Fliers of Antares Page 8

  Turko the Shield, my Khamorro comrade, came from Herrelldrin, and now I understood fully, for he had always been reticent, that the Gorgrens had indeed enslaved Pellow. The Khamorros had developed their syple disciplines of unarmed combat because they were, in truth, not allowed weapons.

  And the Gorgrens sought always to march into Djanduin and serve the Djangs as they had served the people of Herrelldrin.

  Trouble, it seems, is endemic in any culture where peoples fret and struggle and seek to expand their frontiers.

  The only problem with the Djangs was — and here Pallan O. Fellin Coper exercised exquisite tact as he sought to explain to me in a way that would not demean the Djangs in my eyes — that they were, in very truth, exceptionally fine soldiers, but they were seldom entrusted with high command. To be brutally frank about it, the Djangs were bonny fighters in the blood and press of the field, but were not overly bright when it came to the higher command. Tactics — yes, they were superb. Strategy — no. They were duffers.

  “Up to Jiktar rank, and you will scarcely find a better soldier. But give a Djang a brigade and he sweats and groans and worries, and wants to go up to the front line to see how his men are getting on every bur instead of thinking and planning what they ought to do. There are Djang Chuktars; very few.”

  “And you, Pallan Coper?”

  “Oh, I am a civilian administrator. I deal with the roads.” At that moment the carriage gave an almighty jolt and pitched and swung on its simple leaf springs so that we were rattled about like a Bantinko dancer’s peas in his gourd.

  “Now may Djan rot the road!” burst out Coper and immediately turned in alarmed contrition to his wife, who let out a little shriek and waved her perfumed handkerchief.

  When I discovered she was horrified at his outburst and not the shuddering of the carriage I felt my lips rick up. These two were likely to make me laugh before I realized!

  When all was settled Coper explained that his own people handled all the affairs that demanded planning and higher administration for the Djangs. He called himself a Djang, too. He was an Obdjang, that is, a First Djang. He told me frankly that although his race of diffs were clearly not the same as the Djang diffs, no one had any memory of when their partnership had begun, and no records existed in their libraries. Always, so Coper said, the Djangs had fought and the Obdjangs had directed. Each respected the other. Each knew they could do nothing without the other.

  “Except—” And here Coper looked as troubled as I had seen him so far. I chanced a guess.

  “This Kov Nath Jagdur na Hyr Khor,” I said. “The leader of the leemsheads. He would prefer to lead instead of being led.”

  Coper nodded rather forlornly and his whiskers drooped. “That is so, Notor Prescot. You are quick.”

  “You have to be quick to stay alive on Kregen.”

  “Those yetches of Gorgrens are quick, also. We have certain intelligence that they plan a new campaign — and that will play merry hell with my roads — and I am summoned to the palace. The king will need counsel. Chuktar Naghan Stolin Rumferling will be there, I am glad to say. He is a good friend and a great warrior. My part will be a civilian’s, which pleases me, also.”

  “Yes, Ortyg.” His wife spoke up. “Better for you to be a civilian and let the soldiers and the warriors fight. Chuktar Naghan is a very great warrior indeed.”

  “He knows the approaches the Gorgrens will probably take. You see, Notor Prescot, our frontier is protected by the Yawfi Suth and the Wendwath; but there are ways through and between these natural obstacles and an army must be so positioned as to cover all eventualities.”

  “You have to outguess your opponent,” I said. “Yes, I know.”

  I had done a deal of campaigning with my fierce clansmen on the Great Plains of Segesthes. That time we had burned our foemen’s wagons in the Pass of Trampled Leaves had been a great bluff and counter-bluff. They, too, had had an alternative set of routes, and Hap Loder and I had guessed right. Perhaps, the thought occurs, if we had not had the skill and generalship to pick the right answer, I would not be here now. My bones might be moldering away on the plains, my blood and flesh long since gone to feed the grasses grazed upon by the chunkrah.

  Coper glanced at me and I saw the quick intelligence on his gerbil-like face.

  “I know you are a great fighter, Notor Prescot, although I do not think you would have lasted much longer against the leemsheads — and I compliment you, sir, I compliment you — but may I take it you also have knowledge of the art of strategy? Of generalship? Of the maneuvering of armies?”

