A.R.Yngve
DARC AGES Book Two
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A Leper's hand
At the earliest light of dawn, Shara woke up Darc; she wanted them to start moving as soon as possible. Darc showed no enthusiasm, for they were short on water already, and had no food to speak of. In silence, they crawled out of the cave and into the cool desert sands. This early, the landscape was lined with long shadows. They walked away from the point where the wink of light had appeared during the night. Without a compass and no sea in sight, only the sun gave them some directional aid. They walked toward the nearest set of cliffs...
The two outlaws trudged onward through the parched, rocky desert. Gravel and sand gathered in Shara's shoes; Darc's shoes were too soft for the rough terrain, and were starting to crack up at the seams. And they went on, as the sun climbed higher and burned hotter. Darc began to feel the first itching of sunburn in his face.
When the sun climbed to a point directly above the couple, it felt as if the sun burned right through their skulls. Shara had blisters on her feet; her pale face was getting ruddy with sunburn, despite the hood over her head. They were still far from the high, vertical cliffs, and the few nearby rocks seemed to offer very sparse shadow. Darc was slowly getting more and more dizzy in the sun; he gulped down the last drops in his water bottle, but only felt his thirst increase. Suddenly he spotted a tiny little lizard, resting on a flat rock right next to him. It scuttled away before he could have a chance of catching it.
"Damn!" he croaked. "Look for signs of a waterhole, Shara."
Her hoarse reply came fast: "How am I supposed to recognize that? My whole life was spent in cities!"
"Don't know... animals, or more plants, or a pit in the ground... something."
"I could always kill you and drink your blood," she said with tired sarcasm.
"Too much iron and salt in it," he retorted, a faint grin on his reddening face. "You'd get sick and die."
A dog-like desert animal -- a coyote -- appeared about fifty meters from their position. It froze abruptly for a moment, watching them with its round black eyes... then it darted into the underbrush and vanished from sight.
"Let's go there!" Darc said, pointing to the spot the coyote had left. "Animals come to the waterhole in the morning. Has to be there!"
Shara was too exhausted to reply. She staggered after him.
And, just as Darc had guessed, a waterhole did appear fifty meters farther away: at the bottom of a crevice, a little pool of brownish water glittered in the shadow of some tall rocks. Darc and Shara lay down at the waterhole and drank joyously -- not even bothering to filter it first. Then they splashed their faces and clothes, and carefully filled up their bottles. They sat down, pulled off their worn footwear and began shaking out sand and pebbles.
"Shara, maybe we could catch a snake or a lizard to eat --"
"Kristos, no!" she gasped.
Confused for a moment, Darc then turned his head, and saw what had upset her. On a clifftop at least a hundred meters away, stood a cloaked and hooded figure facing them. He, or she, was holding a spear with a rag attached to it. As if to confirm that he had seen them, the figure held up his spear so that the rag fluttered in the wind. It was a banner, with a red symbol painted on it. Darc immediately recognized the symbol: a stylized DNA segment, a cut-off double-helix. Without reflection, Darc and Shara understood that the cloaked figure was a Leper -- and that he was not alone.
Shara put her shoes back on, her shifting eyes desperately searching for an escape-route. The figure pointed straight at them with his spear, obviously making a signal to others. Shara surrendered to her lifelong conditioning -- she panicked and ran away from the sight of the Leper. Darc ran after the hysteric woman. Having longer legs and pants instead of a long wide skirt, he caught up with her after a short distance.
"Stop running," he gasped. "We must stop and talk to them!"
Shara ignored him, rambling on through the terrain. After a number of seconds of mindless flight, she inevitably had to stumble -- a bush-root caught her left foot. She fell with a scream, legs bruised but not broken.
Darc helped her up, but she struggled to continue the escape.
"Run," she droned, "we must run, run --"
"Jesus! Calm down! At least give me a chance to see where we're going --"
They both stopped dead. A multitude of Leper banners was emerging up from behind bushes and rocks. Darc and Shara stood surrounded by a narrowing circle of hooded pursuers. The figure on the clifftop was still pointing them out, following their every movement; there was no point in hiding down.
"Let's head for that flat rock," Darc said.
With Shara leaning on him, they stumbled up on a nearby slope of rock that jutted up over the sand. From there, no escape was possible -- only a last stand. Darc had no idea of what to do next, but he knew that fighting was out of the question. The upright spears and banners rapidly closed in on them, and more cloaked figures showed themselves among the bushes and cactuses. Shara was paralyzed, like a hunted animal caught in a dead end. Darc saw first dozens of figures, then about a hundred of them -- all wearing sand-colored cloaks -- an army of Lepers, silently approaching its prey.
Within minutes, the Lepers had the slope tightly surrounded. Among the cloaked Lepers, one tall figure wore armor pieces on his chest and shoulders, decorated with the double-helix symbol; he appeared to be the leader, and carried a laser rifle on his back. The leader walked up to the foot of the slope -- he was leaning slightly to his left, as if something weighed him down -- and stopped. The Leper crowd seemed disciplined in his presence, more like an army than a mob.
