Avenger of Antares [Dray Prescot #10]

by Alan Burt Akers

  Green ichor spouted as I withdrew, and the captain fell.

  The shanks were now in complete rout.

  “Vallia! Vallia!” my men were shouting. But only when they began another shout did I realize they were not my men. For they began the old cry: “Hai Jikai! Jikai! Prince Dray! Hai Jikai!"

  A dark shadow fleeted across the deck.

  The shadow was hard and black and sharp of edge. It was no cloud.

  Well, we had been fighting our own fight and we had been drifting nearer and nearer the coast of Hamal. There were other people involved in this fight now.

  The Hamalese flier turned, coming up against the wind after its first inspecting pass. I knew what it would do. The shank vessel was a shambles. The galleon was in little better case. The Vallians’ attempts to free the wreckage had so far been fruitless and, locked together, the two vessels drifted down upon the low-lying land. The suns were nearly gone; floods of orange and crimson and emerald stained the water to the westward, and against that flood of radiance the stark black outlines of the land showed as jagged hungry teeth.

  Somehow I found Deldar Rogahan in the confusion.

  I gripped his arm. He was spattered with blood, a shining green figure in the darkling light.

  “Put a varter shot into ‘em, Rogahan!"

  He was gone on the instant. A few shanks still wished to dispute the loss of their vessel, and with a handful of Chuliks and sailors I drove forward to finish the thing.

  I heard a varter clang. I knew Rogahan loosed.

  And then the cry we all dreaded burst up.

  “Fire! Fire!"

  That Opaz-forsaken yetch of a Hamalese airboat had flung down upon us an iron pot filled with blazing combustibles.

  With fearful speed the flames roared upon the ships.

  Smoke and flame rose into the dying light. The flames twined and lifted, roaring, gigantic tongues of fire shooting into the sky. The airboat turned, insolently it seemed, and I saw its Hamalese colors flying; then it showed us its stern and flew away.

  Helpless, on fire, we drifted down onto that bleak and barren shore.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Shipwrecked

  Darkness lay over land and sea.

  The breakers roared and leaped. The entangled ships rode down, wrapped in flames, sheets of fire spreading upon the tumultuous surface of the waters. The waves rolled in to break in crimson bands of flame upon the rocks. Gradually She of the Veils rose into the star-speckled sky to cast down her golden-pinkish light. Everyone left alive clustered to windward of the flames. The flames blew and gyrated in ghastly streamers and fingers of fire down toward the breakers.

  The wind would soon pile us up, if the flames did not eat their way back to our precarious perches along the taffrail and the poop varter platforms. I did not think any shanks had survived. Certainly we saw none. But the thought occurred to me that, being descended directly from fish, they might well be singularly at home in the sea. Even so, had any jumped overboard, they were a very long way from home. You may judge of my frame of mind if I say that I did not then give a great deal of praise to these fish-men's courage in thus venturing so far across the seas; I was concerned only with the foul results of their voyages.

  The wild holocaust of breaking waves and iron-fanged rocks lay waiting for us.

  “Not long now!” bellowed Captain Ehren above the wind. We had all stripped off our armor. But we still carried our weapons. I was glad to see the Lamnian merchant had survived. The Vad of Kavinstok was also there, drenched with spray, a slash across one cheek; his eyes, bright with bitter anger, rested on me accusingly. I ignored him. Wersting Rogahan clung to his varter platform near me. Wind lashed the spray cut from the waves across us. Before our eyes the flames roared and crackled, and the mizzen suddenly exploded into a pillar of fire.

  The conflagration was now so intense that a number of men slipped into the sea, to take their chances against the breakers. Few were seen again. The heat beat against our bodies. The spray steamed as it spattered the decks where the pitch ran like mercury.

  “When we hit, we will slue!” bellowed Ehren. “Then will be the time to jump—when the stern is near the shore."

  He was right, but it was small comfort.

