by Brian Lumley
Fighting…in Shad…in a certain ‘arena of death’? And now Tarra had just about all of it. As his captors bundled him down to the stalled ‘caravan’ (best think of it as a caravan, he supposed) so he cast his mind back on tidbits of information gleaned here and there in his wanderings. About certain wizards, for instance, with names like Mylakhrion – and Black Yoppaloth!
Aye, and it was rumoured that Shad had seen a long line of Yoppaloths. The current sorcerer bearing that name would be the ninth. Black Yoppaloth IX, of the Yhemnis. Huh! But Tarra supposed it had a certain ring to it. Blacker rumours still had it that in fact this was that same foul necromancer who’d lived in Mylakhrion’s time more than a thousand years ago, though it was past Tarra’s fathoming how that could possibly be. As for Shad across the Straits of Yhem: that might well be caravan’s destination, but a certain grim-faced Hrossak wouldn’t be with it when it got there, be certain!
Shad…
Now what, if anything, did Tarra know about Shad? Nothing for sure, except that it was the twin of Yhemnis, which it faced squarely across seventy-five miles of windy straits. As for rumour: Shad was legended to be splendidly barbaric – a city of gold, bronze, ivory, ironwood – jungle-girt hive of pirates and slavers. But merely legend? No longer; it seemed the latter was now indisputable fact! And yet many a year, indeed more than a century, since last Shad raided against whites and so far from jungled coast. Normally the blacks took other blacks, Yhemnis like themselves, from the coastal villages north and south of Yhemnis the city on the mainland’s steamy coast. And vice versa, when mainland blacks would raid on Shadarabar. So what was different now? Had the two sides got together at last? Unlikely, for their rivalry was historic.
Dragged unceremoniously down to the winding, narrow trail through the pass, Tarra was manacled to the side of one of Stumpy’s ‘too long wagons’, where a dozen desperate youths and young men hung in their chains and their rags in various stages of exhaustion. A like number was chained on the other side. Then he was left alone, and as dawn turned to day along came a bronzed, greasy, scar-faced man on a lathered pony, jerking his mount viciously to a halt alongside Tarra. He took a cruel whip from his belt and shook down its coils to the earth, looked down at Tarra from under bushy black eyebrows, Hrossak on Hrossak. ‘That old fool who was with you,’ he grunted. ‘It seems he’s got away.’
Tarra shrugged. ‘Just an old loony,’ he said. ‘But not so daft he didn’t know a good camel when he stole one!’
‘Oh?’ the other pulled in his chin, cocked his head a little on one side, seemed surprised by Tarra’s answer. ‘Chatty, are we? Aren’t you sort of overlooking the fact that you’re now a slave?’
‘It was you who spoke to me, friend,’ Tarra quietly reminded him, ‘and I supposed you required an answer. Also, we’re two of a sort, and it seems to me both a bit out of place here. Me, I was on my way back to the steppes, when—’
The slaver’s whip sang, and Tarra gasped his pain and shock and turned his face away. And again the angry snapping of the whip – again, and again – as his silky shirt was reduced to ribbons on his back. Aye, and his back a little, too. When it was over, he also hung in his chains. But he’d not once cried out. And:
‘There!’ said his tormentor with something of satisfaction, coiling up his whip again.
Tarra found voice. ‘Seems I – uh! – must have angered you somehow …’
‘No,’ the other shook his matted head of hair and grinned down at him – a sneering grin Tarra would never forget. He spat into the dust at Tarra’s feet. ‘You didn’t anger me, and not much likely to. That beating was for nothing, “friend”, so mind you don’t go doing something, right?’ And he spurred his pony away, kicking up dust to sting Tarra’s raw red stripes.
The chained steppeman gazed after him and thought dark red thoughts; and with much creaking, shuddering and jolting, finally the big lizards began to haul and wheels to turn, and the caravan got under way again …
By noon they were down out of the pass and heading south for ancient, ruined Humquass. The way was dry, dusty, a near-desert. With the sun at its zenith, the horizon shimmered white and slavers and captives alike were feeling the heat. But at least the prisoners, trudging along in their chains, could stick to the shade of the big wagons.
