Fliers of Antares Page 10

  “If you are right, Felder—” Vad Larghos took a shuddering breath. “If you are right, my boy, we must take our revenge upon these mad leem!”

  As you know I am not a man much concerned with revenge. Justice — of a suitable kind — usually satisfies me. But I own I shared a little of the Vad’s anger. Punishment must be seen to be inflicted, for the country was falling to pieces and good men were dead.

  We crept on and reached the final packed-earth space before the row of tall windows fronting the house. I looked carefully in the streaming moonlight and could see no sign of movement.

  The Vad waved his men to left and right and, their bows nocked, they spread out.

  Lara stood close to me, breathing in quick excited gasps, her face pale in the moon-glow. I put my hand on her left upper arm, and pressed, and she turned quickly to me and would have spoken, but I took my hand and the thraxter away swiftly and touched the hilt to my lips. I was indicating silence upon her; I think, now, she understood that little gesture differently.

  Those around me were aware of the tense and jumpy business this was. At any moment a storm of arrows and bolts might spurt from those dark windows and cut us down. Someone had to go up to the front door and find out the truth of the situation.

  Why I did what I did, I think, is easy to explain. Such boredom, such bitterness, such hellish misery had been my portion ever since I had been parted from Delia that a kind of fey recklessness had overtaken me. As I marched up to the door with my shield high and thraxter low I knew — I knew — the ranch house would be deserted when I broke in.

  I am not given to having my nerves racked by the various frightful experiences that befall me from time to time and which make life on Kregen so fascinating. If a bolt flicked toward me I would take it on my shield. I wanted to know what had become of Coper and Sinkie. I marched up to the door and kicked it in and smashed my way inside.

  The darkness was partitioned by the long angular parallelograms of pink moonlight from the windows, paired from She of the Veils and the Maiden with the Many Smiles, softer and stronger, as one is the fourth and the other the first moon of Kregen. I padded in, vicious and ready for instant combat.

  The house was empty.

  Mindner followed me in and then the Vad and Lara and we searched, and gradually, with the lighting of torches and the shouting and running of feet, we made a nice little hullabaloo, as the Vad’s men turned the house upside down.

  “You take great chances, Notor Prescot,” said Jiktar Mindner. He flexed his four arms meaningfully.

  “Perhaps. Where will the rasts have taken the Pallan and the Lady Sinkie?”

  “We must find them!” exclaimed Lara. “Poor Sinkie! Think what may be happening to her!”

  “I fear they must all be dead, daughter,” said her father, the Vad, somewhat gruffly.

  “If they are, Vad,” I said, in my old surly way, “I will not believe it until I see them lying before me — dead.”

  “Oh!” said Lara, and she put her sword down as though suddenly aware of what it was.

  “Jiktar!” I said and I saw them all jerk up at my tone. I had spoken as I would have spoken to a Jiktar of the army of Vallia or Valka, or a wild clansman who had not jumped immediately when I asked a question.

  “I think—” Mindner began, a little hazily.

  “By Vox! Spit it out!”

  “If, as Dolar said, this terrible thing was done by the local army unit, they might have gone back to their barracks.”

  “Are the Dwadjangs then so envious of the Obdjangs?” As he opened his mouth to make some sort of answer I chopped him off. “No matter. I know what I know of the Djangs. We fly at once to the barracks. Jiktar Mindner! You lead!”

  “Yes, Notor Prescot.”

  And so once more we mounted our flyers and took the wide-winged wind-eaters into the night sky of Kregen.

  As we hurtled through the rushing air I considered how strange it was that these big rough fighting-men, the Djangs, so desperately needed someone to tell them what to do in moments like this. In a battle or an affray Mindner would never have been at a loss. If I say that the Djangs fight in such wise as to turn even Chuliks a little more yellowly pale than usual, I do not exaggerate. But they need leaders!

  They would have all gone flying off to the barracks, whooping, to plunge down into as bloody an affray as you could wish; I had had to tell Mindner to detail a man to stay at the deserted ranch house to warn the following flights.

