Renegade of Kregen

by Alan Burt Akers

  What I would do was already worked out. I knew that despite all, I could not stop myself.

  The red cloth was stuffed again within the breast of my tunic. I would don the red, draw my longsword, and so hurl myself into the rear of the pikes as the charges went in. Perhaps there would be a little chance for the Krozairs, for the Red Brethren, for the warriors of Zair.

  That chance was slender to the point of nonexistence.

  But, despite all, I could not stop myself.

  Sharply, a shadow fleeted over the ground and we all looked up and there, skimming through the bright air, flew the two-place voller with Genod Gannius gorgeous in green and gold leaning over and encouraging his troops.

  If he had fire-pots up there. . .

  The army of the Green let out a dull surf-roar of welcome and greeting to their king. Very pretty it was. And in defiant answer rose the shouts from the Reds.

  "Grodno! Zair! Green! Red!" The shouts rose and clashed. "Krozair! Ghittawrer!" The yells twined in the brilliant atmosphere. And, a new shout, a shrill screeching: "Genod! Genod! The king!"

  The Zairian cavalry charged, a torrential mass of steel and red bearing down on the massed pikes. I reined Blue Cloud a little way back of the other aides. They were all standing in their stirrups, craning to look down from our eminence onto the drama spread out below. Now was the time to don the red and so charge down and make a finish.

  It might not be a Jikai, but with those Krozair shouts ringing through the air and the brave scarlet fluttering I could do no other. . .

  A shadow flitted into the corner of my eye and I turned, quickly, the red half drawn from my green tunic.

  A Pachak with only one left arm, and a bloody stump where the other should be, rode frantically up to Gafard, his hebra foundering. He yelled at Gafard. I heard his words, caught and blown by the wind; I saw Gafard’s hard mahogany face turn abruptly gray within the iron rim of his helmet.

  "My Lady — treachery — we were surprised — slain — black — men in black — my lord . . ."

  The Pachak fell even as his hebra collapsed.

  Gafard lifted his head and screeched.

  I thrust the red away and kicked Blue Cloud over.

  "Gadak! You I trust! Find Grogor! Find Nath ti Hagon! Take men — anyone — ride, Gadak, ride! My Lady of the Stars — my pearl, my heart . . . ride, Gadak! Ride as you love me!"

  I didn’t love the devil. But — my Lady of the Stars!

  What do I know, now, of my thoughts, my emotions, and my feelings? I know I knew the Zairian army below me was doomed, for I had wrought the instrument of their destruction. But there would come another time, another field, and another battle. Now all my blood clamored that I save my Lady of the Stars.

  I rode. I did not ride wearing the red. I rode not for my lord Gafard, the King’s Striker, the Sea-Zhantil — but for my Lady of the Stars.

  Even now, after all that happened, I do not regret that decision.

  If only some easy power of sorcery had been open to me!

  If only by some magic formula I could have prevented what was fated to occur.

  But I am a mortal man and the fantasies of wish-fulfillment belong to the myths and legends of Kregen, not to the hard reality of that beautiful and terrible world beneath the Suns of Scorpio.

  Yes, there is seeming magic on Kregen, and the wizards practice mighty sorceries, but they are of a piece, following ordained paths. The wonder and mystery of Kregen can never be denied, but it is men and women with hope and courage who flesh out the true fantasies.

  I rode.

  Grogor, Gafard’s second in command, that surly man, did not hesitate a fraction. He screeched a savage order to a squadron of sectrixmen, all picked men-at-arms, apims and diffs, and wheeled his mount and was away with streaming mane and flying feathers. We picked up Nath ti Hagon, Gafard’s trusted ship-Hikdar, and then, in a compact body, we rode from the battlefield. Sand blew from our sectrixes’ hooves. The wind of our passage blustered in our plumes and scorched into our faces. So we left the action, the battle, that debacle for the Red, which the mad genius king Genod called the Battle of Pynzalo.

  Wherever Gafard had hidden his beloved, the rasts of men in black had found her. I had one hope. The voller had been flown by Genod himself and it had flown over the battlefield. We had to deal with men mounted on sectrixes like ourselves.

