A Life for Kregen (12 page)

“Kov Colun,” she said. She spoke in a whisper. “I have sworn to have his manhood and have it I will — I will make him into a nithing, a mewling spineless ninny, and then perhaps, if it pleases me, will I kill him.”

The zorcamen rode on, not seeing us in the shadows, our falling commotion merely a part of the greater confusion.

Jilian stood up with my hand under her armpit. She breathed deeply, magnificently. “The bastard came from that marquee, the unburned one with the golden flags. He has something of mine I would have back.”

With that, without a look at me or another word, she started for the marquee. The cloth-of-gold was not as lavish as that festooning the marquee of Fat Lango; but everything spoke of wealth and refinement and a lavish expenditure of money and the labor of slaves. Jilian’s whip lashed the life from two Rhaclaw guards, their heads shining, domed and as wide as their shoulders, bursting under the impetuous ferocity of the lash. Jilian ran on past them and entered the marquee, the whip black and cutting striking before her.

Whatever was so important as to warrant this risk was no doubt somewhere in there, if she said so. This Kov Colun had looked a different prospect from the others of this army and I deemed it expedient to stand on guard by the marquee entrance. Jilian would find what she wanted, so I contented myself by a harshly shouted: “Hurry, girl!”

She re-appeared and color stained her cheeks like flame.

“By the Rod of Halron and the Mount of Mampe!” She spoke in a breathy whisper, as though drunk, and yet she moved with a sureness that told me she was vibrantly alive with her own personal triumph. Under her arm she carried a silver-mounted balass box, about eighteen inches long. The rapier in her left hand snouted parallel to the ground and even with the box under her arm I fancied she could give an account of herself. The whip was recoiled up her arm, and her white skin was blotched and stained with blood.

I said: “You are quite ready?”

“More ready than those cramphs within.”

“No doubt,” I said, handing her across a couple of corpses and a pool of spilled blood. “They are also without.”

She laughed.

“Aye! Without much.”

The blue and green checks swathing us would serve for a space yet. But the sounds of distant strife wavered on the night air, faded and were gone. A silver trumpet note sounded, tiny and far, signaling the “Recall” and the “Reform.” The way the notes trilled told me that was not Volodu the Lungs but one of the trumpeters of Karidge’s Regiment. They had done well, for the army encampment was in a leem’s mess; but we were left here, alone, and must make shift to get out of this ourselves. In thus pulling his men out, Nath Karidge was strictly obeying my orders. I took Jilian’s arm again and we moved silently into the shadows between the tent lines.

“Zorcas, I think,” I said.

“With a saddle this time, Jak.”

“Aye.”

With a bitterness she made no effort to suppress, she said, “You marked that tapo in the golden armor?”

“You called him Kov Colun.”

“Yes. A piece of dirt that walks about on two legs. Colun Mogper, Kov of Mursham. Never turn your back on him, never trust him. If you can, try to stamp his face flat in the mud — after I have done with him.”

“Mursham,” I said. “In Menaham. That explains the difference, for if he is one of the Bloody Menahem then he would be affronted by the sloth of this army.”

Her bitter anger had been partly mollified by her success in recovering her property, and my words finally brought her thoughts back into some kind of coherence. “You know Menaham?”

“I have fought the Bloody Menahem before. They are one people of Pandahem we will have trouble with in the future—”

“One! All of the rasts in that Opaz-forsaken island.”

“I do not think so.”

“You think because this army is a farce they are all like this?”

We passed beyond a smoke pall from burning forage and the Maiden with the Many Smiles shone out, plunging between cloud wrack, the moon shedding down her fuzzy pink light upon scenes of desolation and death. We saw zorcas moving and headed that way, ready.

“No. There is something almighty strange about this little lot—”

“Of course. They are the dregs of the gutters and the Wharves, dressed up as soldiers. The Chulik paktuns they have engaged as drill instructors left en masse, disgusted. There are no Pachaks and a few Khibils in this sorry army. Pandahem breathed easier when these cramphs were shipped out.”

