“Why?” demanded Hoddan. “Why should I give you a present?”
“If I accepted it,” explained Thal, “and made no gift in return, I would become your retainer. Then it would be my obligation as a Darthian gentleman to ride beside you, advise, counsel, and fight in your defense, and generally to uphold your dignity.”
Hoddan suspected himself of blisters in places that had no dignity about them. He said suspiciously:
“How about Don Loris? Aren’t you his retainer?”
“Between the two of us,” said Thal, “he’s stingy. His presents are not as lavish as they could be. I can make him a return-present of part of the money we won in combat. That frees me of duty to him. Then I could accept the balance of the money from you, and become a retainer of yours.”
“Oh,” said Hoddan.
“You need a retainer badly,” said Thal. “You do not know the customs here. For example, there is enmity between Don Loris and the young Lord Ghek. If the young Lord Ghek is as enterprising as he should be, some of his retainers should be lying in wait to cut our throats as we approach Don Loris’ stronghold.”
“Hm-m-m,” said Hoddan grimly. But Thal seemed undisturbed. “This system of gifts and presents sounds complicated. Why doesn’t Don Loris simply give you so much a year, or week, or whatnot?”
Thal made a shocked sound.
“That would be pay! A Darthian gentleman does not serve for pay! To offer it would be insult!” Then he said, “Listen!”
He reined in. Hoddan clumsily followed his example. After a moment or two Thal clucked to his horse and started off again.
“It was nothing,” he said regretfully. “I hoped we were riding into an ambush.”
Hoddan grunted. It could be that he was being told a tall tale. But back at the spaceport, the men who came after him waving large knives had seemed sincere enough.
“Why should we be ambushed?” he asked. “And why do you hope for it?”
“Your weapons would destroy our enemies,” said Thal placidly, “and the pickings would be good.” He added: “We should be ambushed because the Lady Fani refused to marry the Lord Ghek. She is Don Loris’ daughter, and to refuse to marry a man is naturally a deadly insult. So he should ravage Don Loris’ lands at every opportunity until he gets a chance to carry off the Lady Fani and marry her by force. That is the only way the insult can be wiped out.”
“I see,” said Hoddan ironically.
He didn’t. The two horses topped a rise, and far in the distance there was a yellow light, with a mist above it as of illuminated smoke.
“That is Don Loris’ stronghold,” said Thal. He sighed. “It looks like we may not be ambushed.”
They weren’t. It was very dark where the horses forged ahead through brushwood. As they moved onward, the single light became two. They were great bonfires burning in iron cages some forty feet up in the air. Those cages projected from the battlements of a massive, cut-stone wall. There was no light anywhere else underneath the stars.
Thal rode almost underneath the cressets and shouted upward. A voice answered. Presently a gate clanked open and a black, cavelike opening appeared behind it. Thal rode grandly in, and Hoddan followed. Now that the ride seemed over, he let himself realize where he ached from the unaccustomed exercise. Everywhere. He also guessed at the area of his skin first rubbed to blisters and then to the discomfort of raw flesh underneath.
The gate clanked shut. Torches waved overhead. Hoddan found that he and Thal had ridden into a very tiny courtyard. Twenty feet above them, an inner battlemented wall offered excellent opportunities for the inhabitants of the castle to throw things down at visitors who after admission turned out to be undesired.
Thal shouted further identifications, including a boastful and entirely untruthful declaration that he and Hoddan, together, had slaughtered twenty men in one place and thirty in another, and left them lying in their gore.
The voices that replied sounded derisive. Somebody came down a rope and fastened the gate from the inside. With an extreme amount of creaking, an inner gate swung wide. Men came out of it and took the horses. Hoddan dismounted, and it seemed to him that he creaked as loudly as the gate. Thal swaggered, displaying coins he had picked from the pockets of the men the stun-pistols had disabled. He said splendidly to Hoddan:
“I go to announce your coming to Don Loris. These are his retainers. They will give you to drink.” He added amiably, “If you were given food, it would be disgraceful to cut your throat.”
