The Undesired Princess

by L. Sprague DeCamp

  Hobart was by this time almost as indignant as the medicine-man. He snapped, “I’ll soon put a stop to that. But wait—how about your help?”

  Kai looked crafty, but so openly and transparently so that the effect was more amusing than sinister. He said at last: “If you will really stop Parathai from hurting us, I will help. But can you? They are proud people.”

  “I’ll do my best. If they commit anything on you, I’ll punish them as though it were on a member of their own nation. But what’s your help going to consist of? Are you really a poor magician, or was that just a gag?”

  “I am not very good, but I will do my best, too. Maybe I know more than just a couple tricks.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, I will not tell that. Secret of trade, yes, ha-ha?”

  “Ha-ha yourself,” smiled Hobart. “You’d better show me at least a sample.”

  “I can do.” Kai turned to the clear sky and extended his hands, palms up. He began an ululating wail:

  “Marekula eromanga,

  “Savaii upolu!

  “Maalaea Topanga

  “Nukunana kandavu,

  “Pag pago oamarul.”

  A few hundred feet up, a small cloud formed; at first like one of those that mark an ordinary thermal; then boiling more and more furiously, like a miniature thunderhead. Kai’s voice rose to a shriek, and he clapped his hands. At once a narrow shaft of rain poured down from the cloudlet; it was no trouble to watch the dark streamer extend earthward. It took it two or three minutes to reach the surface of the lake, where it churned the smooth surface in a fifty-foot-circle tangent to the shoreline.

  Kai clapped his hands twice, and the rain was sharply cut off at the source. By the time the drops that had already started down from the cloud had all struck the lake, the cloud itself had evaporated. Kai turned to Hobart with a grin: “I have a couple tricks, yes?”

  “Evidently. Want to get your stuff ready to come with us?”

  “Me come with you? No sir! Not me! I fear Parathai, and my poor people need me. Look!” He took off his necklace with its little rodent skull, and hung it around the engineer’s neck. “When you want me, take hold of the skull and squeeze—not hard, or it breaks—and call me. I come, foosh! But three times only; it will not work after that.”

  “Well—” said Hobart doubtfully.

  “Do not worry; I come! I must protect my people.” Kai stiffened, a far-away look coming into his eyes. He pulled several slivers of bone out of topknot, tossed them into the air, and studied the positions in which they fell to the ground.

  “Ha!” he cried tensely. “Now, Sham, you can show me if you mean what you say. I gave you a sample magic; you give me a sample justice. One of your Parathai has just killed one of my poor people!”

  “What?” Hobart looked wildly around; Yezdeg was plainly missing.

  “Yes. He took the wife of Aao. We think it is a bad, wicked thing to take another man’s wife. The last time it happened, in my father’s days, we gave the bad man to Rumatzi to eat. But that is not all: the wife of Aao fought your horseman, and he got angry and killed her. Now, will you kill your horseman?”

  “Whew!” whistled Hobart. As usual, just when he had been about to draw a breath of relief, it transpired that his apparent piece of astounding good luck had a catch in it. In this case the worm had contained an exceptionally vicious hook: he was committed to having one of his new subjects executed.

  He turned to Sanyesh: “Will you—” But he stopped at the elder’s stony expression. He could trust nobody but himself to find Yezdeg, investigate the alleged murder, and deal impartial justice.

  He picked up his musket, and said, “Come on!” and strode out to where Theiax guarded the horses, to the uneasy displeasure of the latter. There were only three horses, a fact that blasted Hobart’s lingering hope that he might find Yezdeg innocently snoozing in the neighborhood. The Ikthepeli gave all the party a wide berth, hovering ready for a dash to their canoes, except for Kai, who followed sticking the skewers back in his hair.

  “Better come along and see how this turns out,” Hobart told him.

  But Kai shook his head stubbornly, and Hobart, intercepting the glares that Sanyesh and Fruz focused on the medicine-man, could not blame him. Kai explained: “My bones will tell me, Sham!”

