Legions of Antares (4 page)

There was nothing to be done for the unfortunate folk who had fallen victim to the spiders. No one could watch the grief of relatives who had survived unmoved; but no good could come from allowing oneself to break down. In one person’s death the whole world shares. Also, after the ordeal in the slot when the living rock closed up on me, and the poison-tipped sting aimed for my eye, I was still in overwrought condition.

We all welcomed the sight of daylight. We broke from a shaggily overgrown hole in the side of the mountain, and many a one fell to his knees to give thanks for safe deliverance. I took a long, deep and expansive lungful of the glorious Kregan air. By Vox! What it is to be alive!

The land spread out before us, wide and rolling, yellowish-brown with dust and blued with heat haze. By the position of the suns I saw we faced eastwards. And that brought up my words to that Relt who had received such a shock at the stream. Whereaway were we in Opaz-forsaken Hamal?

Pundhri was blessing the people, and already many of them were hurrying away, skipping and jumping down the slopes. Smoke rose into the air from villages down there. The land looked sparse, but there were herds of cattle, and no doubt chores to be done and absences to be explained.

Pundhri turned to me.

“I give you thanks, Zaydo—”

Strom Irvil blossomed. He shook the bloody bandage at me.

“Thanks to a damned dim-witted slave! You are reputed a wise man, Pundhri the Serene. In this, I think your wits wander. It is to me, Strom Irvil of Pine Mountain, the thanks are due.”

Only a few folk were left now, and the ahlnim woman with Pundhri kissed a woman who might have been her twin, and watched her take her children and go down the mountain. I said nothing. Pundhri smiled. The whole cast of his features changed. He looked jolly and mischievous, and as I had thought about his dwablatter and how he must have used that knobby stick before he acquired his name of Serene, so now I thought how he must have laughed and joked before the mysticism took him up.

He looked meaningfully at me. “And is it now you trim the leem’s claws, Zaydo the slave?”

The Kregish saying, something like “to cut him down to size,” amused me. The leem is an eight-legged devilish hunting animal of incredible ferocity and vicious cunning, and often have I been dubbed both a leem-hunter and a cunning old leem. I thought Pundhri used that particular saying for that reason; seeing in me something foreign to a slave, something of the leem.

“Give me the bandage, strom,” I said. “I will do up your head, for you have had a knock.”

Now slaves do not usually address lords by their titles. Irvil started to explode, whiskers bristling, and I took the bandage and slapped it on his head so that an end flapped down over his face. His roar abruptly snuffled on bloody cloth.

I sorted him out, and got the bandage neatly tied, and then he started in on me. Pundhri stared with a nicety of expression very exhilarating.

So, knowing what I was doing, I said, “No, san. No, I think not. It amused me at the time, and it amuses me more, now, that Strom Irvil remain as he is. It would be a pity to trim even a single paring from the leem’s claws in this.”

Irvil bellowed, “I’ll have the skin off your back! I’ll gastronomate you! You’ll be flogged jikaider! So help me — if I had my strength! If my head wasn’t broke in two!”

He took a whooping breath and saw his broken sword where I had dropped it on the grass to see about his bandage.

“And you haven’t cleaned my sword! Oh, why do I suffer so? What have I done to deserve such an oaf, such an ingrate?”

The woman with Pundhri, whom he called his dear Puhlshi, tugged his sleeve gently. “It is time to go. We should be in Hernsmot already by now.”

“Yes, my dear Puhlshi. But we must give our thanks first.”

“Hernsmot,” I said. “Over by the Mountains of the West.”

“A poor place, but there is a meeting there.”

“Well, I am for Thothangir as soon as possible.” Irvil pushed fretfully at his bandage. “I suppose I shall have to endure you, you useless oaf, Zaydo, until we reach a place where I can hire a flier.”

“That will not be easy,” Pundhri pointed out. “With the war. The army and the air services—”

“Yes, yes. You Hamalese are in a fine old state with your stupid war.”

Puhlshi’s ahlnim face turned a dark plum color.