If at first Tarra had wondered what they hauled, wondered about the cargo of those strange, long vehicles, he wondered no longer. At first opportunity, unobserved, he’d lifted up a flap of canvas and gazed beneath. Boats, great Yhemni canoes, but massive-built! And there’d be one to each of the five long wagons. They had sails, too, all folded down now, and chains that ran along the gunnels, and manacles on the oars. No need to wonder how these slavers would return to Shad: they’d go home in triumph, with their captives sculling them speedy across the straits. Why, there’d be room in vessels big as these even for the monster lizards!
Humquass was just in sight – a rim of jagged black edges on the scrubland’s horizon, like low broken hills – when they came on an oasis. The great lizards smelled water and sent up a hissing like a vast pit of snakes, and their Hrossak riders let them build up to something of a lumbering trot as blue waters opened under spindly green palms. The long wagons were drawn in a circle round the oasis; huge wooden buckets of water were fetched for the beasts; the overseer blacks prowled up and down and inspected their captives, ensuring that all was well with them. Little need to worry about that, for they were burly lads all: white gold in Shad’s slave-markets, or gladiators in a wizard’s necromantic arena.
Tarra frowned and wondered: burly lads, aye, but hadn’t Stumpy Adz also said something about lasses? He had indeed! The canvas on the first wagon was thrown back; blacks jumped up onto its platform, gestured with whips and gave guttural commands; frightened female faces appeared, and a dozen gorgeous girls were made to climb down. They paraded there by the wheels of the long wagon, chained together, trying their best to cover their modesty with what scraps of clothing had been left to them.
By now all of the beasts had been watered, the slavers had filled skins from the oasis, last ripples were dying on the surface of the blue pool under the palms. Along came red-robed frizzy boss on a pony, idling his mount where he gazed down on his lovely captives. Only a wagon away, Tarra could hear his raised voice:
‘Go, bathe yourselves, wash off grime and grit. Swim, if you will, and take your ease for an hour. But hurry, before I change my mind!’ And off they went, stumbling a little, soft-skinned under a harsh sun, to bathe themselves at pool’s margin. And:
Oh-ho! But you’re asking for trouble now, my gleamy black slavemaster friend! thought Tarra Khash. What? And hadn’t he seen half-a-dozen Northmen during course of trek so far? And was it likely that those coarse-maned barbarians of northern fjords and mammoth plains would endure this flagrant flaunting of delicate female flesh? Tarra doubted it.
He was chained to that side of the wagon facing the pool. The others strung there with him hauled themselves wearily up onto platform, sat legs adangle, leaned back against giant canoe’s curving strakes and in its shade. They hung their heads, slumped there and groaned of their aching bones; but Tarra merely stood watching the girls where they bathed themselves not one hundred feet away. A slaver passed down the line with chunks of bread, ladling water from a bucket. Tarra took a crust, sipped a little water, and the black passed on. Tarra munched on dry, tasteless bread, stopped munching, felt the corner of his mouth begin to twitch in warning spasm. It was too quiet; a certain tension was in the air; it was going to happen now!
Three huge Northmen tethered their ponies to a palm farthest from the pool, wiped sweaty palms down their leather-clad legs and grinned at each other, and as on some silent command began to shamble toward the pool in the tracks left by the girls. Involuntarily, Tarra strained in his chains, glared at the huge single iron staple hammered home in hardwood, which held him there immobile. A shadow fell on him.
He looked up, eyes half-shuttered against the glar
e of sun. It was the caravan’s master, still astride his pony; and now Tarra recognized the weapon in its scabbard at his hip. There could be no mistaking that jewelled hilt or the curve of the blade’s sheath. The gangly black slaver had taken Tarra’s sword for his own.
‘They call me Cush Gemal,’ the Yhemni half-breed made belated introduction. ‘And you?’
‘Tarra Khash, a Hrossak,’ said Tarra. No need to name his race, but he did so for pride’s sake. Gemal saw that his eyes had gone back to the Northmen, halfway now to the pool. One of them was peeling off his shirt, displaying the bristly mane that ran down his back to base of spine. Another’s belt hung loose, swaying with his lurching gait. The caravan’s master followed Tarra’s nervous gaze.
‘No Hrossak females there,’ he said, curiously. ‘And yet you fear for them.’
‘You’d do well to follow my example,’ said Tarra, ‘if you’d carry them back to Shad intact!’
‘Oh?’ the slaver seemed half-amused.
In his agony of apprehension, Tarra had grown unmindful of his tongue. ‘You’ve obviously little knowledge of Northmen,’ he groaned, licking his suddenly dry lips. ‘No Hrossak women, you say? Man, you couldn’t trust those hairies with your pony!’
