Ardor on Aros Read Online Free PDF Page A

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