A Sword for Kregen (13 page)

The Khibil said: “Lahal, apim. I am Pompino, Scauro Pompino ti Tuscursmot. When I saw the Gdoinye leading you on I realized you were a kregoinye.” He sniffed. “Although why the Everoinye should imagine I would need help against miserable little Ochs, I do not know, by Horato the Potent.”

I felt the solid ground of Kregen lurch beneath me.

A man, another mortal man, was talking of the Gdoinye, of the Star Lords! He knew! He called me and by implication himself a kregoinye. I swallowed. I spoke up.

“Lahal, Scauro Pompino. I am Jak.”

If I was where I thought I was the name of Dray Prescot would have that villain hog-tied and subject to an agonizing death.

About to go on to amplify the single name of Jak with some descriptive appellation — and it would not have been Jak the Drang for news travels where there are vollers — this Scauro Pompino ti Tuscursmot interrupted.

“You call me Pompino. On occasion it pleases me to be called Pompino the Iarvin.”

“Pompino.”

“Now we had best fix this shrewish lady’s axle and then see her safely into the town, which I take to be Gertinlad.”

“I agree. We are in Hamal, I think.”

He shook his head as we began on the axle. The lady made no offer to get out of the coach, and the Rapas gathered themselves to help.

“No. I am not sure; but not Hamal.”

Well, I thought, if you’re right, dom, thank Vox for that.

The Rapa called Onron scowled. “Hamal? You are from Hamal?” His fist gripped his sword, a thraxter, and he half-drew.

“No, Knave,” snapped Pompino. “We are not from Hamal.”

“The Hamalese,” quoth the Rapa, “should be tied up in their own guts and left to rot, by Rhapaporgolam the Reiver of Souls!”

“Quidang to that,” said Pompino.

A soft clump of hoofs drew our attention as a party of men riding totrixes rode up. There were ten of them and their six-legged mounts were lathered. Their weapons glittered in their hands, apim and diff alike. Pompino grabbed his piece of wood and prepared to fight; but Onron shrilled a silly cackle and said: “Peace, Knave. These are the lady Yasuri’s men, my comrades. They were decoyed away by other Ochs, may they rot in Cottmer’s Caverns.”

With the increment in our numbers we were able to repair the wheel and axle and so the coach started creakingly on its way to Gertinlad. Pompino and I rode perched on the roof, with Onron and his partner driving, and the totrix men resuming their function as escorts. We rolled through the mellow countryside and under the archway of the town and so into the familiar sights and stinks of a bustling market town and to an inn called the Green Attar. This was a high class hostelry such as would be patronized by a lady of gentle birth. The commander of her escort, a surly Rapa called Rordan the Negus, would have seen us off with a few curt words. He and his men wore half-armor, and were well armed with spear and bow, sword and shield. Pompino would have started an argument in his high-handed way; but Onron, who had carried the personal satchels from the coach into the inn, came out and yelled that the lady Yasuri would speak with us, and Bratch was the word.

So we jumped and obeyed on the run, which is what a serving man does when Bratch! is yelled at him.

As we went in Pompino said: “I think the Everoinye wish us to continue to take care of this lady. I admit it is not an assignment I relish, but the ways of the Everoinye are not for mortal man to understand.”

I just nodded and so we went into the Green Attar and the smell of cooking and rich wines and stood before the table at which sat the lady Yasuri. The inn looked to be clean and comfortable, with much polished brass and dark upholstered chairs of sturmwood, with a wooden floor strewn with rugs of a weave new to me. We stood respectfully.

“You did well to drive off those rascally Ochs,” said the lady in her high voice. “You will be rewarded.”

She presented an outré picture, for she was tiny, and lined of face, with shapeless clothes that swaddled her in much black material like bombazine, shiny and hard, with a blaze of diamonds and sapphires, and with fine ivory lace at throat and wrist. She was apim, and her face looked like a wrinkled nut, with yet a little juice remaining. Her nose was sharp. She wore a wig of a frightful blond color. The rings on her fingers caught the oil lamps’ gleam and struck brilliants into our eyes.

