Legions of Antares (2 page)

A bunch of people huddled on the hard stones in the light and they were in bad case. Here, I said to myself, is where my labors begin.

The first thing I noticed as I walked among them was their cowed and beaten-down appearance. They were all of races that people on Kregen regard as the delicate and refined ones, the weak and unaggressive diffs. There were Relts and Xaffers, those remote and distant diffs, and Lamnias, shrewd merchants, and others like Lun’elshes
[i]
with soft black body hair, and Dunders, squat, thick-hewed, flat-headed men universally employed as carriers. A number of Ennschafften, whom folk normally call Syblians, huddled together, the men bundles of muscles, the women very beautiful, and all with simple naive baby-faces. I stood for a moment staring at this collection of the deprived of Kregen. Even then, Lamnias are not deprived in the sense of worldly goods, for they are wily merchants with the highest reputations.

As I stood thus looking about, a bull voice broke in a roar.

“A damned apim! Well, apim, and what kept you?”

Lying back on a spread cloak of black and yellow lozenges a numim bellowed at me. The lion-man’s head was wrapped in a clumsy bandage ripped from the hem of the cloak, and the black and yellow interweavings, like the hide of a sanjit, were stained with blood. In his right fist he gripped a sword whose blade had snapped off a foot from the hilt. He looked to be in the most ferocious of bad tempers. His hide was so dark a brown as to appear black, and his bristling lion mane was a tawny umber. He was not of the golden numims.

“By Numi-Hyrjiv the Golden Splendor! You’ve been lollygagging around, and here I lie waiting for you! This is not to be born. And have the Everoinye then sunk so low as to send a naked unarmed apim?” His wrathful lion face grimaced then and he put his left hand to the bandage. “My head rings with all the bells of Beng Kishi, and you stand there like a cretin! Jump to it, onker, and fetch me water! I parch!”

About to bark out a choice remark that would cut this supercilious lion-man down to size, I checked myself. I still wore that foolish grinning face. Before I could speak he was ranting on again, acting merely as he usually acted.

“Onker! Why do you stand there? I am Strom Irvil of Pine Mountain. You jump when I speak to you, as any respectable body slave should jump when his master speaks. That fool Zaydo got himself crushed when the roof caved in and I am all alone and—”

“But—” I began.

In Strom Irvil’s book that was a serious mistake.

“You never argue with your master, Zaydo! Onker! Nulsh! Get me water or I will stripe you most cruelly.”

“My name is not Zaydo—”

“All my body slaves are called Zaydo.” He tried to rise, forcing himself up with the broken sword as a crutch. He gasped. He fell back onto the spread cloak. “Water,” he said. “Fetch water, Zaydo, and you escape the flogging triangle.”

I saw his lion lips were dry and cracked. Without another word I cast about and found a pottery bowl and so went to the stream where I had startled the Relt, and fetched back water for Strom Irvil of Pine Mountain. One Pine Mountain I had heard of lay in Thothangir, in the far south of the continent.

I put the bowl to his lips and he drank, distressedly. I went to lift the bandage to look at his wound, but he knocked my hand away.

“Leave it, Zaydo. I will mend. But the Everoinye will not be pleased if I fail them. You must get us all out of here.”

“What happened?”

He glared up at me, the water shining among the cracks of his lips.

“You call me master, Zaydo, and speak with civility and humility, else it is the flogging triangle. I am a great lord, and you are my body slave, sent by the Everoinye. Remember this.”

A strom, which is roughly equivalent to an Earthly count, is indeed a title of great nobility in some lands, if of a lesser stature in others. The notion grew in me like a moon-bloom opening to the kiss of the suns’ rays after a night of Notor Zan when no moons shine in Kregen’s sky. Just why this affair amused me is difficult to say. I knew I would not act the poltroon in Hamal. But looking at this blowhard numim strom as he lay there, gasping, the bloody bandage incongruous on his head, I suppose I half-reasoned out that no good would come of browbeating him now. We had a job to do. If he labored under the delusion I was his body slave Zaydo, what difference would that make? I wanted to finish this thing off, and then get about wrecking Empress Thyllis’s crazy ambitions. And, into the bargain, I could do with a good laugh, and this numim appeared to me to be able to furnish mirth aplenty.

