Golden Scorpio [Dray Prescot #18]

by Alan Burt Akers

  Well. It was a task. It was a challenge. I fancied I would go into the task with a greater zest now.

  First things first...

  The bolt drew out of my thigh with a deal of unpleasantness. The breechcloth had to be wrapped and pulled tightly. I peered out from under the thorn-ivy. She of the Veils was not yet up but in the last dying wash of light of the suns set the Twins rose in the east, eternally orbiting each other, lurid with a ruddy light. The wind blew soughingly. The yells and screams had mostly died away now and only occasionally a long groan broke that whispering silence.

  I crawled out and stood up—very shakily.

  The broadsword had snapped across in the melee and the shortsword had been carried off wedged in the breastbone of a radvakka whose iron corselet had been burst through. It had been hot work there, in the press.

  Vague ideas of what I was going to do had already formed in my vosk-skull of a head; but I fancied I'd have to walk in on my own two feet—as I have done before, Zair knows. So, grumbling and cursing, I started off, hobbling along. That dip in the Pool of Baptism of the River Zelph in far Aphrasöe would most certainly speed my recuperation and leave me whole and unscarred; but the process of recovery was none the less highly fraught for all that.

  Half-under a corpse of an infantryman I found a thraxter.

  One of the gray scavengers approached and I showed him the blade, lurid in that ruddy light, and snarled, and he withdrew.

  One hell of a racket was breaking up out of Thiurdsmot as I skirted the town. The townspeople would have made good their escape—or I devoutly hoped they had—the moment they had realized the battle was lost. The rout would have been a Cansinsax on a greater and more ghastly scale. Now the barbarians whooped it up in best barbarian style. I flung a few ripe curses at them as I hobbled past in the dappled moons light.

  The three water bottles I had picked up were soon emptied and I had to cast about for a stream. I was ragingly thirsty.

  The light of a small fire twinkled ahead. Carefully I scouted the little camp. These were Vallians—all of them natives of Vallia, I judged, and not a Hamalese among them. They sat hunched around their fire by the stream and their conversation, low-voiced, made me realize just how low-sunk we Vallians had become.

  When I made my presence known the first awkwardness when fists grasped knives was overcome in a quick pappattu. They saw my wounds and one of them, Wando the Squint, helped me bathe them and dress them again. There were about twenty men here, mostly tradesmen of Thiurdsmot of that sturdy class who although employing slaves yet did much of the manual work themselves, being masters at their trades. I gathered their womenfolk had gone back over the Great River a few months ago. And, with them, was the blacksmith with whom I had fled from Cansinsax. When I asked him what had happened, his face clouded over and he beat that thewed arm and iron fist onto his knee.

  “The Opaz-forsaken radvakkas! They slew my family—all of them they slew, and I could do nothing.” His agony pierced me. “But I shall have them.” He spoke quite rationally, this Cleitar the Smith. “I shall wreak my vengeance on them all."

  Very carefully, for I had an inkling of what they purposed, I said: “You pitch your camp perilously close to the town."

  “Aye,” said the fellow who was clearly their elected leader. Tall, darker-complexioned than most Vallians, he lowered down on me, a deep scar furrowing down his left cheek from eye to lip. “Aye. We shall take any stragglers, and send them one by one to the Ice Floes of Sicce. They have conjured up great evil and a greater than they can imagine shall punish them."

  “Amen to that,” I said. “But—"

  This Dorgo the Clis broke in: “We were told the iron men of Hamal were our new friends and allies. The kovneva told us. Well, we did her bidding. And Opaz punished us and sent the Iron Riders to destroy the men of iron. It is just. Now we shall avenge ourselves, as is just."

  “Oh, aye,” I said. “I'm all for slitting a few radvakka throats. But, as you see, I am in no case for running. And you will have to run—if you can."

  They weren't too happy about this. They had a few weapons apart from their knives. One had a bow, a compound arm barely stronger than the bows of the radvakkas. Dorgo the Clis and another hulking fellow had swords, Vallian clanxers. Some of the others had spears, and Cleitar the Smith hefted his hammer. I tried to reason with them—uselessly.

