Omens of Kregen [Dray Prescot #36]

by Alan Burt Akers

  Once contemptuous of the silly remark, I now saw its value in covering up the absence of thought.

  The lookouts shouted down again.

  “More than thirty."

  “Ah,” I said.

  Delia threw me a suspicious look. Casually and with what I hoped was an insouciant air, I strolled over to the bulwarks and leaning out peered ahead. Well, yes, I could see the fliers out there, bearing on, chips of rust against the light.

  More than thirty? We had in this squadron sixteen vessels, a mixture of fighting vollers and larger ships designated transports for this operation. This op was, as I have explained, intended to harass the enemy from the air and hold him until our main forces could come up.

  Now the devils had provided their own air, a completely new force of which we had no intelligence. Therefore, the situation had changed, the odds had altered and the stakes had been raised.

  There was no question of sending our own aerial cavalry aloft. Our two squadrons, hardly more than a hundred and twenty flyers, would be hopelessly outnumbered. I did not relish the idea of a single Valkan astride his flutduin being attacked by ten or a dozen flutsmen.

  “They fly on apace,” said Targon.

  “So I observe,” I said.

  “It will be—interesting."

  The lookouts screeched down for the third time.

  “More than forty!"

  Now was no time for vacuous expressions like: “H'mm.” Now was no time for shilly-shallying, and most certainly now was no time for me to act like some proud intemperate and bloody stupid emperor.

  “That's it,” I said. I made my voice into that rasping and unpleasant gravel-shifting voice of old, and even good old Targon the Tapster jumped.

  “All out.” I fairly hurled the words at the helmsman, using the old foretop-hailing lungpower that had carried commands through many a gale in the Bay of Biscay. “Reverse Course! Speed lever hard over—full speed ahead!"

  Carrying on with the bullroarer of a voice, I shouted commands to the signal Deldars to run up the flags to spell the message out to the rest of the squadron.

  “You, Dray Prescot, are running away!” said Delia.

  “Too right,” I told her, still wrought up. “By Zair! I'm not having all these people of ours chopped uselessly."

  The small almost secret smile that touched her lips heartened me. Delia knew me well enough. She'd seen me change from a hot-headed and damned stupid fighting man into an emperor who was somewhat more cautious of other peoples’ skins. As for myself, well, I suppose had there been no one else to concern myself about, I'd have gone raging into that hopeless fight and you would not now be listening to my words as I relate my story of my life on Kregen.

  The fliers of our squadron curved in the air, swinging about in graceful arcs, all their brave flags flying.

  “Cap'n,” I said in a more moderate voice to Captain Lorgad Voromin, in command of Heart of Imrien, who stood like a bluff barrel girt with leather armor and with feathers in his helmet, face like a beetroot. “Cap'n, I crave your pardon. Would you kindly allow your command to fly last in the squadron?"

  “With all my heart, majis."

  In the violence of those moments before I'd shouted the orders to reverse course, I had been so wrought up I'd thrown overboard altogether the etiquette of ship command.

  Of course, I should have requested Captain Voromin to give the actual sailing orders for his own ship. I had trodden on his toes with a vengeance. He was a bluff old sea dog, transferred to aerial duty, and I thought he would understand. We had not served together before; I had a shrewd idea he knew my mettle.

  If he decided to cut up rough or to try to indicate his perfectly understandable resentment, I'd have to think on, as they say.

  The clouds of flutsmen were for only a few moments thrown by our maneuver. They sensed victory and came flying in with renewed vigor.

  This was to be expected.

  Heart of Imrien dropped back through the squadron to take up station in the rear.

  We did not sail in this position alone. On our starboard flew Pride of Falkerium and to our larboard Azure Strigicaw paced us carefully. Both ships were crammed with men, fighting vollers, and were mighty comforting, by Krun, I can tell you.

  A youngster, Ortyg Thingol, all rosy cheeks and brown curls, smart in his cadet's uniform, rushed up with a signal slate. I'd seen the colors breaking from the signal yards of both Storm Rising and Nath's Hammer, the ships carrying our aerial cavalry squadrons.

