Swordships of Scorpio [Dray Prescot #4] Read online

  I said, “Naghan—will you spare a portion of the pelt—a trifle—to give Pando here a fine new tunic? Remember, he is the son of Tilda the Beautiful."

  Naghan put a foot into the stirrup of his zorca, who sniffed once at the zhantil, and finding it smelling dead, thereafter ignored it. He twisted around, his paunch straining that brilliant blue cummerbund.

  “A tunic for Pando? Of zhantil skin? Ho—I think Tilda of the Many Veils would like that. Ay! She would part with a whole amphora of the best wine of Jholaix for such a zhantil tunic for her adored son!"

  Jholaix, I knew, was the extreme northeastern country of Pandahem, which island is split up into a number of nations of the Pandaheem, and, further, I knew Jholaix wine to be scarce, dear, and extremely potent and pleasant to the tongue.

  “You mercenary old rascal, Naghan the Paunch!” I said.

  But he merely mounted his zorca, with an almighty belch, and winked down at me, whereat I nodded and said, “Done."

  Between us, Pando and I took enough of the zhantil skin to make him a fine tunic, and, also, I cabbaged enough to make a belt for him, also. I would pay the cost of the amphora of Jholaix wine—and, thereby, put back the time when I could buy a passage out of Pa Mejab. But, looking at the rosy glory of Pando's young face, and the sparkle of sheer delight in his eyes, I knew my Delia of the Blue Mountains would forgive me.

  Zair knows, she had much for which to forgive me...

  Naghan's servant, a one-eyed shaven-headed Gon, remained with us to take the rest of the skin and the mane, all of which, by virtue of his office, were the property of Naghan. The caravan had gone perhaps a little farther on than was altogether advisable by the time we had finished, and I made Pando step out smartly. The bloody pelt, rolled, I slung over my left shoulder.

  The shout for help, when it reached me, made me whirl about and fling the pelt down and draw my bow fully.

  There was no need immediately for violence.

  The man who crawled toward us from a clump of missal trees was smothered in blood, and the long ax he bore glistened with gore. He tried to stand up to run toward us, but collapsed and fell. He twitched once and then lay still.

  “Dray!” yelled Pando.

  “Pick up the pelt, Pando. Go back to the caravan—and hurry!” I shouted at the one-eyed Gon. “Run, too! Warn Naghan—the caravan is attacked!"

  For, beyond the man collapsed in his own blood and that of his enemies, I could see the wolfish shapes of halflings riding preysanys coursing toward the caravan, their fleet forms half-hidden by the missals. The opaz glitter from the twin suns speared back blindingly from their brandished weapons. In scant seconds they would be upon the caravan.

  I loosed at the nearest rider and then slung the bow, ran toward the fallen man, and hoisted him upon my back. He was incredibly tall and thin. As I lifted him his eyes opened and he gasped. His right hand did not relax its death-grip on the haft of his ax.

  “Bandits!” He choked the word out, and I knew from the way he spoke he had summoned up all his strength of purpose to run and warn the caravan and had been struck down. “Bandits!"

  “Quiet, dom,” I said. “Rest easy."

  Then I raced back toward the caravan where already I could hear the shrieks of men engaged in mortal combat, and the slither and clang of iron weapons.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIX

  Concerning the taboos of Inch of Ng'groga

  The guards around the center flight of calsanys were already in dire trouble. The caravan had come to a halt and the beasts were milling. Hastily dumping down that impossibly tall man with his ax beside Pando, and yelling to him to keep out of sight and trouble, I drew the longbow.

  The time had almost passed when archery could help; but I was able to feather four of the bandits before a gang of them swung their preysanys and coursed in at me, waving their spears.

  Getting the long sword out of Sosie's scabbard over my shoulder demanded a convulsion of effort, and I had to jump up and bend over in a most undignified fashion to do it. But, once the deadly Krozair brand was in my fists, I was ready to meet these throat-slitting bandits, and to earn the wages Naghan the Paunch paid me.