So... “Yes, master, no master, very good master, and what has happened here that you are in such poor case and Zaydo is crushed to death?”

He blew his whiskers out and glared up at me.

“You are an onker! The roof fell in, that’s what. And when I led these people out through the old mining tunnels, the earthquake brought more down, and so trapped us all again and knocked a damned great hole in my head. Vosk skull!”

“Mayhap, master, a vosk skull, being exceedingly thick, is a good thing to have down here.”

“Do you mock me, ingrate?”

“Mock you, master? Why should a humble body slave do that?”

“I labor mightily for the good of the Everoinye. Why they should burden me with an imbecile like you I cannot imagine.”

Now this Strom Irvil was only the second kregoinye I had so far met. The first, Pompino, was no doubt either safely at home in Pandahem with his wife, or jaunting about Kregen derring-doing on an errand for the Everoinye. I’d have preferred Pompino here with me now. But as I set about finding a way out for the trapped people, I had to put up with Strom Irvil breathing down my neck.

The truth of our predicament was brought home to me quickly and its brutality made me ponder. We were trapped. We
were
trapped. These people, representatives of the weaker races of Kregen, had crept here secretly to hold a meeting and listen to the wise words of a wandering preacher. This man, this Pundhri the Serene, sat on a rock higher than the rest, his fist supporting his bearded chin, his face bent down, talking quietly to a group of people gathered about him. His voice came to me as a mellifluous burble whose individual words were lost. He was a diff of that race of ahlnims whose members have for century after century produced mystics and wise men. He looked the part, for his hair, like a Gon’s, was chalk white. He did not, like a Gon, shave his head bald and polish it up with butter. His face bore that intent, concentrated look of a man absorbed with the import of what he was saying, determined to make his listeners understand and share his vision. He wore a simple dark-blue tunic, and he held a thick staff, unadorned, although with a stout knob at each end.

Strom Irvil said, “Yes, Zaydo. He is the man the Everoinye wish saved. He is our charge — and me with a damned great hole in my head and a stupid thick-skulled onker of a body slave! It is enough to make a man turn to drink.”

“We are trapped — master — but mayhap we can dig a way out. If—”

“We! You mean you will dig a way out, Zaydo! And there are monsters in the tunnels. The old mine workings were abandoned seasons ago. The shrine where the meeting was held has not been used in the memory of living man. But Pundhri the Serene called the meeting there out of the prying eyes of those who would destroy him and his work.”

“And what work is that? Master.”

He glared and winced. “You see what a miserable band these folk are. Not a fighting man among them...”

“The ahlnims fight, on occasion—”

“Aye! And by thus doing break the tenets of their faith.”

I eyed Pundhri’s knobbed stick. They call that kind of dual-skull-basher a dwablatter. I surmised that Pundhri had used it often enough before he was dubbed the Serene.

“And you say there are monsters, master?” I almost mocked, beginning to feel the need of opening my shoulders. “I suppose there are flame-spouting risslacas, and giant spiders, and—”

“The giant spiders are as big as two dinner plates and they can snap your leg off like a rotten twig.”

That sobered me, I can tell you.

He threw the broken sword at me.

“Get on with it, get on with it, then, Zaydo, you useless lazy hound!”

“Yes, master.” I stared about, a trifle vacantly. “Where shall I begin?” After all, if he was the master and I the slave then let him sort out the brainwork.

“Over there where the first tunnel starts, onker!”

The stone chipped away fairly easily at first as I dug the broken blade in and twisted and scraped. A couple of jolly Sybli girls held torches. They had a fair supply of these, being cautious folk. But they would not last forever. There were lanterns, cheap mineral-oil lamps, and these were being saved. Then, after about two arms’ lengths, the rock firmed up into mother bedrock. The steel chimed.

I crawled back and stood up, my head and chest covered with rock dust.

“What are you stopping for?” The lion-man roar burst out. “Get on with it.”

“No way through here. Master.”

“Fool! Then try somewhere else.”