  Yet this was only a tactical move, nothing clever in it, and I suspected there were as many degrees of intuitive intelligence as well as learned skill among the Djangs as among any other diffs. A number of the young fighting-men of Djanduin would go off to become mercenaries; but the vast majority stayed at home to work the soil and serve as soldiers in their own army, constantly menaced by the Gorgrens. Therefore the formidable fighting shape of the four-armed Djang was seldom encountered in the empires and kingdoms and free cities of Kregen. Djanduin is a rich kingdom, and yet it holds itself aloof from the rest of Havilfar, secure behind its treacherous bogs of the Yawfi Suth, the mysterious waters of the Wendwath, and the serried peaks of the Mountains of Mirth.

  There was action aplenty at the barracks.

  We saw the lights flaring and heard the yelling and shouting, whoops of ferocious merriment, the discordant clanging and banging of gongs and punklinglings and drums, and the wailing of flutes, the brazen notes of razztorns and trumpets.

  We touched down out of sight and Mindner looked over a screen of thorn-ivy bushes forming a kind of natural boma around the barrack area, and he looked as delighted, as fierce, as obsessively pleased, as any fighting-man has any right to be casting his avaricious gaze on his foemen.

  “They are Dwadjangs of North Djanduin, very fine doughty warriors, and I have no doubt that the madman Nath Jagdur has besotted their minds with evil promises.”

  If it came to a fight between Djangs, as I knew, they’d fight, by Zair, they’d fight!

  I wished to avoid bloodshed. Oh, I was bitter and savage enough in my self-misery not to care who got themselves killed; but I suppose the devil was working his dark and devious plans in me even then.

  We could see Coper and Sinkie, with other Obdjangs and a few Dwadjangs who must have remained loyal to them, sitting in a corner of the compound, the light from the two moons bright upon them. They had been bound with thongs. They looked dejected and frightened, as they had every right to be. And yet I saw Coper leaning toward his wife, and the way her little body jerked upright, her whiskers quivering, and I could guess with what sweet and reasonable fire he was putting courage back into her. He was a fine man, Pallan O. Fellin Coper!

  The noise came from a drunken band of soldiery who had broken out the musical instruments; each man with a piece that would make a noise was making a noise, and each man was playing a different tune from his neighbor. Other men sang and laughed and jumped, and continually they drank deeply of the liquor that poured from great barrels turned on their sides and wedged up on trestles. I sniffed. Dopa. Well, no wonder they were making this racket. Dopa is a fiendish drink guaranteed to make the coolest headed man fighting drunk in a second, if he takes it neat. The dopa dens usually water or soft-drink their dopa in the ratio of ten to one.

  “Drunk!” said Vad Larghos, with great distaste.

  “I think, Vad, that Kov Nath Jagdur has made them drunk, for otherwise it is doubtful, even though they are Northern Djangs, that they would do what they have done.” Mindner looked a little sick, as he looked on this betrayal of the army in which he served.

  “They may be too drunk to notice us,” I said. I merely tested the wind as I spoke, for I was forming theories about the Djang fighting-man.

  “The hulus!” said Mindner. “They’re drunk enough to tangle with a leem. They’ll see us.”

  There had to be a way around this. There were ten in the party of captives, and at least a hundred drunks cavorting about. Mindner had called them hulus.
Well, here on Earth we apply insulting names, in amused despair, to idiots who are doing something wrong that we know, in normal circumstances, they would not do. It is all in the tone of voice, as when you call a man a bastard or a ratbag you can mean many different things. On Kregen one such term is hulu. And it summed up these onker-rasts perfectly, for they were more villainous at the moment than a simple stupid onker, and yet not quite as outrightly villainous as rasts.

  I said to Mindner, “You will, on my signal, keep them occupied here. I am going to get them out with the flutduins.” He started to huff up at this, but I was brutal with him. “Don’t get yourself killed, Jiktar. And keep an eye open for the Lady Lara and her father. If you have to run away — aye! — run away from them, then run. Just give me a few murs in there, that is all.”

  He managed to get out, “I shall accompany you, Notor Pres—”

  “Do not be a nurdling onker! You keep those hulus occupied in there, and, by the Black Chunkrah, they won’t know a thing has hit ’em.”

