Legions of Antares (7 page)

“You’ll have to keep out of it if we engage in any heavy fighting, Nulty. That contraption strapped to your arm is all very well, but—”

“I’ll fight, master. You’ll see.”

“And,” I said as he swung the strapped steel about, gesticulating, “you’ll have to be a damned sight more careful with it. You’ll have our eyes out or our heads off.”

He let rip a snort of amused disgust, compounded of anger at his predicament and delight in the return of hope and the conceit of his friends’ heads a-rolling on the straw.

“I’ll be careful, master.”

We had to move with energy and speed. The first house Nulty selected proved to contain a family who would dearly love to string Hardil high and toast his soles. The head of the household, a hard grainy man with a scarred face, spread his hands.

“We are all overjoyed that the true Amak has returned. But we are without weapons, for the Amak — Hardil the Mak — has taken them all away.”

This was not the poser it might have seemed. Nath and Lardo unrolled the blanket in which we had wrapped the guards’ gear. “Take your pick.”

That put a very different complexion on the whole affair.

“There are more where those came from,” I said.

From a silly raggle-taggle group trying to topple a lord in power, we slowly grew in strength to a tidy little force. The hired mercenaries would prove the chief problem. Maybe they were slack and not on the top line; for all that they remained men whose trade was killing. I confess I hesitated; it would have been easy for me, now that I was free, to seize a flying beast and simply leave Paline Valley and head for Ruathytu. In a sober assessment of the situation that is probably what I should have done. Life was just bearable for the people here with Hardil in charge. He was vicious and cruel; but his time would pass. Was it only my own self-esteem that made me persevere? Was it a lust for power? All I needed from the valley was a name; Nulty could run the place admirably. Why should men risk their lives just for an Amak who was hardly ever around?

And then one of the people who had taken up a captured sword said, “Notor! We bless the day you return to us, for now we shall be free from a burden on our minds.”

Perhaps that was the turning point. A burden on their bodies was expected; but a burden on their minds...?

So we went up against Hardil the Mak and his bought blades and we fought them.

We had to be clever. We had to use all the advantages that people fighting in their own village possess over intruders. Young lads, whooping with joy, flung lassos from rooftops and snared up the mercenaries. Nets dropped from the shadows and entangled fighting men so that they might be stuxed where they struggled. The mercenaries quickly tired of earning their hire, for they were of middling quality only, and they attempted to strike bargains with the people. At that time I was having a merry little ding-dong with a group of the guards who had escorted me into Hardil’s imposing house. They were being bested, and starting to fall away, and run, when Nulty ran up, shouting that the mercenaries had surrendered, crying quarter, and would enter the service of the old Amak.

“The new Amak is done for, his power forfeit, his charade at an end,” I said, for the benefit of the listening paktuns. “The old Amak has returned to his home.”

They got the message.

I left the elders to sort out the details, and accompanied by Nulty and a group of my people with swords in their fists went off to find out about Hardil the Mak. He was discovered cowering in a chest stuffed with silks and sensils, shaking, and yet very ready to damn and blast us all. What he expected at our hands must remain a mystery. Nulty stepped forward to speak to him, and a woman — little more than a slip of a girl with wild brown hair and blank eyes — leaped. The dagger in her fist flamed. She plunged the blade into Hardil’s throat, above his tunic and jerkin, dragged it out stained with blood, and so drove it in, again and again, screaming, until she was pulled away. She stood, blood-splashed, quivering, straining to get at Hardil.

He needed no further ministrations on Kregen.

“Lalli,” said Nulty in a reproving voice. He knelt at Hardil’s side, and I remembered he had adopted the black-haired boy as his son. Nulty bowed his head and we stood respectfully.

Presently, Nulty stood up. The sword strapped to his arm scraped on the floor.

“He was misguided, poor lad, and turned into a monster. But he promised well, at the beginning. I am sad it turned out like this.”

Lalli screeched.

“Yes, yes,” said Nulty. And, “Help Lalli to her bed, someone. She’ll be better when the child is born.”

Well, there is no guarantee of that, on Kregen as on Earth.

“It was no plan of mine that Hardil should die,” I told Nulty.

“I know you, master, and I know you speak the truth. Mayhap it was better that he did, after all.”

