The Fallable Fiend (10 page)

VIII

YUROG THE SHAMAN

Like the southern part of Solymbria, the northern was infested by robbers. I suspect that some of the rough-looking men I saw on the road or in inns were of this type. Some gave me hard looks, but none molested me. I suppose my appearance dissuaded them from any nefarious plans they may have entertained.

On the second day after leaving Solymbria City, I came to the foothills of the Ellorna Mountains. While eating my supper, I showed the taverner, one Hadrubar, my map and asked him about the road across the mountains.

“Hard to tell,” said he. “The Needle’s Eye”—he pointed to the place on my map that showed the pass over the crest of the range—“is closed in winter by snow. Now it’s high summer, and the pass should have been open for two months or more. But nary a traveler has come through from the land of the Hruntings.”

“How about travelers northward bound?”

“Some have set out hence, but none has returned. Some say the Zaperazh have closed the pass.”

“The what have closed the pass?”

“The Zaperazh—you know, the tribe of cavemen that dwell thereabouts. It used to take a regular military campaign every year to open the pass against their opposition. Then the government made a treaty with ’em, but with murthering savages like that, one never knows.”

“What are these cavemen like?”

“Would you see one? Step hither.”

He led me to his kitchen. There a surly-looking, tawny-haired youth, with a thin iron collar of a slave around his neck, was washing dishes.

“That’s Glob, my Zaperazh slave,” said Hadrubar. “An ill-natured scrowle, almost more trouble to train and discipline than he’s worth.”

“Are cavemen enslaved as a regular thing?”

“No more, since the treaty.”

“This treaty did not, evidently, restore to Master Glob his liberty.”

“Of course not! Some such silly proposal was mooted when the treaty was being higgled; but it roused such a towrow among Solymbrians who’ve paid good money for slaves that the archon rejected it. After all, unjustly to rape us of our property were a tyranny no man of spirit would submit to.”

As he led me back into the common room, Hadrubar continued in a lower tone, so that Glob should not overhear: “Under previous archons, the border was so well patrolled that runaways had little chance of slipping across, but now . . .”

“As we say in demon land,” quoth I, “it is an ill tide that washes nobody’s feet clean.”

Hadrubar shot me a sour look. “Waste not your sympathies on those brutes, who esteem not the niceties of civilization even when they’re forced upon ’em.”

“This is not my world, Master Hadrubar, and it is no concern of mine how you Prime Planers entreat one another. I am, however, often puzzled by the gap between your professed principles and your actions. For ensample, you contemn Glob’s primitive folk; yet methought Solymbrians believed all men to be created equal?”

“You have it wrong, sir demon. That Immur created all Solymbrians equal is a plain fact, attested by divine revelation. Who made the other peoples of the world, and how, I know not. The Zaperazh have a god of their own, hight Rostroi. Belike this Rostroi made the Zaperazh; if so, he botched the job.”

I forbore to carry the argument further, thinking it illogical to dogmatize about these Zaperazh without having known any personally.

###

Novaria has excellent roads linking the capitals of the eleven mainland city-states. (The twelfth, Zolon, is on an isle in the Western Ocean, off the Solymbrian coast.) The road north from Solymbria City, however, was less well kept. After it crossed the border of the polis—where I passed another deserted customs house—it dwindled to a mere track, suitable for pack animals but hardly passable to wheeled vehicles. In the steeper places, freshets had washed the dirt off the bare bones of the mountains. My poor old horse slipped and stumbled so on the rocks that I had to dismount and lead him, scrambling from ledge to ledge.

By the end of the first day out of Hadrubar’s Inn, I had left the border leagues behind and begun to climb. All the next three days I climbed, while the snowy ridges ahead loomed closer and closer. In the foothills rose dense stands of trees with dark-green needles, looking almost black. As I got higher, these forests thinned out to a mere scattering.

As Hadrubar had implied, there was no traffic. The silence was broken only by the sigh of the wind, the purl of a torrent, and the echo of my horse’s hooves from a cliff. I sighted distant flocks of wild goats and sheep, and once a bear on a far hillside frightened the horse.

