I sat in a carved black-wood chair that must have been all of two hundred years old, and talked with the men. I had a strange peace, a tranquility, a sense of time standing still. So near I was to Delia that all my recent frantic scurryings appeared ludicrous. I had merely to sit here, eat and drink and talk, and she would appear in the doorway, radiant, glorious, alive!
In the corner stood a two-handed sword, fully seven feet long, of that peculiar kind used on Earth around the sixteenth century. Contrary to popular belief, these enormously long swords of war were used in combat, and not merely for color guards of honor or as symbols, but the man to wield them must be a man indeed. This one had a leather-wrapped grip, wide quillons, and also a wrapping of velvet around the blade before the quillons. The cotton would have come from Donengil and the silk, probably, from Loh. To protect the hand when grasping this shortening-section a pair of semi-quillons had been neatly set into the metal. The thing looked clean, without rust, but a casual test with my thumb showed it to be blunt.
“The great sword of war of the Blue Mountains,” said Korf Aighos. He half laughed, half sighed. “They are out of fashion now. There was a time when men raced through the ravines wielding the swords of war and none could stand against them.”
These men had never seen a Krozair longsword. Beside this enormous brute a Krozair two-hander was a subtle instrument. I had the sudden craving to feel a real Krozair longsword in my fists again. The feeling made me realize why Aighos had recognized me. He had heard me use a Krozair oath -
“By Zim-Zair!” — and no doubt Delia herself had let the resounding words fall from her lips, also, from time to time. She was fully entitled to do so.
A fracas started in the narrow walk and we went out, laughing and joking, carrying blackjacks of wine, expecting to see sport. A man raced past, screaming, his hair streaming, his face sweating, the eyes like livid coals.
“The shorgortz! The shorgortz!”
A woman screamed and snatched up her child and ran inside, slamming her lenken door. Aighos dropped his blackjack and the rich dark wine spread across the stones.
“The shorgortz,” I said. ‘Tell me, Korf, what is that?”
‘Truly you are not yet of the Blue Mountains, Kr. Drak!”
“Bring fire!” a man yelled.
“Shelter within doors and pray!”
“Fire!”
“If you light torches,” I said, at once adjusting to the peril, “you will tell the guards where we are.”
“Better the Emperor’s aragorn, or the mercenaries, than the shorgortz!”
So it was that serious, then. .
I couldn’t have them running about with torches alarming the neighborhood and alerting the men brought back by Hikdar Stovang. And, far more importantly, if there was some monster out there in the mountains, my Delia was coming. . I did not hesitate. I went back into the house, snatched up the great sword of war, brushed past its protesting owner, and strode out into the street. Men were milling. I shouted loudly, stilling them by my anger.
“Tell me, you Blue Mountain Boys! Where is this Zair-forsaken shorgortz?”
They babbled. A hundred paces along the track from the village. Along the track my Delia must walk. I ran.
I thought of the Ullgishoa and Umgar Stro. Then I had fought only with my chains and had not until later grasped the great Krozair longsword Pur Zenkiren had given me in Pattelonia. Now I held what was little more than a bar of steel. Mind you, I had bested four Womoxes with a length of lumber aboard Viridia’s swordship. . It had seemed to me that a great bashing, cutting instrument of some length would be the best weapon here, better, at any rate, than an ordinary rapier.
I saw the shorgortz.
The thing was immense, nauseating, powerful, and altogether repulsive. I did not hesitate in my headlong dash but went on, at top speed, hurling myself forward, the huge sword of war held high and cocked over my right shoulder.
The shorgortz was a reptile. It was not a risslaca, those dinosaurs of Kregen; it had twelve legs, bent and crooked, so that it walked with the body slung between. Its body was squamous, the scales rimmed with a crimson iridescence, their centers green-black. Its four eyes kept up a rapid blinking. Its tendrils groped forward, writhing, seeking, snatching at anything that ran, to snatch and grip and force the prey into the convulsively chewing parallel jaws that stretched back to the rear of its hideous head. It was of the size of, for example, a double-decker bus, and it stank. It reeked with its own effluvia and the rotting stenches of its victims.