  In one item of my reading of the situation I was wrong.

  We went flying through the near-deserted camp, sending the camp followers stumbling out of our way, only the green of our plumes and dress able to convince them they were not attacked by a raiding party of Zairians. We belted past the lines of tents. I had nudged Blue Cloud gently to the head of the pack, for although I wished to conserve him for what I thought would be a long ride, I still felt the mad desire to hurry on like a maniac and be the first there to rescue my Lady of the Stars.

  The Pachak of her guard who had escaped to warn Gafard must have been a most intelligent as well as a brave man. He must have fought until he saw there was no hope left and then, instead of going on fighting and throwing his life away, had turned and raced for the King’s Striker. Out past the camp we saw the flurry of green cloaks. I looked closer. A party of sectrixmen was picking its way down the sandy slopes toward the beach. A swifter waited there, her stern ladder erected, one end on the quarter and the other on the beach. Beneath the green cloaks I saw — instead of the expected white, or green, or the flash of mail — black.

  Grogor saw, also, and shrilled and we all pelted along, hurling ourselves madly over the bluffs and so roaring down the sandy slopes in great clouds and smothers of sand.

  Somehow Blue Cloud kept his six legs under him. We were on the beach. I yanked out my longsword, that Ghittawrer blade with the device removed, and whirled along the packed sand.

  The black-clad men saw us coming.

  There was a struggle in their midst.

  Grogor and Nath were neck and neck with me. Our three swords thrust forward, three-pronged retribution.

  The black-clad men tried to face us.

  There must have been few men who could have stood up to us in that frenzied moment.

  In the moments before we hit I saw my Lady of the Stars.

  She wielded a long, thin dagger in her white hand, and she toppled one kidnapper from his saddle and whirled on another who tried to spit her through. She parried — it was marvelously done, marvelously! — and riposted and stuck the rast through the eye. He screamed and fell and then we were upon them.

  Our rage was terrible and genuine.

  The longswords whirled and glittered, split and cleft, and whipped aloft again for the next blow, dripping red.

  Blade clanged against blade. My Ghittawrer longsword sang above my head. Aye! It sang as I whirled it up and down. I smashed with full force, seeing a head spin off, seeing a black-masked face abruptly disappear into a ghastly red mask, seeing an arm spin up and away as a back-hander curled beneath a blow. It was all over in scant murs. We panted. I dragged in a great lungful of air and then, dismounting, walked over to my Lady, who lay in the sand. Her green veiling remained in place, for she had one hand to it. But she knew me.

  "Gadak! So you rescue me again."

  "Aye, my Lady. You are unhurt?"

  She stood up. She put a hand on my shoulder. Her left hand. In her right hand, smothered in blood, she still gripped the slender, jeweled dagger.

  "I am unharmed. They tried to — at the end — when they saw you coming. But—"

  "Yes, my Lady. You yourself created a Jikai, I saw." Then I smiled — I, who am a surly beast and with a face like the ram of a swifter. "I am minded of another lady, my Lady."

  "I would not have thought—" she began, and then stopped and threw the dagger to the sand. She took her hand from my shoulder and drew herself up. She put that clean left hand to her hair. Typically, the next words she said were, "And my lord? How goes the battle?"

  "The battle will go well enough."<
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  She sighed.

  She, like myself, had been Zairian once.

  "I returned to the camp, Gadak, and they were waiting for me. Men in black. Stikitches — kidnappers for a space — but real stikitches, nonetheless."

  "Aye."

  My men were inspecting the corpses. The swifter was gone, pulling madly out to sea.

  Grogor turned one body over with his foot and then cocked an eye at me. I looked down.

  The brown face with a livid scar all across it showed where Golitas, who had received that scar from the hands of Pur Dray, had died in agony.

  "It would be best to heave these carrion into the sea." Grogor took out his knife. "But first — My Lady, would you please retire for a space, for there are things that must be done."

  She understood well enough. A warrior maid, for she had fought magnificently, now she was a practical lady with a man to protect. So we disfigured the corpses so that they would never be recognized and heaved them into the sea. When we had finished we escorted my Lady back to camp and had anyone challenged us he would have been a dead man.