  Somehow, whether from my need to be independent and free or from a resentment of being pushed, I said, “Oh, as to that, Pallan Coper, I have been a fighting-man for a long time. I am content to leave the higher command in the hands of those who believe they are masters at that game.”

  He sank back in his seat. He rubbed his whiskers and pulled his scarlet hat over one ear, and so we fell into a silence that, at least for me, came with unwelcome desolation. I had the uncomfortable feeling that there was more to O. Fellin Coper.

  Over the rumble of the carriage wheels we did not hear the beat of wings, and an escort Djang thrust his head through the window as the carriage shuddered to a halt.

  “Well, Deldar Pocor! What is it, what is it?”

  “A messenger from Chuktar Stolin Rumferling, Pallan.”

  The door was opened and, fussing and complaining of delays, Coper and his wife alighted. The other carriage with its Obdjang attendants pulled up also and the escort sat their totrixes with the blind indifference of the soldier wanting to get back to barracks and the local inn. A fluttclepper curved through the air in a barrage of swift wing-beats to land beside the road. The rider, a young and athletic Djang wearing flying leathers of orange and gray, leaped off. A long flexible staff whipped aft of his saddle and flew a multicolored flag with many tails. This, I guessed, was a badge and the reason the guard Deldar had known the messenger came from Chuktar Rumferling.

  Using a steel key strung on a golden chain around his neck, Coper unlocked the flat balass box the messenger proffered. He took out a narrow strip of paper and broke the seal with a practiced flick of his left thumb. He unfolded the paper and read. His whiskers quivered and then stood out, stiff and rigid.

  He crumpled the paper in his small hand.

  “Very good, merker. A verbal reply. ‘Returning in all haste.’ Now get airborne.”

  “My wings are yours to command,” said the merker in the rote fashion of the messenger and leaped aboard his fluttclepper and took off immediately. Coper ushered us back into the carriage and squeaked up very hotly at Deldar Pocor.

  “We must hurry, good Pocor! Great things are afoot in Djanguraj. I expect us to reach the city by sunset.”

  “By sunset, Pallan. Very good, Pallan.”

  Sinkie fluttered at her businesslike husband.

  “Oh, Ortyg! Whatever can be the matter?”

  Coper shot that shrewd look at me and then leaned forward and patted his wife’s knee.

  “This is terrible news, Sinkie, and you must be brave. I will tell you now, for Notor Prescot is not of Djanduin and is not concerned with our affairs, for all that he is a guest and will be made truly welcome in our house.”

  “Of course, Ortyg! Notor Prescot saved us from those horrible leemsheads and I am very fond of him. But, my dear, the news . . . ?”

  The news was, in truth, enough to shake any Pallan of the kingdom.“The king and queen have been assassinated. Chuktar Naghan has certain news of the Gorgrens’ invasion. The two terrible events are linked. Now, Sinkie! You must be brave. We will win through, in the end, as we have always done before.”

  “Oh, the poor dear king! And the queen—” Sinkie burst into tears that shook her little body. She looked absolutely woebegone, with the tears dripping from the ends of her drooping whiskers.

  Coper looked at me meaningfully.

  “You are our honored guest, Notor Prescot. I can
judge a man, even if he is apim, and I know you to be a Horter and a Notor. You will not divulge any of this until it is generally known?”

  “You may rely on me, Pallan Coper. And, as you say, this is not my business. I have no wish to become involved.” I had just been brought from the horror of the Heavenly Mines, and had fought damned hard, and I meant what I said. In my prison of time I intended to live it up and have a good time — nothing more.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In Djanguraj

  I, Dray Prescot, of Earth and of Kregen, fell into low ways and low company.

  I make no excuses.

  The taverns I explored, the dopa dens, the theaters, the fighting arenas (Djanduin is mightily contemptuous of the Jikhorkduns of Hamal and Hyrklana and instead flocks to see real fighting by professionals that almost invariably results in no one dying at all), the dancing girls I gawped at, the zorca races and the sleeth races, the dicing, the gambling, the drinking! Money came in, for I have skills at certain of the hairier games of Kregen, and I never went hungry or thirsty — or, at least, not often.

