The Fallable Fiend (11 page)

IX

CHAM THEORIK

For three days I plodded over the flat, grassy, windswept steppes of western Shven without seeing a sign of human life. In fact, I saw no animal life, even, save birds and a few antelope and wild ass far off. I had long since finished the horsemeat and had no means of getting more food, since the wild animals were too swift even for me to run down and I had no missile weapon.

Lacking food and water, I was weakening when my tendrils picked up a hint of dampness. I stood at gaze, testing the air, and set off in the direction indicated. In half an hour I found a water hole, surrounded by a few small trees. The water was largely mud, but I did not let that stop me. Luckily, we demons are proof against nearly all the diseases of the Prime Plane.

I was still sucking up muddy water when the sound of hooves aroused me. As I arose, the horseman spurred his beast to a gallop. He was a big man, similar to the Shvenite mercenaries whom I had seen at Ir. He wore a bulbous fur hat, a sheepskin coat, and baggy woollen trousers tucked into felt boots. His blond beard blew in the wind.

I held up my hand and cried in Shvenish: “Take me to your leader!” This was one of several phrases that I had memorized before setting forth. Time and a good instructor had been lacking for a complete course in the language.

The horseman shouted something like,
“Yipi!”
, and continued his charge. As he came, he unfastened a coil of rope that hung from his saddle and whirled a noose on the end about his head.

Evidently, the man intended to snare me with his lariat, as Aithor’s robbers had done in the Green Forest, and drag me along the ground. Not relishing such treatment, I braced myself. As the loop came whirling towards me, I sprang into the air and caught the rope in my claws. As I came down, I dug in my heels and threw myself backwards.

The results were astonishing. The rider was prepared to pull me off my feet and drag me, but the unexpected tug from my end jerked him out of the saddle, to fall on his head in the grass. The horse halted and fell to grazing.

I hastened to the fallen man. When I turned him over, I was still more astonished to find him dead. The fall had broken his neck.

This put a new complexion on things. The man’s garments would furnish me with some insulation against extremes of temperature, for the midday heat of the steppe nearly prostrated me and the cold of midnight froze me almost to immobility. I therefore adopted the man’s fur hat, sheepskin coat, and felt boots. The trousers I gave up because of the discomfort of cramming my tail into them. I also adopted the man’s weapons and his flint and steel.

The horse I essayed to catch. Repelled by my looks and odor, it moved away as I approached. At the same time, it seemed reluctant to leave the neighborhood of the water hole. I pursued it round and round the clump of trees in a circle; but, weak from hunger, I could not catch it.

Then I bethought me of the lariat. I had never practiced the art of casting nooses, and the first time I tried it I only wound the rope around my legs and sent myself sprawling. Several hours of practice, however, enabled me to make a fairly good cast up to twenty feet. By this means I succeeded at last in getting close enough to throw the noose over the horse’s head. Then I led it back to the water hole and tethered it to a tree.

The dead man I ate, rejoicing in being able to cook my repast for a change. Some Prime Planers would be horrified and deem me a mortal enemy of mankind, but I cannot take their illogical and inconsistent tabus seriously. The man had brought about his own death by attacking me. His soul had presumably gone to that Prime Plane afterworld, where everything is done by machinery. If he had no more use for his body, I certainly did.

Knowing men’s peculiar feelings about the devouring of their own kind, however, I buried the dead man’s remains. It would be hard enough to engage these barbarians in a rational discourse without giving them an additional reason for hostility.

Then I mounted the horse and steered it northwest. According to the map I had once possessed, this was the way to Cham Theorik’s horde. One could never be sure, because every few sennights the tribe packed up and moved in search of new grass for their flocks and herds.

On the second day from the water hole, I sighted another rider on my left. He was headed in a more northerly direction than I, so that our courses converged. Like the first nomad, he wore a fur hat and a sheepskin coat.

As the man and I neared each other, I waved. Here, I thought, was he who should show me to the horde’s present encampment.

The man waved back, and I thought I had made a friendly contact. When we drew nigher, I called in my rudimentary Shvenish: “Sir, would you please direct me to the camp of Cham Theorik?”

