The young man most recently caged charged for the
priestess at the console. He seized her, dragged her to the vacated box, locked
her within; then returning to the console, pressed home the firevalve, and the
priestess sang an ululating contralto. Another of the erstwhile captives seized
a torch, fired one of the sheds; others took clubs and began to bludgeon the
wailing celebrants.

Reith led the
sobbing girl down around the outskirts of the tumult, and was able to snatch up
a cape which he drew about the shoulders of the girl.

Priestesses
were trying to flee the area-up the hillside, down the east road. Some tried to
wriggle their half-naked bodies under sheds, only to be dragged back by the
heels and clubbed.

Reith led the
girl down the main road toward the east. From the stable came rushing a wagon
frantically urged by four priestesses. Tall and dominant bulked the Grand
Mother. As Reith watched, a man vaulted up on the bed of the wagon, seized the
Grand Mother and sought to strangle her with his bare hands. She reached up
with her massive arms, drew him down, cast him on the deck and started to stamp
on his head. Reith leapt up behind her, gave her a push; she fell off the
wagon. Reith turned to the other priestesses: the three who had traveled with
the caravan. “Off! To the ground!”

“We’ll be
killed! The men are mad things! They are killing the Grand Mother!”

Reith turned
to look; four men had surrounded the Grand Mother, who stood at bay, roaring
like a bear. One of the priestesses, taking advantage of Reith’s distraction,
tried to knife him. Reith threw her to the ground, and the other two as well.
He pulled the girl up beside him and drove down the east road toward Fasm
Junction.

Ylin-Ylan the
Flower of Cath huddled against him, exhausted, apathetic. Reith battered,
bruised, dry of emotion, hunched in the seat. The sky behind them reddened;
flames licked up into the black sky.

AN HOUR AFTER
dawn they reached Fasm junction: three bleak structures of earthen brick on the
edge of the steppe, the tall walls punctuated by the smallest and narrowest of
black windows, a stockade of timber surrounding. The gate was closed; Reith
halted the wagon, pounded and called, to no effect. The two, comatose from
fatigue and the dullness following extreme emotion, settled themselves to wait
until the folk in the junction saw fit to open the gates.

Investigating
the back of the wagon Reith found, among other effects, two small satchels
containing sequins, to a number Reith could not even estimate.

“So now we
have the priestesses’ wealth,” he told the Flower of Cath. “Enough, I should
think, to buy you safe passage home.”

The girl
spoke in a puzzled voice: “You would give me the sequins and send me home and
you demand nothing in return?”

“Nothing,”
said Reith with a sigh.

“The
Dirdirman’s joke seems real,” said the girl sternly. “You act as if you were
indeed from a distant world.” And she turned half away from him.

Reith looked
off across the steppe, smiling somewhat sadly. Assuming the unlikely, that he
were able to return to Earth, would he then be content to remain, to live his
life out and never return to Tschai? No, probably not, mused Reith. Impossible
to predict official Earth policy, but he himself could never be content while
the Dirdir, the Chasch and the Wankh exploited men and used them as despised
subordinates. The situation was a personal affront. Somewhat absently he asked
Ylin-Ylan, “What do your people think of the Dirdirmen, the Chaschmen, the
others?”

She frowned
in perplexity, and seemed, for some reason obscure to Reith, annoyed. “What is
there to think? They exist. When they do not disturb us, we ignore them. Why do
you speak of Dirdirmen? We were speaking of you and me!”

Reith looked
at her. She watched him with passive expectancy. Reith drew a deep breath,
started to move closer to her, when the gate into the depot raised and a man
looked forth. He was squat, with thick legs, long arms; his face was big-nosed
and askew, with skin and hair the color of lead: evidently a Gray.

“Who are you?
That’s a Seminary wagon. Last night flames burnt the sky. Was that the Rite?
The priestesses are as eerie as potlinks during the Rite.”

Reith gave
him an evasive answer and drove the wagon into the enclosure.