He disappeared. Hoddan carried his ship bag and followed a man in a dirty pink shirt to a stone-walled room containing a table and a chair. He sat down, relieved to have a rest for his back. The man in the pink shirt brought him a flagon of wine. He disappeared again.
Hoddan drank sour wine and brooded. He was very hungry and very tired, and it seemed to him that he had been disillusioned in a new dimension. Morbidly, he remembered a frequently given lecture from his grandfather on Zan.
“It’s no use!” it was the custom of his grandfather to say. “There’s not a bit o’ use in having brains! All they do is get you into trouble! A lucky idiot’s ten times better off than a brainy man with a jinx on him! A smart man starts thinkin’, and he thinks himself into a jail cell if his luck is bad, and good luck’s wasted on him because it ain’t reasonable and he don’t believe in it when it happens! It’s taken me a lifetime to keep my brains from ruinin’ me! No, sir! I hope none o’ my descendants inherit my brains! I pity ’em if they do!”
Hoddan had been on Darth not more than four hours. In that time he’d found himself robbed, had resented it, had been the object of two spirited attempts at assassination, had ridden an excruciating number of miles on an unfamiliar animal, and now found himself in a stone dungeon and deprived of food lest feeding him obligate his host not to cut his throat. And he’d gotten into this by himself! He’d chosen it! He’d practically asked for it!
He began strongly to share his grandfather’s disillusioned view of brains.
* * * *
After a long time the door of the cell opened. Thal was back, chastened.
“Don Loris wants to talk to you,” he said in a subdued voice. “He’s not pleased.”
Hoddan took another gulp of the wine. He picked up his ship bag and limped to the door. He decided painfully that he was limping on the wrong leg. He tried the other. No improvement. He really needed to limp on both.
He followed a singularly silent Thal through a long stone corridor and up stone steps until they came to a monstrous hall with torches in holders on the side walls. It was barbarically hung with banners, but it was not exactly a cheery place. At the far end logs burned in a great fireplace.
Don Loris sat in a carved chair beside it; wizened and white-bearded, in a fur-trimmed velvet robe, with a peevish expression on his face.
“My chieftain,” said Thal subduedly, “here is the engineer from Walden.”
Hoddan scowled at Don Loris, whose expression of peevishness did not lighten. He did regard Hoddan with a flicker of interest, however. A stranger who unfeignedly scowls at a feudal lord with no superior and many inferiors is anyhow a novelty.
“Thal tells me,” said Don Loris fretfully, “that you and he, together, slaughtered some dozens of the retainers of my neighbors today. I consider it unfortunate. They may ask me to have the two of you hanged, and it would be impolite to refuse.”
Hoddan said truculently:
“I considered it impolite for your neighbors’ retainers to march toward me waving large knives and announcing what they intended to do to my inwards with them!”
“Yes,” agreed Don Loris impatiently. “I concede that point. It is natural enough to act hastily at such times. But still—How many did you kill?”
“None,” said Hoddan curtly. “I shot them with stun-pistols I’d just charged in the control room of the landing grid.”
Don Loris sat up straight.
“Stun-pistols?” he demanded sharply. “You used
stun-pistols on Darth?”
“Naturally on Darth,” said Hoddan with some tartness. “I was here! But nobody was killed. One or two may be slightly blistered. All of them had their pockets picked by Thal. I understand that is a local custom. There’s nothing to worry about.”
But Don Loris stared at him, aghast.
“But this is deplorable!” he protested. “Stun-pistols used here? It is the one thing I would have given strict orders to avoid! My neighbors will talk about it. Some of them may even think about it! You could have used any other weapon, but of all things why did you have to use a stun-pistol?”
“Because I had one,” said Hoddan briefly.
“Horrible!” said Don Loris peevishly. “The worst thing you could possibly have done! I have to disown you. Unmistakably! You’ll have to disappear at once. We’ll blame it on Ghek’s retainers.”
Hoddan said:
“Disappear? Me?”