“We detest the war! We speak against it—”

“Ah!” I said, and when they all looked at me in surprise at this intelligent comment, I coughed and looked at the grass. Still and all, that did explain a lot. Perhaps the Star Lords were no longer quite so anxious about Hamal as I had thought? Perhaps my own brave country of Vallia had entered the reckoning? Saying good-bye and calling the remberees, we watched Pundhri and his ahlnim party making their way down the hill. Irvil shook himself, winced, and blamed me for that.

“You are supposed to be a kregoinye,” he said. “Although why the Everoinye should choose a stupid apim, and send him to me naked and weaponless, I cannot imagine.”

“Do you always arrive where the Everoinye send you with clothes and weapons, master?”

He stared. “If I thought you were serious...”

“Have you been a kregoinye long, master?”

He glowered. “You should address me as master before you speak. You are damned insolent, Zaydo, and this displeases me.” He stretched, and, again, he winced. “We will have to find shelter and food. I starve. If you have to carry me on your back—”

“Surely the Everoinye will take care of you?”

“Of course!” He brayed that out. But I saw he was not at all sure. Then he started to shake, and after that he sat down on a boulder on the hillside, and for a space I left him to his own devices.

Presently, he called across: “Zaydo! You are an onker and a hulu. But you fought well down there in the earth’s guts. I have been a kregoinye for ten seasons. I was chosen, so they told me, because I am a fighting man with intelligence and a high moral code.”

I did not laugh. As though a high moral code would weigh in the scales of the Star Lords!

He went on: “But I was wounded. I think the Everoinye no longer cared for me when I could not do their bidding.”

“Yes. But you still live.”

“Just, you onker.”

A harsh croak floated down from the sky. We both looked up. I, for one, knew what — or who — floated up there on wide pinions, and I guessed Irvil knew, also.

The Gdoinye, the scarlet- and golden-feathered raptor of the Star Lords, circled over us. He turned his bright head and a beady eye surveyed us. I did not, as was my wont, shake my fist at that glorious bird and hurl abuse at him. Instead, I looked to see what Irvil would do. He stood up. He stood up and he stood to attention, smartly, as though on emperor’s parade.

“What are your commands, Notor Gdoinye?”

Well, perhaps the only other kregoinye I had known, Pompino, might have spoken thus, and certainly he stood in great awe of this splendid bird; but, all the same, it was extraordinarily difficult for me to keep a straight face and not to burst out with a series of choice epithets to express what I thought of this nurdling great loon of a bird.

Perhaps the Gdoinye saw or sensed those irreverent feelings in me. He winged lower, the suns glisten vanishing from his body and wings as he ruffled his feathers in the draught. Low over our heads he volplaned, swishing down, hurtling over us and then soaring up and up and dwindling to a vanishing dot. As he passed so he let rip one contemptuous squawk.

On this occasion the messenger of the Star Lords had delivered no verbal message. As he was a supernatural creature serving beings with awesome powers, there was no doubt of his opinion of us. Also, there was no doubt his report had gone in. No doubt at all.

Strom Irvil let his body slump. He did not relax, for he looked uneasy. His scowl appeared shifty. “I wanted to complain about the trash they sent me as a body slave, Zaydo, you fambly. But I did not. I do not know why I did not.” He picked up his broken sword and hefted it. He was going to throw it to me — at me more likely.

“Get this cleaned up!” His big lion-man bellow broke about my ears, brashly reasserting self-confidence.

A puff of dust lifted about him. Instantly it was apparent that dust was no natural phenomenon. Blue radiance glowed. For the space of two heartbeats the dust flowed and lifted and irradiated by the blue fire formed itself into the semblance of a living lion man. The sapphire statue swirled up in an expanding dissipating cloud.

Strom Irvil no longer stood with me on the mountainside in western Hamal.

Chapter three

A Length of Lumber Instructs Flutsmen

The task was to defeat the Empire of Hamal.

No. No, that was not strictly true. The task was not so much to defeat Hamal as to encourage the people to see the errors in their ways of carrying on. They had to see that instead of trying to conquer and subdue the people around them — and people like Vallians who lived at a considerable distance, by Vox! — they should join with them in a mutual defense against the weird Fishheaded folk who raided all our coasts.

I tasted the wind, looked around the heat-hazed land, remembered a few things, and started off walking.

I headed north.