They
breakfasted on tea, stewed herbs, hard bread and went back out to the wagon to
await the arrival of the caravan. The early morning mood had passed; both felt
heavy and uncommunicative. Reith relinquished the seat to Ylin-Ylan and
stretched out in the bed of the wagon. In the warm sunlight both became drowsy
and slept.

At noon the
caravan was sighted: a heaving line of gray and black. The surviving Ilanth
scout-and a scowling round-faced youth promoted to the position from gunner
arrived at the junction first, then, wheeling their leap-horses, bounded back
to the caravan. The tall wagons drawn by soft-footed beasts arrived, the
drivers hunched in voluminous cloaks, faces thin under long-billed hats. Then
came barrack-wagons with passengers sitting in the openings to their cubicles.
Traz greeted Reith with obvious pleasure; Anacho the Dirdirman gave an airy
flutter of the fingers which might have meant anything. “We were sure that you
had been killed or kidnapped,” Traz told Reith. “We searched the hills, we went
out on the steppe, but found nothing. Today we were going to seek you at the
Seminary.”

“We?” asked
Reith.

“The
Dirdirman and myself. He’s not such a bad sort as one might think.”

“The Seminary
no longer exists,” said Reith.

Baojian
appeared, stopped short at the sight of Reith and Ylin-Ylan but asked no
questions. Reith, who half-suspected Baojian of facilitating the priestesses’
departure from Zadno’s Depot, volunteered no information. Baojian assigned them
to compartments, and accepted the priestesses’ wagon as passage payment to
Pera.

Bundles were discharged
at the Junction, others were loaded aboard the wagons, and the caravan
proceeded to the northeast.

Days passed:
easy idle days of trundling across the steppe. For a period they skirted a wide
shallow lake of brackish water, then with great caution crossed a marsh
overgrown with jointed white reeds. The scout discovered an ambush laid by a
dwarfish tribe of marshmen, who at once fled into the reeds before the caravan
guns could be brought to bear.

On three
occasions Dirdir aircraft swooped low to inspect the caravan, on which
occasions Anacho concealed himself in his compartment. Another time a Blue
Chasch platform slid overhead.

Reith would
have enjoyed the journey had he not been anxious in regard to his space-boat.
There was also the problem of Ylin-Ylan, the Flower of Cath. Upon reaching
Pera, the caravan would return to Coad on the Dwan Zher, where the girl could
take passage aboard a ship for Cath. Reith assumed this to be her plan, though
she said nothing of the matter and in fact had become somewhat cool, to Reith’s
puzzlement.

So went the
days, and the caravan crept northward, under the slate-dark skies of Tschai.
Twice thunderstorms shattered the afternoon, but for the most part the weather
was even. They passed through a dark forest, and the next day followed an
ancient causeway across a vast black quagmire covered with bubble-plants and
bubble-insects simulating the bubble-plants. The quagmire was the habitat of
many fascinating creatures: wingless frog-sized things which propelled themselves
through the air by a vibration of fan-like tails; larger creatures,
half-spider, half-bat, which, anchoring by means of an exuded thread, rode the
breeze on extended wings like a kite.

At Wind
Mountain Depot they met a caravan bound for Malagash, south behind the hills on
the Hedajha Gulf. Twice small bands of Green Chasch were sighted, but on
neither occasion did they attack. The caravan-master declared them to be mating
groups en route to a procreation area north of the Dead Steppe. On another
occasion a troop of nomads halted to watch them pass: tall men and tall women
with faces painted blue. Traz identified them as cannibals and stated that the
women fought in battle on an even footing with the men. Twice the caravan
passed close to ruined cities; once it swung south to deliver aromatics,
essences and amphire wood to an Old Chasch city which Reith found peculiarly
fascinating. There were myriads of low white domes half-hidden under foliage,
with gardens everywhere. The air held a peculiar freshness, exuded by tall
yellow-green trees, not unlike poplars, known as adarak. These, so Reith
learned, were cultivated by Old Chasch and Blue Chasch alike for the clarity
which they gave the air.