The increasing cold made me sluggish and stiff. The robe that Aithor had given me was of little help, since we demons do not have a source of internal heat like the higher animals of the Prime Plane. Hence our bodies cool down to the temperature of the ambient air, and our activity slows proportionately. The first two nights, I could thaw myself out enough by my campfire to carry me through the following day; but then I found that I needs must stop at midday, build a fire, and warm myself then as well.

On the fifth day after leaving the inn, I reached the pass called the Needle’s Eye. The track wound up and down fearsome precipices. Snow lay in isolated banks and patches. Huge, snow-clad peaks towered to right and left.

At noon by my pocket sun-ring, I stopped to build a fire. The horse ate a small bagful of grain that I carried for such emergencies, since there was too little herbage at this height to keep him fed.

Gathering material for a fire proved onerous, for there was nothing to burn save a few gnarled and scattered shrubs. Moreover, between the cold and the thinness of the air, I had become so sluggish that I could scarcely move. After an hour of burdensome efforts, I collected enough combustibles. Moving like one of those Prime Plane garden pests called snails, I kindled my fire.

I hardly had the blaze going when a strange thing happened. My tendrils detected magic. Then, with a roar, a blast of ice-cold air swept down upon me. It seemed to come from overhead. It flattened out my little fire, which blazed up fiercely and then died almost as quickly as the twigs were consumed.

I lurched to my feet, meaning to put more fuel on the fire. By the time I had stood up, however, the cold had so slowed my movements that I became as rigid as a statue. Not being well braced, I toppled slowly over—fortunately not into the dying fire—and lay stiffly in the posture I had reached when I lost the power of movement.

The horse pricked its ears, snorted, and began to shamble away, clop-clop. Then came a snapping of bowstrings and a whistle of arrows. The horse screamed, reared, and fell over thrashing as several shafts struck it in the side. Others, missing their target, clattered and tinkled against the rocks. One fell near me, and I saw that the arrowhead looked like glass.

Later, I learnt that this was indeed the case. The cavemen of the Ellornas are in the stone age of culture. Discovering that glass was as easily worked as flint and furnished even sharper edges, they had made a practice of trading furs with the Solymbrians for the cullet from broken bottles and windowpanes.

This they wrought into arrowheads and other tools and weapons.

The archers now appeared from behind boulders and streamed down into the path. Some began cutting up my dead horse with knives of flint and glass. Others clustered around me.

The Zaperazh looked at first sight like some sort of bearmen, but as they got closer I saw that this was the result of the furs wherein they were clad from head to boots. They were evidently of the same species as the Novarians and other human Prime Planers, not members of another species as in the case of Ungah. They were taller and heavier on the average than the Novarians. From what I could see of their faces past the fur hoods, beards, and dirt, they were not ill-looking men as Prime Planers go, with hair of assorted hues and eyes of brown or gray. Their smell, however, was overpowering. Frozen stiff as I was, I could do nought to avoid it.

They yammered in their own tongue, being even greater chatterboxes than the Novarians. I did not, naturally, understand a word of their speech. There seemed to be two leaders among them: a very tall, middle-aged man, and a stooped, white-bearded oldster. The former ordered the tribesmen about but paused betimes to consult in an undertone with the latter.

They turned me over and unfastened my robe to examine me in detail, with much pointing of fingers and a perfect torrent of words. At last four of them picked me up, one by each limb, and bore me off. The rest followed laden with masses of flesh from the horse, of whom little was now left but the skeleton.

I could see little of the route we followed, since I was in a supine position and could neither turn my head nor roll my eyes. I could only stare at the sky, with my pupils closed down to slits against the glare of the sun.

###

The Zaperazh dwelt in a village of leathern tents, clustered about the entrance to a huge cave at the base of a cliff. They bore me through the village, which swarmed with women and young, and into the cave. The darkness of the cave was soon banished by torches and by a multitude of little stone lamps, which they set around the floor at the edges. Each lamp was a shallow dish with a handle to one side, and in it a wick in the form of a lump of moss, floating in a pool of melted fat.

To the rear of the cave, dimly illumined, stood a stone statue, twice the size of a man. It appeared to have been sculptured from a big stalagmite. It had holes for eyes and mouth, a knob for a nose, and a male organ as big as any of its rough-hewn limbs.

For a while, the Zaperazh ignored me. There was an infinity of coming and going and of ceaseless talk.