  Hobart mounted and led the way to the top of the slope. The flat, cactus-studded desert spread out before them, and Hobart immediately saw in the distance a horseman ambling peacefully toward them on a yellow horse. It was Yezdeg without a doubt.

  A muttered conversation between Fruz and Sanyesh behind him made the skin of his back crawl, though he could not understand a word. It would be bad enough to have to kill a man, without risking retaliation by the deceased’s friends.

  The two Parathai were evidently thinking along similar lines, for Sanyesh cried sharply: “Sham! I heard your talk with savage. You cannot shoot Yezdeg for little thing like that! Fruz says so, too.”

  “What makes you so sure he’s guilty?” said Hobart.

  “Oh, savage knows. But suppose Yezdeg did? Not crime to kill useless fish-eaters; everybody does. Not like real people.”

  Rollin Hobart needed just this opposition to make him really determined. “Well, they are real people from now on,” he barked. “You heard my agreement.”

  “But Sham!” persisted Sanyesh. “If she real person, why not act like real person? Real woman like Parathai never go around with no clothes if not want man to take. If she real person, then she want man to take, and all her fault. Woman cannot say to Parathaian, ‘take,’ and then hit him when he try to; that insult. If not real person, then no crime to kill anyway.”

  “Makes no difference,” snapped Hobart. “The new law of the Parathai is that the Ikthepeli are real people whether they wear clothes or not, and are to be treated as such. I, the sham, say so.”

  But it appeared that the customs of the barbarians were not as easily disposed of as that. Sanyesh continued his argument: “Was not law when Yezdeg killed woman. Cannot kill man for breaking law nobody ever heard of!”

  It was true; there was even a provision in the U.S. Constitution against ex post facto laws. Besides Sanyesh and Fruz were by now gently fingering their sword hilts, the elder apologetically, the young retainer defiantly. The implication was that he might shoot one of the three, but the survivors would make sure he had no chance to reload.

  By now Yezdeg was close enough for a hail, the sun gleaming on his yellow hair. He was caroling a song as if he had not a care in the world, and wiping an obviously bloody knife with a piece of thin leather.

  The other two Parathai tensed themselves, watching Hobart. But the engineer merely said: “Time to start for home, boys,” and led off.

  After they had ridden a while in silence, Hobart pulled alongside of Sanyesh and asked: “I ought to know more about the laws of the Parathai. You recognize the right of self-defense?”

  “That’s so,” said the counsellor, not at all chummy.

  “How about duels?”

  “We have. Depends. If fair fight, same weapons, same everything, no crime. If you pick fight and have big advantage, like gun, counts like murder. Man’s family can take you before tribal assembly and get permission to kill you.”

  “How about responsibility for agents’ acts?”

  “What is that?”

  “Suppose a man hires another man to kill a third man. Who’s the murderer?”

  “Each is half-murder. Instead of killing one man, we half kill both.”

  “How would you do that?” asked Hobart, intrigued despite his predicament.

  “Easy; cut off heads halfway.”

  Hobart abandoned a nascent idea of sicking Theiax on the unregenerate Yezdeg. As far as he was concerned there was no distinction between being decapitated halfway and completely. He would have to get Yezdeg killed by some less direct method.

  Not that Hobart wanted to kill Yezdeg or anybody else, abhorrent though the young barbar
ian’s act seemed to him. But he’d promised Gordius, and he’d promised Kai . . .

  “Damn all promises!” he said aloud.

  He jogged along in deep thought for a while. Then he directed Sanyesh: “Tell Yezdeg that he’s evidently brave enough to kill a woman.”

  Sanyesh gave Hobart a glance glittering with suspicion, but spoke a sentence to Yezdeg. The latter seemed puzzled for a while, then answered with a long speech.

  “He say,” interpreted Sanyesh, “he brave man; killed many Marathai.”

  “I haven’t seen him kill any Marathai, but I do know he killed a woman.”

  Again the pause for translation. Sanyesh reported: “He say he not kill real woman, only dirty fish-eater.”

  “Okay,” said Hobart amiably. “Then he’s brave enough to kill a poor fish-eater woman.”