We were now about twenty or thirty paces apart. Evidently the man was near-sighted, for only now did he appear to notice that the face under the fur hat was not that of a fellow tribesman after all. His eyes widened with horror, and he shouted something like: “Aroint thee, vile demon!” He pulled the bow from his bow case and fumbled with the arrows in his quiver.

I had a bow and a quiver, too, but never having practiced archery I had no hope of hitting him before he skewered me. Moreover, I wanted a guide, not another corpse.

My next actions were quite out of character. Had I stopped to plan them rationally, I am sure that I should have abandoned the scheme as rash and foredoomed. I had never even practiced the maneuver, which were difficult at best. But as we demons say, luck oft befalls the fearless.

I jabbed my horse’s flanks with the sharp corners of the heavy iron stirrups, which the Shvenites employ in lieu of spurs. As the beast bounded ahead, I swerved towards the mounted Shvenite. While the latter was still nocking his arrow, I swooped within a few feet of him. Then, doing as I had seen Madam Dulnessa do in Bagardo’s circus, I threw myself up on my hands, gripping the saddle bow, and brought my feet up under me. In a trice I was standing erect on the back of the galloping horse.

If I had had to go any distance, I had surely fallen off this precarious perch. By this time, however, the two horses were almost in contact. I sprang from the saddle on which I stood to the rump of the other horse and slipped into the riding position just behind the other rider. I grasped his neck with both hands, driving the ends of my talons into his throat beneath his beard, and shouted in his ear: “Take me to your leader!”

“I will take you!” he cried in a strangled voice. “Only pray cease digging your claws into my neck, lest you open my veins and slay me!”

I let him continue on his course. The poor fellow did not realize that I was as weak with terror at my own recent daring as he was at my unfamiliar aspect.

###

The movable city of the Hruntings reminded me of the camp of the Paaluans and even of the village of the Zaperazh. The houses, however, differed from either of these, being made of sheets of felt spread on hemispherical frameworks of poles. Around this mass of gray domes, areas were marked off for special purposes, among which I noted horse lines, an archery range, and a park for war mammoths.

The nomads and their females and young swarmed about the mass of felt tents, among which were also placed hundreds of large four-wheeled wagons. As my captive guided his mount through the spaces between these obstacles, he and the other nomads kept up a running fire of shouts. My man cried: “Keep off! Stand back! Interfere not, or this thing will slay me!”

In the midst of the tent city stood a tent of double size, with a clear space around it. Before it rose a pair of standards bedight with horsetails, human skulls, and other emblems of nomadic sovranty. A pair of Hruntings, in cuirasses of lacquered leather, stood guard before the cham’s tent; or rather, were supposed to be standing guard. One sat with his back to one of the standards and his head bowed on his knees, asleep. The other sat with his back to the other standard; while not asleep, he was idly spinning a little wooden top with thumb and forefinger on the hard soil before him.

At my captive’s shout, both sentries hastily rose. After an exchange of words with my captive, the sentry with the top clumped into the tent and soon returned to say that the cham would see me forthwith.

I leaped down from the horse and walked towards the entrance. My captive also dismounted and started for me, drawing his sword and yelling threats. I half-drew my own blade, but at this point the sentries intervened. They pushed him back with the shafts of their spears; I left them shouting, and entered.

Part of the oversized tent had been partitioned off as an audience room. As I came in, the cham and two more guards scrambled into official positions and assumed expressions of dignified sternness. The cham sat on a saddle placed on a block of wood to hold it clear of the floor, thus giving visitors the impression of the fearless leader of intrepid horsemen. A guard in fancy dress, with squares of gilded brass sewn to his leathern cuirass, stood on each side of the cham with spear and shield.

Cham Theorik was an elderly Hrunting, as tall as I and hugely fat, with an enormous white beard curling down his chest. He wore a purple robe embroidered with silken patterns from far Iraz. Golden hoops, chains, and other gauds larded his neck and arms.

As instructed, I got down on all fours and touched my forehead to the carpet, remaining in that ungraceful pose until the cham said: “Rise! Who are you and what do you want?”