  “We may be honest tradesmen and no warriors. I think you are a paktun, Jak the Drang. Well, your paktun comrades ran and were cut down in the battle, as the Hamalese were. Now it is the turn of us to—"

  “Listen, Dorgo! What do you know of fighting? I mean real fighting, as a warrior fights, in battle, with edged weapons? You have your town brawls with cudgels and a knife or two. But a real battle is a vastly different affair, by Vox!"

  One of the men, a fellow who hefted a spear meanly, said: “My son was always reading the great stories, the legends, tales of the heroes. He ran away to be a mercenary, seeing, as he said, Vallia gave no place for a soldier in his native land. I have heard from him once. He is now a paktun, and fought in a place called Khorundur, wherever in the Light of the Invisible Twins that may be."

  I did not tell him that Khorundur was a nation of the Dawn Lands of Havilfar. His son had traveled widely.

  “And what is the meaning to your words, Magin?” demanded Dorgo the Clis.

  “My son is not here to fight. But I shall. I shall stick my spear into the guts of a radvakka, at the least."

  The real meaning behind Magin's words was there, plain as a pikestaff; but he had not yet teased out what he meant himself. He and his comrades, like the great mass of the people of Vallia, had not yet fully understood what they felt, had not yet come to a comprehension of what they must do. And what they must do had ramifications quite beyond the immediate knocking of a few Iron Riders over the head.

  Trying to tell them to wait was like trying to melt the Ice Floes of Sicce with a half-ob candle. In the end, when I had told them I intended to raise a proper army to fight the Iron Riders and they were properly incredulous—not to say suspiciously contemptuous of any such grandiose concept—I said: “I am for Therminsax. If you can, join me there."

  Dorgo the Clis stroked a broken thumbnail down his scar.

  “It is certain you can be of no help to us, Jak the Drang. So we wish you well. But I do not think we shall meet in Therminsax."

  “I think perhaps you will,” I said. “May the light of Opaz go with you.” And so, regretfully, I hobbled off into the night.

  That journey recurs now, not, perhaps, with the frightfulness of other journeys I have undertaken on Kregen but, certainly, with a certain frisson. I hobbled. Thoughts of the Hamalese intruded along with all manner of nonsenses as I labored on. Rees and Chido, thank Krun they were safe. Even then I recalled how the Hamalian Army had been suspect against a heavy cavalry charge. Rees being overset by a hersany charge in Pandahem; our own wild charge at Tomor Peak ... With an irony I did not relish I had to face the unpalatable fact that in this section of Vallia the only hope for Vallia at the moment was her enemy, Hamal. Nothing stood between the radvakkas and the soft heartlands of Vallia but the Hamalian Army. If I could find someone to listen to me—and I'd do it in the guise of the Amak Hamun nal Paline Valley—we'd strew caltrops, we'd dig ditches, we'd set ambushes, we'd smother the Iron Riders with bolts. It could be done; but at a price. Then I brightened up. That price, by Krun, would be paid by the Hamalese! Capital!

  But, no—as I hobbled on through the night to the nearest canal, I knew that was a base thought. Good men would be sacrificed and die and I could take no pleasure from that.

  Therminsax lay in a north northwesterly direction and altogether too near the border of Sakwara for comfort. But all reports spoke of the city as holding out so far against the radvakkas. The treacherous attack by the Kovneva of Aduimbrev against her northern neighbor and the subsequent occupation by the Hawkwas and the forces of Hamal had gone through very rapidly. What c
onditions would be like now I had no idea. So I pushed on and curved around and at last found the Therduim Cut and a little group of canalfolk anxiously pushing on to Thermin. They had seen parties of Iron Riders crossing the cut; but so far had been unmolested.

  All the North East must lie under the iron heel of the radvakkas. Layco Jhansi and the provinces he had taken with his own forces and the mercenaries he had hired would be the next on the list. What was going on up in the north, down in the southwest, in the southeast, was anybody's guess. Vondium, the capital and the surrounding provinces, owed allegiance to this new emperor, Seakon, and if the radvakkas or Layco Jhansi did not deal with him, then I would. Vallia was a disturbed ants’ nest these days, with every man's hand, it seemed, turned against every other man's.

