The night sky enfolded me. I set the course at west-southwest and cracked up to full speed. Huringa sped past below.
I was free!
And then — and then the black clouds boiled solidly before me and a mighty wind rushed upon my craft, spinning it end for end and the noise blasted into my ears, and I was falling. . falling. . falling into blackness. .
Chapter Eleven
The neemus of Queen Fahia of Hyrklana
Sparks and stars and planets and meteors shot and crackled about me. The airboat fell from the sky as though smashed in the paw of a gigantic leem. Whirled headlong the voller sliced through treetops and foliage whipped about my ears. No control was possible. That black maelstrom stirred the sky into a caldron. Other vollers there were being hurled pell-mell. I saw two smash together and the small frantic figures of jerking passengers fall through the storm to the ground. No need to ask by whose malign power this gale had been sent!
Once again, as had happened before, I was being warned off by the Star Lords. They did not wish me to travel to Migla and they were giving me no chance to find out if I might travel to Valka, away to the north across the equator. This was no ordinary storm. The blackness, the massive billowing of the clouds, angry, lightning-shot, and violence of the wind and rain, all were supernormal. I clung to the gyrating voller and I cursed the Star Lords. Oh, yes, I cursed them blue!
Another voller narrowly avoided crushing mine, for this craft that yawed away was a monster and I could see the deck covered with iron cages. Weight is of no consequence to a voller. In those cages, illuminated eerily by the flickering shards of lightning, wild beasts leaped and yowled and screeched. This was a flier bringing prize specimens for the arena.
Both vollers hit the ground at the same time. Mine went somersaulting over a low brick wall, smashing a thatched roof, ripping through a loloo yard, came shudderingly to rest against a low thorn-ivy hedge. I scrambled out. I had no wish once again to go breeches first through a thorn-ivy hedge. The cages had burst on impact. Screams and yells, horrid in the uncertain light, created a bedlam. The aftercabin of the flier, a two-deck construction, had splintered to destruction, and costly silks and satins, mashcera and damask, floated and strewed the shattered house. Men and women were running in crazy circles. I saw Rhaclaws carrying torches and whips trying to round up some of the beasts — I saw a strigicaw tear the head off one and spit it out before racing for a second. In that incredible scene of confusion with maddened wild beasts, of a ferocity known only to Kregen, terrifying humans, halflings, and apims alike, I stood for a moment. I knew I must help but knew, also, I was likely to get killed in affording that help.
Any hesitation was instantly banished as from the shattered wreckage of the cabin’s upper deck the slim and half-naked form of a girl leaped and ran, screaming. Her hair blazed flame in the torchlight, by which I assumed she might hail from Loh. Now the thatch of the house was alight and in that curdling orange radiance I saw the low feline shape of a neemu racing after the slender white form of the girl. The neemu had been injured, for it ran favoring its off front foot. Four legs have the neemus, round and smooth their heads, with squat triangular ears, and wide slit eyes of a lambent smoky-gold. All black are neemus, sleek and deadly, their fur highly prized, their ways amoral and feral. Their red jaws and sharp white teeth love nothing better than closing upon rosy living flesh. Vaguely puma-like, the neemu, vicious and treacherous and utterly deadly.
No thought was necessary.
I leaped forward, drawing my sword.
The girl cast me one terrified, appealing look, and collapsed, her foot twisting under her. I stepped forward and the neemu did not hesitate.
It leaped.
That long sinuous black body packed with muscle sprang and in that rounded smooth head the lambent golden eyes glittered at me with deadly intent.
I slid the first lashing claw and because the beast was injured in its right paw was able to lean to my left and bring the thraxter around and down in a short and savagely chopping stroke at the neemu’s neck. It screeched as it went past. It landed short of the girl, who cowered back, one hand to her mouth, her eyes enormous. Without giving the neemu a chance to recover — for that blow, mighty as it had been and bringing a gout of blood from the gash in the beast’s neck, had not killed it — I jumped in again. This time the sword cut and thrust as it was built to do and the neemu shrank back, hissing and screeching, its glossy black fur dappled with blood, and so rolled over, slumped, and died. It did not die easily. Seven lives, neemus have, so goes the old superstition. I gave it seven thrusts, and then seven more, just to make sure.
