He solved both problems easily, by making Zarouk carry the old man! The prince bit his lip, scowled, but did as he was told. Rather than cut his hands free, Ryker had him carry Valarda’s grandsire piggyback.
They trudged on.
There was no water, only a little wine. This he rationed out in grudging sips. It was barely sufficient to wet parched, dust-covered lips, but it would have to do.
The old priest, Dmu Dran, did not weaken and have to be carried, and for this, at least, Ryker was grimly thankful. The priest was an enemy, and, even in the best of times, Ryker bore no love for priests—-Martian or Earthsider—but he wasn’t sure he had it in him to abandon the old man to die the slow death of dehydration.
Thank God he didn’t have to make that decision. For, despite his age and seeming frailty, the fanatic seemed tireless as iron.
The cliffs that were the sides of the great plateau were ever before them, but never seemed to get any nearer. They danced and wavered in the tired vision of the travelers like some devilish mirage of the waste, and seemed in fact to recede into the distance the closer you came.
Ryker, who had the rudiments of an education, thought of Tantalus and Ixion and Sisyphus, and of the torments invented for them by the gods. He grinned sourly; Mars could have taught a lesson or two to the Olympians, when it came to dreaming up tortures.
They plodded on, and every foot seemed like a mile, and every minute like an hour. Somehow they kept going.
At last they reached the foot of the plateau, which proved to be no illusion after all. Here they would have fallen to the ground to sleep where they fell, but Ryker drove them on with oaths and blows and curses.
He was made of granite, but even granite can crack and crumble. For a little while longer, though, he held strong.
He drove them into the mouth of a deep, narrow ravine, and made them follow it. They stumbled along on numb legs, dazed and mindless, like men who walked in their sleep. Between the tall, towering walls the ravine twisted and turned, but at its end the solid rock of the plateau was worn away in strata which could be climbed, although not easily.
It was like ascending a staircase built for giants, but they made it to the top of the plateau. And here he allowed them to rest and to make camp. Here he felt safe—safe enough, at any rate. He knew that the desert hawks would be following them. But he also knew there was no way for Zarouk’s warriors to tell which of the ten thousand ravines into which the edge of the plateau was cloven was the one they had followed.
And from the edge of the cliff wall, by daylight, he could see for many miles, and spot the raiders on their trail.
He did not let Valarda make a fire. Fire can be seen far off in the black gloom of a Martian night. So they munched dry bread and devoured cold meat, huddled in their fur cloaks for warmth. They had each two mouthfuls of cold wine from the leather bottles, and it was Valarda who served them.
Ryker was bone weary by now, and so tired that his brain felt numb and dead as if his skull were stuffed with cotton, but he drove himself a bit further. There were two prisoners to tend to, and both were very dangerous and deadly enemies. But, after all, they too were men.
So he unbound their hands and stood by, his palms resting on his gun butts, watching while Zarouk and the aged priest chafed the blood back to their stiff limbs. He permitted them to relieve themselves a little ways from camp, then herded them back with the others, and bound their hands again, and their ankles, too, this time, and wrapped them in their cloaks for sleep.
Probably, he should have killed them or left them at the foot of the cliff to die in the night, but it was not in him to murder men in cold blood. So, cursing himself for his weakness, he let them live a while longer.
Then he slept. There was no strength left in him to stand guard all night. And, anyway, the wine had made him woozy and more than a little drunk. And he would need every atom of his strength to go on tomorrow.
He slept like a dead man. The deep, bottomless sleep of absolute exhaustion. And there were no dreams this time.
He had done all that a man could do. He had taken every precaution that was possible for a man of his fiber. The two captives he made sleep apart, with the others between them, to reduce the possibility that they might crawl together in the darkness and work each other’s bonds free.
He had no fear of this. Zarouk and Dmu Dran were only men, and probably far wearier than he. They, too, would sleep deeply—as deeply as he.
Which is why he awoke sometime after sunrise, as tonished to find his guns gone and his wrists tied behind him with leather thongs.
Ryker rolled over onto his back and peered around him with a cold horror in his heart and a sinking feeling deep in his guts at what he would see.
But instead of what he had feared, quite a different sight met his eyes.
“Surprised, scum?” Zarouk asked, in a voice like iron scraping against iron. “No man can trust a zhaggua. Now you have learned the truth of it, fool!”
Ryker stared. Valarda and Melandron and the boy Kiki were nowhere to be seen. They were gone. Gone, too, were their sleeping furs, and all the gear. And the food and drink they had carried off from the caravan encampment, and the weapons, too.
He rolled onto one side and sat up, painfully and stiffly, unable to believe the evidence of his senses.
The holsters strapped to his thighs were empty. They had taken his guns.
And then it came to him that one other thing was gone from him as well, an old, familiar weight he had worn over his heart for so long that he had become accustomed to the weight of it, and hardly felt it any more.
Now the very absence of that weight reminded him of it.
The ancient black seal he had carried in a little leather bag suspended about his throat by a thong was missing!
Bag, seal and thong they had stolen.
And left him here to die.
His heart contracted, became a cold, hard lump within his breast. And something within him died then. Something he had begun to feel for the girl with the golden eyes … something that was more than mere lust or mere desire … something that had begun in a hungry wanting, but had grown and flowered into something that was very close to love.
Dead, now, that emotion. Burnt to ashes in the fires of the fierce, hating fury that woke within him.
Zarouk saw it in the hard mask of his face and the deadly coldness of his slitted eyes, and laughed to see it. The old priest who lay across from him, hooded eyes fixed on nothing, must have felt it too, but said nothing. His heart was so charged with the venom of hatred there was no room for more.
Sometime in the night while he had lain in that deathlike sleep of utter weariness—or in the first light of dawn, perhaps—they had quietly awakened—Valarda and her old grandsire and the naked imp of a boy.
Stealthily and furtively, they had crept upon Ryker and thieved from him his power guns and the thing that lay above upon his heart in the little leather bag.
Then, gently and carefully, so as not to waken him, they had bound his wrists together so that he was helpless. Then they had gathered up their furs, and all the food and drink there was left, and stole away like the thieves they were.
Or maybe they hadn’t been so gentle and so careful with him, after all. Maybe they hadn’t feared of waking him before they were done with their treachery and betrayal. Maybe they hadn ‘t had to fear, because of the drug Valarda had slipped into the wine she served him the night before.
For, from the vile, oily taste on his tongue, and the little hot red throb of pain behind his eyes, Ryker guessed that he had been drugged. He had been drugged once before, while those he thought were friends had robbed him and left him to die, and he remembered the effects of it well.