  We had saved my Lady of the Stars for Gafard, Sea-Zhantil; we had saved her from the clutches of King Genod himself and no one to point the finger of accusation at us. Also, a man who knew my face was dead. Besides the safety of my Lady that was of no importance at all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Grogor surprises me

  Black magbirds flew overhead. To larboard the lesser Pharos passed at the end of the mole. The stones gleamed in the slanting lines of masonry, and the curve of stonework opened out into a broad view across the outer harbor. Two swifters rode to their moorings here, their yards crossed, and the last preparations caused a bustle on their long, lean decks as they were readied for sea. Volgodont’s Fang glided on, the oars pulling with a slow, steady rhythm that drove our stem through the water with a low musical chinkle.

  The frowning stone gateway to the cothon, the inner basin, lined up directly with our ram. Nath ti Hagon stood staring directly ahead, lining up the ship, giving quick, direct orders to the oar-master in his tabernacle and to the two helm-Deldars at their rudder handles. These two old tarpaulins turned the curved steering oars with cunning, smooth movements that kept the swifter dead on track.

  The group standing with me on the quarterdeck included Gafard, but he was in this matter quite content to let his trusted first lieutenant conn the ship. Hardly a breeze ruffled the still surface of the water in which reflections stood out in perfect mirror-images.

  The entrance to this cothon had been excavated widely enough to accommodate the spread wings of a swifter. Many cothons have narrow entrances, so that a galley must be drawn through by pulling-boat or, more usually, by gangs of men hauling hawsers from the dock side, all heaving together at the crack of a whip and the yell of "Grak!"

  We glided on smoothly. I had no doubts that Nath would take the ship fairly through the center of the narrow channel with not a single oar splintered. Swifters habitually carry as many as half the number of oars again to replace broken oars, for breaking oars is a familiar hazard to the swifter captains of the inner sea.

  Once we were fairly through the whistles shrilled and the drum-Deldar tapped his peculiar terminal notes and every oar lifted and remained level. Swifters of the size of Volgodont’s Fang are reasonably stable in the water, unlike the smaller swifters that rock so much a man must step lightly and the oars must rest in the water to ensure stability.

  How familiar the details of bringing a vessel into port!

  I watched, storing away the nostalgic memories and refusing to become maudlin. The sides of the cothon were lined with the long, slanting ship-sheds, narrow structures, two slips to a roof, inclined toward the water. Ingenious capstans and pulleys were arranged so that the swifters might be drawn up out of the water and gangs of slaves whipped to the work. The open fronts of the sheds with their ornate columns and Magdaggian arches could be closed by wooden doors in inclement weather — of which there is, thankfully, very little in the Eye of the World — and as they clustered closely together they presented a compact, crowded nesting effect. Little over the width of a swifter, probably not one being more than forty feet wide to accept the apostis, they were long, a hundred and eighty feet or more. This was not the king’s harbor. Over there the sheds were, of course, larger. The massively impressive building rising to the rear, sculptured almost like a temple, was the Arsenal of the Jikgernus — the warrior lords — and there were kept the multifarious stores demanded by the swifters. The smell of that place could waft me away and away four hundred light-years in my mind’s eye.

  Farther to one side and lifting grandly over the ship-sheds, the bulk of a real temple glittered in the suns-light. All smothered in green tiling, ceramics of the same high quality that decorated the megaliths, the temple of the sea-god, Shorush-Tish, sparkled and glistered in the light. Set at the apex of its many-peaked roofs the marble representations of swifters, one third full size, leered down over the mariners and marines and slaves who crowded the narrow streets, busy about the sea business of Shorush-Tish.

  It is a remarkable fact — at least, at that time it was remarkable to me — that the blue-maned sea-god, Shorush-Tish, is shared by Grodnim and Zairian. In all else they clash in their beliefs, for all that they sprang from the same original religious convictions. Temples to Shorush-Tish are obligatory on all the seafronts of all the ports of the north and south, the Green and the Red. Even the Proconians erect altars to Shorush-Tish. Even the many races of diffs who live up in the northeastern areas of the Eye of the World — and particularly around the smaller sea known as the Sea of Onyx to the apims because of the many chalcedony mines around its shores — build their temples to their halfling representations of Shorush-Tish. Even the Sorzarts who live and reive from their islands up there respect the power of the universal sea-god of the Eye of the World.