  We glided along the cut and as my wound healed so I helped haul. The canalfolk accepted me as one of themselves, as I was able to drink the canalwater, a true test. The kutven of this group was Rordam na Therduim, a brawny, cheerful fellow much cast down by the evil days and the disreputable state of the cut. Often we had to drop over the side of the lead narrow boat and with spades slice a way through the mud fallen in to make a passage. Once we halted in the shade of a group of missals as a long line of radvakkas passed, and with them wagons hauled by benhoffs, wagons no doubt containing much plunder.

  “If only there was some way of getting back at them,” said Rordam, wiping his forehead, frowning.

  “There will be, kutven. We have to plan and organize."

  “Plan what? Organize with what?"

  “Once we get to Therminsax we'll be able to see better what to do."

  But, I own, my own words sounded hollow even to me. Of the towns and villages along the cut it were best not to speak. This canal, as I have said, ran for much of its course through border-land, march country, and men had not in the old days built anything other than frontier forts. With the establishment of the empire by Delia's ancestors, the need for forts had gone; but the land was barely suitable for anything other than desultory grazing. The few towns were uniformly abandoned, looted and destroyed by the Iron Riders. We did meet other canalfolk and with them hauled on to Therminsax.

  Approaching the city the land took on for a space a much wilder aspect, with rocky outcrops and precipitous descents alternating with broader open rides of grassland. The canal scythed through between cutting walls. Then, when Kutven Rordam said Therminsax lay half a day's haul away, the country opened out into the broader fields and pastures I remembered from my previous visits to the city. We hauled on lustily.

  It fell to my lot to take the turn at striding out ahead along the towpath, well in front, to scout our safe passage, when we ran into the fight.

  Standing immobile in the shade of the trees fringing the towpath I watched the scene on a grassy bank near a tumbledown village. Men fought and struggled there, and yet I saw they struck at one another with wooden cudgels, and fists, and feet, and bellowed and roared their mutual fury. There were two sides to the combat, and one side wore the blue and green of the high kovnate of Sakwara, and the other side wore the colors of Thermin, an emperor's province, colors of crimson and brown. I thought of the Iron Riders and felt my fury rising. This was a nonsense.

  The city could only be an ulm or two beyond the next curve in the cut and when I barged out into the fight and grabbed a man wearing the crimson and brown and hoicked him out of it, he confirmed my suspicions of what was happening here. He saw my face and the thraxter, and he was very ready to talk.

  “Yes, jen, yes. The devils of Hawkwas tried to cross and we must stop them—"

  I shook my head.

  “Who is in command of your men here?"

  He squirmed around in my fist. The fight raged, with men staggering away holding their heads, and the dust lifting, and the uproar bellowing on. He pointed. “Yonder. Targon the Tapster.” Targon, bellowing, struck wildly with his cudgel at a beefy individual who ducked and struck back.

  I turned on the fellow I gripped and stuck my face into his. “Just you stand here, dom, peaceably, whilst I sort this out."

  He nodded his head frantically, almost choking. I let him go and waded into the fight, got a grip on a Hawkwa. The question to him produced a string of swear words; but he sobered up quickly enough after I spoke to him, and he said: “There. With the black beard. Naghan ti Lodkwara—"

  So, for the third time, I plunged into the fight. Men fell as I barged through. I hit Targon on the chin and dragged him along by my left arm, heaving struggling men away, pounding on, took Naghan ti Lodkwara by the neck. I hauled them both back out of the scrum and plunked them down against a ruined wall.

  I glared at them as they stared up, quite unable to understand what had hit them.

  “Now, you two hulus. Listen and listen well. You may be of Therminsax and you may be a Hawkwa. I can guess why you are fighting. You stupid onkers! Haven't you heard of the Iron Riders?"

  “These cramphs of Hawkwas stole six ponshos!"

  “They wandered about, lost—we but gave them a home—"

  “Aye! In your swag bellies!"

  They'd have started up again; but I waggled the thraxter at them.

  A couple of men spun out of the fight, saw me and their respective leaders, and came over to lend a hand. I was forced to stretch them upon the ground, where they slumbered. I glared at these two, this Targon the Tapster and this Naghan ti Lodkwara.