If it seems ludicrous that a single, unarmed and almost naked man should thus set off to topple a proud empire — well, yes, it may seem passing strange. But it was a task laid on me. Also, and this warmed me as I trudged along, I was not really alone. There were many good friends on Kregen who stood at my side in battle. My country of Vallia would be joined by other nations desirous of ridding themselves of the yoke of Hamal. Together, we would make a mighty flood that would sweep away mad Empress Thyllis.

To return at once to Vallia was a strong and almost overpowering temptation. It had to be resisted.

We in Vallia had suffered devastating invasions and great humiliations from Hamal. Now we planned to gather an army and invade in our turn. But my people at home could deal with all these purely military matters. Much as I wanted to return at once to my capital of Vondium, picking up Delia from Huringa en route, I knew I could be of more use here. Here in Hamal I could work from within, the worm in the bud. Here was the scene of my labors.

So, with joy that I was about the business that obsessed me, and with despair that this duty deprived me of all that I loved, I set off for Paline Valley.

Before that, though, I hankered after going down to the village and seeking Pundhri the Serene. Dressed as I was, in a sober brown loincloth, I could pass easily enough as a free working man. By exercising a little carpentry skill I could pass as a gul, one of the artisans and craftsmen and small shopkeepers of Hamal, rather than as a clum, the festering mass of poor — free but little better than slave.

The village grew clearer as I scrambled down the slope. It looked a dead and alive hole. There would be guls and clums there, possibly; most of them tended to congregate in the towns and cities. One worrying factor was that the military might of Hamal, being strained, was now prepared to accept clums into the army. Along with the mercenaries Hamalian gold could hire, the clums would constitute a new and major threat. They’d take time to train and they’d desert as fast as they could; but the laws of Hamal are as of steel. Once the Hamalian military machine gained control of an individual clum, that once-free man would turn into just another cog in the iron legions of Hamal.

Not a pretty prospect, and yet just one of the hundreds of problems that beset me. There was much to ponder as I walked into the end of the main and only street of the village. Pundhri the Serene was not there. He had taken his little party off at once, riding preysanys, a common form of saddle animal among the less wealthy. I looked at the gaffer who told me this, and shook my head, and went away from that village. I had not cared for their looks.

And this made me even more keenly aware of the strangest part of this whole business.

I was unarmed.

On Kregen, a man does not care to be parted from his arsenal of weapons.

Now I do not wish to impugn the honesty of that village, or the gaffer to whom I had spoken, or his headman. But my surmise is, and I apologize to those unknown Hamalese if I am wrong, my surmise is the gaffer ran off at once to his headman, robe flapping around his ankles, slippers flicking dust, and the headman, fondling his chain of office, nodded sagely and ordered a signal fire lit. It would be a small signal fire. I saw the plume of smoke rise, tall and straight, and I frowned.

Directly ahead a stream crossed my path with a stand of trees from which the village would have been invisible. They were so damned anxious they hadn’t even waited until their signal smoke would not be seen by the potential victim.

The smoke rose, thin and unwavering. A one-man signal, that, I guessed.

I splashed across the stream and looked around in the little copse. Finding a length of wood in a forest is not as easy as it sounds. Oh, yes, there is wood aplenty, lumber by the yard. I wanted a stick of a certain thickness, length and shape, and I took perhaps a little longer than circumspection might suggest was advisable. I found the stick. Barehanded, freeing it from its parent involved a deal of grunting and twisting and straining, and I used my teeth to trim up the ends to a rough symmetry. Some three feet long — some meter long, I suppose you latter-day folk would say — it snugged firmly in my fists, spread apart to give leverage. I swung the stick about. It was not a simple cudgel or bludgeon or shillelagh, admirable though they are in the right hands. This length of simple wood held the feel and balance of a Krozair longsword, and with that potent and terrible brand of destruction a man might go up against devils.

So, swinging my pseudo-longsword, I marched off out of the wood and I kept screwing my head around and staring aloft.

They were not long in making their evil appearance.

The piece of wood stopped its circling motions as I loosened up the old muscles. The end where it had ripped away from its parent glistened yellow and clean and sharp, very sharp, a wooden splinter like a fang.