  This time Yezdeg frowned. Sanyesh announced: “He say he brave enough to kill fish-eater, or real woman, or real man, or anybody.”

  “Maybe so. I still haven’t seen him kill a real man or even a real woman, but only a poor fish-eater, and a female at that.”

  When this was reported to Yezdeg, the young man’s temper flared. He rose in his stirrups and shouted. When Sanyesh could get in a word, the old man told Hobart: “He say you insult him.”

  “Not at all,” protested Hobart. “I’m just stating facts. You agree, don’t you, that I haven’t seen him kill any Marathai, and that if he killed the Ikthepeli woman he must obviously have been brave enough to do so?”

  “I guess so,” said Sanyesh grudgingly.

  This time, Yezdeg really went off with a bang. He screeched and fingered his hilt menacingly. Hobart had prudently gotten out his cigarette lighter; he now applied it to the match of his gun.

  He remarked as casually as he could manage: “You agree, don’t you Sanyesh, that I haven’t attacked Yezdeg, and that if he goes for me I’m obviously entitled to shoot him in self-defense?”

  “I guess so,” muttered Sanyesh.

  “Ask Fruz if I’m not right.” Fruz agreed in a vague way; the dialectics of the quarrel had gotten beyond his simple mind.

  Yezdeg was still shouting. Sanyesh interpreted: “He say he want fight you, but gun against sword no fair.”

  “Well—” Hobart hesitated; the last thing he wanted was a sword-duel with Yezdeg, who would probably make Salisbury of him. “Tell him that if he’s brave enough to kill a fish-eater woman—”

  He was drowned by another torrent of speech from Yezdeg, who had evidently become sufficiently familiar with the sound-sequence “fish-eater woman” to be sensitive to it.

  Sanyesh said: “He say swords not fair either. You beat Khurav; he best sword-fighter of Parathai; you must be best sword-fighter. You too good.”

  That was a break. What should he suggest? Wrestling? A look at Yezdeg’s massive shoulders banished that idea. Boxing? It would hardly be fatal, and like most professional workers Hobart had not actually used his fists since he was an adolescent, though like most Americans he had a general impression that his people were a nation of natural-born boxers.

  Then his eye fell on the red-and-black desert surface. “Tell him,” he said, “that to make everything fair, since he insists on a fight, I’ll fight him with stones.”

  Yezdeg was in a state where he would have agreed to flyswatters in a telephone booth. They dismounted.

  “Hope you know what you do, Prince,” growled Theiax. “Want me to—”

  “No. Sanyesh, do you and Fruz agree that, since insults are untrue statements and I haven’t said anything untrue, I haven’t insulted Yezdeg?”

  “He say—I not know—”

  “A thing is either an insult or it isn’t, isn’t it?” said Hobart triumphantly. The two mounted men nodded glumly. Hobart continued: “And that Yezdeg has challenged me; practically forced this fight on me? And I’ve done everything I could to give him his fair chance? And that no matter how it comes out, I haven’t violated any of the laws and customs of the Parathai?”

  Sanyesh found no way to deny all this, much as he might have liked to.

  The combatants each collected a pile of the black stone balls, placed in front of him about thirty feet from his adversary. Hobart made winding-up motions to limber his arm, which had not thrown a baseball since his college days. Yezdeg tried clumsily to imitate this procedure. Finally each stood with a stone in each hand.

  “Yikhi!” shouted Sanyesh, acting as referee.

  Yezdeg threw his first stone underhand and wildly. Hobart ignored it, swung both arms forward and up, then right down, back, and forward, like the lunge of a snake. The stone whizzed past Yezdeg’s right ear; the barbarian threw his second even more wildly and stooped quickly to snatch more ammunition. Hobart waited until he started to straighten up again, estimated where his head would come by the time the stone got there, and let fly. Forehead and stone converged. Crunch!

  They buried Yezdeg in the desert, quickly, lest his corpse suddenly liquefy in the heat. Kai’s bones, if he consulted them, would give him the desired news now.

  Hobart remounted, concealing as best he could the fact that he was suffering from a bad case of the shakes. Sanyesh and Fruz followed, looking at him with expressions of apprehensive awe.