  Since that long-gone day when I had met Hap Loder on the beach and we had made pappattu and then I had taken obi of him, I had learned much of sword fighting. Then I had been accounted a useful man with a cutlass, and had learned a great deal with those wonderful swords of the Savanti; but, all the same, when my clansmen armed with broadsword and short sword had gone up against the sophisticated rapier and dagger men of the city of Zenicce, I had worried about them. Now, I had all the skills and scientific knowledge, and the art and mystic practice, of the Krozairs of Zy to drive my nerves and impel my sword arm.

  The rapier and the left-handed dagger are excellent weapons, as I have indicated, and they can between them take on much variegated weaponry. By this time the bandits and the guards were at it hammer-and-tongs, their broad-bladed spears flung down, and the rapiers and main-gauches, the Jiktars and the Hikdars, flaming and slicing, cutting and stabbing, in a welter of slivers of finely-honed steel.

  I charged the bandits running at me with a great shout of: “Hai! Jikai!” and at once that terrible Krozair long sword was whirling a path of destruction through the bandits.

  My own rapier and dagger bounced scabbarded at my side.

  The long sword took the head off the first bandit—he was a man of uncertain origin (but of certain destination)—and sliced back to lop the rapier-wielding arm of the next one. They spurred their preysanys in to get at me, and this, I believe, led to their own destruction, for I could reach them with the long sword and they could not reach me. This fight roared and bloodied away. At least to me it appeared topsy-turvy, for the mounted men used weapons shorter than they should, given the fine length of their rapiers, and I had no long pole arm. In this fight I did not learn, truly, of the full problems of long sword against rapier and dagger. The fight taught me only that I had to get it over fast, for I caught a distorted glimpse of young Pando, with a snatched up dagger, trying to hamstring a bandit preysany. If anything happened to him ... !

  Already Tilda must be frantic with worry over where the little devil had got to—and if I returned and told her he had been with me, and had been killed ... I couldn't face that.

  So my long sword became a bloodied blur. The bandits fell before me. They were of many races of men and half-men: Fristles, Ochs, Rapas, Gons; alike they fell before my brand.

  Obolya I saw, fighting like a demon, spitting his man, taking another's attack on his dagger, twirling with a laugh full of braggadocio, lunging into the belly. Naghan the Paunch I saw, also, striking about him with a broad-bladed spear that from his height on the zorca kept the bandits at bay.

  I shortened the long sword and drove it carefully into the neck of an Och, sliding above his out-thrust shield. I body-swerved to avoid the thrust that his last involuntary movement impelled. I jumped over his falling body. Right-handedly I slashed away a Rapa who, wasting time screeching, tried to spit me. He went over with his beak sheared off.

  I jumped over a preysany, my Earthly muscles back to full power and tone, chopping short and hard down onto the man who ducked far too late. I landed neatly enough, removed another Rapa beak, swung and slashed and so forged my gory way toward Pando.

  He came up screeching, scooped under my left arm. I laid the flat of the sword across his rump, whereat he yelled like a trapped leem, and left a long blood smear there.

  “Quiet, you imp of Sicce!"

  Obolya was down.

  A Rapa, his fiercely predatory bird face gobbling with blood lust, was in the act, seeming so deliberate, of thrusting his rapier down into Obolya's belly. Without pausing in my run I swung the long sword in a flat arc that intersected first with the Rapa's right arm, thus removing it and the rapier from Obolya's intestines, and then sheared on into the Rapa's side. He was wearing a bronze corselet. The Krozair blade smashed through in a scr
eeching splintering of metal.

  I wrenched the brand free, spun, caught a rapier and, with the supple wrist-twist that is easy enough with a rapier, damned difficult with a long sword, managed to thrust the blade into the bandit's throat. He vomited blood and went over.

  Obolya was up. He glared at me.

  “How many more are there, Obolya, in Zair's name?"

  “Enough for me to repay you my life, Dray Prescot."

  There was no time to wonder about that. The bandits pressed and we guards earned our money. When I had contrived to deposit Pando back among the plains asses—who were more restful and far less impossible than the calsanys, to whom everyone fighting gave a wide berth—and sorted out another group of bandits, I began to think we would best them.

  They had waited for us here, on the outskirts of the cultivated areas, thinking that having traversed the dangerous lands we would relax our guard. As it was, with Naghan yelling us on, with Obolya fighting like a demon, and with my long sword that simply destroyed them, they had had enough.