The other gave a guttural chuckle. ‘Ah, but I do know Northmen, Tarra Khash! And I agree with you entirely. But the leader of that trio has crossed me once too often, and this is my way of drawing him out.’
‘You’ll do that right enough,’ Tarra gave a jerky nod, strained again at his chain, ‘with periodic parade of female flesh before the eyes of scum like that. But it won’t do the girls much good …’
‘I believe you’d actually interfere!’ Cush Gemal marvelled. ‘Even though they’d kill you for it.’
‘Just let me out of these chains and I’ll show you how right you are,’ Tarra grated.
The Northmen were at pool’s rim, and as they came through the palms and rushes the girls saw them, saw their intention. They quickly crushed themselves together in a knot, used their hands to cover their nakedness. The barbarians stood ankle deep in the water and leered at them.
Gemal touched the hilt of Tarra’s ex-sword. ‘Is it a good weapon?’ he murmured.
‘Depends who’s using it,’ Tarra growled through clenched teeth. He couldn’t turn his eyes from the frozen tableau at the pool, which wouldn’t stay frozen much longer, he knew.
‘Then let’s see how well it does in the hands of Cush Gemal!’ the other snapped, and suddenly animated, he spurred his pony toward the pool. As he rode he called ahead:
‘Hold! You there, Gorlis Thad. What’s this? Don’t you know those girls are virgins? Indeed you do! Also why they were taken and who they belong to. Only bruise one of those fruits and Black Yoppaloth will flay you alive. Break one and he’ll make drums of your hide and a fine fly-switch of your sweaty mane!’
Gorlis Thad! Top dog of northern pack a Thad, eh? Tarra had heard of this barbarous family, so huge it was almost a tribe in itself. Indeed he’d killed one, during a brief and vengeful visit to the isles of the Crater Sea. Thad: the name itself made his nostrils wrinkle, as if it carried a stench. The most ingrown, degenerate, murderous Northmen of them all, the Thads, and never a one born that a man – or any woman – could trust.
Gorlis must be the one who’d taken off his shirt, who’d waded into pool and was even now dragging a girl out by her hair. All chained together, where she went the rest must follow; and so they trooped along behind, all moaning and covering themselves with soaking rags, the water streaming from their lovely bodies.
At the edge of the pool Gorlis turned, saw the rider Cush Gemal bearing down on him. He’d heard his shouting, scowled at his threats. ‘What?’ he shouted at the man on the pony where he reined to a halt close by. ‘You’re worried about that stinking shaman six hundred miles away in Shad? Well, it’s my skin, Gemal, so let me do the worrying, right?’
‘Fool!’ Gemal hissed. ‘Dolt! He could be watching you right now, at this very moment. Shaman? Aye, he is that, and his eyes are everywhere!’
Gorlis’ sidekicks had also laid hands on a pair of girls, but at first mention of magick they turned them loose, stumbled up out of the water, stood glaring at their ringleader. Like most Northmen, they were cowed by merest mention of wizardry or witchcraft. But not, apparently, the Thad himself.
He scowled his scorn at them, looked up at Cush Gemal. ‘I’ve promised this fine pair of lads a bit of sweet meat,’ he said. ‘They’re not much for going without – not while it’s standing around just waiting to be taken – no, and neither am I. So I say unchain just three of ’em, for half an hour, and no harm done. I’ll promise you that much: no harm done, not permanent anyway. We’ll use one of the boats, so’s not to get the other bucks worked up. Out of sight, out of mind, eh?’ And now he grinned through his beard at the caravan’s master.
Gemal sneered cynically, nodded his red-crested comb of hair. ‘Out of sight, out of mind? I’ll say you are, Gorlis Thad!’ The half-breed slaver slitted his eyes, swung easily down from his mount. ‘Why, Black Yoppaloth would know if you’d even breathed on one of his brides! What? You risk your eyes just looking at them! So I’ll say it one more time, Gorlis Thad: let go that girl’s hair and get back to your place, or there’s trouble here and now …’
‘Then let it be trouble!’ Thad’s hand snaked toward the throwing knife in his belt.