  I gave him no time to argue. Back into that moon-spattered night I went, and the Lady Lara pattered along with me, and I turned my look on her, and I knew — Zair forgive me! — what my face looked like then. “Go back, Lara, and keep out of the way. If you do not, I shall tan you so that you won’t sit a zorca for a sennight!”

  “You hairy graint, Dray Prescot!”

  And then I — Dray Prescot — chuckled. It was not in me to laugh, not then. “I have been called a hairy graint before, Lara, many and many a time — to my eternal joy!”

  “Oh — you!” she said, and swung about and marched back to the distraction party outside the boma.

  Managing the flutduins was not as difficult as I had expected, and they followed me into the air on leading lines, a smoothly rhythmical flight that slotted them into a pattern that economically took up the minimum space their wide yellow wings required. We passed over the boma and that was the signal Mindner awaited. As I went streaking over the packed earth I twisted to look at Mindner and his party. They were putting up a brave show, loosing arrows, yelling and shrieking, and they’d thought to twist up quick torches from clumps of grass which they tossed cunningly down just the other side of the boma. These served before they burned out to illuminate the boma and the drunken soldiery and, by contrast, to drown the pink light of the two moons and throw Coper and the captives into shadow.

  The flutduins were birds that could not be easily hidden. I had no stupid ideas that I would not be seen. But the Vad’s marksmen were aware of the importance of Coper. So many Obdjangs had been killed that the Pallan of the Highways was now a most exalted personage. Vad Larghos’ men would shoot, and they would shoot to kill.

  The flutduins landed and I was off the back of my bird and at Coper and Sinkie with a hunting knife. Their thongs sliced free.

  “Oh! Notor Prescot!”

  “Up, Ortyg!” I yelled, as Sinkie, calling on her husband Ortyg, fainted into his arms. “Grab Sinkie and get on a flutduin! Move!

  Savage slashes that, I confess, drew blood, released the other captives and I herded them onto the remaining birds. The flutduins rose into the sky. A crossbow bolt sheared past my arm and vanished into the shadows. I whirled. Half a dozen drunken soldiers were staring at me, and shouting and gesticulating. One of them was trying to wind his arbalest, but the ratchet kept slipping and he kept falling over his own feet. Another drew his thraxter, waving wildly, and charged.

  I knew what they would have done to Coper and Sinkie when Kov Nath Jagdur arrived, and so I could resign myself to cutting this hulu down. He fell without a screech. The flutduins were aloft now, their yellow wings powerful in the pink moons-shine. I jumped for my bird, the last remaining one, and took off without strapping myself up in the clerketer. I found the ready bow and I drew and loosed six deadly shafts before we rose past the boma, and six of those less drunk than their fellows, who were trying to shoot up, fell, screeching.

  Out over the boma we whirled and a darkness descended as the crude torches flared and died. Then eyes adjusted and I was seeing my comrades rushing for the flutduins and mounting up. Each bird can carry three people, at push of pike, and we were not overloaded as we winged off into the Kregan night.

  No surprise at all, none whatsoever, that the Lady Lara contrived to leap up before me and let me grasp her around the waist as the flutduin belabored the air. She leaned back and her coppery hair brushed my cheeks.

  “I declare, Notor Prescot! Hai Jikai!”

  We flew off, and, I think, perhaps that had been a good Jikai. Not a High Jikai. But, still, a Jikai to remember.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Khokkak the Meddler and the King of Djanduin

  They say the devil finds work for idle hands.

  Well, there are many devils of many different shades of deviltry on Kregen, as there are parts of that profoundly mysterious planet where devils are accounted of no value at all; and I suppose the devil who got into me was most likely to be Khokkak the Meddler.

  I do not think it could have been Sly the Ambitious, or Gleen the Envious. No, on reflection, some few aspects of Hoko the Amusingly Malicious must have helped along the general deviltry of Khokkak the Meddler.

  At any event, what with my own desperate boredom and savage misery, and the way the country was going, and the stupid succession of stupid kings, and what was happening to fine people like Coper and Sinkie, for something to do I decided I would become king of Djanduin.

  This was a consciously mischievous decision.