These words gave me serious concern — more than concern, an all panic stations alarm. I saw it — not all of it, but a deal of it and the core of it. The plan against Vallia... This army was the decoy, a rabble dressed up in fine fancy uniforms and taught to march together and then let loose into Vallia. They were expendable. They had been provided with a cavalry screen composed of men who had once been soldiers and who had been told off for this duty probably for dire misdeeds, or indiscipline or some fault. There are always these men who take the letter of Vikatu the Dodger and fail to see the spirit of that archetypal old sweat of the armies of mythology. That explained the conduct of the patrol we had ambushed. It explained why the army was as it was. But it did not do one very vital and overmasteringly fearful thing.

This knowledge newly given into my hands did not tell me where the real armies were, where the blow aimed to destroy us all would be struck at Vallia.

Chapter Nine

The Whip and the Claw

Jilian kept singing snatches of a silly little song as we jogged along in the suns shine the next day. We had all the world to ourselves, it seemed. The sky stretched emptily and the unending grassland was studded only with small trees and bushes, a wide heath that was, in truth, deceptive, for it extended merely between towns here in eastern Thadelm. The song concerned the comical efforts of a little Och maiden and a strapping young Tlochu youth to sort out the twelve limbs they possessed between them. I found Jilian’s song silly but enchanting. It is called
The Conundrum of the Hyrshiv.
The eventual solution the Och girl and the Tlochu boy worked out for themselves is ironical and funny; it is touching and true, though, for it illustrates that despite difficulties love, what is sometimes ludicrously called “True Love,” will find a way around problems of this physical kind.

She broke off singing and with that graceful turn of her head looked across at me and said, “You could, at least, Jak the Drang, Jikai, have found us zorcas.”

Her use of Jikai here was entirely sarcastic.

We rode hirvels. Now the hirvel is a perfectly good saddle animal. He is a stubby, four-legged beast looking not unlike a nightmare version of a llama with his tall round neck, cup-shaped ears and shaggy body and twitching snout. But he will carry you along if not as fleetly as a zorca or as powerfully as a nikvove in some comfort and despatch.

I said, “There has been enough killing for one night.”

“Deaths don’t frighten me.”

“I saw that. Can you tell me where you were trained?”

By my phraseology she understood that I was circumspect about the sororities. She laughed.

“There is no secret about
where,
Jak. That was at Lancival. Oh, a wonderful place, all red roofs and ivied walls and the gentle cooing of doves and the sliding gleam from the water well, that is a long time ago now.” She sighed and her laughter died. I judged that to a man with a thousand years of life, as I had awaiting me, her memory of a long time ago might seem as yesterday. Or not, given the terrors and the pains of the intervening period. She flashed her eyes at me. “But as to
how,
that you may ask and never get an answer.”

“I do not think I would choose to ask.”

“And you?”

“Here and there about the world—”

“Oh, really, Jak! If we are to be friends, as I sincerely hope, you must do better than that.”

“You would wish to be friends with me?”

Her regard on me wavered and she looked away. She shivered. “Better a friend than an enemy.”

“Well,” I said, trying not to be offended. “And I think if we are to be friends you must do better than that.”

“Mayhap I do not wish to be — friends.”

“As to that, we must let Opaz guide us.”

“Yes.”

“So how was it you were slave with the Pandaheem?”

Her face flushed up again in remembered terror and anguish, and, too, recollected anger.

“I served the Sisters well. At least, I think I did. I have some skill. But when the Troubles fell on Vallia, flutsmen came and I was taken. They dropped from the air like stones. We fought but were overborne. They are not — not nice, flutsmen.”

“Most, not all,” I agreed, equably. “And this Kov Colun?”

“I will say nothing of him save that I shall sink my talons into him, and rip him, and may then, if it pleases me, kill him.”

I nodded and the conversation died for a space.

After a time as we rode along and the motion of the hirvels jolted our livers, we regained a more pleasant atmosphere and she told me she was one of six children born to a shopkeeper in Frelensmot. He had been a happy, jolly man, and just rich enough to buy three slaves for the shop, which was, she said with a funny little toss of the head, a Banje store, a place where you could buy candy and sweets and toffee-apples and miscils and all manner of toothsome, mouthwatering trifles. But the shop fell on evil days and her father spilled a vat of boiling treacle on his foot and it never healed and that broke him. She herself was sent at first to the Little Sisters of Opaz, where she learned a great deal of how to be demure and polite and sew a fine stitch. Later she went — and here she hauled herself up in her tale, and regarded me with those eyes of hers slanting on me with the telltale surprise for herself that she had said so much.