Everyone gathered in the main compound under the light of Kregen’s first moon, the Maiden with the Many Smiles, and the mercenaries were discharged. They would find employment very quickly and remain tazll for only a short time in Hamal where armies were being formed for projects unknown. I asked after the army of whose structure I remained ignorant, and the soldiers here, who had remained strictly aloof from the fighting, knew nothing beyond their orders, which required them to provide food and provender. An army demands enormous quantities of supplies and mad Empress Thyllis was not choosy about how she obtained the sinews of war.

The Hikdar in command of this supply detachment said to me, “So, notor, you are the real Amak. But it is all one to us. We collect supplies for the army, and you or the other Amak will provide them.”

He was a lean man with a tic in his left eye, and a shriveled left arm. I refused to allow myself to think that I was providing supplies for the enemy.

“You will take what your requisitions call for, Hikdar, and not a single sack more.”

“Oh, aye, notor. We’ll take what the law allows.”

And that was a lot, a voracious lot, by Krun.

To Nulty, privily, I said, “We must arrange to depress the figures next season, so that we appear poorer than we are.”

“Aye, master. I do not relish growing crops for these leeches to take away.”

“Well, every little helps...”

“And we can leave the cattle in the high pastures for a little longer.”

“You will risk the wild men—”

“Our young men not in the army can care for the cattle. You will see.”

Nulty had striven hard to rebuild the valley and had attracted fresh settlers. Paline Valley was resuming the importance it had once held in the surrounding valleys. Paline was the center one of the Three Valleys — Hammarat, Paline and Thyriodon — and they were all remote and isolated from the current of events in Hamal. Now that I was certain I might travel the empire using my name of Hamun ham Farthytu the urgency to be off obsessed me. Yet much had to be done here for humanity’s sake before I could leave.

When I saw Nulty after he had himself cleaned up I gaped. His shock of wild hair was trimmed, his bulbous nose looked respectable, and his walk was not the shambling progression of a hairy graint. Only his twisted hands struck an incongruous note. He wore a neat white tunic cinctured by a plain leather belt — plain but for two plaques of bronze showing, one a chavonth, the other a zorca. He looked spick and span.

“And you will be leaving us soon, master?”

“I must. But Paline Valley can now look forward to a period of prosperity again.” I frowned. “You had best show me the treasure young Hardil amassed.”

Nulty’s face expressed amazement only for two heartbeats; then he sighed and lifted a hand.

“I should have remembered, master, you are as cunning as a leem. Yes, Hardil kept treasure hoarded up for himself.”

“It must be returned to its owners—”

“Most of them are dead.”

“Then, as the Amak, I will take a tithe. The balance goes to the valley. That is understood?”

“Understood, master.”

“Make it so.”

The box of tough lenken wood bound in black iron stood under Hardil’s bed. Some of Nulty’s people dragged the chest out and smashed the locks. They threw the lid back. We all stared in. Treasure... Ah, treasure! This was the muck men fought and killed for, this was the wonder women schemed for...

There was a fair old quantity of gold and silver, some boxes of gems. Kregans are aware of the magic inherent in a gem if it is cut and faceted, unlike the Ancients of our own world. We hauled the stuff out and Nulty appointed a young stylor to make a reckoning, with elders standing by to oversee. The stylor Manchi was not available. Privately, Nulty told me he thought someone had chopped the stylor’s head off and stuffed him into a crack in the mountains. The Whip Deldars, too, suffered a similar fate. Deprecate the bestiality as much as we may, we must also face human nature. So the stylor carefully wrote down an account. I picked up a fine sword. It was a thraxter, but of a fineness that had caused it to be regarded as a treasure rather than a weapon. I hefted it. I bent the blade and it twanged back sweetly.

“Yes, master?” said Nulty.

“Write this among my share,” I said.

No one argued.

Perhaps that was as it should be, too. I know I was aware of the amusement that a Hamalian treasure store had yielded a superb sword for an enemy of Hamal. On the blade the etched magical brudstern in its usual open flower shape showed the blade to be of value. Folk tend to whisper rather than proclaim the magic properties inherent in the brudstern. To
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me it meant simply the blade had been valued by someone enough to make me accept it as a brand of quality.