What with the village fires at the entrance, the lamps and torches, and the swarm of Zaperazh, the cave was warmer than the air outside. I began to thaw out. I found that I could move my eyes, then my head, and lastly my fingers and toes.

While I was still planning how best to use my newfound mobility, the white-haired oldster whom I had seen before came through the milling mass and stood over me, holding a lamp and peering.

Presently he leaned over, grasped my hand, and gave a sharp tug.

I ought to have pretended to be rigid still, but the move caught me by surprise. I jerked my hand away from the Zaperazh, betraying the fact that I was recovering my normal lissomness. The old man shouted to some of his fellow tribesmen, who hastened up. Some wrenched off the robe and the cap that Aithor had given me; others bound my wrists and ankles together with rawhide thongs. Those who had taken the garments amused themselves by trying them on, roaring with laughter at each other’s appearance thus garbed.

The oldster set down his lamp and seated himself cross-legged beside me. He asked me a question in a language I did not know. I could only stare. Then he said in broken Novarian: “You speaking Novarian?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Who you?”

“My name is Zdim. Whom have I the honor to address?”

“Me Yurog, shaman—what you call wizard—of Zaperazh. But
what
you? You not man.”

“Nay, sir, I am no man. I am a demon from the Twelfth Plane, on an errand for the Syndicate of Ir. May I take the liberty of inquiring your purpose?”

Yurog chuckled. “Demons evil, wicked things. But you got nice manner, anyway. We sacrificing you to Rostroi.” He nodded to the idol at the back of the cave. “Then Rostroi send us many sheep, many goats to eat.”

I tried to explain the reason for my journey and the urgency of my mission, but he only laughed off my explanations.

“All demons liars,” he said. “Everybody know that. We no fear your black men, even if they true.”

I asked: “Doctor Yurog, tell me, pray. I was told that a treaty between your folk and the Solymbrians provided for the safe passage of travelers through the Needle’s Eye. So why should you seize me?”

“Treaty no good! Solymbrians promise give us one ox every month, to eat, so we let people through pass. When Gavindos become chief of Solymbrians, he no sending oxes no more. He no keep treaty, we no keep him either. All flatlanders liars.”

“Did you capture me by a magical spell that froze me stiff?”

“Why, sure. Me great wizard. Not know freeze spell make you hard like stone, like snake or lizard from flatlands. That make it easy for us, ha ha.”

“Well now, behold. You have cut up my horse for food and leather, and it must have almost as much meat as one of those oxen the Solymbrians used to send you. Wouldn’t you consider that a fair payment of toll to allow me to pass on through your land?”

“No great treaty with you. You enemy. All flatlanders enemies; all demons enemies. Is right to sacrifice them whenever we catching them. Tell you what, though. Zaperazh like me to skin you, slowly; but, because you nice demon with good manner and because of horse, I cut your throat quick-quick, so you got hardly no pain. Is good of me, yes?”

“Aye, though it were better still to treat me as a friend—”

Before I could carry this interesting discussion further, the tall chief loomed up and spoke to Yurog in his own tongue. Yurog replied and added in his atrocious Novarian: “Chief, must meet guest. Is demon Zdim. Zdim, meet Vilsk, chief of Zaperazh. I got nice manner, too, yes?”

Then the chief and the shaman went off together. For some hours I had nothing to do but lie in my bonds and watch the cavemen prepare for a grand festival. The first item was to be a ceremony in honor of Rostroi, to be followed by a feast on the remains of my horse, washed down with some sort of beer they brewed and kept in leathern bags.

###

The sun was setting when the Zaperazh gathered in semicircular rows at the entrance to the cave. The men occupied the foremost rows, with women and children in the rear. Many of the women were nourishing their infants by means of those protruding lacteal glands that distinguish the females of the higher animals of the Prime Plane. The stench of the crowd was overwhelming. My tendrils picked up emotions of intense anticipation.

One tribesman sat down beside the statue of Rostroi with a drum, while another, with a wooden pipe of the flute kind, sat down on the other side of the idol. Vilsk made a speech. It went on and on and on. He gestured, shook his fists, stamped, shouted, roared, growled, whispered, laughed, wept, sobbed, and went through the entire gamut of human emotions.