A Life for Kregen (11 page)

“Hai, Jikai,” said the girl, very calmly. Her body was lithe and lissome, remarkable, firm and curved, and she swayed with natural grace as she picked up a discarded cloth to cover her nakedness.

I gestured the rapier.

“The commander?”

“Oh, Lango is in there with his painted boys. You will have no trouble with him. Your men will destroy this army with ease.”

“Mayhap,” I said. I went across to the inner opening which was fastened with more cloth-of-gold. The girl picked up a rapier and by the way she handled the blade it was clear she had used weapons before. She smiled at me.

“But, I think, Jikai, you will let me deal with him.”

“He is of concern to me only as an enemy of Vallia.”

“So ho! A patriot. I had thought all patriots long since fled. Your name, Jikai?”

“As to that, I have been called Jak the Drang. And you?”

“Lahal, Jak the Drang. You may call me Jilian.”

“Lahal, Jilian. Now, for the sweet sake of Opaz, let us get on and do this Lango’s business for him.”

The close atmosphere with the lamps shining evenly, the long lines of drapes against the tent walls, the gold and silver goblets spilled across the rugs and the wine soaking into the priceless fabrics, the stink of blood, the sprawled bodies of the men, clung about us. Her coolness both amazed and amused me — the amusement a genuine feeling, the amazement stupid in a world where I had already encountered Jikai Vuvushis — Battle Maidens.

I noticed without comment that Jilian selected from among the pile of tumbled clothes a red length of cloth to wrap around herself, ignoring the lustrous golds and silvers, the greens and blues.

She called me Jikai, which in the connotation she used meant great warrior, and understood that I commanded men. She would get a shock, I thought, when she discovered I had merely three cavalry regiments with me. But all that must wait. We moved together toward the inner opening.

Her face was pale. I thought that to be a natural part of her beauty and not brought on by the circumstances. There was color there, a palest tinge of rose along the cheekbones. Her face was artfully formed, low-browed, wide, with deep eyes that appeared in the lamps’ glow to burn with the desire to exact revenge. Well, there were red and angry weal marks on her buttocks and thighs, and I did not doubt she felt she had good cause to give back what had been taken out on her body.

Her dark hair reached low over that broad white forehead, adding a luster to the eyes, giving an air of intenseness to her whole face, the features clear and pleasing, the mouth warm and red and mobile. She moved with grace. We stood together by the entrance and from beyond the muffling drapes of cloth-of-gold the sound of light laughter reached us.

Jilian’s rapier flickered like the tail of a leem.

“They laugh, those rasts. But now we will smoke them out.”

“We must hurry. There is a whole army encamped about us and there will be many guards.”

Her dark eyes flayed into me, and I could feel the pressure of her thoughts.

“And do you, Jak the Drang, Jikai, fear an army?”

“Assuredly so — when I have other irons in the fire.”

She reached out and ripped away the cloth-of-gold.

“Then let us heat this iron, together, and soon!”

Chapter Eight

Kov Colun Mogper of Mursham

Wherever Jilian had sprung from, the people there had taught her swordplay. Also, and this I found highly intriguing, she stopped to pick up the thick black whip the slave-master had wielded. When we burst through into the inner tented enclosure of the army commander, Fat Lango, it was the whip which, cracking out like a striking risslaca tongue, barbed, lashed him into painful movement. He shrieked. The lash coiled and lifted and struck, and again Fat Lango shrieked.

Jilian laughed.

Her teeth were very white and even.

The guards here were apim, slothful, over-dressed and arrogant to the point of stupidity. They did not interfere as Jilian lashed Lango.

And, still, I carried the Krozair longsword scabbarded over my back.

The painted and perfumed boys fled screaming from the wide pillow-strewn bed. Lango was bleeding. He tried to scramble away on all fours, like a dog, and the whip belted chunks of skin from his rump. Again Jilian laughed, drawing her arm up so that her whole body tensed, cracking the whip forward in a long raking slash that sliced all across Lango and made him shriek in agony.

He fell face down, and now the whip rose and fell, rose and fell, and I saw the last of the guards run. I turned back.

“Time to go, Jilian.”

“I,” she said, panting only a little, magnificent in her barbarism, “have not yet finished.”

“Then, lady, I must leave without you.”

