Ardor on Aros (3 page)

He lay in the cave, dying. It did not take me long to realize that he had not yelled—after all, I should have known that any voice I heard here wouldn’t yell for help in
English!

Anyhow, it kept repeating, in my head as I subsequently learned, and I followed it. Yes, I was on the right track; it grew “louder” as I foozled my way up that mountain. Not, I am sorry to say, without scraping myself up pretty nicely.

But I made it, and entered that cave, dark and increasingly cool, and I found him. He lay on his back, his mouth ajar, and when I again “heard” him I realized that I was hearing his
thoughts:
his mouth did not move, nor did his thirst-thick tongue. He had repeatedly filled my mind with a picture begging succor. Now he projected another: he asked me either to kill him with the slim sword lying nearby, or to go further back into the cavern, where there was a spring-fed little stream. I brought the water, incidentally banging my head and scraping an elbow in the darkness of the cave.

Holding his head up, just a little, I gave him drink—just a little. It had obviously been quite awhile since he’d had water or anything else to drink, and I remembered having read that you should never overdo in such circumstances. It’s easy to overdo, rescuing a patient from inanition. Now I know that his kind can go for long periods without water. Much longer than Earth people, me included. But that did not help my patient that first day here; he had passed his limit.

His leg was broken and he’d taken a nice would low in the belly—or high in the intestine. It had bled a lot, all over his lower belly and genitals. He was stuck to the rock floor of the cave, in his own dried blood. When he moved, obviously with renewed life after receiving the water, his belly started leaking again.

He was a ma. Whether his black hair grew that way or he’d shorn it, I could be sure at the time, but it formed a manelike ridge along the center of his skull and on down his back, like a bread hindside before. Like the scalplock of an American Indian—was it the Mohawks who wore that kind of hairdo?—the Mohicans? His brows were black, too, and his eyes, iris and all, so that they looked enormous, even though half-closed. There appeared to be no hair elsewhere on his body—except his face. He wore a rather wide bu not bushy mustache, and a short beard that ran up his cheeks to the bottoms of his lobeless ears. No sideburns. No hair on his pate expect for the scalplock.

The all-black eyes were strange, but I’ve seen people with eyes only a little different, their irises are so dark. And my father has no earlobes. And the hair—I’d no idea at the time if it just grew that way or if it had been shorn on either side, as a sort of decoration or tribal mark, like the Amerind hairdo it resembled.

The rest of it: two eyes, one mouth-type mouth, one nose, high-bridged and rather Italian-looking. Skin about the color of a penny. Not a shiny new penny; a year-old one, one that’s been handled several times. The color of some of those exchange students I’d seen from India, although a lot of them were considerably darker. As a matter of fact he bore a startling resemblance to a Delhi student I knew, Ram Gupta. A startling resemblance.

Two arms, two hands. Two legs (one very broken, and several days back, I thought). Each ended in a normal foot, shod in buskins of a blue-gray leather, laced with rawhide.

Normal. Standard homo sapiens type male. With standard reproductive equipment—stuck together with dried blood.

He’d worn flyless shorts, sort of like low-slung bikini briefs. Very tight, no more than straps on each hip, tied in a normal-looking knot. They were a jarringly bright red, apparently made of silk. Fire Island stuff. They’d been bright red even before he bled all over them. (I learned later that in back the job they made of covering him was only half-assed—literally.) He had stripped them off to bare his wound, but then hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

And he wore that ancient, standard costume; a tunic, fancied up by being cut deep below the low, round neck and laced. It was made with only one sleeve, the left, embroidered with a yellow sword. The tunic was very short, and I saw that his briefs would still show if he stood. It was red, too, and apparently silk, with a little sheen.

He wore a broad baldric from left shoulder to right hop; it too was of blue-gray leather and supported both sword and dagger scabbard. He was left-handed. Mirror image?

His name was Kro Kodres. He was from someplace called Brynda, and he called this world “Aros.” Big help. He had a message he was hot to get back to Brynda, but he’d been run down and chopped up by some inimical nomads called Vardors. Big help. They left him for dead, taking his mount (a
slook;
big help again). He dragged himself up here, and now I had the explanations of the dark stains I’d seen on the rocks as I ascended. God, what stamina the man had!

