“Seg! Cover yourself up — grab that idiot Thelda! Hurry!”
We cowered there, the four of us beneath silks and furs, as we let a myriad tiny birds harass and torture the mighty impiters into ignoble retreat. We could hear the sounds of that strife clear across the broad valley into which we had descended. The screechings and the shriekings persisted for some time and then gradually faded and I was able to poke a cautious head out from our cover to see the last of the flying monsters circling aloft with heavy wingbeats as the tiny dots of the little pink and yellow birds clustered thickly about.
Thelda was shaking all over and sobbing hysterically.
That was a normal reaction and I thought nothing of it. Seg tried to comfort her, but she wiped her eyes and turned a shoulder on him. Across that smooth skin lay a vivid weal.
“Well,” said my Delia. “I shall always have a soft spot in my heart for those little birds. What were they, anyway?”
No one knew their name; none of us had ever heard of them. There is much to know of Kregen, and much that I tell you now I picked up later — but to spoil the effect of those thousands of little birds with their vindictive feud with the impiters is something I cannot do. We were shaken, bruised, cut — but alive.
After inspection, Delia pronounced the airboat as unusable.
Whether from a blow from the impiters or from an inherent failure we didn’t know. What we did know was that from here on in we must walk if we wished to reach Port Tavetus. All across the western skyline and extending out of sight to north and south stretched the colossal mass of The Stratemsk.
Before us lay a valley, and then open country with the glint of rivers and the clumping of trees amid the grasses.
“We walk,” I said.
Thelda had recovered and we had drunk and eaten. Now she made a face. “I never did like walking. It’s so unladylike.”
Our preparations at the beginning were ambitious.
Thelda insisted on our bringing with us a mass of equipment she said was, “Absolutely vital.”
I threw a handsome silver-mounted mirror into the grass.
“Sheer lumber, Thelda. If you want to preen — use a pool.”
She started to argue and Delia started to try to persuade her, but I just said, “If you want to bring all that junk you must carry it yourself.”
That settled that.
We took long swords, bows and arrows, daggers and knives. We took sleeping equipment. We took what food I thought we would need before we got into our stride and could hunt what would be necessary. We took water bottles, large canteens of Sanurkazz leather, which is the best tanned and treated of the inner sea although perhaps not as fine, in the manner of tooling, as that of Magdag — Zair rot them!
On Delia’s suggestion we buried all the treasures — the gold and jewels, the luxury trappings. If ever we passed this way again we might retrieve them, and if some unknown warrior stalking this way found the marker he would be suddenly rich, and good luck to him. As for footwear, we took every item we had, for although I prefer to walk barefooted, the others were mindful of the discomforts of the way — Seg must be used to hunting barefoot over his mountains of Erthyrdrin, and Delia, I knew from the time we had escaped from the roof-garden of the Princess Natema and had spent a wonderful time on the Plains of Segesthes, could cope adequately without shoes. No, it was a way of saying we thought Thelda would not keep up with us without shoes.
Poor Thelda!
Poor Seg!
He perfectly resigned himself to carrying her, if needs be.
I must admit that I had not a care in the world. We had landed safely. We had arms and food, we were fit, and we had a continent to explore. Vallia would be there when we got there. I was in no hurry to reach that mysterious, potent, terrible island empire and face the emperor-father of the girl I wanted to marry. The future would take care of itself; only the here and now mattered — for was not Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond, walking so lightly and freely at my side?
Chapter Nine
Delia sang.
As we marched along Delia sang.
My chest itched.
As soon as Thelda had recovered herself and seen the weals crisscrossing my chest she had cooed and pursed up her fat lips and gone off to pick some brilliantly-mauve wild flowers which she bashed and mixed into a paste. Delia had wondered across and bent down and looked closely at the flowers and at Thelda’s intensely absorbed face as she pounded and stirred, and had smiled slantingly at me, and gone off, humming.
Now Thelda had splattered the mauve paste all over my fiery chest, saying: “This will do you the world of good, Dray! It’s an old Vallian remedy and wonderfully efficacious. Why, these little vilmy flowers will have your poor dear chest healed in no time!” The confounded paste was irritating and fretting me like a hive of bees fastened to my chest.
And Delia marched on at the head of our little caravan and sang.
She sang wonderfully. Gay, rollicking airs that sped our feet over the grass, sad little laments that made me, for one, think back on all the great times and powerful men I had known who were now no more, silly little catch-phrase songs in which we all joined — Thelda with a self-important air of consciousness of the effect she was creating, Seg with a most powerful and musical tenor that truly delighted me, and me with my own wild and savage bellowings that always made Thelda jump and Delia sing on superbly. But that damn chest itched until I could stand it no more.
“May the Black Chunkrah take it!” I yelled. I ripped the whole sticky mauve plastery mass off and flung it into the grass and jumped on it “My chest’s on fire!”
“Really, Dray!” sighed Thelda, sorely tried by my ingratitude. “You must persevere. You must give it time to work its healing magic.”
“Healing magic nothing!” I shouted at her. “You try it! You stick it on your own imposing chest and see what it feels like!”
“Dray Prescot!”
“We-ell-”
The tinkling of a stream a short distance off by a line of salitas trees gave me the excuse not to exhibit further my sullen disgrace. I ran across and dived in and if all the monsters from the fabulous book called the Legends of Spitz and His Enchanted Sword that had been popular at the time I’d spent in Zenicce had started for me with gnashing jaws and talons I’d have scrubbed that confounded chest of mine clean first. Since Delia and I had taken that baptism by immersion in the sacred pool on the River Zelph in distant Aphrasoe — distant! No one knew where Aphrasoe, the City of the Savanti, was located! — we seemed to have picked up the valuable attribute of not only remaining healthy and with a promised life span of a thousand years but also of recovering with remarkable rapidity from wounds. We never seemed to get sick.
I rejoined them and I heard Delia, in a musing kind of voice, talking about a little blue flower she had picked.
“How pretty it is, Seg! See the petals, and the stamens, and the curious little silverish shape on each petal, like a heart-”
Thelda said “Oh!” and put a hand to her mouth.