“Vanish,” said Don Loris. “I suppose there’s no real necessity to cut your throat, but you plainly have to disappear, though it would have been much more discreet if you’d simply gotten killed.”
“I was indiscreet to survive?” demanded Hoddan bristling.
“Extremely so!” snapped Don Loris. “Here I had you come all the way from Walden to help arrange a delicate matter, and before you’d traveled even the few miles to my castle—within minutes of landing on Darth!—you spoiled everything! I am a reasonable man, but there are the facts! You used stun-pistols, so you have to disappear. I think it generous for me to say only until people on Darth forget that such things exist. But the two of you…oh, for a year or so…there are some fairly cozy dungeons—”
Hoddan seethed suddenly. He’d tried to do something brilliant on Walden, and had been framed for jail for life. He’d defended his life and property on Darth, and nearly the same thing popped up as a prospect. Hoddan angrily suspected fate and chance of plain conspiracy against him.
But there was an interruption. A clanking of arms sounded somewhere nearby. Men with long, gruesome, glittering spears came through a doorway. They stood aside. A girl entered the great hall. More spearmen followed her. They stopped by the door. The girl came across the hall.
She was a pretty girl, but Hoddan hardly noticed the fact. With so many other things on his mind, he had no time for girls.
Thal, behind him, said in a quivering voice:
“My Lady Fani, I beg you to plead with your father for his most faithful retainer!”
The girl looked surprisedly at him. Her eyes fell on Hoddan. She looked interested. Hoddan, at that moment, was very nearly as disgusted and as indignant as a man could be. He did not look romantically at her—which to the Lady Fani, daughter of that Don Loris who was prince of this and baron of that and so on, was news. He did not look at her at all. He ground his teeth.
“Don’t try to wheedle me, Fani!” snapped Don Loris. “I am a reasonable man, but I indulge you too much—even to allowing you to refuse that young imbecile Ghek, with no end of inconvenience as a result. But I will not have you question my decision about Thal and this Hoddan person!”
The girl said pleasantly:
“Of course not, Father. But what have they done?”
“The two of them,” snapped Don Loris again, “fought twenty men today and defeated all of them! Thal plundered them. Then thirty other men, mounted, tried to avenge the first and they defeated them also! Thal plundered eighteen. And all this was permissible, if unlikely. But they did it with stun-pistols! Everybody within news range will talk of it! They’ll know that this Hoddan came to Darth to see me! They’ll suspect that I imported new weapons for political purposes! They’ll guess at the prettiest scheme I’ve had these twenty years!”
The girl stood still. A spearman leaned his weapon against the wall, raced across the hall, shifted a chair to a convenient position for the Lady Fani to sit on it, and raced back to his fellows. She sat down.
“But did they really defeat so many?” she asked, marveling. “That’s wonderful! And Thal was undoubtedly fighting in defense of someone you’d told him to protect, as a loyal retainer should do. Wasn’t he?”
“I wish,” fumed her father, “that you would not throw in irrelevances! I sent him to bring this Hoddan here this afternoon, not to massacre my neighbors’ retainers—or rather, not to not massacre them. A little blood-letting would have done no harm, but stun-pistols—”
“He was protecting somebody he was told to protect,” said Fani. “And this other man, this—”
“Hoddan. Bron Hoddan,” said her father irritably. “Yes. He was protecting himself! Doubtless he thought he did me a service in doing that! But if he’d only let himself get killed quietly the whole affair would be simplified!”
The Lady Fani said with quiet dignity:
“By the same reasoning, Father, it would simplify things greatly if I let the Lord Ghek kidnap me.”
“It’s not the same thing at all—”
“At least,” said Fani, “I wouldn’t have a pack of spearmen following me about like puppies everywhere I go!”
“It’s not the same—”
“Their breaths smelling of wine except when they smell of beer, and they breathe very noisily and—”
“It’s not—”
“And it’s especially unreasonable,” said the Lady Fani with even greater dignity, “when you could put Thal and this—Hoddan person on duty to guard me instead. If they can fight twenty and thirty men at once, all by themselves, it doesn’t seem to me that you think much of my safety when you want to lock them up somewhere instead of using them to keep your daughter safe from that particularly horrible Ghek!”