  Before the signal cadet had time to gasp out anything at all I snarled at him: “No, Cadet Thingol. Signal back Request Refused."

  He went scarlet clear up past those fetching brown curls.

  “Quidang, majister!"

  Galloping off back to the signal halyards, he fairly broke the speed records. I sighed. If my precious aerial cavalry lads had their wish and took off, the squadrons would just simply be ripped apart. They would be wasted for nothing. They might buy us a few moments of time. That kind of exchange might be regarded by your puissant high and mighty emperor as a fair deal; it did not suit me.

  “Here they come,” said Targon the Tapster in a matter-of-fact way.

  “Shaft the cramphs good."

  Bows bending, gleaming in the light of the twin suns, slender shafts flashing outwards, feathers all aglitter in the radiance. Crossbows clanging and twanging, and the cruel bolts hurtling. Varters coughing their ugly chunks of rock, or driving their long barbed darts deeply into enemy flesh. Oh, yes, by Krun, we shafted them.

  Because of our hurtling onward speed the windrush drove our flags stiffly to the rear, making the reading of signals difficult for ships ahead and astern. Partially to overcome this problem, the aerial sailors of Kregen fitted up guy lines on the outside of the flags, by which means they could draw the outer edges around to make the flags more easily identifiable. This could be done for short moments only. Even then, more than one set of flags was ripped to shreds.

  “Signal to the lead voller,” I rapped out. “Change course to south southeast.” We were rushing along almost due southerly.

  I wanted to avoid drawing this ravening pack on our heels over the heads of those refugees.

  By this time we were really shifting along. After two more abortive attempts at us, the flutsmen were left to our rear, for no fluttrell can fly as fast as a voller at top speed.

  The pursuing airboats kept on after us, and I wondered if they were picking up their aerial cavalry, or if they had not yet mastered that tricky technique. We kept up a watch for what went on back there; but the distance and the haze of afternoon rendered accurate observation difficult. There were far fewer fluttrells in the sky; that could simply be because they had called it a day and flown back to their base.

  The haze thickened into the outskirts of real clouds.

  Captain Voromin rubbed his hands.

  “If we are to run away, majis, then a few handy clouds will not come amiss; no, by Corg."

  “Right you are, Cap'n."

  Lorgad Voromin had been the master of one of the superb sailing galleons of Vallia. Now he had transferred to the Vallian Air Service he took, as I had instituted recently, the rank of Jiktar as the commander of a largish vessel. Still, we all called the old sea dog Cap'n still, which pleased him.

  Weirdly enough, this business of running away did not distress half as much as I anticipated. Those folk who had known me in the long ago when I'd first arrived on Kregen would snort with derision at what I was now doing. Dray Prescot, they'd say, laughing, Dray Prescot run away? Never!

  In these latter days, concerns over wider issues than merely my own skin motivated me.

  The clouds whisked by, thickening and then thinning and then churning into a white froth that rolled back over our forecastle and along the deck like spilled milk.

  Before the opportunity was altogether lost, I managed to get off further signals to the squadron. Their instructions were to bear straight on until we broke out of the
clouds. We were making slightly under nine db's.[2]

  [2 db's: dwaburs per bur. A dwabur is five miles and a bur is forty minutes. A.B.A.]

  With the flutsmen left straggling to the rear we had the sky to play in.

  There had to be a plan to fetch success out of apparent failure.

  Captain Voromin, in a quiet conversational voice, said: “The clouds will thin soon, I can feel that in my bones.” Then he went on: “As the bitter blast blows the leaves away, so the wide-winged bird breasts the wind and soars."

  “San Dweloin, I think, Captain. But I could not put my finger on the exact stanza,” said Delia.

  Voromin let rip a pleased wheezing snort.

  “Aye, majestrix, San Dweloin, who, being dead these three thousand seasons or more, is a great comfort to me."

  There was no need for me to marvel at Voromin's love of poetry. I'd been thinking of him as a “bluff old sea dog.” Well, he was, to be sure; but the cliché rang hollow set against the pretty discussion of verse that ensued upon the deck of Heart of Imrien. And, as we thus discussed the niceties of poetry, so the clouds thinned and I knew the time for decision grew near.