He had no idea how long he’d lain here; several days, I could see that. And smell it. He was worried about a girl he’d stashed for safety:
cor
Jadiriyah. (I soon larned that “
cor
” means “the.”)

He wanted to know who I was and where I was from. I told him, saw he didn’t understand a word of it, and concentrated on thinking at him, as hard as I could. He frowned, poor Kro Kodres did, and began to look worried.

“Why do you shield your thoughts?” he asked, in my mind.

Rather than answer, I concentrated hard:
I’m not shielding my thoughts, I’m trying like all hell to broadcast!

I failed; he didn’t receive a thing. I learned it later, and I may as well say it now:

The people of Aros are telepaths: senders. That is, they don’t “read minds,” they broadcast their thoughts, so that others can “hear” them. It’s purely voluntary, and they seldom use the ability save in times of stress; emergencies. And I should say “project” rather than broadcast. They’ve some astonishingly well-oiled machinery up there in their heads, and they can think
at
one person so that another nearby can’t “hear” a thing. Anyhow, since they are only weak receiving sets with very powerful broadcasting equipment, all mental, and since I don’t know how to broadcast, they can’t hear a word I think.

“Hank Ardor,” I said, touching my chest. “Hank Ardor.”

“Hahnk Ahdah,” he croaked, after several repetitions. Most of their
a
’s and
r
’s sound Bostonian, like Evelyn’s, both pronounced “ah.” Few people seem to pronounce
r
’s as most Americans do.

I smiled, nodding vigorously. “Hank Ardor,” I said again, touching myself, and then touched his chest and said “Kro Kodres.” He blinked in assent. If those people nodded, he couldn’t have at the time.

“Where are you from?” he asked in my mind.

“America,” I told him, and repeated it several times. He got it, but let me know he’d never heard of it, and hadn’t seen much reddish hair either, and I didn’t try to go any further. His clothing and weapons didn’t look as if Coperincus or Galileo had showed up on Aros yet. It occurred to me that I might well shoot off my mouth about coming from the sky and get myself burned for a heretic, or whatever this people did to people who thought differently.

Kro Kodres had a knapsack of soft russet-colored leather. In it were implements, and a few coins, along with meat: jerked meat for a far traveler, but it tasted pretty good otherwise, I will add, unless you don’t like the meat you buy in kosher delicatessens. We had plenty of water, of course, from the shiveringly cool little stream in the back of the cave.

There seemed very little I could do for the poor guy, other than feed him, give him water, commiserate, and think positively. Set his leg?—could you? I didn’t know anything about that, but I did see I’d have to break it again before I tried, anyhow. I didn’t dare. Treat his wound? Sure. That’s properly heroic and I’d like to merit the image and say I performed brilliant medical rites over him. There was some powder in the knapsack, and he indicated that I should sprinkle his ripped gut with it. I did, but I didn’t much of anywhere. He was mostly dried blood there, and I figured that cruor was all that was holding him in—along with whatever blood he had left.

Bandage him up? All right, I did that. He wore little, and I nothing, but he did have a cloak, a long, heavy one that was white on one side and black on the other. Noticing that there seemed to be no particular inside or outside, I guessed the white would reflect the sun during the day. And—the black would disguise the wearer at night? The white contrasted nicely with his tunic and shorts, which looked like a sort of uniform, particularly with that embroidered design on the tunic sleeve.

Using his dagger—its back edge was saw-toothed; clever—I tore the cloak and bound him up around the middle as best I could. He started bleeding again, which gave me a fine helpless feeling as I secured the ends of the heavy cloth to make a tighter bandage. He seemed to appreciate it, and he tried to sit up with a little smile, and he passed out.

Shortly thereafter I learned something else about the planet Aros. It is warm by day, nearly all over save the poles, of course, but where we were there was no humidity to boil us. Where we were, far from the equator, the temperature when I’d waked up here was probably a dry ninety degrees Fahrenheit. (I know centigrade are far more scientific and impressive, but it takes me about two minutes to convert each one.) But at night—well, I guess it dropped close to sixty. And that was damned cold, in a cave, without heat or clothing or covers, much less the pajamas I’d never worn anyhow.