  It would be a foolish and reckless captain who did not make an offering to Shorush-Tish before he observed the fantamyrrh boarding his vessel.

  For all my own dogged beliefs I complied with the custom, and many were the rings and cups I had given to the blue-robed priests of Shorush-Tish in his great temple on the waterfront of the inner harbor at Sanurkazz.

  Over by the near wall as we glided on, busy gangs of workmen swarmed over an old swifter of that class rowed in the fashion the savants call a terzaruolo. I have mentioned that the extra power gained by using a number of men on one oar rowing over an apostis in the a scaloccio system had reached the inner sea; but, like the swordships up along the coasts of the Hoboling Islands, the older system still clung on. This swifter with her five men to a bench, angled to the stern, each man pulling on one oar, could not hope to match the speed of a modern swifter of the type of Volgodont’s Fang. Yet she had been built well and the teredo had not got her, and her timbers were still sound. She had been a fairly large example, rowing five men to a bench each side and with thirty-two oars in each bank. This gave her a total of three hundred and twenty oarsmen and three hundred and twenty oars.

  When I say she would not reach the same speed as the more modern examples, I mean essentially the same sustained speed and the same driving power. To improve her it would be necessary to place the five men of each bench all pulling on the same oar, and to increase the length and strength of that oar out of all recognition of the smaller loom and blade hauled by a single man.

  This is exactly what the workmen were doing.

  When completed, she would be classed as a five sixty-two swifter. I looked to see if they were building a second bank, but saw no sign that this was proposed in her rebuilding.

  We went through all the usual formalities of landing. The slaves were herded off to their bagnios. They would very quickly be pressed into service again, for, as the conversion of the old swifter of the a terzaruolo system showed, Magdag was scraping up all her resources to fling into what everyone here must consider as the final stages of a victorious war.

>   The omens looked propitious for King Genod and the overlords of Magdag as for the whole of the Grodnim alliance. I had more or less recovered from the smart of that series of disasters on the Red southern shore. Now we had come back to Magdag, For all the others here this was a homecoming. For me it was the chance to further my plans — those plans that envisaged the king, Gafard, and a voller.

  King Genod had duly won his Battle of Pynzalo. There had been few prisoners, and while I was glad of that, I knew the truth lay buried in the sands or running back to Pynzalo and beyond. That, I tell you, was one battle I was glad with a heartfelt gratitude to have missed.

  Gafard did not tell me of what passed between him and Genod.

  After all, I was as far as he was concerned merely a fellow renegade he had befriended and given employment and who had by chance come into contact with his beloved in ways that, hitherto, he had rewarded with death. I did have a privileged position of a sort, that was clear, but it did not extend past the concerns of his household and domestic matters.

  He had thanked the group who had rescued the Lady of the Stars, thanked them profusely and with gold. We were only too well aware of what we had done; but the squadron under Grogor was composed of picked men, every man loyal to Gafard personally. No possible blame could attach to the King’s Striker for having his men cut down black-clad assassins and kidnappers.

  All the same, at the first opportunity, Genod handed over command of the army to Genal Furneld, the Rog of Giddur, and called Gafard back to Magdag. A gloss was put on this by the announcement to the army that soon Prince Glycas would take over command of the combined armies and Gafard, the King’s Striker, was required for further duties.

  This Genal Furneld was of the usual cut of unpleasant overlords of Magdag and I avoided him. Giddur was sited on the River Dag in one of the great sweeping bends south of Hagon. He had arrived on the southern shore breathing fire and slaughter and having fifty men of a pike regiment punished for dirty equipment. I thought the army was welcome to him. Gafard had said, lightly, concealing his feelings, that Genal Furneld could sit down in front of Pynzalo and freeze for all he cared. No one imagined that he would carry the city with the same panache as the Sea-Zhantil. That had cheered me a little.