  Pallan Coper and his charming wife Sinkie had shown me tremendous hospitality and they had been horrified by my antics and pleaded with me to give up such a terrible life. But they would not hear a word spoken against me.

  And the cause of all this wanton debauchery?

  As I have told you, calendars and dates are highly individual idiosyncrasies on Kregen, and every people and every race and every country keep some kind of time in their own way, and to the Ice Floes of Sicce with everyone else’s.

  By the expenditure of a great deal of time and effort and by constant application at the observatory of the Todalpheme of Djanduin — a small and humble group compared with other Todalpheme I have known — I calculated out dates. The Todalpheme are those austere and dedicated men whose charge it is to work out the tides of Kregen, and give timely warning. So I worked on my figures and when I had finished I stared in appalled horror at the final figure, under which I scrawled a great slashing red line.

  Ten years.

  Ten Terrestrial years, it was going to take, for the present in which I now lived to catch up with the time I had left the Heavenly Mines.

  I did not go mad; after all, this was a mere matter of waiting, and patience is a virtue, even for me, sinner that I am. And I would wait in as much comfort and pleasure as I could contrive. My only true comfort was that Delia would not know of my durance, and her sufferings could, if I ranked my Deldars correctly, be curtailed or obviated altogether.

  So I plunged into the heady nightlife of Djanguraj and found most of the strong young men gone off to war, and their womenfolk moping after them, and war and talk of war filling everyone’s horizons. This suited me ill.

  Chuktar N. Stolin Rumferling had gone off to war.

  Seeing him briefly before he flew off I was struck by the cunning way nature can produce entirely different end products from the same original material. Imagine a meek and mild little clerk, with contact lenses and a sinus drip, hunched over a computer in a glass-walled office in a great city of Earth, weak-chested, scrawny-armed, flabby where it would do the most harm, prim and precise — there, to slander him, you have a defamatory picture of O. Fellin Coper. Imagine a fullback, bulky, powerful, superbly muscled, charging head-down into a mess of footballers in his way, chunking them aside with massive energy — there you have a not unflattering picture of Chuktar N. Stolin Rumferling. They are both men. They both come from the same stock. But what a difference between them!

  “This will be a bloody business, Notor Prescot.” Rumferling spoke in a gruff way that told me he was perfectly capable of cowing the roistering, rough-and-tough barbaric Djangs he would command. “Those cramphs of Gorgrens must be taught a lesson, once and for all.”

  “They will return and return, Naghan,” squeaked Coper. “We all know that, Djan rot ’em!”

  There was no gentle Sinkie present to protest his language.

  So the fighting-men went off to war and I frolicked about town, enjoying what I could of the fleshpots.

  Ten years! Ten long damned years!

  I witnessed the new king’s coronation. It was a rushed affair, with a hushed and spartan wartime atmosphere. This king was a nonentity, the old king’s nephew by marriage, and he would not, I fancied, last long in some places of Kregen I had been — Sanurkazz or Magdag, for example, or Vallia herself.

  He did not last.

  A palace revolution was the first upheaval and that placed another nephew on the throne. He was strong, but a fool. He was murdered after a season and the Chuktar of the palace crowned himself as king. He lasted until the next Chuktar of the palace bribed enough of the king’s personal bodyguard and overthrew him. His body was dragged though a pool of fighting fish, something like piranha, and the new king was crowned.

  All this time I caroused and drank and sang and watched the dancing girls — for they were dancing girls, unlike those fine free girls of my clansmen who danced for us beneath the moons of Kregen — and they were very skilled in the arts of the dance. Their four arms weaved arabesques of beauty, and their oiled bodies and gleaming masses of silver bangles and golden bells, of waving fans and swirling silks, charmed me even as they bored me.

  I would have none of them.

  Ten godforsaken years!

  My Delia — I had to get the disaster that had overtaken me in proportion. My overriding duty lay to Delia, and through her to Vallia, and to my people of Valka because I was their Strom. Also I owed a duty to Strombor and my clansmen of the Great Plains. But Gloag in Strombor and Hap Loder with the clans did everything right, as I well knew, and my duty was fully and freely carried out by them. Delia — I had to think of other things. Like the teasing arguments we indulged in so often over the merits and demerits of the wonderful zorcas of her Blue Mountains’ blue-grass grazing estates as against the fabulous zorcas of my clansmen.