  As Hobart jogged along with his head bowed, Theiax questioned: “What is matter, Prince? Everything you try to do, you do, but each time you look sadder! You want me to do trick? Look!” And the lion turned three summersaults in succession.

  Hobart grinned wryly. He said: “Thanks, old bean, but if I felt like laughing I’d be rolling in the aisles at my own situation. If you want to cheer me up, you just figure out a way I can be a spectacular, hundred-percent failure!”

  12

  When Hobart reached his own tent, his companions started off toward their respective quarters. The engineer called: “Hey, Sanyesh, I’m not through with you yet!”

  “What is?” queried the elder, turning back. Hobart led him into the sham’s tent.

  “Sanyesh,” said Hobart, “I want to start a little war with the Marathai right away.”

  “War!” cried Sanyesh. The old man jumped up, hand on his sword. Hobart was alarmed until it transpired that the gesture had merely symbolic significance. “War! Ha! Cut! Stab! Shoot! Kill lots Marathai! Gr-r-r.” Then the ferocity suddenly left the leathery face; Sanyesh stared blankly. “Sham, cannot start war right away! Must gather men, tell chiefs, plan battle!”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Five—six days.”

  “Oh, that’s all right.”

  “Huh,” grumbled Sanyesh, sitting down again. “If you not mean right away, why you say right away? Get me all excited for nothing. You fight fair war?”

  This question puzzled Hobart; he answered with a vague, “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  “Good.” Sanyesh went to the entrance and hollered into the darkness. Presently a dapper young barbarian appeared; Hobart supposed him to be some sort of adjutant. Sanyesh spoke to him in Parathaian, then came back to Hobart and asked: “How many men you want take?”

  “How many can we raise?”

  “Twelve thousand, four hundred, nine,” replied the elder promptly.

  “Okay, we’ll take ’em all.”

  Sanyesh whistled. “Why you say little war when you mean big war? You terrible hard sham understand. I thought you meant little battle, one hundred each side.”

  “No, I’m playing for keeps. But what do you mean, a little battle with a hundred on each side? Do you pick even numbers like a game?”

  “Sure, everybody knows that!”

  Hobart shook his head wonderingly. “I can see where it might have advantages. You’d settle things without much bloodshed.”

  “Oh, it is not that,” said Sanyesh comfortably. “Brave Parathai not afraid die, and even in big war hardly any get killed. Just in—inconvenient for so many leave during lambing season and things.”

  “I’m glad your wars are so unsanguiary, but how can that be if you’r
e so brave?”

  “Look, Sham,” said Sanyesh with the air of explaining two times two to a backward child, “here is company of men, we suppose, yes? All right. Company can fight in formation, yes? Cannot fight if dis—you know, all scattered. All right. Battle start. Men get knocked down, pushed around. One or two get shot. Company not in formation. Cannot fight, so run away. Not cowardly to run when cannot fight, no?”

  Hobart thought it was too bad that all the military units in history who had run at the first casualty had not had Sanyesh’s logic to excuse themselves with. He abandoned the argument to get down to the material questions of organizing a campaign. The elder drew him a rough map on a piece of hide with charcoal and pointed out several alternative routes for the invasion.

  “Really, I don’t know,” said Hobart. “Which one do you think best, Sanyesh?”

  Sanyesh immediately indicated the most direct approach to Marathaia. Hobart shrugged. “Okay, if you say so,” he said, though with mental reservations. He thought vaguely that he would have preferred an indirect approach, but since he could not really run the expedition he considered it wise to interfere with Sanyesh’s judgment as little as possible.

  His next shock came when he was sitting on horseback with Sanyesh outside the tent-city the following afternoon and watching some troops go through evolutions. He asked casually: “Say, Sanyesh, who was that young fellow who sat in with us at our conference last night? Haven’t seen him around today.”

  “Him herald,” grunted the elder. “Gone to warn Marathai.”

  “What?”

  “I said him gone warn Marathai; tell them when we attack, what route, everything.”

  “Oh my lord! You mean he’s a traitor or a spy?”