  The scene presented a mad, confused nightmare: the black rocks, the spouting waves glinting a fierce orange and ruby in the awful conflagration as the ships burned, the driving wind and stinging sheets of spray, the continuous wild screeching that penetrated our eardrums and battered our bodies. The ships struck. Before they could swing, the waves pounded them and instantly they shivered to kindling. In a tumultuous torrent of helpless humanity we were swept from our perches. Smashed at by timbers and spars, by barrels and wreckage of all description, we went splashing headlong into the sea. The waves tumbled us head over heels. Many a man was struck and knocked unconscious and slipped beneath the contused surface of the sea. But some of us struck out boldly, struggling and fighting to stagger at last up onto a long shelving beach between rocks. The waters dragged at our shoulders, our waists, our legs, until we finally staggered free and collapsed, like drunken men, breathing in loud, harsh gasps, sprawled on the silver sand—but safe!

  That night passed miserably as we huddled up the beach, exhausted, trying to sleep and regain our strength. Along toward midnight enough wood had been gathered and stripped to expose the dry layers within, and a fire was started. The men of Kregen do not need an electronic or gas-fueled lighter in order to make flame; if a bow and drill do not suffice, a compression tube will do the trick. We gathered about the fire, warming ourselves and drying our clothes, and I could not fail to remark upon the tameness of this fire compared with the one that had destroyed us. Man is adept at using forces so powerful he barely understands them.

  With the first glow in the sky heralding the coming of the suns we stretched and yawned. Awake now, we stood up, ready to take stock of our situation.

  The Risshamal Keys consist of a number of fingerlike extensions of islands, cays, mere rocks, shoals, and reefs, all running out in a generally northeastward direction from the northeastern corner of the continent of Havilfar, which is also, of course, the northeastern corner of the empire of Hamal. At the farthest extent of one long island chain rises the island of Piraju. In all, we might have come to grief in worse spots. The length of the longest chain is something of the order of a hundred and seventy dwaburs.[2] Many of the islands are quite deserted, others support a small fishing population. Hamal's laws extended to this remote spot, and I knew there would be garrisons scattered throughout the Keys, evidence of which we had received in so unwelcome a fashion when the airboat attacked us.

  [2 Dwabur: five miles.]

  “We will have to find a fishing village,” said Captain Ehren. “And barter, buy, or steal a boat."

  The Vad of Kavinstok made a disgusted sound.

  “We can barter our ibs, we have nothing with which to buy. You will have to steal a boat, Captain."

  “Whatever method,” said Lars Ehren, frigidly polite. “We will secure a vessel in which to sail for Vallia."

  Wersting Rogahan was coming up the beach swinging a line on which dangled a number of fine fish. I made a face.

  I said: “It is practically certain there will be war between Hamal and Vallia. The Hamalians are insane with imperial ambition. Therefore we can claim privilege if we take a boat. The laws of Hamal are precise on the subject."

  The Vallians were thoroughly sick of the subject of Hamalese laws. Everything in Hamal is ordered, numbered, ticketed. At this time in their development as an empire the Hamalians still held to many of the old, rigid laws that had given them strength in the past. The signs of a new age were everywhere apparent, not least in the coming to power of Queen Thyllis, who merely awaited the favorable opportunity of a great victory against Hamal's foes to prove in her coronation as empress her divine right to rule. I was sure she would cut through the strict law-structure of Hamal to furthe
r her own ends and in the process fatally weaken her nation. Mind you, I welcomed that day. Indeed I did.

  A most unpleasant odor curled into my nostrils and, wrinkling up my nose, I turned to where the seamen were busy with their fish and their fire.

  The smell did not come from the fish. It is not true, I suppose, to say I dislike all fish. Sardines in olive oil are fine, though not in tomato sauce, and kippers are also very fine. In later years I have taken to tinned salmon where the fresh fish leaves a mere rubbery taste in the mouth. But the smell that was now offending everyone on the beach came from the fire itself.

  “By Vox, Wersting! What vile muck are you burning there?"

  I might have guessed.

  “We found timbers from that Corg-blasted shank, Prince. It is those timbers that stink."

  “Impregnated with the damned fish stink,” said Captain Ehren.

