The Gifts of Asti

The Gifts of Asti by Andre Norton

Varta, last surviving Maiden of Asti, watches from the mountain retreat above Memphir as barbarians from Klem sack the city below. Guided by Asti's command, she enters the god's hidden shrine with her mute reptilian companion Lur and performs the ancient rite: she draws from the statue's outstretched hand the small orange-red sun and its four orbiting worlds, which becomes a diadem above her head, its light guiding her as she opens a secret passage in the temple wall. Descending an endless stairway into the mountain, Varta and Lur reach a chamber holding relics left from Memphir's youth. She exchanges her priestess's regalia for a scaled, taloned suit of lizard skin that will protect her from the dangers below, and takes a pouch of preserved supplies. The two press on through a gorge wreathed in deadly yellow vapor, Varta's suit and Lur's own hide shielding them, until they reach a crossroads guarded by a skeletal, whining creature, the Guardian of the Chasms. Varta identifies herself and corrects symbols the Guardian draws in the dust, invoking an old pact made in Asti's name. The Guardian permits them to pass, warning that one path leads to its own dark country and death for surface creatures, while the other, by legend only, may lead upward. They take the untested path, climbing worn passages until they break through into the open night air of the upper world of Erb, far from any land Memphir ever ruled. Waking in ruins unknown to either of them, Varta and Lur find the land unclaimed by men and abundant with wild turbi fruit and game. Following an ancient road, they come to a scorched desert of glassy slag, evidence, Lur surmises, of some forgotten war fought with weapons beyond even Memphir's knowledge. Skirting the wasteland along a mountain ridge, they discover a strange lake whose opaline water preserves anything submerged in it exactly as it was at the moment of immersion, demonstrated by a turbi branch bearing months-old blossoms still fresh beneath the surface. Along the lake's edge, they find the wreckage of an ancient, unknown craft, a "sky ship," its exposed metal rusted to dust but its submerged silver hull untouched by time. Believing Asti's will has led them to this discovery, Varta dons her protective suit and enters the sunken vessel with Lur. Inside they find dead machinery and, behind a stubbornly sealed inner door that Lur forces open, a sealed compartment containing a suited, four-limbed figure bound by metal hoops to the wall, seemingly a man preserved by the same ageless water. Reasoning that the lake's preserving power might mean he still lives, as the turbi flowers still bloomed, Varta and Lur resolve to free him. Ordinary strength cannot break the hoops, so Varta invokes the power of Asti's miniature sun, directing its beam to weaken the metal so Lur can tear the bonds away. They drag the stranger from the wreck into open air and daylight, and give him water from an untainted spring above the lake. Lur detects that the man is alive, and Varta helps revive his breathing. Reading his sleeping mind, she glimpses fragmentary visions: a great city destroyed in an instant, the man's guilt over his part in it, his rebellion against those responsible, and his imprisonment just before losing consciousness. When he wakes, disoriented and defensive, Lur — skilled in wordless mind-speech beyond Varta's own ability — calms him and slowly establishes communication. Through halting exchanges, the stranger reveals that he belongs to a spacefaring people who came to Erb from another star system, found it empty of humankind, and built great colony cities there, living for centuries in peace. War then broke out on their distant home world and devastated it; survivors fled to the Erb colonies, but among the refugees were men driven mad by grief, who turned to destroying the very cities that sheltered them, declaring their whole kind must be annihilated. The stranger had opposed one such maddened leader and was imprisoned aboard the ship just before an attack on the colonies' largest city; he remembers nothing after that. Varta, unsettled by the implication that her own people, and even the barbarian conquerors of Memphir, might share ancestry with Lur's reptilian race, questions her heritage. Lur reassures her that she is instead descended from these star-born colonists, pointing to the stranger's resemblance to Memphir's people in their earlier, less decadent days. Lur further muses that Asti's plan spans centuries: Memphir fell through its own softness and wrongdoing, the barbarians will now hold the northern lands, but Asti is not finished shaping events, having granted both Varta and the stranger a second life. He calls this rescue one of the "Gifts of Asti," urging Varta not to spurn it. Varta, blushing, turns to regard the still-bewildered stranger with new consideration, while Lur laughs quietly in both their minds. The narrative ends here.

By Andre Norton · First published 1979 · Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure · 6,558 words

First lines

Even here, on the black terrace before the forgotten mountain retreat of Asti, it was possible to smell the dank stench of burning Memphir, to imagine that the dawn wind bore upward from the pillaged city the faint tortured cries of those whom the barbarians of Klem hunted to their prolonged death. Indeed it was time to leave --

Varta, last of the virgin Maidens of Asti, shivered. The scaled and wattled creature who crouched beside her thigh turned his reptilian head so that golden eyes met the aquamarine ones set slantingly at a faintly provocative angle in her smooth ivory face.

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Fantasy · Science Fiction · Adventure · Romance · Space Opera · Alien Invasion · Human Evolution · Planetary Colonization · Intergalactic Travel · Time Travel · Alternate Reality · Coming of Age

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