She looked up, and the whip trailed.

“You would?”

“Believe it.”

“I do, Jikai, I do. And, I am ready.” With this she struck not, as she had done, in the pain-ways of the whip, but in the death-ways. I have described this vile kind of Kregen whip before, like a Russian knout or a sjambok. A thick, tapering instrument of agony and death. Fat Lango jerked, abruptly, rearing up like a praying mantis; then he slumped and he was dead.

“Now,” said Jilian, and she coiled that thick rope of vileness along her white arm. “Now, Jikai, I am ready.”

She moved like a stalking chavonth toward the cloth-of-gold entrance. I went the other way, toward the rear, where blue and green striped cottons covered the thicker material of the marquee. She stared after me.

“I go this way.”

The bloody rapier licked out and stripped away the cloth, ripped in a lunge and a twisting tear down, and then across and down again. An opening gaped onto the starshot night.

“I,” said Jilian, with some amused acerbity, “will go with you, Jak the Drang, Jikai.”

“You may call me Jak, Jilian. And I welcome you. You are, I think, a mistress of the Jikai Vuvushis.”

“Yes.”

Together, shoulder to shoulder, we stepped out. Guy ropes angled, glimmering whitely, to catch unwary feet. The commotion boomed away and the flames were still shooting up, orange and lurid, blurring the luminous stars. I headed directly away from the sumptuous marquee of the commander, the late and unlamented Fat Lango, and I kept my eyes peeled for sight of my men. The uproar was prodigious, and once away from the marquee and only four dead men to betray that anyone had passed, we were able to slow down. But there was no sign of my men.

“Where, Jak, is your army?”

We stood by a line of picketed hersanys, their white coats ghostly in that eerie light. Jilian looked completely composed, the red cloth wrapped about her waist, the rapier in her left hand held negligently, the whip coiled up along the right arm, ready to be shaken down in an instant.

“Why do you think I have an army?”

She smiled. “Men like you always command armies.”

“That may be. But my army is not here. We must find mounts and ride.”

She threw her head back and laughed. Then, abruptly, her head came forward and her face lowered on me, intense, demanding, challenging. “Yes, Jak. Yes. I think — I think I would ride with you.”

I was turning away, ready to free the nearest couple of hersanys, and cursing one that tried to take a bite out of my arm. The six-legged beasts are as intractable as any of the trix family of saddle animals, but thicker in the body and, certainly according to my lion-man comrade, Rees, thicker in the skull. I gave the hersany a pat along the neck, soothing him, and swiftly freed the tether. I handed the rope to Jilian, not doubting that she could ride bareback.

A Fristle guard came running up, yelling, his whiskery cat-face outraged. Jilian felled him with a single slicing blow from her whip. It had sprung from her arm and struck as though impelled by an inner life of its own.

The Fristle fell against my hersany. I took the opportunity to wipe my rapier clean on the fellow’s tunic, before I thrust the blade away in its scabbard. And Jilian laughed.

As we mounted up I reflected on her intense and brooding face, almost fierce — not quite fierce, I remark, but intent and concentrated — and compared that with the wild passion of her laughter. This was a girl whose inner spirit held much within her opaque depths. Maybe no man had plumbed her fully yet. Well, that was no job for me. I had not envisaged rescuing a girl, anyway, in this night’s work. And that, of course, brought to mind the other girls chained to their posts, terrified and shrieking in their nakedness.

I turned the hersany’s head back.

Jilian said: “You may be a Jikai, Jak; but your bump of direction is sadly misplaced.”

“Your friends,” I said, most mildly. “I think I should see if their chains may be removed.”

She stared at me, and, I think for the first time, saw me as other than a hulking warrior.

Silently, she turned her hersany too, and together we trotted back to the marquee.

Many a time I have ridden quietly through a shrieking bedlam, an uproarious furor, and marveled at the maniacal things poor crazed wights will do in times of stress. We saw sights that would have amazed your solid stay-at-home citizen; men yelling and crying, women rushing about with streaming hair oblivious to anything, anything at all, so that they ran all a-crying into blazing tents, animals driven mad with fear and trampling down men too crazed to step out of their way. Other things there were too that it would be kinder not to talk about. Through it all Jilian rode with that intense, lowering look on her face that was not a frown, not quite. We reached the marquee and saw how the guards were.

