Camelot in Orbit Read online

  Camelot in Orbit

  Camelot #2

  by

  Arthur H. Landis

  PRINTED IN U.S.A.

  The red-gold orb of mighty Fomalhaut I blazed for brief seconds through a wind-blown rift in the lowering snow clouds. The effect was prismatic, causing hoar frost on granite walls, crenellated turrets, and even the bulk of great Castle Glagmaron to sparkle with a myriad of colors. The bridge to the castle gates, now rimed and hung with icicles, glowed too with an iridescence similar to Terra’s mythical “Bifrost Bridge”-that beauteous link ‘twixt the world of men and mighty Asgaard.

  All very poetic, if viewed from the comfort of a hovering spacecraft. But I wasn’t in a hovering spacecraft. Indeed, I was seated on a wooden stool next to a wooden table, ‘neath a most incongruous draping of weathered, purple canvas-my pavilion….

  Paradoxically, I was in full armor while dripping sweat in a surrounding temperature of five degrees Fahrenheit. I had just completed a series of jousting runs, thus the sweat. It was mid-winter on Fregis, Fomalhaut’s second planet, thus the temperature. The place was the martial training field to the east of Glagmaron Castle in the country of Marack, most powerful of the five kingdoms of the northern continent of Marack.

  The stool whereon I sat was next to that of my shield-companion Sir Rawl Fergis, nephew to Marack’s Queen Tindil. Student squires were unlacing our plates. To the Fregisian eye we were alike as two peas in a pod; each of us weighing in at about one-ninety, and with a height of 6’l”. But the likeness ended there. For whereas Rawl’s fur was auburn and real, mine was jet-black and of a gene-cultured origin. Rawl’s eyes were purpleblue; all Fregisians’ eyes were purpleblue. Mine were brown, beneath purpleblue contacts. Lastly, I had twice the strength he had, since I came from a planet with twice the mass. An important factor, too, in a world of mayhem, was that an imposed neural preconditioning, infused during the hours of sleep prior to planetfall, had made me a master of all Fregisian weaponry.

  Even the beauteous stones of my swordbelt were not just “stones.” They were a link to certain death-dealing laser beams, were I granted the power to use them, and to various other “things,” including a communications potential with the starship Deneb-3, now, hopefully, orbiting Fregis.

  I reached for the pitcher of sviss which but short minutes before had been gog-milk, changed now by my companion’s shouted “words.” Rawl once confessed to me that he’d learned but three things of magick at Glagmaron City’s Collegium: the thing of the sviss, skilled lute playing, and a spell for love-to be used three times only. He’d used all three on the Lady Caroween, daughter to the Lord Breen Hoggle Fitz; wasted them actually, since I’d been told later that Caroween would have used the three she had on him.

  Snow lay in drifts upon the ground, sailed lazily through the air in puffs and swirls from fat pummeled clouds; all pushed in our direction by a cold wind. I sampled the sviss, rolled its tartness around my tongue and swallowed, Pleased, I emptied the cup.

  Rawl refilled it, said casually, “With that frown ‘twixt your eyes, Sir Collin, I’m bound to think you’ve a second thought as to our gerd hunt.”

  “To the hunt, no! To the company we’ll be keeping, yes!” I nodded down the field toward one of a number of pavilions around which were a half-dozen warriors and dottle mounts. “Sir Soolis, yon young Lord of Bleese has had no love for me of late. Now he seeks me out-and with the gift of a riding gerd, if we can take it. Why would he do this?”

  “Why else? You’re the ‘Collin.’ Heeeeyyyy-” Rawl squinted at me with laughter in his eyes. “You’ve qualms of Soolis? Why, my lord, did he come at us with all the Bleesian Army, just you and I and Hoggle could take the lot of them. Nay, lord. He’ll play no tricks; though I wish to the gods he’d try.”

  “‘Tis the thing of the eyes,” I said softly.

  He was instantly alert. “You think again of the Dark One, of the Kaleen?”

  “I do.”

  “Then you believe It true, what you said at council-that he’s come again to Marack?”

  “I do,” I repeated.

  Rawl’s grin grew wider, the original blithe spirit. His eyes shone. “Would it were true, my lord, This time we’ll pursue the bastard across the River-sea. We’ll take the whole of Om.

  We’ll storm the gates of Hish itself…”

  I sighed. “He knows our strength now. I doubt we’ll have that chance.”