  I inspected some of the wood the hands had gathered. Of a heavy and close-grained appearance, it bore a greasy greenish texture, somewhat spongy to the feel and, surprisingly, not particularly heavy at all. No one recognized the wood.

  “The wood stinks of itself,” I said. “And I guess it is a capital timber for ship construction."

  “Aye,” said Lars Ehren. “Capital for fish-men! But I'll allow their stinking craft outsailed our old Ovynth, Opaz rot ‘em!"

  I said briskly, “This stink blowing downwind will bring out the locals if I'm not mistaken."

  How instructive it was to see who made an instinctive check of their weapons, feeling the sword snugged neatly to waist, the spar to hand, the knife at belt!

  We ate the fish, and poor fare it was, too. Then we set about marching from the beach southerly, looking for water.

  The burning stink from our fire wafted with us for a good long way.

  The shank ship, burning, would have alerted the people along this coast, both by fire and smell. We marched, ready for what might befall us.

  In the event the local inhabitants were far more frightened of us than we had need to be of them. We first saw them popping up over the sand dunes inland, where scraggly bushes and coarse rank grasses grew, showing scared faces which seemed all eyes and mouths, before they turned tail and ran. They turned tail quite literally, for these were Yuccamots, a sleek otter-like people with long, broad flattened tails. They had progressed as a race from swimming individually to catch the fish on which they lived, to sailing open boats with purse seines (nets which they looped in a great semicircle and dragged ashore), a whole village hauling on the lines. Their fingers are no longer webbed, but their feet still are. To my delight I found the Yuccamots proud of their webbed feet. How different this was from the shame the Undurkers, those supercilious canine folk from the islands south of Persinia, feel for their hind paws!

  Well, it takes all kinds to make a world. The Gons, as you know, are ashamed of their white hair and religiously shave off every last lock of white from their scalps.

  We made contact with the Yuccamots, and after a time managed to convince them we bore them no ill will. That we might have to steal one of their boats was a question not raised at this time. The boats themselves possessed the tall incurving stem and stern of the type of boat built two thousand years ago in the Mediterranean. They were flat bottomed, broad beamed, and lacked sails. They were propelled by six massive oars, each crewed by at least eight men, often amidships by a dozen, pushing and pulling, after the manner of swordships. These boats, with the bright colors and the otter-eyes painted in the bows, reminded me most, I suppose, of xavegas. The xavega, a Portuguese boat used against the Atlantic to catch sardines in exactly the same way as the Yuccamots use their boats to catch their fish, is fast dying out on the Earth. A pity.

  The Yuccamots had developed the technique used in xavegas of positioning extra men judiciously about the craft and having them haul on lines attached to the looms of the oars. Exactly the same kind of extra manpower on the oars is employed by the captains of the inner sea in their swifters, and the captains of swordships along the coasts of the outer oceans.

  Captain Ehren expressed himself as satisfied with the boats themselves, although wishing for a little more fullness in the bottom lines, or a leeboard, failing a keel. But he was scathing about the absence of masts and sails.

  “We can fashion masts, Captain Lars,” I said. “Aye, and sails, also. If it comes to the fluttrell vane, we can do it."

  Captain Ehren favored me with an odd look, and I realized I had unthinkingly used a common Hamalese saying. The fluttrell, that powerful saddle-bird of Havilfar, has that deuced awkward vane at the rear of its head, rather like an ancient Terrestrial pteranodon, and this quite naturally makes riding more than two aback somewhat a matter of ducking down to avoid the massive vane. So “to come to the fluttrell vane” is the cant saying in Hamal for putting up with less than the most desirable.

  Once we had convinced the Yuccamots we were merely friendly, shipwrecked mariners, they were ready to aid us. They had noticed our weapons, of course, and so understood we were in good case to defend ourselves against treachery. We were given food to eat—more damned fish—but there were a few gritty loaves and a bowl or two of fruit. The bright yellow berries of the paline were eagerly snatched up, a most sovereign remedy against depression. The paline bush is one of Zair's greatest gifts to Kregen.

