A Life for Kregen (21 page)

Somewhere a harp was being played, long muted ripples of sound pouring through the close confines of the corridor where the lavender drapes and the pictures set an incongruous note against the harsh armor and weapons and the passions. For I was wrought up, and the Fristle was half-dead with fear, and the guards to relieve the tedium were mindful for a little fun.

We walked along as sedately as a pair of candidates for the Dunmow Flitch. But these idle-bored-half-witted guards! The antics of people attempting to relieve the tedium by teasing and taking pleasure from baiting others have always repelled me, and, by Krun, always will. These four started the usual nonsense and I walked on with a stony face which, in their ignorance, they failed to observe. The Fristle gasped. When the buffoonery became too coarse, for they halted us with a lazily dropped spear to bar the passage, and the Fristle, shivering with a paroxysm of terror, fell half-swooning, and the guards moved in with more intent purpose, there was nothing else left for that onker of onkers, Dray Prescot, to do but prevent them.

They went to sleep peacefully enough, all four of them.

“The devil take it!” I was wroth. Now, as there had been nothing for it when the guards started to have their idiot nasty fun, so now there was nothing for it but to go in and bring Thelda Polisto and her son out. The guards’ slumbering bodies would soon be noticed. If we dragged them in and locked the door their absence would soon be noticed. And if we simply left them they would recover and they would soon give notice.

So, in we went.

The revolting behavior of the guards outside should have given me some warning. Of the four, one had been a paktun. Their Hikdar inside the prison chambers was also a paktun, an apim and a damned handsome fellow in his own eyes with his curly brown hair and striking eyes and smooth easy swagger. The woman he held in his arms in an alcove struggled silently with him. He had begun his little antics early. I wondered if Layco Jhansi was aware, and realized instantly that he could not be. Or, he might — and not give a damn. Provided Lol’s wife was still alive to act as a bargaining counter, Jhansi wouldn’t care what tortures she went through. The two were in partial shadow. I let go of the Fristle, who swooned clean away, and crossed the rugs in half a dozen strides, knocking an ornamental table with spindly legs over on the way. The baby lay in a crib to the side and Thelda’s dress was disarranged and I guessed she had been putting the infant to sleep after his morning feed. I felt inclined to put this rast of a Hikdar to sleep, also.

I hit him with a certain force under the ear.

He collapsed, face first, soundlessly, onto the carpets at the woman’s feet. Her face blazed up. She swayed. Her hand went to her breast.

“Dray! Oh, Dray — it is you!”

I stared, appalled.

Chapter Fifteen

I Postpone a Problem

Sometimes a man will leap out of bed after a vile dream with a cry of horror on his lips, and his hand will reach out for the sword scabbarded conveniently on the bedpost.

Well, I could not stop the anguished cry from bursting past my lips. And I already held a sword in my fist.

But I knew I could not awake from this nightmare.

Seg!

“Dray, oh, Dray!” Thelda lurched toward me, her arms out and I could only take her into my arm, and hold her and feel how she trembled, like a hunted beast in a snare. She was trapped, horribly trapped, and she did not know it.

“Thelda,” I said, stupidly. Then, “We’ll get you out of this. Now, love, brace up.”

Her face lifted and she looked at me. Tears spangled her cheeks. She was just as I remembered her, just as beautiful, just as plump and happy, just as self-oriented with all her outward devotion to her friends, like puppy-love. Yes, this was Thelda, whom I have mocked and laughed at, who was a good comrade to Delia and me, and who was Seg’s wife and the mother of his children.

I moved a little back in a gentle attempt to free myself from her embrace and swung about a little; but she clung to me, her naked arms about my neck, her tear-stained face reaching up to mine. I did not kiss her. I do not think I ever had. Standing thus so closely-entwined I could feel the warmth of her, the perfume, and I saw the door open with a smash and a man burst in. I started to hurl Thelda away and then there was no need.

Lol Polisto stood there, disheveled, the sword in his fist caked with blood to the hilt and blood splashed most horridly over that smart Chulik uniform. He saw us.

The instinctive and fierce flash of jealousy that burst up like flame into his face was instantly quelled as I spoke.

“Thank Opaz you got out of that pit, Lol. Here is Thelda and safe. The baby too. Now, for the sweet sake of all we hold dear, let us get out of here.”