  So with some of my ill-gotten winnings I went to the zorcadrome to buy myself the best zorca I could.

  The zorcas of Djanduin are fine animals. But then, it is difficult to find a zorca that is not a fine animal, for of all the animals of Kregen, I believe, it is the zorca who most nobly fulfills its ancestral breeding. This is not to gainsay the superb quality of the vove, that fearsome steed of the Great Plains. But voves — real voves — are found only there in the natural state, while zorcas are found in many areas of Kregen.

  Passing the totrixdrome — as you know I have never been fond of the sectrix, the nactrix, or the totrix, or of any other of the trix family — and hurrying on with Khobo the So chattering away in my ear as he guided me through the throngs of people who seem forever to wander and push and shout through the markets of two worlds, we came out to a wide dusty space fenced in with lenken rails. A pair of zorcas were racing up toward us, having completed a circuit of the oval, and they were neck and neck. Even at speed like that a clansman can point a zorca, and the faults of both these were at once apparent. But a fat cortilinden merchant, sweating happily as he paid out golden deldys, bought them for his son, who looked as though a quick belt on the backside would suit him better than a zorca saddle. They were Lamnias, and so the merchant should have known better.

  “Rubbish!” Khobo whispered in my ear. He was a jaunty rogue, a carousing companion I had rescued from a brawl and who had stuck to me since. “I know old Planath the Zorca. He will not cheat me.”

  I grimaced at the name of Planath’s, for although it is common on Kregen for the occupation to decide the label — and very colorful that is, to be sure — there were places I knew where to be called anything at all to do with zorcas meant much effort and sweat, not a little blood, and general approbation from one’s peers. As for that genial rascal Khobo, he was called the So for obvious reasons. He’d been in the army and as a young man had had his upper left arm lopped off. As so is Kregish for three, thus Khobo was the So.

  As I casually inspected the zorcas on display — for some reason I ha
ve always disliked the use of the word horseflesh for horses and zorcaflesh for zorcas — I was vividly reminded of what my father used to tell me as he doctored up a lame horse, or patted a strong chestnut neck, his eyes filled with the love of horses. It was with a nostalgic thought or two that I came at last to a magnificent pair held by two Djang grooms of Planath the Zorca’s establishment.

  “Wonderful animals, Notor, wonderful!” Planath babbled on, but cunningly. “See their quarters, their fetlocks, see their teeth—” At this, like two rat-traps, the lads opened up the zorcas’ mouths. “Both are guaranteed perfect! Never, I swear by Holy Djan Himself, have there been two such zorcas as these.”

  Khobo rolled spittle around his mouth and spat into the dust. He laid a finger on the soft nose of the larboard one.

  I shook my head.

  “This one, I think, Khobo.”

  At this everyone began to wrangle, thoroughly enjoying themselves in the dust and the summer suns-shine, having supple Djangi girls bring them beaker after beaker of that sherbet drink called parclear that tickles the nose and is a sovereign thirst-quencher. Khobo, I knew, had not spotted that tiny divergence in the shoulder blades of the zorca he chose so confidently. That one was a splendid snow-white and, indeed, was a magnificent animal. But the one I wanted, and would give no reason for so doing beyond a stubborn foolishness, was the one a clansman would have selected, for all that he was a dusty shabby gray color. But I liked the look of him, the bright light of intelligence in his eyes.

  “So you rush upon disaster, good Notor! Well, I can say no more!” And Khobo the So threw up his three hands in despair. “Choose this Dust Pounder, Notor, and have done, then.”

  So, astride Dust Pounder, thrilling again to the feel of a blood zorca between my knees, I rode back to the tavern at which for the moment I stayed. This was The Paline and Queng, run by a fat and happy Obdjang who knew exactly where every last ob came from and went to, and who made the best vosk pie in all Djanguraj. I downed some of his better wine, a clear yellow vintage from east, beyond the Mountains of Mirth, and bade Khobo sup up, and roared out that now I would challenge all comers in the zorca races.