The sword of war slashed down.
The blade struck the thing cleanly over the head — and bounced!
The damn thing was as blunt as a lead razor.
I struck again and again and then had to skip back as a tendril writhed out toward me. My blows had no apparent effect on the shorgortz. No doubt it was merely fulfilling its destiny. No doubt it was acting as its nature impelled it. But I knew that my Delia would come walking lightly down this track and if this obscene thing was alive to meet her. . I would not think of that. This time I did what I should have done at first. I ran in, thrusting, to plunge the sword of war into the top right-hand eye. Thick ichor pulsed forth, gagging with the smell of vomit. The thing lashed its tail with tremendous force from side to side, splitting and pulverizing the rocks‹ I leaped, thrust again, and now the lower right-hand eye burst.
I dodged back. A tendril lapped my body and I had to let go the sword of war with my left hand, draw my dagger and cut through. The keen steel bit. Maybe the sword of war had been a mistake? I needed a weapon that would bite!
The shrieks and hissings of the reptile screeched higher. I kept the dagger in my left hand, the curved steel guard shielding, and began a systematic slashing away of the groping tendrils. Twice the massive tail arched over at me and smashed brutishly along the ground where I stood the instant before I leaped aside. I stuck the dagger into it, but it did no good. Thrusting the dagger between my teeth, dribbling and drooling the foul-tasting blood smearing it, I took the sword of war into my fists again. This time I slashed and hacked and thrust, blotted out the lower left eye. But the thing kept jerking back, protecting its last remaining orb, and I kept thrusting and missing. And now it began to clutch out at me with its forelegs. Wickedly sharp talons raked past me. I felt my leather tunic rip and a white-hot pain scored my side. I kept on. I had to. My body was smothered with the ichor. Steam rose in the light of the mingled rays of the twin suns. I leaped and struck — I slipped and a foreleg darted for me. Only the reflex of muscles long trained and hardened barred the sword up, a barrier of steel, to chop off the blow. I felt the vibrations hammer through my hands.
On my feet, I leaped, aiming for the remaining eye. The head twisted, reared, the fanged mouth opened
— I hauled back.
In blind anger I hurled the two-handed sword down. I hauled out the rapier. I launched myself at the beast.
Two, three, four thrusts at the eye, and all parried or blocked. I brought the rapier down in a swooshing cut and the sharp steel scythed into scale. Again and again I cut, but I could see, clearly and with growing desperation, that the rapier lacked the bulk, for all that the rapier is a cutting weapon, to slice through the armored scale. The bulk inched ponderously forward on the ten legs to the rear. The shorgortz was hesitant to push on. It must recognize that it faced some being not prepared to submit to being snatched up and stuffed down the fanged mouth.
Those fangs opened and closed, chewing angrily.
The thing was no more angry than me.
I leaped again, tried for the eye, missed, slashed down furiously, and the rapier pinged and broke across.
I threw the hilt at the eye.
It caromed off the snout.
Beneath the thing’s foreclaws lay the sword of war.
I took the dagger out of my mouth and plunged it deeply between two claws. The leg wrenched back, taking the dagger with it. I seized the great sword.
A mere lump
of steel. Blunt as a boxer’s chin. I took a breath. I could feel the foul gunk all over me. I poised.
Then I leaped.
The point of the sword of war penetrated the left upper eye. It burst in a showering of liquid. I slipped, fell, rolled, saw a flailing claw descending on me, and rolled on.
The talons hit the rock at my side, gouting up dust.
I leaped up and with a last and desperate thrust got the sword through the broken lower left eye. This time I did not pull it out. I leaned on it and thrust as hard as my muscles could push. I sweated and panted and thrust, my feet swinging off the ground as the beast reared. It was shrieking and I was yelling. It roared in its last agony, and I roared in my agony that it would not die before my Delia passed by. I felt the foreleg brush past me, felt the talons rip my tunic back. I felt, again, that white-hot line of acid scorch down my back.
My fingers slipped from the greasy hilt.
I toppled back.
The rocks came up, hard; but they did not knock me out, and I was able to claw up, ready to fight the thing with my bare hands if necessary.
I recall little after that.