  As you will know, among my clansmen my success there had been entirely because I would not allow myself to be killed, when, in truth, I had no great reason to live, and through the accumulation of obi and a growing respect, culminating in the selection by the elders and the election of myself as leader, subsequently Zorcander. And in Zenicce no one had been more surprised than I had been myself when Great-Aunt Shusha — who was not my great-aunt — had bestowed on me the House of Strombor. And in Valka, I had fought, I and my men, for the island, and they had petitioned behind my back with the Emperor to make me their Strom. As for being Prince Majister of Vallia, that meant nothing. Delia, as the Princess Majestrix, had been the prize not only for me, but I as her prize.

  So I had not gone out of my way to grasp for ranks and titles and honors. I had with some calculation accepted Can-thirda and Zamra, but they were political acquisitions, with an eye to the future.

  Here, in Djanduin, with much inner amusement, I took a calm decision. I, Dray Prescot, would make myself King of Djanduin.

  It would not be easy. That was all to the good. I had what was left of ten years to do it in, and the harder it was the more amusement I would have.

  Oh, do not think I did not falter on occasion as the years wore on, when I saw fine young men, superb fighting Djangs, dying on some stupid battlefield, or in some affray that went awry; but I took the weakling’s comfort in the knowledge that had I not struggled to put the country in order those fine young men would have died, anyway, and many more with them. When Nath Wonlin Sundermair was assassinated as he waited in my tent for me — while I was out repairing a varter that had been damaged by a chunk of rock thrown by the enemy artillery — do not think I was unmoved. N. Wonlin Sundermair had fought them and shouted for aid, and my guards had come running, too late. The assassins were caught. A military court sat, and adjudged, and they were hanged, all six of them, hanged and left to rot.

  The fateful charisma that envelops me whether I will it or not worked for me in Djanduin. Many men, and not only Djangs, but Lamnias and Fristles and Brokelsh and others of the marvelous diffs of Kregen, had reached a dead end in their hopes for Djanduin. The leemsheads were now so bold in their raids that only strongly escorted parties of non-Djangs might venture out onto the white dusty roads, or take cautiously to the air astride their flutduins.

  The onslaught of the Gorgrens had, at last and following on the death of Chuktar Naghan Rumferling, burst through a pathway of the Yaw
fi Suth, and a clever feint southward toward the Wendwath had sent the bulk of the Djanduin army rushing southward. The Gorgrens surged through the land of East Djanduin to reach the Mountains of Mirth. Here they were stopped, not by the army but by those old allies of Djanduin, the Mountains of Mirth and the desolate country at their feet to the east.

  You will recall that great period when the events chronicled in the song “The Fetching of Drak na Valka” were being enacted. Somehow, during this time when I struggled with only two hands to hold Djanduin together and to defeat the Gorgrens, I could take no high joy from the enterprise. No song, I thought, would be composed by the skalds of Djanduin to commemorate these wild and skirling events.

  Well, I was wrong in that, as you shall hear.

  One day when the little band I had gathered together — old soldiers, young men out for adventure, rascals like Khobo the So, one or two diffs from overseas who thought I looked a likely prospect for future plunder — came down into a hollow among tuffa trees and found the remnants of an army unit shattered and burned, I met Kytun Kholin Dom. We had a smart set-to with the Gorgrens — nasty brutes — before they were seen off, and I took pleasure from the way this tall and agile young Djang fought. He roared his joy as my men came running down swiftly into the hollow between the tuffa trees, and his thraxter twinkled merrily in and out, and his shield rang with return blows.

  “You are welcome, Dray Prescot!” he yelled at me, and dispatched his man and swung to engage the next. “Lara has told me what a great shaggy graint you are! But, Lahal! You are right welcome!”

  “Lahal, Kytun Dom,” I shouted, and ran to stand with him back to back and so beat off the last of the Gorgrens. Truly, he is a man among men, Kytun!

  We had incredible adventures together and he became a good comrade to whom I could confide much of my story. We understood each other. He was a Dwadjang, and therefore as bonny a fighter as there is on Kregen, and I was apim, and therefore as canny as an Obdjang. We formed a great team.