  Later on that day, while we sat dozing in the blue shadows of the straw and seaweed huts, the dark leaf-shaped shadow of a flier passed across the mud-packed square. Using great caution I looked out and peered up. The voller up there was patrolling; it lazed along, its flags fluttering, keeping a watch on what went on below.

  “Fliers from the naval air station,” said the Yuccamot headman, old in years yet with a still silky coat and a fat flat tail. His name was Otbrinhan and he wore a white robe much adorned with motifs in green thread of seashells and squids and amazingly finned fish. “They say we must guard against attacks."

  He saw my astonishment.

  “Aye, Notor. Attacks.” He flapped his tail, making a meaty thump against the dried mud. “When I ask who will attack us poor folk, the Hikdar laughs and says we will know when they attack. It is beyond me."

  “Where is this air station, Otbrinhan?"

  He used his tail to point the way, angled inland and past the crest of a sizable gorse-clad hill that rose a dwabur off. This island was of a fair size, and being so close to the equator I expected dense jungles. But the salt water ran through the soil far inland and made of it poor-quality stuff. Other islands in the chain were choked with jungles.

  “How far?"

  I might have guessed that to a seafaring folk, a land distance was difficult to describe. Two days, he told me, but I had to recalculate that to the length of stride of my apims and to knock off at least half a day.

  Later I said comfortably to Captain Ehren: “I think we will not need to steal a boat from these folk, Captain Lars."

  “I am heartily glad to hear it. A single boat is an enormous treasure to them."

  “So what if it is?” demanded Kov Nalgre Sultant in his unpleasant hectoring tone. “They are no friends to Vallia."

  “They are friendly enough to us!” began Ehren, hotly.

  “Do not seek a quarrel with me, captain!” The Vad of Kavinstok's color was up, his lips thin and most unpleasantly curled, his jeweled hand pressing down the equally jeweled hilt of his rapier.

  If it came to it I would control this insufferable Vad. If the empire ruled over by my Delia's father was to survive we would need every single one of the good men of Vallia. Between these two, this bluff ship captain and this over-refined and contemptuous Vad, there was in my mind no choice. But, surprisingly, the little Lamnian merchant stepped forward. He held a leather bag in his hand and as we looked at him, surprised, Lorgad Endo drew the string and upended the bag over his palm and poured out a small stream of silver.

  “These are sinvers from Xilicia,” he said. He spoke quite calmly. “I came by them honestly in the way
of trade. They seemed to me, when we set out on this journey, to be a useful currency to carry to Havilfar, seeing that Xilicia is one of the ancient kingdoms bordering the Shrouded Sea."

  “True, Koter Endo,” said Strom Diluvon.

  “Let us then pay these good Yuccamots for their hospitality. If we all put together what we have, we may yet find we have enough to buy a boat."

  “This I doubt, Koter,” said Captain Ehren. “Faith! All my treasures are gone with the old Ovynth!"

  “And mine! And mine!” various survivors commented.

  I moved forward.

  “The offer made by Koter Endo is brave and generous. We will pay these Yuccamots for their food and drink. But we will have no need to steal a boat. We shall take a flier from the Opaz-forsaken cramphs of the Hamalian Air Service!"

  They gaped at me.

  “And how, Prince Majister,” said Vad Nalgre, emphasizing the title and thus further insulting me by his tone, “do you propose to do that?"

  But Hikdar Insur ti Fotor had jumped forward, excitedly speaking over the last of the Vad's words.

  “By Vox! It is a good plan, Prince! Let us go forth now and show these Hamalian vosks how true Vallians fight!"

  In the hubbub that followed these survivors further divided out. There were those, led by the Vad, who were for stealing a boat. There were those who would strike for the air station and take a flier. I held up my arm.

  “Let there be no dissension here. We strike a blow for Vallia if we take a voller. We merely embarrass poor fisher-folk if we steal a boat.” I bent my ugly face toward the Vad. “And in any case, Vad Nalgre, do not think, if we stole a boat, that you would be excused rowing."

  Some in the gathered throng, ruffianly seamen mostly, guffawed lustily at this sally.