I did hear a man shout, dimly and far off, “Hai! Jikai!”
But that held no meaning.
The thing was down, was gushing blood everywhere. I staggered back, bruised, cut, exhausted, empty-handed. Men surrounded me. I heard the clang of weapons. I heard a yelling, wrapped in the fog of nonunderstanding.
Then, sharp and clear, like a lance-thrust, words shocked out at me.
“That’s Drak ti Valkanium! Take the rast! The traitor will die, slowly. Take him and bind him with iron chains!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Chained before the Emperor of Vallia
They took me and bound me with iron chains, and our sorry coffle wended painfully down the mountain trails to the plains and so to the canal.
I knew what was in store. I suppose, given that all things come to all men in the fullness of time, I had always known I would become a slave hauler and haul an Emperor’s barge. This was fitting. This was the circle of vaol-paol complete.
The difference was that I and my comrades captured by mercenaries in the employ of the Emperor were noted brigands, outlaws, who had robbed the caravan of the Kov Vektor. The wedding gifts were lost and could not be found. I had no idea where they were, and — with a heartfelt relief that had nothing to do with the fact that I would not suffer — I learned that we would not be put to the question. Torture is commonplace in some areas of Kregen; it had been outlawed centuries ago in Vallia. The Emperor’s authority was autocratic, although some men did not obey him, but he could not flout the rules of civilized behavior in this. We were being taken to Vondium to answer for our crimes before a properly constituted court. I say being taken — we were in the chained gangs of haulers who walked all the way there on bleeding feet.
With the vanishment of the wedding gifts, the Princess Majestrix could only refuse the wedding itself. No one could fault her in that. Presents must be exchanged on both sides. It was a civilized custom. There was no dowry and nothing from the other side; there was no buying of a wife and nothing on the other side. There was an exchange.
We were treated abominably enough on that journey. We hauled the barges at a fast rate, fairly running under the lash and the knout. We slept on a barge reserved for the purpose, and it stank of stale sweat, urine, and fear. All day and all night we kept up that steady progress, passing narrow boat after narrow boat on the way. The stentor with his curled-spiral trumpet sounded the warning of our coming long and loud before us, and the tows went splash, splash, splash, into the cut, and the narrow boat skippers poled out to the center to leave a clear right of way.
We were not just ordinary slave haulers; we were going to a just trial and then an execution, or a lifetime as haulers. I felt that most of my hauling comrades would welcome the first. I will not dwell on that time of hauling. My hair and beard, which had grown unattended during my travels across Vallia in search of Delia, grew luxuriantly, like bushes, untidy, knotted, filthy, covering my face. The lacerations from the shorgortz’s talons suppurated, and I knew that if I had not taken that bath of baptism in the sacred pool of the River Zelph, I would have been a dead man. The whips of the slave-masters and guards wealed me so that I was truly jikaidered. Sores covered my feet. The disgusting rag that had once been a gray slave breechclout around my loins stank and crawled with vermin. I tried to wash it and was flogged for my pains. Fresh water was provided for those people who could not drink the canalwater, and dry biscuits, with a minced stew of vosk and ponsho leavings. Each day we had a handful of palines, and I believe these alone kept people alive and going, and, in many cases, controlled the degree of their insanity.
The branding with the Emperor’s mark on our right shoulders we all underwent did not unduly worry me, for I knew that a brand would, on me, slowly thin and vanish as subcutaneous and cutaneous cells rebuilt themselves. The painful part came in that I had to be rebranded. The scar tissue on a normal human skin usually remained permanently; but I knew there were many skills on Kregen. I had seen how a brand might be removed in Zenicce. But I annoyed the slave-masters, and they kept an eye on me, and lashed their whips and their knouts with special viciousness in my direction. I was, all in all, during that passage, down in spirit.
The talons of the shorgortz must have exuded a poison, or a toxic fluid in the effluvia in which I had been drenched had penetrated my skin like an acid, for the wounds refused to heal. The guards took a perverse delight in laying their whips accurately across the old cuts. I was jikaidered well and truly. Jikaida is played on a checkered board; my hide was crisscrossed with the checkers of the lash. As I hauled and tugged at the harsh tow rope I did not think even the archangel Gabriel would recognize me. I was in far worse condition than ever I had been as an oar-slave in the swifters of Magdag. Zorg, my old oar-comrade, now dead, or Nath and Zolta, my two rascals, could never have seen in this hairy, stinking, lashed specimen the man Dray Prescot they had known.