“Yes, yes,” cried Thelda. There was no pretense in the way she freed herself from me and flung herself at Lol all blood-caked as he was. I stood there and the brains in my old vosk-skull felt as though they were frizzling. Didn’t Thelda know Seg was still alive? And, if knowing, did she care? Then I remembered what Lol had said, off-handedly, that the Kov of Falinur was dead. Thelda must believe that, too. She
must
...

“Now, my heart,” said Lol, holding Thelda close, stroking her back, her hair, soothing her in an old familiar way that spoke eloquently of their intimate relationship. “The emperor and I will get you out of here, and our son, and then—”

Thelda drew back a little, her face flushed; but she still clasped Lol with a fierce and supplicating grasp. “Is the emperor here with an army, then? After all I have done for him and his family that is the least he could do for us.”

And, I swear it, I laughed.

Wasn’t that Thelda — to the life?

The puzzlement in Lol’s tough face added to my amusement.

“Here is the emperor, Thelda, my heart, so do be — polite.”

“I do not see him, Lol. What—?”

“Come on, you two,” I broke in. “If you must gabble, gabble as we run.”

Leaving the unconscious and unharmed Fristle where she lay a-swoon, and the Hikdar, of whose conduct I felt it best not to apprise Lol, draped across the carpets, we went out. Thelda carried the baby on her breast. Lol’s protective instincts were now so fully aroused I had not the slightest query to make how he had got out of the pit. As we went quickly along the corridor he told me that he had chopped a couple of werstings, those ferocious hunting dogs of Kregen, and a couple of slave handlers, too, the cramphs. At this I lost my smile. He had arrived here from the other direction, the way the Fristle was leading me, and seeing the guards guessed at once he had arrived at where he needed to be. He had also, he said, breathed a quick prayer to Opaz before flinging the door open and bursting in.

At the first stairway we went up, for Thelda told us there was a small and private flier park on the roof of the Lattice House. This was the means by which she had been brought here. The next flight of stairs was guarded by two Fristles, lounging and yawning, and they yawned in a more ghastly way after Lol was through with them. The stairs were no longer carpeted with lushly decorative patterns, merely a plain ochre weave. Our footsteps remained soundless. Near the top an alcove held a silver lamp shaped in the form of an airboat, its tall single flame unwavering. The quietness struck oddly after the racket below. Thelda paused, and gasped, and half-laughing said: “Give me leave to rest awhile, my love.”

At once full of contrition, Lol halted and Thelda sat down in the alcove and began to fuss with the baby. I stood with my back against the wall below and Lol above on the stairs.

Thelda wanted to talk and she asked again about the emperor and his army. I said, “You found yourself in Evir, Thelda. So what then?”

Being Thelda and being faced with something she found incomprehensible, she had simply blotted the incident out as though it had not happened. From the Sacred Pool of Baptism in far Aphrasöe she had been magically transported to her homeland of Evir. She had at once started for Falinur where she was the kovneva and her husband, Seg Segutorio, was the kov, however unwilling a kov he might be. She had arrived just in time to be caught up in the Troubles.

“Oh, it was terrible, Dray! The burning and the looting and—”

I could not help noticing how Lol kept jumping each time Thelda called me by name. Despite all my own views on the idiocy of protocol and suchlike fripperies, I do not accept into the circle of those who may call me by my given name everyone who may imagine he or she has the right. So — beware! And for Lol Polisto it was very clear I should be addressed as majister. So, to smooth one difficulty and to skirt another, I said: “Thelda and I are old friends, Lol. And, it is clear she does not know of Jak the Drang.”

“Who?” said Thelda.

Lol started to say something, but I went on speaking, asking Thelda to tell us the rest before we pushed on. From below stairs no sounds reached us. And Thelda was still in a state of shock, too abruptly released. And, also, I wanted to scout the roof before we burst out.

She had been through a lot in her kovnate of Falinur, where she had been thoroughly detested. And, in the way of things, Lol Polisto had come along and rescued her from a particularly nasty scrape. And nature had taken its course. She firmly believed Seg was dead. She had been told so by taunting officers of Layco Jhansi before Lol took her away from them.