  “Our magick, too, was greater.”

  “‘Twas not our magick,” I said, unthinking.

  “You mean, ‘twas yours?”

  “Nay.” I shrugged impatiently. “But ‘twas not ours.”

  He frowned. At the far pavilion the stocky Sir Soolis, bereft now of armor, was donning a fresh jupon and furs,…

  In Galactic Foundation listings, Fregis was called Camelot; the indisputable facts being that other than a classical, medieval culture and the like, spells, enchantments, and dark wizardry, as practiced by Fregis’ sorcerers, really worked. Moreover, the planet was an occultists’, alchemists’, metaphysicists’ paradise.

  Foundation Center had been aware of this anomaly for quite some time. Indeed, over a period of two galactic centuries assigned Watchers-opposite-sexed pairs with a high compatibility potential-had forever apprised them of these facts.

  To read a Camelot report had been a joy indeed, excepting the one received six months before predicting the onset of a dark and terrible sorcery to encompass the entire planet. Unless we moved quickly, the report had said, the forces for progress, the five kingdoms of the north, would be ruined, destroyed. The result? Chaos! A new dark age, and worse, for all the foreseeable future of the beauteous water-world of Fregis-Camelot.

  Not liking the prognostication one damned bit, the Foundation had moved instantly to insert a bit of magick of its own, scientific magick! In essence, me, Kyrie Fern, an Adjuster-manipulator of the socio-evolutionary processes-the sly introducer at dark campfires of the sharpened stick and the gut-stringed bow. At the Court of Marack, I had passed myself off as Sir Harl Lenti. I had also been accepted-for my prodigious deeds-as their “Collin mythos,” reborn. He who had returned to save the Northlands from darkest peril!

  A graduate of the Foundation’s Collegium, I’d become, at age thirty, somewhat of a genius in the art of “adjusting.” The very man for the job, said the Prime Council, except that Camelot was one gigantic game of misdirection. On the one hand the “play” involved an extra-universal, alien intruder ferred to as the Kaleen, or the “Dark One”; with his opponents, other than Marackians, etc., being the host-occupants of a half-dozen cuddly, button-eyed, wet-nosed, fat-fannied, normally useless tree dwellers called Pug Boos. The Foundation and the Prime Council hadn’t the whiff of an idea of what the job really was. And I, after six months of a great and bloody war, wild sorcery, and a seething chaos of events involving a potpourri of the most lovable and zany friends that a humanoid could have-and the most evil of enemies-was just beginning to find out!

  I glanced toward the Lord of Bleese. He was seated and smacking his lips over the steaming contents of a stirrup cup. “The man’s smart,” Rawl said bluntly. “He makes haste slowly, since our good Lord Hoggle-Fitz is still at joust.” A roar from the lists where Hoggle was no doubt pummeling somebody, backed up this statement.

  Toward the east then and sharp on the frozen air came the shrill notes of a trumpet, to be followed by a lusty feminine hallooing from many voices. I turned to stare in that direction; focused my contacts to four magnitudes. A covey of riders had topped the road up from Glagmaron City on the banks of the Cyr below. Their colors were those of my betrothed, Murie Nigaard Caronne, the Princess of Marack.

  I nudged the squinting Rawl. The squires had finished with ou
r plate-mail so that we now sat in padded jupon and chain long-shirts. I waved them away. “‘Tis the Princess,” I told Rawl softly. “Your lady’s with her.”

  He frowned, half arose, and sat again; said, puzzled, “But ‘tis only four days. They were to be gone a week.”

  She’d spotted my colors-the field being not all that broad from the bluff’s edge to the bridge. An instant wheeling of her mount in a shower of ice shards from off the cobbles, and she charged toward me as she’d seemingly charged the gates.

  At first sight, I’d thought she but raced the threat of the storm clouds. But her ride toward me, headlong, precipitous, gutsy, was not only symptomatic of her character, but suggested, too, a possibility of peril.

  Her dottle skidded to a whoooing halt within but six feet of us. We moved not a muscle. ‘Twould have been UnMarackian to do so. A second dottle arrived just as precipitously, skidded, fat-fanny to the ground, at about fifteen feet to our right, deliberately.