The girl could not rise. She lay there, her gauzy scraps of clothing only partially covering her glowing body. She tried to speak, and I heard the whispered words “Hai Jikai!”
And then rough and ungentle hands seized me, and a giant Rapa cunningly cast chains about my limbs, and his fellows, Rhaclaws, Rapas, Fristles, and apims, manacled and fettered me.
“What are you about, you yetches!” I roared.
But they struck me across the face and then gagged me, so that I could not yell the curses that boiled and spluttered in my head. What nonsense was this, that I should thus be chained?
The answer to that bore down on me with all the old sense of injustice that festers in many parts of Kregen, as, indeed to our shame, it does on this Earth in the here and now. I was taken swiftly aboard another flier, for the storm inspired by the Star Lords had died as swiftly as it had begun, and with the passengers from the beast-carrying voller was carried with the utmost dispatch to the frowning fortress of Hakal, which dominates the city of Huringa in Hyrklana.
In certain essentials one fortress is much like another, although in Valka I have made certain changes that make of the Valkan castles the finest and most impregnable in all of Kregen, or so I fondly believe. Almost all Kregan castles are comfortable, of course, for comfort and Kregan nobility are tolerably well acquainted. I was taken wrapped in my chains and bundled down into a cell, where sundry Rhaclaws picked me, a Rapa bit me (the Rapa beaks are notorious), and a Fristle flicked me across the face with his tail. Had my mouth not been gagged he, at least, would have regretted his conduct. I kicked a number of them where it would materially impair their mating instincts; but in the end I was beaten down and chained up. They used a great deal of solid iron chain on me so that, finally, I was helpless.
After some time — time meant nothing among the nobility when dealing with their inferiors — I was hauled out and beaten again just to remind me. Then I was dragged helplessly up stone stairs and so through many back stairs and corridors into a low-ceiled room hung with many bright tapestries and furnished luxuriously with the wealth of empire, and flung down before Queen Fahia of Hyrklana. I was hungry.
My chains chafed and my muscles were cramped and twisted. I had a headache and I was in the foulest of foul bad tempers.
The queen sat in a simple curule-styled chair, a zhantil pelt strewn carelessly upon it. A Fristle girl hovered with ready goblets of wine, another with tidbits on golden platters. A giant Brokelsh, dressed up in ridiculous finery, waved a feathered fan above her head, for it was full day and the suns pouring in through the open windows gave heat as well as light to the chamber. I took a quick squint — for my eyes were adjusted to the darkness of prison cells and not the glory of Zim and Genodras — to see whether or not the scarlet and golden Gdoinye or the white dove of the Savanti might not be looking in and having a damned good chuckle at my predicament.
“So this is the rast.”
The queen’s voice might once have been musical and low, but years of undisputed authority had coarsened it. She looked very much like her twin sister, the Princess Lilah; but there hung that coarseness about her, that reddening of artery and vein, that thickening of the flesh of her neck and chin, that cluster of lines between her eyebrows no amount of careful exercise and cosmetics could clear. Her hair had been plaited and dressed into a magnificent golden
pile upon her head, ablaze with gems. She wore a long green gown and over that a bodice that seemed to be made from a blaze of jewels. Her feet were clad in satin slippers. She took a goblet of wine from the fifi and sipped reflectively, gazing at me over the rim. She was a beautiful woman, who was slowly losing the battle against too rich food and too much wine and too little exercise. She was aware of her beauty, and, probably, not completely able to grasp that she was losing that glory.
If I do not mention the lines of habitual cruelty that had sunk into her skin around her mouth and pinched her nose, I do so only out of pity for her. Zair knows, she had need of pity!