Watching all of this, Tarra Khash winced, or blinked, it makes no difference; but in any case he shuttered his eyes for a moment, the merest moment, before opening them on unbelievable scene. Prior to that, however, during the course of conversation between black slavemaster and northern barbarian, he had taken the opportunity to glance all about. Apart from the three Northmen central to this affair, at least five others looked on from where they sat or stood by the wagons. All were armed to the teeth, where with sidelong glances they measured up Gemal’s superior numbers. In a fight it would be a close thing, for the four or five rogue steppemen would probably join with the Northmen against the blacks; even in steppes outcasts such as these, instinct to side with the underdog would be a powerful force. Outnumbered more than two to one, still they’d make a damn good go of it, Tarra knew. The Yhemnis must know it, too, and yet a curious thing: not a man of the frizzies seemed remotely concerned! They merely looked on, as if the outcome were already decided. Which perhaps it was.
But in any case Tarra had winced, or blinked, and now unblinked – then gaped at what he saw!
Gorlis Thad’s knife was airborne, a silver streak speeding close to gleaming black breast – but Tarra’s jewelled scimitar had somehow managed to sprout from Gemal’s hand! Drawn from scabbard? What? In the blink of an eye? Even in two blinks? And yet there it was, deflecting hurtling knife like tossed apple; and Gemal thin-faced, nostrils flaring where he advanced on the stunned Northman. Fascinated, Tarra continued to watch.
Even in the water, one of Gorlis’ colleagues had retained a great broadsword; now in a squeal of steel he unsheathed it, tossed it down on the sand at Gorlis’ feet. One crashing blow of that great sword, and the slender scimitar would shiver to shards. And now the barbarian knew that he had Gemal’s measure. He bent to retrieve the broadsword – and Gemal leaped forward, edge of scimitar resting lightly on Gorlis’ neck. The Northman froze, drew back his hand from hilt of broadsword where it lay.
His eyes went this way and that, and colour drained from his face. ‘And how’s this for a fair fight?’ he suddenly shouted.
Gemal, too, raised his voice: ‘Now he wants a fair fight, who without warning hurled his knife! What say you – do I give him one?’
The entire caravan, barring only slaves themselves, answered with one voice: ‘Aye!’ And Tarra noted that the Yhemnis shouted loudest of all. He wondered: is Gemal that good? And got his answer in the space of a double heartbeat.
As Gorlis Thad straightened up, tall as Cush Gemal himself but blocky as a bull, so his half-breed opponent tossed down his scimita
r alongside broadsword. ‘Now we’re equal—’ he started to say, but already the treacherous barbarian had uttered a whoop of savage glee, gone to one knee, grasped his weapon’s hilt – which was exactly what Gemal had known he would do.
As Northman’s hand closed on weapon’s hilt, Gemal slammed his sandalled foot down on the other’s wrist, stooped and retrieved the scimitar. It came alive in his hand as he straightened, slicing Gorlis through his trousers from groin to rib-cage.
Blood drenched the sand as Gemal lithely turned to face Gorlis’ henchmen. ‘You?’ he offered. ‘Or you?’ They skulked away. And still Gorlis kneeling in the sand, holding in his unfettered guts. Then he looked up, through eyes already glazing over, to where Gemal sheathed his weapon and mounted his pony; and finally he fell face-down, mouth gaping, on the sand.
‘Make ready!’ cried Gemal, guiding his mount back toward Tarra Khash where the Hrossak openly admired him. ‘Load up! Tonight we make camp in yonder ruins.’ And not a man of the barbarians offering the slightest resistance, but all averting their eyes and carrying on with their duties as if nothing whatever had occurred. Which was perhaps to say a lot for commonsense, and an equal amount for Gorlis Thad’s popularity.
Gemal rode close to chained Hrossak, briefly reined in. ‘It’s a good weapon right enough, Tarra Khash,’ he said. ‘I thank you for gifting it to me.’
As he spurred away Tarra looked after him and nodded. But to himself: ‘Best consider it a loan,’ he said, ‘for which repayment later …’
‘Peace!’ said Teh Atht, holding up long-fingered hand to stay his crystal’s activity. ‘Let it be for now – but continue to watch and remember all. I shall doubtless desire to scry it later …’
His bones creaked as he stood up from his viewing, and as the shewstone reverted once more to opaque and milky sphere he groaned and stretched his cramped limbs a little. Since the Hrossak’s moonlight meeting with Stumpy Adz in the pass, the wizard had slept when they slept, observed when they were up and about, and apart from that he’d done precious little else. There was much to fascinate him here, and also several mysteries to unravel.