  By quoting those two particular lines, Voromin clearly indicated what he wanted to do. I gathered the quotation came from San Dweloin's poem “The Force of Human Nature,” written in his old age and extolling light and life over darkness and death.

  Well, that light came very often after a damned long dark tunnel.

  “Yes, Cap'n,” I said, breaking into a point of the over-use of alliteration. “If you'll kindly signal out for the flutduins to be loosed on my signal, I shall be obliged."

  “Quidang!"

  “Let us gain more height. Certainly I want to clear the tops of the clouds before we leave them."

  There was no great ensuing bustle as the voller lifted, for the simple reason that the Deldar at the controls merely pushed over his levers and the vessel rose smoothly through the clouds. Aboard the other vessels of the squadron as we flew from cloud to cloud and passed alongside the flanks of the monstrous masses of whiteness our signals were picked up. There was no guarantee that all the vollers would read the signals; we might lose a few carrying straight on below us.

  Of the various classes and types of airboats manufactured on Kregen, we had since our alliance with Hamal had the opportunity of acquiring new types. Still troubled by the destruction caused to her shipyards during the wars, Hamal was not yet back to full-scale voller production. Therefore, we had very few vollers in which the onward force contains also the air within the envelope. We had to keep our heads down behind the windscreens. The clouds when we lanced through them went past like boiling milk all streaming in long lightning flashes of vapor.

  I said to Larghos Hemlok, the first lieutenant: “Fires nice and hot, Hik Hemlok?"

  He smiled with a peculiarly bloodthirsty look.

  “Bright and hot, majister. Bright and hot."

  If I mention that the first luff's name of Hemlok had no connotative meaning with the word hemlock in terrestrial usage, that is true; he remained a fellow who could hemlock an opponent's drink in the middle of a passage of arms.

  “By Corg!” quoth Captain Voromin. “We're going to have ourselves a lovely lot of bonfires!"

  Well, that was the plan. Simpleminded enough; but something better than tamely running away.

  Soaring and leaping through the air, Heart of Imrien sailed up between two vast expanses of white forming a chasm in which a fleet might be lost.

  So mixed up and out of formation had the squadron become by this time that I was positively gratified to spy six other vollers fleeting along with us. The other ten would be haring along between the masses of cloud. Well, what had to be done would have to be done with the ships available to me now.

  Higher and higher we climbed until, with the exception of a few towering cumulus pinnacles like Mount Everests piling away left and right, we broke through into the light of the twin suns. That streaming mingled radiance of Zim and Genodras bathed all the clouds in a rosy jade glory. The view was breathtaking. Still, we were not sightseers, we were warriors of the air, and we were after our prey.

  Tradition means a great deal on Kregen.

  Even though we flew in a Vallian Air Service flier, and for Kregen all the modern appurtenances surrounded us, still the lookouts used the time-honored words.

  The lookouts screeched down the sightings in the hallowed way.

  “Sail ho!"

  Out from those mazy masses of clouds below and to the rear of us the first of the pursuing vollers rocketed out like avenging demons.

  * * *

  Chapter four

  Ambush in the clouds

  Captain Voromin handled Heart of Imrien beautifully. His orders to his helmsman were crisp and not to be misunderstood. Lookouts positioned along the lower fighting galleries kept up a constant stream of information regarding the movements and courses of the hostile vessels. Our ship cut tightly around in a sweet one-eighty-degree turn and pounced.

  The signal to release the flutduin squadron was passed. Unfortunately, I could see only one cavalry-carrying vessel, Nath's Hammer, still in company with us. When the flyers took off the thought occurred to me they looked far more like the blown leaves in San Dweloin's poem than the “wide-winged birds breasting the wind."

  They didn't bother to form up. They simply flew headlong for the enemy ships. I tore my gaze away. They had their orders and they knew their business. They would get on with what they had to do just as we were getting on with what the situation required here.

  Inevitably, when fire is maneuvered and manhandled aboard ship, particularly a painted wooden ship, extreme caution and care must be taken, and some language is used.