“If,” I said, “Your Terribility could furnish an interpreter of Novarian, since I know little Shvenish—”

“We speak Novarian, also, our good—we cannot say ‘our good man,’ now can we? Ho ho ho!” Theorik slapped his sides and guffawed. “In fact, we are told we speak it perfectly. So we will proceed in that tongue.”

Actually, the cham spoke Novarian with such a thick accent that I could not understand it much better than I could his Shvenish. I did not, however, deem it prudent to offer my opinion. I related the circumstances of my visit to Shven.

“So,” said Theorik when I had finished, “the money-grubbing Syndicate wants us to save them from the fruit of their own avarice and poltroonery, eh? Or so you say. Where are your credentials, and where is the Syndicate’s offer in writing?”

“As I have told Your Terribility, the cavemen of the Ellornas took all my papers when they captured me.”

“Then what proof have you?” He wagged a fat forefinger. “We have a short way with people who try to deceive us. They are apt to find themselves with sharp stakes up their arses, ho ho ho!”

By a mighty effort of thought, I found a solution to this latest snag. “Great Cham, before the invasion, a few hundred Hruntings served Ir as mercenaries. After the battle, these men marched off to their homeland. Some will remember seeing me in Ir.”

“This shall be looked into.
Rodovek!”

“Aye, sire?” said an official-looking Hrunting, issuing from a curtained doorway.

“See that Master Zdim be lodged in a style proper to an ambassador. See also that he be guarded against attack from without—or against escape from within. If he turn out in sooth to be an ambassador, well and good; if not, ho ho ho! Now then, Master Zdim, you shall return hither at sunset, when our chieftains and we hold a drunken tribal council. We shall then discuss your proposal.”

“Excuse me, sire, but did I hear you say ‘drunken tribal council’?”

“Certes. Know that it is our custom to discuss all at two councils, the first drunken so that thoughts shall come freely and fearlessly, the second sober so that reason and prudence shall prevail. The sober council will be on the morrow. Fare you well, lizardman; you have our leave to go.”

My last glimpse of Cham Theorik on this occasion showed his two guards, with much heaving and grunting, getting him off the saddle he used as a throne.

###

The drunken council was held in a pavilion in the open space behind the cham’s abode. Unlike the latter, it was a tent of canvas, supported by poles and guys like the main tent of Bagardo’s circus. In fact, it had a familiar look. It harbored fifty-odd chiefs and other tribal officials, stinking worse than the Zaperazh.

When I had been shown my place, my table mate on one side was an extremely tall, powerful young Hrunting, with shiny hair the color of gold falling to his shoulders. He was Prince Hvaednir, a nephew of the cham. Since he belonged to the same royal clan as Theorik and was the strongest and handsomest man of that clan, he was considered next in line for the rule of the Hruntings. As he spoke only a few words of Novarian, he and I exchanged no more than polite amenities.

The neighbor on the other side, Prince Shnorri, was short and fat. He, too, belonged to the royal clan. More to the point, he was fluent in Novarian, having studied at the Academy at Othomae. To him I spoke of the familiar look of the tent.

“It is no wonder,” said Shnorri. “An I mistake not, this is the same tent that your circus man employed. When his properties were auctioned, an enterprising trader brought it over the Ellornas and sold it to the cham. He argued that it would hold more diners with less weight and bulk than would one of our traditional round tents of poles and felt.

“The deal caused a great to-do amongst the Hruntings. Some said: Buy the tent, for it represents progress. Progress is inevitable, and our only defense against it is to keep up with it. Others said: Nay, the old and tried ways are best. Besides, to use essentials from Novaria were to make ourselves dependent upon the Novarians, who would soon, by greed and trickery, reduce us all to beggars. As you see, the party of progress prevailed.”

The council began with a dinner. Unlike the Novarians, the Shvenites chewed loudly with their mouths open. The huge drinking jacks were set out and filled with beer by the women. The cham and his chiefs began guzzling.

The time arrived for toasts. The Shvenish custom differs from the Novarian. Novarians drink to others whom they would honor; the honored one remains seated and abstains while his dinner mates rise and drink to him simultaneously. A Shvenite, on the other hand, stands up, boasts of his prowess, and drinks to himself. For ensample, one burly fellow with a broken nose stood up, belched, and declaimed as fellows: