The Quest of Kadji
- Автор: Картер Лин Спрэг
- Серия: Chronicles of Kylix #1
- Год: 1973
- Язык: английский
- Год: Five Star Paperback
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
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And then he took the sword in his side. It came in low and under the ribs and it sank deep within him. He did not feel it, but he could feel the warm wetness spreading over his belly and down his thighs, as if a floodgate had been opened. And as the blood went out of him, his strength went too, as if the wound had loosed both at one blow. The Axe of Thom-Ra flew from his nerveless hands—striking yet another Perushka in the face, shattering his skull, and taking down to death yet one more foe, although he knew it not. And he fell forward and moved no more.
It had been a good fight, he thought. His grandfather would have approved.
And then there was nothing but the darkness.
Part Four
THE DARK TIME
And what if death be dark and near,
And we be toys wherewith Cods play?
Though night be cold and filled with fear,
A man can die but once, they say!
—Road Song of the Kozanga Nomads
i. The Dreams
THE DARKNESS was deep and numb and thick, and in it there were no sounds or sights or feelings. Not even memories could penetrate the numb black womb which cradled him. It was like what a tree must feel in the blind and tongueless silence, in the deep slow half-sleep of vegetable existence.
After a time there were visions, or dreams, but they were confused and scattered and meant nothing to him. There were faces that bent over him through a red blur, the white face of a girl with frightened eyes, and an old man’s face, long-jawed and knobby and remarkably unhandsome, with yellow skin and sad, slant black eyes.
And voices, too, dim whispers, like the echoes of far converse. It seemed that people were arguing, something about whether or not to move him or to let him lie. The girl was saying that they must get him under shelter or he would freeze to death on the cold ground; the little old man said that be was nine-tenths dead as it was, for the point of the sword had nipped the lungs, and with every breath he was drowning in his own blood, and that to move him even a little would be to kill him on the spot; no, no, they would have to drag a tent over him, and leave him lying where he was … and then the voices faded away and although he could blurrily see the lips moving he could bear nothing, nothing at all.
THEN, A LONG while later, after he had spent a measureless eternity of frozen cold, there was warmth, slow golden warmth, baking deep into the chill that bound him. He basked in it thankfully, feeling the cold seep out of his body, drop by drop and he drowsily let his eyelids flutter and fall open and he could see warm red firelight dancing against the roof of a tent and painting huge monstrous black moving shadows. And there was someone by him, someone near, and he looked up at a long grey-furred muzzle, a wet black nose, and an open mouth with white fangs a-glisten and a long pink tongue.
The grey-furred face looked down at him with mute, questioning eyes, and sniffed at his face, and then the rasping pink tongue licked his face and he laughed a little weakly … but that started the coughing again, the slow horrible racking coughing that he had lived with so long and had forgotten between sleeps, and a dirty, thin-faced girl with unkempt red hair came quickly to shoo away the dog—or was it a wolf ?—and to hold the wet cloth at his nostrils so that he breathed again the good, clean, astringent spicy smell that seemed to dull the red pain in his lungs and to sooth the slow, racking fit of coughs… .
THEY WERE very strange, the dreams, each one different from the one he remembered before, and somehow he could not seem to summon the wits to piece them together into a fabric of meaning. It was like one of those painted puzzles sawn in many small segments that children piece together in play: but he could not seem to fit the pieces together. They remained bright, meaningless scraps.
There was another dream, filled with pain. He could not breathe; it was as if a hill was mounded upon his chest, and the pain of it, the heavy crushing weight, the close, stifling warmth, forced him to struggle up from the black sleep into the light again. And there was a girl bending over him, the same girl from before, he thought, although much thinner, with great dark hollows beneath the eyes, and a thin, pinched, colorless mouth. She held a bright thing in her hands, cradled it, like a glowing coal. And behind her was the thin sallow-faced little man, mere skin and bones he was now, and there was fear written on his face. He was saying that it could not be done—whatever it was—and the girl, grim and tight around the mouth, kept repeating that it could and that it must, for he was drowning in his own blood … she kept muttering that strange phrase over and over again, like a curse, or a prayer.
The old man was trying to stop her, to seize her wrists, but she turned a fierce bright intolerable gaze on him that; made him shrink away into a huddle.
“I am guilty,” the girl said in a hard voice. “If he dies, I have killed him. For I was stupid and wrong and stubborn, and he was right—we should have left the camp at once, not lingered arguing until that black rogue of a Perushka dog struck him treacherously from behind with a knife.”
And then she bent over him and did the thing she meant to do, and he felt a pain beyond all of the other intervals of pain, bright, blinding, incredible … and the blackness came again, and the deep sleep, and there were no dreams for a long time thereafter.
HE FELT like a drowning man must: the sleep that engulfed him was like a black, lightless sea, from which he emerged at intervals into the dim light of day, to gulp a breath or two of air before sinking below the suffocating waves again.
Once again he came swimming slowly up out of the black sea of sleep into the daylight, they were arguing.
“This person must remind the young woman that she has not slept in two days. She cannot long continue in this manner, or old Akthoob will have two invalids on his hands… .”
“I am fine; this is the crisis; if he comes through this night safely, then he may yet mend … but it takes great concentration … I must guide his sleeping body to repair itself, for flesh can heal, and bone can mend, but the lung …”
The girl, he saw fuzzily, was kneeling beside him, her face blank and dead, her gaze turned inwardly. A small spiral of green smoke crept from a pot clasped between her knees and as she breathed in this spicy smoke it seemed to him that her spirit departed from its house of flesh and left only—vacancy.
Over her thin shoulder he saw the long bony face of the old man. Slitted black eyes were narrowed thoughtfully, and his mouth was pursed as in distaste.
The old man said, in a low muttering voice: “Zoromesh … Zoromesh … it must be that … but why did the girl lie to us?”
None of this made any sense to him, so he let go and sank effortlessly once again down into the black sea of sleep whose smothering waves rose hungrily about him to suck him down to silence and restful ease.
And after this there were no more dreams at all.
ii. Zoromesh
HE OPENED his eyes and gazed incuriously upon strangeness.
There was a rough rocky roof above him, and stalactites dangled therefrom like pendent spears of stone.
Curled up against his side, the great grey wolf slept, its nose buried in its tail, like a huge friendly dog. Bazan, that was the brute’s name, he remembered.