  The Ship-Deldar, purple and engorged, bashed his stick about and actually put a steadying hand to the carrying pole. The fire went below in good order contained in its pottery and metal canister. I decided against going below myself to the lower gallery. I'd done my share of setting ships alight.

  Voromin's reversal of course and immediate swoop into combat left the lead ships of the enemy force no chance whatsoever. As they debouched from the clouds so we sailed above them. One, two, three, the flaming pots of combustibles went over the side. One, two, three, and then one, two, three again.

  “They've caught the leader!” screeched up the last in the chain of message relayers. This was young Cadet Ortyg Thingol. His higher voice near cracked with excitement.

  And, a heartbeat later: “And number two's burning!"

  We circled like a hawk above fluttering prey. Alongside Delia I could look down from a perch in the bulwarks. Captain Voromin occupied a similar niche on the other side, reserved for him. I might be the emperor, but when Captain Voromin wanted to look over this side of his ship, I'd have to shift out of the way sharpish.

  The view below stretched away and away, dizzy with perspective. Out from the massed and bulbous shapes of the clouds flew the pursuing vollers, popping out like fish leaping from the seabreakers. As they appeared so our flutduins whirled above them, their riders hurling down firepots. Some missed. Some fizzled out. Some were extinguished by alert fire parties on the decks of the ships beneath. But many did not miss, did not fizzle out, were not extinguished.

  The pursuing ships burned.

  Through the warm sharpness of the afternoon air I could smell the stink of burning below. Black clouds roiled away, smearing all that white brightness with their foulness. I do not like to see ships burn. The act is indecent in the sight of a sailorman.

  For the sake of the unity of Vallia, and subsequently for the unification of all Paz and the defeat of the Shanks, these abominable acts must be committed.

  Like minnows darting this way and that with the light of the suns glinting along their flanks, the ships twisted and turned in midair.

  As I have indicated, Heart of Imrien was not an overlarge flier. She could not maneuver with the same agility as a sleek, fast voller of the sma
ller types. She could swerve well enough about in the air to perform the duty now called for. Captain Voromin handled her smartly. We had coursed clean over the three lead ships and set them ablaze before the enemy reacted.

  After that it would be a matter of clawing for height and speed and outmaneuvering our opponents.

  Pride of Falkerium and Azure Strigicaw swirled into action, flaming the following ships. I tried to count the numbers of the enemy, and amid all the headlong rushing of ships through the air, of smoke and cloud and of the saddle birds gyrating like autumn leaves in a gale, the task was difficult. I fancied something like eighteen ships had pursued us on this course. The others could be anywhere. So, for that matter, could the rest of our squadron.

  “They do not,” commented Targon the Tapster in my ear, “they most certainly do not care for this."

  “Nobody would."

  Targon referred to some of the other members of the choice band who had followed me when, as Jak the Drang, I'd aspired to be Emperor of Vallia, folk like Naghan ti Lodkwara, Cleitar the Standard, Dorgo the Clis and Uthnior Chavonthjid. “They're scattered about the squadron,” he said with great satisfaction, “and those who aren't here will kick themselves when I tell ‘em, by Vox!"

  “I believe Mazdo Voordun is aboard Strelviz Lancer,” I said. “And, see, there she goes plummeting down on that fellow with the green and yellow hull—ah!"

  “Yes!” said Delia. “The poor ship is burning."

  “Poor ship, my lady,” said Targon. “She'd have burned us if she had the chance."

  “Yes, I know and, of course, you are right. All the same, when a ship burns the world is a poorer place."

  Targon held his peace. I agreed with Delia; but I perfectly saw the common-sense position of my ferocious jurukker commander.

  These fellows of mine in the guard corps, well, they didn't go in much for high-flown and imposing-sounding ranks. They were of the emperor's bodyguard. When they told a chuktar to jump, he jumped.

  And, I hasten to add, I kept a close eye out to see that this was not abused. The last thing I wanted was to create an elite, hated throughout the army. That was not my way, and was strictly counterproductive. Targon gave a hitch to his safety belt. Since a certain disastrous accident, I'd intemperately ordered that belts be manufactured, each with its own pair of small silver boxes that gave lift, and further instructed that they be worn by aerial sailors.