  “Now, you two, you hulus. Call off your men. Stop this fight. Or, by Vox! I'll go in there and really thump a few heads."

  Targon looked pretty sullen. “We are not used to fighting with swords—"

  “So tell your men, sharpish. Bratch!"

  In the event, between us we managed to sort out the confusion. Men sat on the ground, panting, holding their heads. Others leaned on one another, gasping. They were a sorry looking bunch, and no mistake. I stood up and shouted at them. Shouting at people seems to be an occupational disease; but needs must when the devil drives—in this case, far more devils than the immediate deviltry of the Iron Riders.

  “The Iron Riders are coming to sack your city—"

  “They are way down south,” objected Targon sullenly.

  “They drove us out,” shouted Naghan viciously. “That is why we run and take your skinny ponshos."

  “Our ponshos are fine and fat! We do not need nit-stinking Hawkwas to tell us about our ponshos."

  “You will all be ponshos in the jaws of the leems,” I bellowed at them. I went on in fine style, rhetoric, threats, not blandishments so much as promises of what lay in store for them when the radvakkas had been seen off and peace and prosperity once more enfolded Vallia. I watched their faces. “You are all Vallians. The North East is the northeast of Vallia. The Hamalese—"

  At this a chorus of curses and blasphemies and threats of what they'd like to do to the Hamalese broke out. Kovneva Marta had wrought well with her mercenaries in Thermin, and these men were not likely to forget.

  “Do the Hamalese hold Therminsax?"

  “Aye, dom—” began Targon.

  “I am Jak the Drang,” I said, and, as though that was a kind of signal allied to what I had done and said, they at once started calling me jen, which is Vallian for lord. I let it pass. If I was to do what I had to do, then any additional slender threads of authority were useful, no matter how ludicrous or despicable in my eyes.

  The Hamalian Army was represented in Therminsax chiefly by a regiment of foot and a regiment of crossbowmen. The balance of the forces was made up of paktuns and masichieri, and of men hired by Aduimbrev. That would have to be sorted out. Also, there was a mercenary force of flutsmen.

  “If I know flutsmen,” I told these men who were stanching their cuts and rubbing their bruises, “they will fly off the moment the going gets tough. After all, Therminsax means nothing to them, nor does Vallia and the North East. They are not Vallians. But, doms, you are."

  “Maybe,” spat out Naghan ti Lodkwara. “But we have no money to hire m
ercenaries to fight for us."

  I let his words hang. I wanted these men to examine them. I repeated what he had said. Then, putting contempt into my voice, I said: “Gold—you pay gold for other men to fight for you. If you see your wife and child about to be killed and your house burned, you hold out a purse of gold and pray someone will come along and save your family, your home. Is that it?"

  “No—no!” shouted some. They were growing warm. “It is not that at all,” shouted others. They were all struggling with preconceived notions. Ordinary citizens just didn't go out and fight as common soldiers. Foul-mouthed mercenaries did that, and got paid to do it.

  I pointed at Targon. “If you stood in your house and saw your wife and child about to be murdered—” I thought a subtle or not so subtle notion might enhance my argument here, and so I said: “Assuming any girl has been misguided enough to wed you—” which brought a few guffaws out. “And you had that cudgel you've been trying to brain these Hawkwas with—would you not strike down the assassin?"

  “Well,” flared out Targon, mightily angry. “Of course!"

  “So when the Iron Riders get here—will you hit their iron with a wooden club?"

  I was surprised to hear a few guffaws at this, and realized I was making headway.

  “Give me your sword, jen, and you would see!"

  I let out a sigh. About to speak, perhaps to come to the crux, I halted as a man yelled and pointed up.

  “There are the flutsmen,” he shouted. “What do they want? Have they seen the Iron Riders?"

  The mercenaries of the skies, self-centered, wheeled on their wing-fluttering birds, circling the village. Then they descended steeply through the bright air. I saw the way they handled their weapons. I knew flutsmen of old.

  “Take cover!” I bellowed, furious, seething. “They are true devils. They will slay us all for mere sport!"