Neither of us spoke the other’s language, and we hadn’t any books or paper or ball-points. But he would say a word or phrase and project a picture into my mind. Think about it: I got it fast, then faster, then I was rushing past the abecedarian stage, toward mastery of Aro, their language. It is used nearly all over the planet, although of course there are plenty of dialect and slang differences—and I’ve never even been out of this hemisphere. Within five days I was speaking pretty good pidjin Aro. Without his psi-broadcasting powers it’d have taken a month just to get a noun vocabulary, without paper and books. We didn’t have a month. But we had nothing else to do, and I’m good at languages, and that vocal-plus-mental picture method is unbeatable. It was almost like being programmed, force-fed. All I had to do was remember.

He was very anxious about “the” Jadiriyah, but I decided to hell with chivalry—I wasn’t leaving him. Maybe he’d heal, or the powder was magic, and he and I could go for her together. Maybe he was a prince, and Jadiriyah was his sister, and I’d be warlord, at the very least. I promised him I’d see about her. Later. Yes, I’d be sure she got that odd ring. He was might emphatic about that.

It’s a good thing I stuffed myself with Aro in those five days. Our supply of jerked meat was down to a nubbin, I had a runny nose from night after cold night (plus a bath in that icy stream), and—on the fifth night Kro Kodres awoke me from the first sound sleep I’d had. I knew why immediately. He was blistering hot with fever, streaming sweat, and shivering violently. He’d been twisting around; his bandages were red-soaked and he was leaking through and beneath them.

“The golden cup is big bones!” he yelled, and he yelled it again, struggling to get up. Then he collapsed, and he died very quickly.

The poor guy was full of infection and he’d run out of blood to lose, and I’d been worse than useless to him.

I remembered the phrase: the golden cup is big bones! “
Hai azul thade cor zorveli nas!
” Although he’d run it together: “
Hai azulthade cor zorvelinas.
”

You won’t hear any valiant tales from me about how I buried him. Be properly shocked if you want, but—what’s the use? If you’re Christian or Jewish or one of several others, you think the body is nothing, a thing, a transitory chalice to hold the soul, which is going on alone—so why plant the body, other than as fertilizer for more bodies? In which case it shouldn’t be neatly boxed anyhow. If you’re from India and think you’re coming back in a new body—as the Arones believe—then why bother with the old one? It’s no more than a snake’s discarded skin, a butterfly’s cocoon. What’s the market value of used cocoons?

No, we—I mean
you
, on Earth—plant people because they smell bad, and attract flies and animals and vultures and buzzards, and because a long, long time ago our ancestors wanted the bodies of the faithful departed well-planted so they wouldn’t come back and bug everybody. To be doubly certain, they piled rocks on top of the body-hole. Sure, that’s why tombstones: remnant holdovers from when man used to heap rocks on graves, to keep the spirit down and out of his hair.

“The evil that men do lives long after them; the good is oft interred with the bones.” So said Shakespeare (if the quotation’s off, remember that I haven’t anything here to crib from), and so our remote ancestors believed—literally. “Rest in peace” means just that: rest in peace down there,
don’t get restless and come back; leave us in peace, too!
It’s a command, not a well-wishing sendoff.

I Left Kro Kodres lying on his back in the cave. How many stiffs got a private sepulcher with running water?

I left him there in his torn, blood-imbrued clothing but without his weapons and gear and his (torn) cloak—and his buskins. (He had six toes. On each foot.) I performed the necessary but worse-than-unpleasant task of accepting the legacy of his boots and weapons, which I had to remove. I worked hard at washing everything in that cold stream, but some bloodstains remained. The water didn’t do the leather baldric any good, either. His short, soft boots were a little wide in the feet and looser on my calves than his. I laced them tight and let my toes wander around in them.

From his cloak I made a loin-and-rump cover, sort of like an overgrown and particularly loose diaper. A thin strop from the same cloak served to belt the makeshift thing about me, low on my hips, There was no reason for anything else, so I slung the ragged remnant of his cloak about my shoulders as a sort of short mantle; it could also be pulled up to cover my head, if that sun tried boiling my brain.