  The last we saw of them was the dust their preysanys kicked up as they ran.

  Without pausing I ran across to a preysany from whose saddle a man hung with his foot entangled in the stirrup. I put my foot on his face and kicked him free. Then I swung up into the saddle.

  Naghan yelled: “Don't pursue them, Dray. They won't be back."

  I rode across to another preysany which stood nuzzling the bloody rags around the head and shoulders of the Gon, its late master. The head and the shoulders were separated by a space of bloody grass. I remembered that one. Grasping the reins, I pulled the animal away and, a little reluctantly, it followed.

  I said to Naghan the Paunch: “I claim these two preysanys for Pando and me. Agreed?"

  He huffed his paunch more comfortably in the saddle and nodded. “You may claim them, Dray Prescot, with pleasure. Under the terms of our contract they are mine, as you well know. You can work them out of your pay."

  “Naghan the Paunch!” I yelled.

  He was chuckling and wiping the blade of his spear and reveling in it. I did not chuckle; but I suddenly shouted: “Hai!” and the zorca started and leaped and Naghan went careering across the grass, wildly grasping anything to keep from falling off.

  I heard a deep belly-rumble of laughter and turned and there was Obolya with his black-bristle face all crumpled with malicious mirth.

  “You treat men hard, Dray Prescot."

  No surprise showed on my face. This was only a petty border skirmish, a thing to be done and forgotten and not to be placed alongside the great battles and campaigns of my life; but a man can be killed as easily in a skirmish as a world-shaking battle.

  “True, Obolya. To their deserts."

  He eyed me a moment, and then went off about the business of a mercenary guard—stripping the dead of their valuables. In this I heartily agreed. Pickings are hard-come-by. But when I saw Pando engaged in the same occupation I started off at once to check him, outraged, wondering what Tilda would say if she could see her son—and then I stopped. This was life. This was what fighting and killing were all about. Let Pando learn the true facts, and then, perhaps, in later life he would not be so quick to provoke a quarrel or to seek to kill.

  I went back to see about the tall and thin man I had rescued, with a parting shout to Pando: “Don't waste time on trifles, Pando. Pick the best."

  On the way back I took three rings from bandit fingers. As it happened the rings came off easily enough, greased by blood. Had I had to hack the fingers off to get at the rings this I would have done. I needed cash to buy a passage to Vallia and my Delia.

  The drivers were sorting out the calsanys now and soon the caravan got under way again.

  The tall man, still smeared with blood, was loaded facedown onto one of the preysanys I had acquired and the loot obtained by Pando and myself bundled in our sleeping gear on the other. Pando was hopping wild with excitement still, running up and down and emitting shrill Red-Indian-like war whoops. I let him blow off steam. Any fancy modern notions that his mind had been affected by the horrific sights he had seen, of course, did not apply on Kregen, where the absence of such sights usually indicates abject slavery on one side. He was growing up into a world of great beauty and wonder, for Kregen is a planet at once gorgeous and barbaric and highly-colored; but at the same time he was also preparing himself to face the other side of Kregen, the terror and the horror and the continuous struggle for existence.

  Young Zorg, the son of Zorg of Felteraz, Krozair of Zy, my friend and oar comrade now dead and eaten by chanks, and his sister Fwymay, were both preparing themselves to enter the adult world of Kregen, far away there in Felteraz on the shore of the inner sea. Their mother, Zorg's widow, Mayfwy and Tilda had little in common except a love for their children and the sense of loss for their husbands—but I thought of them both, then, as I strode along, thinking, as I always do, mostly of my Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond.

  When we camped that night the man I had rescued had so far recovered as to consent to being washed. I discovered that most of the blood splattering him was not his. He kept that great ax close by him. He had had a thwacking great thump on the head, that I judged had smashed beyond repair the helmet he had lost, and was still a little muzzy. After some wine—mediocre red stuff from a local Pa Mejab vintnery—and a morsel of bread from a long Kregan loaf, liberally smeared with yellow butter, he sat with his back wedged against a tree bole munching a handful of palines. They would soon clear his headache.

  “I am Inch,” he said. “From Ng'groga."