Outside, in the sweet air of Kregen, Nulty cocked a fishy eye up at me. “When, notor?”

“I grieve to say it, old friend. But as soon as possible.”

“I feared so.”

“Then do not fear. You know I repose complete trust in you. You have made of Paline Valley a paradise among the hills. The people love and respect you. I shall be back again to drink a stoup of ale with you and talk over the old days.”

“Make it sooner rather than later.”

“I will, as Havil is my witness.”

A week, I decided, would not be too much of a crime against my people of Vallia. A sennight I would spend with my people of Paline Valley, who were at war with Vallia. As Nulty said, screwing up his eyes against sunglare as the drums rolled from the watchtowers: “We may be cut off and isolated here, but we try to keep abreast of the news. Pandahem island is all ours now, and parts of Vallia. I have heard little from the south, from the Dawn Lands recently.” Then he snorted one of his barking laughs. “I heard precious little, stuck in the cells.”

The drum beat brought the people out of the houses. We all stared up. Wide-winged shapes drifted down among the streaming mingled rays of the Suns of Scorpio. Caught by Nulty’s appraisal of Hamal’s situation, for if anybody could, he represented grass-roots opinion, I stared at those shapes drifting down. I was surprised. More — I was flabbergasted.

“What—?” I said.

“Aye, master. The new flying ships of the air. Do not ask me why the Air Service uses them, although it is whispered they run short of essential commodities in voller manufacture.”

Hamal was never a great seafaring nation; they control airboats, which they call vollers. Together with Hyrklana and other countries of the Dawn Lands — and in Balintol or eastwards, we now believed — they had supplied Paz with vollers, always refusing to sell to old enemies. The secrets of voller manufacture were jealously guarded. We in Vallia had developed flying ships which could rise in the air and grip onto etheric-magnetic lines of force and so sail the skies, tacking and making boards against the wind. It had not seemed Hamal with her sky-spanning fleets of enormous ships would need to descend to mere vessels powered by wind and sails. But, clearly, they had. As the ships of the Train of Supply furled their sails and made bumpy landings, I saw only one true voller, swinging high as tail guard.

Also, I observed that the Hamalese made unhandy sailors.

“They have come to take our produce from us.” Nulty was grumpy, bowing under the inevitability of taxation. “Vultures.”

“The empire needs supplies, Nulty.”

“Oh, yes. We must needs feed and clothe our armies and provender their animals. But we have to defend ourselves against the wild men from the Mountains of the West. And our soldiers are away in the Dawn Lands, or Vallia.” He cocked an eye up at me. “They say your namesake there, Dray Prescot, who is the Emperor of Vallia, is a devil spawned from hell and should be stuffed and roasted to a cinder.”

“So they say.”

Then Nulty surprised me. We walked slowly in the suns light toward the grounded sailing ships of the sky. Nulty said: “Now if the Dray Prescot who is Hamun ham Farthytu could be the Dray Prescot who is Emperor of Vallia, I think he would run things very differently, very differently, by Havil the Green!”

I digested this. If you understand that I felt very small you will not be far from the truth. Difficult to feel ashamed, though, damned difficult, when I was just a simple ordinary sailor man trying to run an empire and chuck out the slavers and the aragorn and the thieving flutsmen and reiving mercenaries, and then trying to join all the lands of Paz into a friendship that was genuine and would last, so that we might together turn our attention to the Opaz-forsaken Shanks who raided us all with fire and blood and misery. Damned difficult.

“Well, Nulty, old friend. I’m just the Amak of Paline Valley here, and have work to do in Ruathytu.”

The officers in charge of the supply position were barely polite. I saw they were annoyed at being forced to fly sailing ships of the air, which the Hamalese called famblehoys, instead of queening it through the upper levels aboard vollers. We in Vallia sometimes called our flying sailing ships vorlcas, and as you will see, the two names reflect the respective worth in which the countries held their sky sailers. No doubts at all afflicted me that I must take a very careful look at these aerial vessels. The officers bore down, and although second line troops, the uniforms blazed bullion and lace and flaunted feathers. Nulty pulled a face, and then we were busy trying to keep as much of our produce as we could for ourselves.