Don Loris swore in a cracked voice. Then he said:
“To end the argument I’ll think it over. Until tomorrow. Now go away!”
Fani, beaming, rose and kissed him on the forehead. He squirmed. She turned to leave, and beckoned casually for Thal and Hoddan to follow her.
“My chieftain,” said Thal tremulously, “do we depart, too?”
“Yes!” rasped Don Loris. “Get out of my sight!”
Thal moved with agility in the wake of the Lady Fani. Hoddan picked up his bag and followed. This, he considered darkly, was in the nature of a reprieve only. And if those three spaceships overhead did come from Walden—but why three?
* * * *
The Lady Fani went out the door she’d entered by. Some of the spearmen went ahead, and others closed in behind her. Hoddan followed. There were stone steps leading upward. They were steep and uneven and interminable. Hoddan climbed on aching legs for what seemed ages.
Stars appeared. The leading spearmen stepped out on a flagstoned level area. When Hoddan got there he saw that they had arrived at the battlements of a high part of the castle wall. Starlight showed a rambling wall of circumvallation, with peaked roofs inside it. He could look down into a courtyard where a fire burned and several men busily did things beside it. But there were no other lights. Beyond the castle wall the ground stretched away toward a nearby range of rugged low mountains. It was vaguely splotched with different degrees of darkness, where fields and pastures and woodland copses stood.
“Here’s a bench,” said Fani cheerfully, “and you can sit down beside me and explain things. What’s your name, again, and where did you come from?”
“I’m Bron Hoddan,” said Hoddan. He found himself scowling. “I come from Zan, where everybody is a space pirate. My grandfather heads the most notorious of the pirate gangs.”
“Wonderful!” said Fani, admiringly. “I knew you couldn’t be just an ordinary person and fight like my father said you did today!”
Thal cleared his throat.
“Lady Fani—”
“Hush!” said Fani. “You’re a nice old fuddy-duddy that father sent to the spaceport because he figured you’d be too timid to get into trouble. Hush!” To Hoddan she said interestedly, “Now, tell me all about the fighting. It must have been terrible!”
Sh
e watched him with her head on one side, expectantly.
“The fighting I did today,” said Hoddan angrily, “was exactly as dangerous and as difficult as shooting fish in a bucket. A little more trouble, but not much.”
Even in the starlight he could see that her expression was more admiring than before.
“I thought you’d say something like that!” she said contentedly. “Go on!”
“That’s all,” said Hoddan.
“Quite all?”
“I can’t think of anything else,” he told her. He added drearily: “I rode a horse for three hours today. I’m not used to it. I ache. Your father is thinking of putting me in a dungeon until some scheme or other of his goes through. I’m disappointed. I’m worried about three lights that went across the sky at sundown and I’m simply too tired and befuddled for normal conversation.”
“Oh,” said Fani.
“If I may take my leave,” said Hoddan querulously, “I’ll get some rest and do some thinking when I get up. I’ll hope to have more entertaining things to say.”
He got to his feet and picked up his bag.
“Where do I go?” he asked.
Fani regarded him enigmatically. Thal squirmed.
“Thal will show you.” Then Fani said deliberately, “Bron Hoddan, will you fight for me?”
Thal plucked anxiously at his arm. Hoddan said politely:
“If at all desirable, yes. But now I must get some sleep.”
“Thank you,” said Fani. “I am troubled by the Lord Ghek.”
She watched him move away. Thal, moaning softly, went with him down another monstrosity of a stone stairway.
“Oh, what folly!” mourned Thal. “I tried to warn you! You would not pay attention! When the Lady Fani asked if you would fight for her, you should have said if her father permitted you that honor. But you said yes! The spearmen heard you! Now you must either fight the Lord Ghek within a night and day or be disgraced!”
“I doubt,” said Hoddan tiredly, “that the obligations of Darthian gentility apply to the grandson of a pirate or an escap.… To me.”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 150