  So far had I come from Magdag that all those “G's” did not worry me. Inch told us that Ng'groga was a nation situated on the southeastern part of the continent of Loh, facing the unknown southern sea. He was, himself, a somewhat amazing individual. He was, as I have said, incredibly tall, some seven feet of him from toe to the top of his head. That head was covered in long and silky yellow hair that hung to his waist and which he would bind up and coil when in action. He was thin, also, but I did not miss the bulge of muscle about that sinewy body. At the moment his only clothing was an old and tattered brown tunic, gathered in by a leather belt of lesten hide. Beside his great ax, which reminded me of the Danish pattern carried by the clansmen of Viktrik, with the addition of a daggered head after the fashion of my own clansmen of Felschraung and Longuelm, he bore at his waist a long knife. He had no sword.

  “I shipped out as a mercenary, as so many youngsters do,” he said. “The life suited me but ill. Then I was betrayed—that does not concern me now—and was sold as slave. So I escaped and joined the brigands. But, that life, also, was not for me."

  “Then what happened?” demanded Pando. He was hunched up, eagerly listening to the story, which Inch embroidered far more than I have indicated.

  “At last the bandits said they were going to attack the next caravan, slay all the men and—ah—” He cocked an eye at Pando, and went on after a cough. “Abduct all the girls. I had an argument with the chief of the bandits and left him, I fancy, with his ears wider apart than they had been."

  As he spoke he moved his hand across the ax, and I could well imagine that mighty weapon splitting down through the skull of the bandit chief.

  “And?"

  “That was a foolish thing to do. My taboos had not warned me adequately, which was passing strange."

  This was the first I had heard of Inch's taboos; but not the last, oh, certainly, not the last! As you shall hear.

  “So I ran from them, and they pursued, and I killed many; but then Largan the Wily hurled a stone, and I fell, and they would have beaten my brains out but for my old helmet.” He reached a long hand up to his head, and felt his yellow mane of hair. “I am sorry I lost that, by Ngrangi, yes!"

  “Yes, yes!” said Pando. “And then?"

  “Then, when I thought I was done for, and the caravan gone, I called out and this monstrous man here, Dray Prescot, came and took me up and shot Larg
an the Wily with that bow that, if I mistake not, is a true bow of Erthyrdrin."

  “Yes,” I said. I could not speak of Seg, not yet, to Inch.

  For, from what Sosie had told me, I knew this Lohvian bow she had given me was a true bow of Erthyrdrin, made from true wood of the Yerthyr tree, long matured and sweetly seasoned. I thought even Seg Segutorio would be happy with this bow, although comparing it always unfavorably with his own stave he had cut himself from the private tree of Kak Kakutorio.

  Gone—those days, gone and dead and best forgotten!

  In Pa Weinob, a city of wooden, high-built houses and a wooden stockade with watchtowers, we waited for the goods to be collected for the caravan to take back to the coast in exchange for the manufactures we had brought here. During this period I had a local woman recommended to me cure and prepare Pando's zhantil skin. Another woman, a clever seamstress, sewed him a fine tunic and belt. When he donned the gear and turned to let us see, both Inch and I made all the necessary noises of surprise and gratification. In truth, Pando did cut a dashing figure, and he was as pleased as a woflo eating his way through a whole Loguetter cheese.

  By the time the country produce had been baled and loaded and we set forth to return to Pa Mejab, Inch had been taken on as guard by Naghan the Paunch, and he and I and Pando had palled up in a way that surprised me, although Pando took it all in his stride.

  One night when the Maiden with the Many Smiles shone down from a cloudless sky, Inch approached the fire where we were cooking a tasty vosk haunch purchased in the town. He crinkled up his nose at the delightful smell. Over his long fair hair he wore a huge mass of cloth, like a sloppily-wound turban. Not a scrap of his hair was visible.

  Pando let out a yell.

  “Hey! Inch! That's my sleeping cloth!"

  Pando started to pull the bundle of cloth from Inch's head.

  Inch went mad.

  He jumped up, waving his arms, screaming words no one understood, words clearly of his local language of Ng'groga. A strand of hair fell loose. Inch shrieked as though his flesh was being wrung out by red-hot pincers. He jumped toward the fire—he jumped into the fire!