The inevitable had happened. For, as she said quite simply: “Seg wasn’t there when I needed him.”

By Zair, he wasn’t! He was busy trying to escape the lash and the chains of slavery with a damned great wound in him, that had healed only to be broken again and again, and now this last breaking would be attended to, or my name wasn’t Dray Prescot. The machinations of the Savanti nal Aphrasöe through their creature, Vanti of the Pool, ensured that Seg could not be in the same place as Thelda when she needed him, for he had been pitchforked back to his homeland of Erthyrdrin in Loh. Never had fate — and fate had been employed, this time, by the Savanti — played a much dirtier trick.

By the way in which these two looked at each other, the way they touched, by what they said, I could see with limpid clarity they were deeply in love. Well, that was all very fine. I knew that Seg and Thelda had loved each other very deeply, also. Some people aver that it is possible to love more than one person at the same time; love, I mean, in the intimate, sexual union properly belonging to man and wife. Monogamy was the fashion in Vallia, never mind what exotic goings-on occurred in other parts of Kregen. To love more than one person in sequence, that is understandable, else widows and widowers would never escape happily out of their state. But — at the same time? I was not sure. It is a knotty one, and demands scrutiny. Total love, well, by its very nature that cannot be given to more than one at a time. Can it?

Equally, although I had known Lol Polisto for a short time, a very short time, I fancied I had summed him up as a courageous, upright, honest man, who fought for what he loved and believed in. There was nothing here in this new union of the moist-mouthed contemptible underhand way of Quergey the Murgey, the arch-seducer. The obvious way out meant it was all down to Thelda. For the time being I would not, could not, tell her that her husband still lived.

Lol did not know, for he had been out on his fruitless bid to break through the ring of besieging mercenaries when Seg and I had arrived in the fortress of the Stony Korf. So why destroy the happiness of these two now? Anyway, despite his immersion in that milky fluid that gave such tremendous recuperative powers, Seg might still die of that ghastly wound. And we were not out of the wood yet. Lol might die. Thelda might die. We might all die. I pushed away from the wall and, saying, “Bide a space here while I scout the roof,” went on up the stairs.

What a situation! Maybe it is not new on two worlds, maybe it seems trite to the blasé, I could feel for my comrade Seg, and feel for Thelda, and, by Vox, I could feel for Lol, also. Emotions twist a fellow’s guts up in a positively physical way, putting him off his food, making him lean and irritable. And I was feeling highly wrought up as I shoved the door open and stepped out onto the roof, the naked brand in my fist.

The roof was empty.

A single small flier stood chained down, and a tiny wind blew miasmic odors in from the niksuth.

I went back through the doorway and motioned to them to come up. Thelda carried the baby up first, and Lol guarded the rear. We stood on the roof and looked at the flier.

“That is a single place craft...” Lol stated the obvious.

“Hum,” I said, for I had nothing helpful to add.

“It is very clear you must go,” said Lol, speaking with a tightness to his lips that, while it warmed me, made me angry, also. “As for us, we will—”

“Thelda and the baby will go, Lol, and you will ride the coaming. That voller will take you both, I know. I have built the things.” I walked across, not prepared to have any further argument.

Lol wouldn’t have it. “But—” he began.

I took Thelda’s arm as she came up and swung around to face Lol. “In with you, Thelda. Careful of the baby. Now, Lol, stretch out here, on the coaming, and we will strap you tightly.”

“But there is room for you—”

I shook my head, “The way they build these things is a disgrace. All Vallians know that. But this will be built by Hamalese for Hamalese and so should not fail. But she won’t take us all. Now, Lol, get aboard!”

“But you! How will—?”

I lifted Thelda bodily and plumped her into the narrow cockpit of the flier among the flying silks and furs. She held the baby with a care that was completely genuine. I faced Lol.

“Do you wish to argue, Tyr Lol?”

His face betrayed the emotions of rebellion, fear for his wife — for the woman he believed was his wife — and loyalty to Vallia represented by me. I wanted to smile at his confusion; but time was running out. I jerked my head at the voller. “In with you.”

“But it isn’t right—”

“I am perfectly prepared to knock you over the head,” I told him. “But would prefer to say, simply, that your emperor commands you. Would you disobey a lawful command of your emperor?”