“Yes, master.” I didn’t bother about any more fun and frolic. A careful look around in the uncertain illumination revealed the way the cavern sloped down at one end, with arching rockfalls fanning out from ancient subsidences. One or two of the dark slots looked promising. I marched across to the nearest. I passed near the group listening respectfully to Pundhri the Serene. At the rock face the slot proved too narrow for my shoulders and I turned, intending to go on to the next.

A small ahlnim woman approached, carrying a length of brown cloth. Her hair was pinned neatly at the nape of her neck, as I saw as she bowed her head. Her robe was torn and smeared with dust, and I fancied that was unusual for her. She looked calm and competent and capable of running a household.

“The master offers you this, and all his prayers are for your success.”

I took the cloth. “Thank you, hortera,” I said, giving her the courtesy title of lady.

She ducked her head and went back to sit comfortably on a flat rock just to the side and rear of Pundhri. I wound the brown cloth about my nakedness and, spitting on my hands, set to work with the broken sword.

At that, I did not fail to complain that the Star Lords habitually sent me off to do their dirty work for them stark naked and weaponless. For this high and mighty Strom Irvil, they supplied clothes and weapons — and a personal body slave!

Some of the Dunders came across and began helping to shift the chips and chunks of rock I flaked off. Squat knots of muscle, short in stubby leg, thick of arm, the Dunders have been blessed — or cursed — by nature or the meddling hand of genetic manipulation with heads as flat across the top as billiard tables. Do not imagine they can be brilliantly intellectual; but they do think, they do suffer from emotions and they are men. Carriers of burdens, the Dunders, and there had been a number of them with us down the Moder before the monsters finished their work forever.

Pausing for a breather, I said to the nearest flat-headed Dunder: “Is the San a healer, dom?”

He shook that strange head. “No, dom, no. I do not think so.” Then he added in perfect explanation of his race’s outlook: “No one told me he is a healer.”

San Pundhri the Serene continued to talk. The title of san, which means master, dominie, sage, was accorded him as by right. He held a magnetic attraction for these poor folk. Not many were slaves, and this, presumably, because slaves of other slave-owners would have been unable to get away to the meeting, and the free folk here could afford few slaves. I went back to rock bashing.

The way opened after considerable effort and a torch, thrust through the first chink to appear onto the rocks tumbled into the tunnel, revealed an empty openness.

“A cavern,” I said. “Once we’re into that we’ll be well away.”

The rocky fall was cleared and it was time to try to rouse these people to movement. With a barrage of groans and snorts and burstings of bad temper, Strom Irvil got himself up. He swayed on those dark-furred legs. I gave him an arm for support and he brushed it away, pettishly.

“I can stand, Zaydo, you onker!”

I went across to Pundhri.

“San,” I said with due formality. “Will you help to move the people? They are frightened—”

He stared at me and I saw his eyes resting on me with calculation. He grasped his knobbed stick and stood up.

“They have reason to be frightened. You are Zaydo?”

In for a zorca, in for a vove. “Yes, San.”

“We have no weapons against the monsters.”

I shook rock dust off the broken sword.

He moved off his flat rock. “I will help these people, of course. You need not have asked. But I do not think your broken sword will avail us here.”

“It has opened the way. It may yet serve.”

He stopped and bent his brows on me. “And you are slave?”

I did not answer but went bashing back to a group of silly Xaffers who wanted to go the wrong way in the confusing torchlit darkness. When we were sorted out and moving through the gap broken in the fall and into the next cavern, I fancied Pundhri might have other things to occupy him besides the character of the slave called Zaydo.

The next cavern echoed hollowly to our voices. The torches, held high, showed the craggy rock at our backs and an empty darkness ahead. Everyone stopped. There was no doubt at all that this place held an eerie atmosphere that worked on the susceptibilities. People spoke in low tones. A subdued apprehension made movements awkward. At any moment horror could burst upon us from the darkness.

“Zaydo!” brayed the lion voice. “Get on, get on! And give me my sword. Slaves do not carry swords.”

“There are some countries where slaves carry swords, master.”

“If I had my strength I’d knock you flat on your back! Impudent tapo! Insolent yetch!”

Handing the broken sword across, I said: “You will not stripe me, master?”

“I don’t see why I should not. My head! You are an ingrate and I am too kind to my slaves. Now get on, and go that way, for I feel a draught there.”