  Its lithesome rider, with the cowl of her cloak flung back to expose her flaming red hair, was the Lady Caroween, dainty Valkyrie daughter to our Lord of Great Ortmund, Breen Hoggle-Fitz. Rawl rose instantly to go to her.

  The remaining six maidens of the entourage, one of whom held a trumpet and smiled most sweetly, halted respectfully some twenty paces to the princess’ rear. Their dottles wheeed a greeting to our own.

  The princess dealt a resounding whack to her mount’s broad bottom so that it knelt before me with a pained look in its big blue eyes. Its six paws were instantly tucked beneath the warmth of its belly.

  “My Lord Collin,” she began, though her aura of urgency still allowed for a sparkling eye and a baiting grin, “When last we spoke, sir, you said you’d had your fill of lance and ‘flats’-‘til Ormon’s Day, come spring. But here you are again…”

  She referred to my challenging colors, a sprig of violets against a field of gold, which flew from a great lance in the midst of a half hundred or more pavilions, each flaunting the blazonry of this lord or that. All around us on the line of a dozen lists, as many as a hundred belted knights, or heggles, inclusive of the Lady Caroween’s father, were unseating each other in thunderous crashes of lance on shield, or were fighting a’foot with sword flats in melees of screaming, cursing chaos.

  From the corner of one eye I saw that the Lord of Breese, though mounted now, still held back to sit and stare in our direction. I ignored him.

  “My Lady,” I said, absolving myself with a careless shrug of any guilt, “there’s simply nought else left to do.” I’d moved forward to offer a hand, were she inclined to leave her lacquered, wooden saddle. She wasn’t. I winked deliberately, allowing a twinkle to touch my right contact. Her returned stare was in every way as bold.

  I sighed inwardly. Each new setting wherein I saw her renewed my belief that she was truly the fairy-tale princess, right out of the archaic “Crock of Gold.” She had golden hair, golden fur, saucy blue-purple eyes, a quite elfish face, with dainty, slightly pointed ears-though this last was no salient feature of Fregisians-and a forever demanding tilt to her chin. Petite, she was beautifully formed. Pound for pound, she was also the match of any warrior with sword or faldirk…

  She wore a white and gold cloak with voluminous sleeves, furred inside and out and reaching to her soft-booted calves. The cowl was thrown back. Being but loosely belted it was open now, allowing for the sight of padded, blue-velvet ski pants, with pullover to match.

  A white scarf was at her throat.

  Beneath her altogether feminine boldness, however, I had sensed, indeed, knew instantly, that my princess was a very worried female.

  I offered my half-filled cup, said softly, “You’ve returned early, my love. I’ve missed you.”

  She drained the cup, grinned saucily, scratched her nose and said, “Well! Have you, now? I should visit my cousin more often. I’d be there yet, sir-” and she fixed me hard with her eyes-“had I not spoken in dream last night to my good Dame Malion!”

  I reached by reflex to my belt, pressing the stud for extended “null” so’s to protect our group from whatever “mind” games the Dark One might just be up to. She’d referred to her

  “Court-appointed Companion,” and she’d kept her voice deliberately low.

  “Are you sure,” I queried, “that ‘twas not but a simple, normal dream?”

  “‘Twas neither simple nor normal, Collin. There’s peril, sir, to my father.”

  “No nightmares?” I persisted-“No over-eating, of gogmeat potpies? I do recall, my lady-“

  “‘Twas magick, Sir Lenti-of the kind that you know well!”

  “Tell me of it.”

  She said shortly, “There’s no time.” Her gaze had been drawn to my left, down the line of pavilions from whence there now came a clumping of dottle paws.

  My eyes followed hers. The Lord of Bleese with two attendants was approaching. I instantly held up a hand to stay him. And because I was who I was he promptly halted. Murie continued: “I go to my dame now, Collin. We’ll speak at sup …But know one thing: if ‘twixt the hours of now and then the Lord Gen-Rondin arrives to Castle Glagmaron, then do you come quickly to my father’s side. For Marack will surely be in deadly danger.”

  I shrugged, said softly, “The danger’s never left us, Murie. So guard yourself, for I’ll be gone ‘til sup. I’ve a thing to look into.”

  She frowned. “By the gods, Collin, I speak of peril beyond dangers Why leave me now, sir?”

  “‘Tis but a ride of ten miles,” I said shortly. “But it must be done.”

  She forced a smile. “Well, kiss me then, for I’ve missed you too.”