The leader figure pointed his spear at the trapped fugitives, and shouted: "Look at them, my children!"
To his surprise, Darc understood the leader's slurry voice rather well -- the dialect the man was speaking resembled English even more than that of Castilia.
"See how they tremble, these ugly, evil creatures! It was their sins who made us what we are!" The leader's voice was full of righteous anger, and the Lepers roared their raging support. "Yes, they are ugly!" he confirmed. "Pretty on the outside, but ugly on the inside!"
The Lepers waved their spears, roaring again.
"But we are not like them -- are we?" he asked rhetorically.
"NO!" the cloaked figures shouted as one.
"So let them see how beautiful we are on the inside!" The leader tore off his hood and glared up at Darc and Shara. "See us!"
Shara shrieked, and looked away. Darc couldn't help but gaze at the sight. The leader slurred because some of his front teeth were jutting out of his mouth -- but that wasn't all. The entire left side of his face was healthy -- but his right eye bulged, bloated and bloodshot, out of its sore socket. The skin around his right eye was stretched by huge lumps on his bald skull and right cheek. The leader held up his left arm to the sun -- a hand like an oversized claw. Two of the left hand's fingers were twice as long as the rest. Darc had never before seen such a misshapen man, neither in this age or his own. It took him a few seconds to understand that the leader's deformities were real. He was shaken -- yet this sight could not have prepared him for the next shock. As he watched, unable to move, the other Lepers pulled off their hoods and exposed faces and hands to the sun.
Darc made an involuntary yelp.
A line-up of deformed men and women glowered at him, eyes full of unforgiving reproach; a hate that nearly matched their hideousness, eyes saying: We hate you as you must hate us! Every one of them, including the leader, had the double-helix symbol tattooed onto the forehead -- or both foreheads, in one case. Darc was shocked numb, not even able to feel ordinary fear -- it was too much at once.
From the mass of faces, he only managed to take in brief glimpses of horror: faces with the ears and noses placed wrong, or drawn out like half-molten wax figures. Faces pockmarked by brown teeth, sticking out of the skin like a barber's nightmare. A man with empty, black eye-sockets, and absolutely no lower jaw -- just a quivering, boneless lip which pulled his tongue down into an everlasting grimace. An outstretched hand, with a single, blinking eye glaring out of its palm. An obscene head, with genitals growing on top of its scalp. Hair growing from a woman's mouth and eyes. A baby in a woman's pouch, with two fused heads, the two middle eyes fused into a single mass with two pupils. There was more -- numerous other shapes so subtly yet unnaturally distorted, that Darc feared he was going insane. He bit his lip, and tasted blood. No, it was for real. Shara, still silent, looked up again -- and screamed and screamed, until Darc slapped her. The Lepers leered and laughed at them, pointing their fingers and distorted limbs at the couple.
"Look at the ugly woman!"
"Has the sun burned you up?"
The desert echoed with bubbling, scornful laughter; it was perfectly clear that here Darc and Shara were the freaks, and the Lepers were the norm.
"Look at that hair -- all white!"
It seemed like the taunting would never end. Darc lowered his gaze, and his face burned with the heat of angry, fearful shame: he remembered a childhood schoolday, when a big, dumb bully teased him for being different, smarter than the bully. And he remembered the first time he talked back to a bigger child. The fear in his gut turned inside out, and became anger. Damn it, he wasn't going to die being laughed at! He faced the jeering crowd, amazed himself that he dared.
"Shut up!" he yelled at them. "We have done you no wrong!"
The Lepers fell dead silent. These new victims broke the old pattern, by talking back to them -- whenever banished city-dwellers or stranded aircraft passengers were found by them, all they did was to scream and escape, or kill themselves. Shara was too dazed to do anything; but if she had, her first move would have been to impale herself on the Leper leader's spear. The leader nodded thoughtfully, grinning with his grotesque set of brown-stained gums: this victim was different.
"You," he boomed, the echo rolling back and forth from the cliffs. "You are a strange intruder!" The leader stepped closer and lowered his voice. "What brings you two here? Speak!" He made little circles in the air with his claw-like hand as he spoke. "Before we kill you..." -- murmurs of disappointment came from his ranks, quickly silenced -- "...tell us how you ended up here, why they dropped you off so far from the cities! If it's a good story," he slurred casually, "we might let you live..." and added loudly: "...long enough to tell it!"
The Lepers roared with laughter. They seemed confident that it would soon be over. Darc understood that he had to speak up, or die for sure... what the hell was he supposed to say? The seconds passed all too quickly. Those mutants, or whatever they were, looked as impatient as they were ugly. The leader's healthy eye measured Darc up, and his bloated, red eye glared at Shara's beautiful but sun-scorched, grimy face. The leader's hatred of city-dwellers told him what ought to be done to her -- besides, if the chief didn't, someone else in the tribe would. But his own wives, deformed as they were, would become dangerously jealous. Decisions, decisions...