Of the country through which we passed I was aware only of the towpath. We slaves, in a ragged bunch roughly three abreast, clawed onto our leashes, knotted and spliced to the main tow rope, and pulled, heads down. I saw the muddy track beneath my feet. Also, occasionally, and with a relief that broke the monotony, I saw lock gates and the smooth wooden beams that had to be opened and closed. I was never allowed what would have been the pleasant diversion of turning the paddle handles. That was reserved for the favored of the slaves, girls usually, whom the guards pampered. Somewhere, in this despairing mass of humanity like a clogging mass of insects at the end of a jam-sticky knife, trudged Korf Aighos. I did not even know how many of us had been captured, although the how of it was easy enough. The laundry girl had been captured, and the noise of my battle with that confounded shorgortz had drawn the guards like a magnet.
I couldn’t feel enmity for Hikdar Stovang. But although I had borne him no malice, he had believed the worst of me, and here I was, hauling for the Emperor.
We were riding the various canals on our way back southeastward to Vondium. I hardly cared. We must have ridden the Vindelka Cut, for Vindelka lies immediately to the northwest of Vondium. Often as I trod after my fellow haulers I walked a sea of muddy blood.
Some damned alchemy of that reptilian monster’s foul acid-dripping ichor refused to let my body heal up. My mind was cloudy for much of that passage. Sores covered me. The daily lashings merely kept my body bloody. I still had strength, and could march; those of the ordinary haulers who fell were left to die, if they were dying, or had their throats cut if they feigned death after repeated floggings. Those of the haulers facing court hearings were flogged every now and then and given a ride, and flogged again, so that they preferred to haul rather than face the incessant extra floggings. If you think I came to hate these slave-guards — you are right.
The red and black bands on their sleeves burned into my brain.
But
I said I would not dwell on this unhappy period of my life. I would prefer to forget it, although I do not believe I ever will.
At last we came to the flight of locks leading to the inner network of waterways of Vondium. We locked through and finally came to a long low stone warehouse where more guards waited for us. The regular haulers were taken away to their barracks. We criminals were rounded up, loaded with chains — whereat many a man screamed as the harsh iron bit into his open wounds — and dragged off. All I could see was the stone beneath my feet. The guards were mere blurs of dark crimson in the corner of my eyes. I heard them whistling as they strode along — a tune I knew, surely — The Bowmen of Loh. That did not belong to any part of my life now; that came from a distant and dimly-remembered time when I was fit and well, with clean clothes on my back, a full belly, laughter and wine, kind faces about me. . I trudged and stumbled on over the stones, done for.
Down dank stairways we went, into dark dungeons where the leepitix darted and scrabbled, where the rats gnawed dead men’s bones, where the vermin clustered in the corners waiting for fresh meat. We were chained to the wall.
I slumped down. I did not think I could raise a little finger to bash a guard, as I would customarily have struck with my fists until either the guards were dead or I was out like a light. I tried to rest and sleep, but phantasms thronged my brain, and I moaned. Chains rattled and clanked dismally. We were not fed. Guards came for us, men wearing the red and black, and we were hauled out. We were starving, for we had not eaten for two days. There were ten of us, I saw, ten starved lean scarecrows, all hairy, filthy, and covered in sores. We were moaning as we were dragged along, our chains rattling on the stones. Up we were dragged, half throttled in the chains. Up and up. We were in the Emperor’s palace in Vondium. We were pulled out onto a wide and shining floor. Sunshine lanced down, emerald and crimson. There was a great throng of people, courtiers, guards, Air Servicemen, women gorgeous in fine clothes. All was a dazzlement to me. I could barely stand. I was weak, I tottered and fell, and a boot kicked me up. Korf Aighos fell and was dragged. I fell and was dragged. We left a bloody trail across that shining floor.
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