A windrow lay in blood. Others were reeling and staggering, desolated by wounds. The shambles showed a fight had raged here that must have been terrible in its ferocity. Among the corpses I saw a twisted figure, wearing the brave old red and yellow, and I dismounted and turned him over gently. It was Yallan the Iron-throated, a good comrade, who had ridden with us since the Battle of Sabbator. A spear had penetrated between the hooped plates of his kax tralkish and done for him.

Jilian dismounted and walked across to stand at my side.

“One of your men?”

“Aye. Just the one. The wounded would have been carried off. That is the way my men are.”

She said, “There are many dead here. Yet you mourn just the one?”

The flash of feeling I experienced shook me. We had just met and I had thought — and now, how little she knew of me! I knew nothing of her, save that she had courage, and a beauty to set a man’s pulses thumping, and a cool appraisal of life that, I suspected, had brought her through many a dangerous turn.

So, just as gently, I said, “I mourn for all men slain in battle or dead in bed. Yet some must, I think in nature, mean more than others. Is that so strange?”

“No. But they look so — so pathetic. Like the offal a butcher throws to the dogs.”

I marked her words.

She was right. And, by saying that, she revealed more of herself.

Inside the marquee we found more dead guards, blegs and numims and Fristles, and all the slave girls had gone. The chains had been parted by savage blows, the cut edges of the links bright and glittering. So I knew Barty and the others, looking for me, had taken the time.

“We must leave. My men have saved your friends.”

As we mounted up — and the whip chopped two Rapas who would have taken our mounts, as the rapier snicked the life from a third — she said, “I pray you, Jak. Do not call them my friends. They were poor little shishis, slave-girls by nature. I am not as they are.”

I restrained my anger.

“No one is a slave by nature unless they are told this. A baby is born and must learn—”

“Slaves are born slaves.”

“On this, Jilian, you and I must have words later.”

“With you, Jikai, mayhap words will not be enough.”

The tip of the rapier snicked up the warrior-cloak from a body, and a flick sent it sailing like a zizil of The Stratemsk toward Jilian, who caught it deftly and wrapped its blue and green check folds about herself. Another blue and green check enfolded my red and yellow. We turned the hersany’s heads away from the marquee and the windrows of dead, as soldiers with torches ran across from the bivouac lines, shouting.

Into the shadows we rode, but gently, gently, restraining the impulses of our mounts to gallop in frenzy from the bedlam.

The noise of genuine combat floated up in a clangor of iron from the east and that, therefore, was the way my men had gone and the way I must go, too. I glanced at the girl.

Erect, she sat her steed, bareback, grasping the coarse rope with a slender hand that, I could guess, would have a grip of steel. She looked across at me and the redness of her mouth, purple plum in that light, curved into a smile. And then her eyes widened and she stared across my shoulder.

I switched around on the beast’s back and saw riding among torches carried by a body of zorcamen a man in armor who glittered like a golden idol, resplendent, radiant, his sword lifted high as he bellowed orders. The zorcamen surrounding him looked more competent than any of the soldiers I had yet encountered in this army. They rode hard and they trampled down anyone and anything that chanced to get in their way.

It seemed prudent for us to sidle into the shadows of an undamaged tent until this formed body of hardened veterans passed.

Jilian’s face screwed up into a fist. The whip snapped free. Her naked heels lifted out. I reached out and grabbed for the rope and her heels kicked in and the hersany leaped.

My clutching fingers missed the rope. The animal bounded away. Jilian made straight for that body of zorcamen and straight for that shining golden figure. The fury in her face was colder than the Ice Floes of Sicce.

“By the disgusting diseased liver and lights of Makki Grodno!” I yelled, clapping in my heels. “Can’t you control your temper, girl!”

With Jilian in the lead we hurtled toward the zorcamen.

If the Fates, who play with us poor mortals as children play with insects, inspecting a wing here and a leg there, had a hand in it I do not know. But Jilian’s hersany caught a hoof in a guy rope and staggered sideways, twisting, hurling her from his back. The beast went down thrashing and I had time only to haul my own away. I checked him with a vicious tug on the rope and swung down. Jilian lay winded, glaring up with such a look of vindictive hatred as would make a man’s innards turn to treacle.