"Well?" he barked in his loud, slurring voice. "Your time is running out!"
Darc concentrated, let his fear recede behind his natural curiosity. These Lepers had to be human at heart. Their leader had to have a shred of reason in his misshapen head. He looked past the leader's facial deformities, saw his healthy eye -- and, with an effort, focused on it. The leader blinked uncertainly -- and then Darc knew. Inspiration came. Darc drank some of his water, and cleared his throat. He touched his chest, and spoke.
"I am a Leper."
The deformed men and women around him understood Darc's statement fairly well -- only its meaning confused them. Was he some kind of Leper? Was that why his hair and eyebrows were all white?
Darc pointed at the trembling figure of Shara, kneeling at his feet, and added emphatically: "She is a Leper." With a made a sweeping gesture at the crowd, he declared: "You are Lepers." Before the startled Lepers could react, Darc exclaimed gravely: "All humans are Lepers! All the people in the cities -- all of them! -- are Lepers! They think they are not, but they are wrong! I can prove it!"
He paused for a breath, gathering courage so that his voice wouldn't quiver. It might be a dream, not real life he was going through; and the more he felt it, the more fearless he grew.
An angry voice from the Leper tribe shouted back: "Liar! You are not like us -- you are different!"
Darc grabbed the word "different" in his mind, and hurled it back at the crowd.
"Yes -- I am different! All humans are different from one another! That's why all humans are Lepers!"
The Leper leader was seized by a new, unfamiliar sensation -- he could not name it, which made him afraid.
He pointed his claw-like hand menacingly at the white-haired stranger, and boomed: "Who do you think you are, to talk like that?"
Darc grinned at him, surprising even himself with his boldness: "Who are you, my good man?"
"I am Claw, chief of the Southern Eksako tribe. Who are you? Where do you come from?"
"I am David Archibald, also called Darc. I am from England, from another time. I have come from the past, from 900 years before this time!"
Claw shook his head; this outcast had surely spent too many hours in the sun.
"You are crazy, that's what! You cannot prove anything you say!"
"Yes I can! I can show you how little difference there is between you... and the people of the cities!"
"How?" a voice in the crowd asked.
Darc hesitated, almost too long -- a hesitation that might have ruined everything -- and blurted out: "I am a witchdoctor from the Golden Age, and I can cure you from the Plague!"
Gasps of astonishment came from the Leper tribe. They had expected desperate pleas for mercy, offerings of ransom they would have taken anyway -- but never, ever the promise of salvation. They stared at the white-haired stranger, then at each other, then at their leader. They did not know what to do.
Claw, a bright man hardened by a brutal life, felt a sting of pain in his heart. Deep inside, he wished to be healthy as much as any man, woman, or child of his tribe. All his life, his sore eye and deformed teeth had given him constant pains, ruined his sleep and given him the look and sound of a mean-minded, glaring brute. He had lost many deformed children, and some wives, to the Plague – lost more than he wanted to remember. Instinctively, Claw hated Darc for torturing him with false hopes. Who had ever heard of a cure for the Plague? His people had always been born deformed, and would always be. It was the punishment of the Goddess, for betraying her and the Singing King.
Stirred by feelings of guilt and hope, Claw slurred ominously: "You say you are from the Golden Age, stranger. If you lie, you will be infected with the Plague, and truly become a Leper. But if you convince me of who you are, I shall let you live. So speak. Tell us all about the Golden Age, and how you got here. We have all the time in the world!"
On Claw's command, his people sat down; this group appeared to have healthy legs, at least. A few protests came from the younger warriors. The man with no eyes or lower jaw gibbered confusedly, asking what was going on. The eye in a man's palm blinked repeatedly at Darc and Shara, as if suspicious of them.
A female Leper, Claw's favorite wife, leaned close to the chieftain and said softly in his ear: "That man is a fool, just another madman. Let him go, but do not listen to his crazy talk. It would only serve to make us unhappy."
He met her stern gaze with his healthy eye. She had an undistorted, adult face -- almost painfully beautiful compared to the other women's features -- but she also had a second face on her back, which used to mutter while she slept. This woman's name was Double-Mouth, and sometimes the mutterings of her second face frightened Claw.
"I gave him my word," he replied.
Claw turned away from Double-Mouth and sat on a rock, facing Darc again. He gestured impatiently at the stranger to begin. Darc scratched his head. Here we go again, he thought. Better take it nice and slow, and repeat myself often so they get the words right. All the way from the beginning. These are simple people. Ought to have music too. Like the old Greek storytellers... He sat down and clutched the shivering Shara, who clung to him like a wide-eyed baby.
Looking out at his frightening but curiously attentive audience, Darc spoke: "I said I am from the past, and that is the truth. I am Darc, and this is the true story of who I am, where I came from, and how I got here. Think back in time, nine hundred long years... before the wars... before the Eternal Ice. Think of the Golden Age, the first time of the Goddess and the Singing King. I was born then, and I heard the King's songs from when I was a child.
"I can still recall many of his songs, as I heard them..."