“When I went to Lancival I learned what to do with a length of steel somewhat longer than a sewing needle.”

She laughed. “And I learned other things, also, and one day Kov Colun will find out how I can rip him up in a twinkling.”

Her hand reached back and stroked down the polished balass of the box. A sensuousness in the gesture reminded me of the way a great cat will turn her head and rub a paw down past her ear. Then Jilian laughed again, her head thrown back and the long line of her throat bared and free to the breeze.

“And you are just Jilian?”

“For you, Jak, just Jilian.”

“I see.” Well, it was no business of mine. Although she wouldn’t understand, I did not think we would go up the hill to fetch a pail of water together.

We would have to avoid habitations until we reached Vond, and any other riders we encountered would without doubt be hostile. The rendezvous with Barty and the others lay some way ahead and although I was in a fever of impatience to reach Vondium and attempt to discover where the main threat to the city would come, I had to tread cautiously. So we covered the dwaburs, talking and laughing, and keeping our weapons loose in their scabbards.

A scatter of black-winged warvols rose ahead of us. The scavenging birds would rip a body up, dead or half-dead; but they were a part of nature fulfilling a function and so must be treated on their own merits. We rode up to the mess hunkered by a grassy hillock.

The three zorcas were almost stripped down to the bone. The three jutmen because of their armor were not in so detailed a state of dissolution, although their faces were gone, and only three yellow skulls jutted above the corselet rims. Their weapons were gone, and although two of the arrows had been withdrawn, the third, broken in half, still shafted from the gaping eye socket of a skull. One always, in these circumstances, inspects the fletchings.

There was no sense in grieving over the three zorcamen. By their uniforms and insignia they were of the Second, Jiktar Wando Varon’s regiment. Stragglers, they must have been attempting to catch up with the main body, as we were, heading for the rendezvous.

The arrows were fletched with natural gray and brown feathers, and were of the length to be shot from a standard compound bow. “Hamalese?” said Jilian.

“Very likely, or their mercenary allies. We have a ways to go before we reach Vond. The river will set a barrier of some sort between us. Keep your eyes skinned.”

And that was an unnecessary injunction, to be sure.

The mercenaries turned out to be masichieri, very cheap and nasty examples of men earning a living hiring out as killers and pretending to be soldiers, and they found us as the twin suns were sinking into banks of bruised clouds and streaming a choked, opaline, smoky light over the grass.

“I make ten of them, Jak.”

“Yes.”

“Will that be five each, d’you think?”

They were infantry, armored in an assortment of harnesses, bearing a variety of weapons, and their bristly ferocious faces exhibited their joy at thus finding two lonely strangers at this time of the evening. They rose from the bushes and four of them bent bows upon us. They were joking among themselves.

“Best step down nice and easy, horter and hortera,” one shouted, very jocose, calling us gentleman and lady.

“Had I a bow—” began Jilian.

I said: “Put your head down, girl!”

I clapped in my heels, the Krozair longsword flamed a single brand of livid light against the sky and I leaped forward.

Three of the arrows were caught and deflected as the masichieri, startled, loosed. The third whistled past out of reach to my rear. Then I was in among them. The Krozair longsword — well, that brand of destruction is indeed a marvel, and this was a true Krozair brand, brought from Valka, the blade and hilt so cunningly wrought that the steel sings of itself as it thrusts and cuts. Four, five and then six were down before they even had time to consider what manner of retribution they had brought on themselves. I kneed the hirvel to the side and the Krozair blade hissed. Back the other way and a thraxter that came down at me abruptly checked, snapped across, and its owner went smashing backwards without a face.

The remaining two were to my rear and I hauled the hirvel up squealing on his haunches and swung him about. His hooves clawed at the sunset. We were down and I was belting back, and saw a sight, by Krun!