A thirst for vengeance came into him then, like a cold black poison in his blood.
Those who had betrayed him that time before had left him to die, like this—bound and helpless for the first cliff dragon or sandcat who came near, hunting meat.
But he had fooled them.
He had endured. He had clung tenaciously to life with an iron grip. And he had lived. Lived to hunt them down, those three, one by one, though half a world lay between them.
And he had taken his revenge, slowly, one at a time, enjoying it. Afterwards, he had not liked remembering what he had done, but he did not regret the doing of it. For a man pays his debts, every last debt, or he is something less than a man.
Staring at the empty day with hard, slitted eyes, Ryker knew that he would pay this debt, too. On the boy; on the old man; and—yes—even on the girl. The girl he had been very near to loving… .
“If you’re done feeling sorry for yourself, F’yagh,” said Zarouk quietly, “roll over here beside me. There is a knife slid down my boot, but as my hands are tied I cannot reach it. Maybe you can. If so, cut me free, and I will free your hands, and the priest’s.”
“You’ll slit my throat first, and you know it,” grunted Ryker.
Prince Zarouk shrugged. “Why should I bother? We’ll all die here—of thirst, or of the fangs of the first beast that comes this way. Unless you cut me free.”
“You’ll blood your knife in me the moment your hands are free, because you hate my guts.”
The prince looked at him. “I have no love for you, scum of the F’yagha. But there are those whom I hate more than you. You know the truth of that, because you
hate them too—the friends you rescued from the mob back in Yeolarn, who betrayed you here while you slept, and stole away like thieves in the night, leaving you to die. You hate them, too, more than you hate Zarouk, who has done you no particular hurt.”
Ryker said nothing. He could not deny the truth of what Zarouk said, but swallowing it left a bitter taste.
“Come, man, fight for life, don’t lie there pitying yourself!” the prince said levelly. “I would be a fool to slay you now, even if I could. When the beasts come—as they will come, unless my laggardly men get here first— we’ll have a better chance at living longer, two strong men to stand against them. The priest is nothing, you know that, half-mad, and old and feeble. I cannot fight the dragons of the cliffs alone, armed only with a slim knife. But the two of us, together, we might live. To be revenged someday on those who left us here.”
Ryker sighed, knowing he was a damned fool, and rolled over to where the desert-hawk sat, and began fumbling for the knife thrust down into his boot. He found it after a time, and inched it out. Then, with numb fingers and aching wrists, he sawed clumsily at the thongs that bound Zarouk’s hands—sawing at the flesh of those hands, as often as not, although the prince neither winced nor cried out at the pain of it.
After a long while, Zarouk was free. He chafed his wrists until the circulation began to return, then got up and went over to where Dmu Dran lay, and cut his bonds.
Then he strode over to where Ryker lay in a huddle and stood looking down at him, smiling slightly, fingering the knife.
Ryker said nothing. But he gave him look for look, and there was no weakness in his face, no trace of fear.
The prince knelt and cut his hands free. Then he stood up and put the knife into his sleeve, and went to look over the cliff edge, and searched the desert with narrowed eyes.
As soon as he had rubbed the numbness from his stiff muscles, Ryker came over to where Zarouk stood.
“What now?” he asked.
Zarouk shrugged.
“Now we sit down and wait until my men get here,” he said flatly. “After that, we’ll see.”
Ryker nodded thoughtfully. Then he found a convenient boulder and sat down. And waited.
To learn whether he was going to live or die.
III
THE DOOR TO ZHIAM
11. The Lost Nation
After the men had tired of using the whips on him, they left him hanging there in the chains all night without water. He was half unconscious most of the time; the rest of the time he was a little mad, and would have raved if his longue were not black and swollen from thirst.
With dawn they relented and cut him down, and let the F’yagh who was their other captive tend to his cold wounds and lacerated back. Through a blood-dimmed haze Ryker caught glimpses of this man, a white man, an Earthsider, whom he had never seen before and whose name he knew not.
Nor cared. What mattered was that the Earthman gave him water. Cool, sweet, blessed water—more wondrous than any wine, more precious than rubies. He drank, and drank, and fell into a doze. And woke to find the man working over him.
He opened the older wounds and cleaned the pus out of them and soothed them with creamy ointments filled with drugs that numbed the pain and drained the poison and held death at bay. Then he shot Ryker full of antibacterials and fever fighters and fed him hot, delicious broth until he fell asleep again. This time it was a wholesome sleep from which, when he woke, he woke refreshed and strengthened and—sane.
Zarouk’s men called him the Dok-i-Tar, which was the nearest they could bend their tongues around “doctor.” The People have no word in their language for a savant, a scientist, a man who devotes his life to the gathering of knowledge with a selfless fervor that is almost religious. Such a man, Ryker soon learned, was Eli Herzog, an Israeli by nationality, a Martian by exile, a scientist and philosopher by nature.
He was an old man with a tall brow and a big nose and not much hair. What there was of it was thin and white and silky. His eyes were watery, gentle, wise, filled with humor and wistful dreams, but without illusions.
They were exactly the eyes of another Jewish savant, a man named Einstein, in the famous portrait by Roether which Ryker had seen once, years ago, in the great museum on Luna.
Like that other great mind, Herzog loved humanity as he loved knowledge, but he had no delusions about the sanctity of either. He had been exiled to Mars twenty years before, for so-called political “crimes” back on Earth— during “The Troubles” merely to express an opinion that differed from the official line was defined as criminal.
On Earth, then, Doc Herzog had been a criminal. Here, he was more like a saint. He fell in love with the People and with their ancient ways and traditions. He loved them for their pride and their poverty, their grimly cherished honor, and their refusal to yield one inch before the overwhelming might of Earth and all her millions and her machines.
He had devoted all the remainder of his life to the study of their civilization. Science had changed much by this j century. Back in the 1900s, an astrophysicist was an astrophysicist, an archaeologist was an archaeologist, and seldom the twain did meet. Today, things were different, and Herzog knew as much about both topics as he knew about Martian literature and myth, or comparative anthropology, or nine-dimensional geometric theory, or null-state mathematics—which was plenty. He was a Synthesis!, with a dozen or thirteen doctorates in as many different fields. Since he was a doctor thirteen times over, Ryker decided to call him simply “Doc,” and they left it at that.
Zarouk had picked him up several months ago down in Chryse, hunting for petroglyphs. Since Dok-i-Tars of his sort have great powers of healing, and Zarouk had a lieutenant who had been badly mauled by a sandcat, his men captured the old F’yagh. Herzog had an M.D. tucked away among those thirteen doctorates, so it was no great feat for him to bring the man back to health. But Zarouk thought it was a marvel, and kept the old Dok-i-Tar around as a sort of good-luck talisman.