Now, when I was thrown at her feet, chained and gagged and helpless, she was at the height of her powers. She completely dominated all of Hyrklana, having pushed the kingdom’s bounds out to every part of the island, and in the continual nagging misunderstandings with Hamal, the giant neighbor country in the northeast of Havilfar, having quite a few notable successes. Surrounded as she was by subservient pallans and courtiers, her merest whim was unbreakable law. She might live in a dream world, but where that world impinged on the greater world without, the dream world of the Queen of Hyrklana would always prevail.
Princess Lilah had said to me that she longed to return to her father’s palace in Hyrklana. I was to learn that the old king still lived, in retirement, having abdicated in favor of his daughter Fahia. He had opposed this obsession with the Jikhorkdun, and Princess Lilah, also, had wanted no part of the arena scene. I remembered her horror at the idea of the Manhounds of Faol hunting people. The King’s retirement had been engineered by his daughter Fahia. Fahia’s husband, Rogan, the present king, was a mere cipher, a nonentity.
At the queen’s side, reclining in a low couch wide enough for six, lay four beautiful girls. They were diaphanously clad and smothered with feathers and gems. One of them was the flame-haired girl I had rescued from the wounded neemu.
She looked at me now so piteously that I cursed my gag and bonds afresh, for I judged she blamed herself for my position, and I would have comforted her.
The gaunt figure of a pallan now moved forward. He wore a long robe of blue, girt with the symbols of his authority, and a face much like his must have promised hellfire to many an unbeliever before the fire consumed him utterly.
This was Pallan Ord Mahmud nal Yrmcelt. He was so addressed by the Deldar of the guard. My ears pricked.
The queen stared down at me as she sipped her wine. Then, in a gesture she might imagine to be regal but which was, in all truth, merely pretty, she flung the dregs in my face.
“Yetch! You destroyed my neemu!”
The flame-haired girl gasped.
It was quite unnecessary for the queen to spell out my crime. From the moment I had entered this luxurious chamber I had understood. For tied by silver chains, one on each side of that curule chair, the feral black forms of two neemus were pulling toward me. They yawned to reveal their blood-red mouths and their sharp white fangs. She liked to tickle them now and then with a golden tickler a Fristle fifi had charge of, and when the queen commanded the girl would hand the golden feather-tipped rod across and the queen would stroke and tickle her pets and they would purr like enormous black cats. I knew how deadly they were. But these possessed themselves, partially trained, I had no doubt, willing to be fussed and petted by a human woman in return for a warm spot to sleep and much milk and meat. The neemus regarded me with their baleful golden slit eyes, and yawned, and the queen tickled them and they purred.
“Take his gag off!”
The gag was roughly removed. I worked my aching jaws, but I did not speak. I stared up evilly at this gorgeous golden woman with her jewels and her feathers and her sleek black neemus and her slaves. I stared at that whole barbaric picture and I thought that perhaps I did not have long to live.
“You have not been put to the question yet, yetch, for you have been gagged, and so have had no opportunity to lie. I shall ask you questions. You would do well to tell the truth.”
I waited. Now I had to think. The Dray Prescot of only a few seasons ago would have rolled in his chains toward this woman and caught her leg and so dragged her down and hoped her head might be chewed off by one of her pet neemus. The Dray Prescot who would have done that had been almighty lucky to have survived. The Dray Prescot who had come so far on Kregen had learned — a little, not much, as you shall hear.
“What is your name, cramph?”
This was the obvious question. To tell them I was a kaidur in their arena would mean I was markedly inferior, nothing better than a pampered slave, and so marked for destruction. To claim a spurious ancestry and say I was Varko of Hakkinostoling would be merely foolish. But, if I was a lord, a Kov -
even a prince — I might stand some chance.
I said, “I am Dray Prescot, Pr-” and was immediately interrupted.
“You slaughtered one of my neemus, a prize, a hyr-neemu I had paid for and had sent from a far distance. Your crime is a heinous one.”
I knew she was playing with me, as her neemus might play with a woflo; but the test was yet to come. So far I had concentrated all my attention on her and her immediate surroundings. There were others in the chamber, of course, high dignitaries and nobles, pallans of the realm. I ignored them. Dare I bring in the flame-haired girl? My eyes flickered toward her, and her pale face whitened more. The queen fairly snarled at me.