  Her dottle, kneeling, had brought her small, snow-maiden face to a level with my own.

  My steel shirt being a barrier to anything more daring, I kissed her, open-eyed, and with a casual though possessive hand placed gently on her thigh. Her eyes searched mine avidly, as if she sought some quick revealing truth.

  I cautioned in one small ear: “From now on, love, do not look thusly into the eyes of our sorcerer, Fairwyn. Tell this to the king and your mother-and to your close friend Caroween.”

  She gasped, said tight against my throat, “‘Tis true then, what you said before at council-that the Dark One’s returned; that some among our lords might be possessed, like unto that which my dame has told me, too?”

  “I think ‘tis true. I’ll know for sure tonight.”

  She drew away, kissed me again, smiled grimly, then drew the circle of the god, Ormon, upon her breast. And then, because she could do it, she winked at me, signaled her escort and her red-haired shield-maiden, and whistled her dottle to its feet.

  It stomped its six fat paws to rid them of unmelted ice, whoooed loudly and led off toward the castle. The bridge, now that red Fomalhaut had fled, was again a somber gray.

  Fresh snow-flurries touched all the plain around us. An idiot’s time, I mused wryly, for to go a’gerd hunting.

  It was just then that I noticed the presence of Hooli the Court Pug Boo. He’d been hidden by Murie’s cloak. Now he clung to it for dear life, lest he be bounced from off her dottle’s rump. Round, symmetrical, Hooli was hardly two feet in height. His legs and arms were short, sturdy; his ears furtufted, on a puff-ball head. I was again reminded of the first time I’d seen him, when I’d whimsically compared him to a cuddly toy I’d owned in the dreams or the play of my childhood.

  Hooli was a number of things. First, he was a leaf-eating tree-dweller, indigenous to the southern-Kaleen-controlled-continent of Om. He was also one of the Court Pug Boos sacred to the kingdoms and the gods of the northern continent. He was, specifically, however, the entity-occupant of the Pug Boo attached to the Marackian Court.

  Exactly who or what this entity-occupant was, I hadn’t the slightest idea. I knew only that without his aid all our efforts at the previous battle of Dunguring, in the northern land of Kelb where we had smashed and driven the hordes of the Dark One, the Kaleen, into the River Sea, would have
come to nought. For it had been his, Hooli’s magick, about which Rawl had spoken.

  All the more reason then for my resurgent fear of new dangers all around us-for Hooli and his cohorts, Pawbi, Dahkti, Jindil, and Chuuk, had disappeared, ceased to occupy their hosts immediately after that battle. For six long months I’d had no contact with him. And in that time, while I awaited the return of the Foundation Starship, Deneb-3, I’d become obsessed with the insidious idea that I, Kyrie Fern, Adjuster, was quite alone now; had been left, indeed, saddled, with the awful responsibility for every vestige of life on Camelot-Fregis.

  With the first coming of snow rumors had become rife of riders on ice-bound roads where their would not normally be; of strange guests in the castles of certain lords; of ships and dark visitors to seacoast towns and villages. I’d even enjoined a preliminary discussion some weeks before with the king and the lords of the privy council. To no avail. True evidence Was lacking, they said, for a sequestering of this lord or that. Come spring, ‘twould all be checked out. And too, Dunguring, to them, with its two hundred thousand dead, was both the greatest battle and the greatest victory of all time. How then, they reasoned, could any enemy recover so quickly? Need I add that it was impossible to convey the simple fact that while it was winter in Marack, it was the softest of summers in Om?

  They’d listened, true, inclusive of the king himself. But they did so only because I was the Collin-their hero-mythos-savior; that and the fact that no man alive, Kaleen possessed or otherwise, would challenge the Collin’s sword.

  Two final things had brought the stew to boiling. But one week past my courier, the student warrior, Hargis, had returned from Klimpinge, a seacoast town, with the dread news that the two Foundation Watchers had been murdered-by a cloud, so it was told to him, of ebon-black with points of diamond light, that had burst the door of their bedroom in the inn which they used as a front, and entered to take their breath-and so, their lives. And then, on the very day in fact when Murie’d left to visit her cousin, I’d watched alarmed as our venerable and aged sorcerer, Fairwyn, had slumped in his chair at the king’s table, his hands folded corpse-like upon his withered breast while his pale eyes stared to nowhere.