“You look at my handmaiden Shirli! Perhaps you two have a criminal liaison? Perhaps you plot together against me?”
I shook my head, and those damned famous bells of Beng-Kishi clanged resonantly inside my skull.
“Not so, Majestrix, not so. I have never seen the girl before the neemu would have killed her-”
“And if I believe you, does that give you the right to slaughter my glorious neemu so wantonly?”
“But the beast was about to devour the girl!”
“You yetch! Is that any reason to slay it? Of what value is a shishi compared with a glorious neemu, so black, so velvety, so smooth? You shall be slaughtered yourself, in a way that shall make you regret your criminal act! Oh, yes!”
I rolled over and struggled to stand up. I felt the indignity of my position. As I thus wriggled I saw a young man standing with the nobles and dignitaries, and he stared at me with so horrified a light in his eyes, so petrified a look of terror on his face, that he stood as one hypnotized. I recognized him.
He was Mahmud nal Yrmcelt, the brilliant young man who had given me the kick that had freed me from the intolerable burden of the slate slab when first I had been pitched into this land of Hyrklana. And, more — his father was a chief pallan to the queen! And, more! He had been plotting treasons against his queen.
No wonder as he saw my eyes on him he trembled and that look of utter horror transfixed his handsome face!
I let my gaze travel across his face, pass him, and so stare at the others in that brilliant audience as I struggled to my feet. The guard Deldar moved in, his thraxter point pressing up against my side. I took a breath.
“I have committed no crime in any man’s justice. I did not wish to slay the neemu; but the life of a girl is more precious in the sight of Opaz than even the life of so wonderful a wild beast as a neemu.”
A frozen silence ensued.
The queen took more wine, and a slave wiped her forehead with a tissue-thin scrap of sensil. At last she spoke.
“Havil is the only true god.”
She said this woodenly. I knew instantly that she did not believe this, that the worship of Havil was mere state policy, that she, herself, looked to other and probably darker deities for her inspiration.
“Yes,” I said quickly, before they could get in. “Yes, Havil will relish the life of a girl over that of a neemu.”
‘Take him away-” the queen started to say, and I knew my blundering tongue had condemned me. Mahmud nal Yrmcelt moved forward. Suddenly he was lively, light on his feet, smiling and smirking, bowing before the queen. “May I ad
dress the divine glory of your person, oh great queen?”
She looked down and she smiled, she smiled at this Mahmud nal Yrmcelt, did the puissant Queen of Hyrklana.
The moment was fraught with a great peril for us both.
“You may speak, Orlan, for you have always some jest, some merry jape to play. Proceed.”
This Orlan Mahmud was sweating, and smiling and bowing, and was shaken clear down to his fashionable sandals.
“May it not prove a merry jest if this man faces his death in the arena, oh gracious queen?”
She put her hand to her chin. She pondered. Everyone waited on her words, for this was a weighty decision. Then she smiled on Orlan Mahmud nal Yrmcelt.
“You speak well, Orlan, and thus prove yourself a worthy son of a great father, who is my chief pallan. Truly, this yetch shall face his death in the arena!”
“Your Majestrix is too kind,” babbled Orlan Mahmud. He bowed and backed away. The queen shot him a sudden hard look.
If she wondered why this made her kind to him, she chose not to pursue the matter at the moment. I had read this Orlan Mahmud correctly. He had made his bargain with me.
“Don’t tell the queen,” he was in effect saying. “You are a doomed man; but this way you may save your life. There is at least a chance for a man who can lift a slate slab. .”
“And if he wins the contest, oh puissant lady?”
Queen Fahia chuckled and reached for a handful of palines on the golden dish handed to her by a Fristle fifi.
“I do not think that likely. He slew a neemu, very dear to me. Therefore by the green light of Havil it is only just he meet a test of greater import in the arena.”
A long susurrating sigh rose from the audience.
They guessed.
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