Pompino said: “We thank you, lady.”

She glared at him as though he had offered her violence.

“I am for LionardDen. The kov here is my friend; but he is away in the north helping in the fight against those Havil-forsaken rasts of Hamal. The land is hungry for fighting men. You are mercenaries. I offer you employment to see me safely through to Jikaida City.”

Pompino took a breath.

Before he could speak, the lady rattled on: “I can offer you better pay than usual. A silver strebe a day will buy a mercenary here. I offer you eight per sennight.”

With a dignity that set well with him, Pompino pointed out, “One does not buy a paktun. One pays him for services rendered.” As he spoke I received the impression that he was a paktun, probably a hyr-paktun and entitled to wear the golden pakzhan at his throat. “But, lady — are the silver strebes broad or short?”

She cocked up her sharp chin at this.

This was, indeed, a matter of moment. Coinage varies all over Kregen, of course, just as it does on Earth; but the common language imposed, so I thought, by the Star Lords, and the wild entanglement of peoples and animals and plants mean a creeping universality makes of Kregen a place unique by virtue of its very commonality. A short strebe, the silver coin known over most of the Dawn Lands, is worth far less than a broad strebe, and every honest citizen knows very well how to value the two in the scales. They may carry the very same head of whatever king or potentate has issued them, and the reverse may show the same magniloquent declarations of power or current advertisement of political policy; but the short and the broad will not buy the same quantity of goods in the markets — no, by Krun, not by a long chalk.

Now the Dawn Lands of Havilfar form a crazy patchwork of countries, and they bear no resemblance to the ordered checkers of the Jikaida board. They are a confusing conglomeration of kingdoms and princedoms and kovnates and republics, and a map-maker’s nightmare. The lady Yasuri hailed from one kingdom and while she was gone her king might be deposed, or her country invaded, so that when she returned she would have to vow fealty to a new sovereign — that was if her vadvarate still belonged to her. The Dawn Lands, viewed from some lofty perch in space, must resemble a stewpot forever on the boil.

Watching the lady Yasuri I saw how she used her shiny black bombazine to armor herself against the world. She was more accustomed, I guessed, to soft sensil and languorous dresses in the privacy of her own quarters, and she’d probably doff that hideous wig. She presented a hard and shrewish front to the world out of fear or the desire to intimidate. She screwed up her eyes, and her white hand toyed with her glass. She made a great show of thinking deeply. Then:

“Broad.”

Pompino nodded, still grave, still engaged in the negotiation of hiring out as a mercenary. But he did not attempt to increase the offer on account of his being, as I supposed, a hyr-paktun. He said: “But I am a Khibil. It would be nine for me.”

“Done,” said the lady Yasuri, promptly. “Nine for you, Khibil, and eight for the apim.”

I was too amused to argue.

Most places of Kregen use the six-day week, which I, rather contrarily, call a sennight. So our pay would be useful. A Pachak here would receive at least twelve broad strebes, possibly fourteen. A Chulik would get the same. You would rarely find a Kataki as a mercenary although there were renowned races of that slavemaster people whose second method of earning a living was hiring out as mercenaries; and they would grump until they got their twelve. As for the Ochs, four or five at the most. Rapas and Fristles and the like would get the standard one strebe a day.

If they didn’t argue it out, they’d get short strebes, too.

Pay is relative, of course, and I guessed that in these lands profoundly affected by the war with Hamal up north the price of commodities would have shot up. Perhaps this pay was not as excellent as at first sight it appeared. All the same, I contrasted these rates with those paid to the bowmen and archers of home, where a silver stiver was regarded as the small fortune paid to a Relianchun and where the bronze krad, a denomination of coin newly introduced by the Presidio, figured largely in the imaginations of the men come pay day. The krad, with, I hesitate to observe, an unspeakable likeness of the Emperor of Vallia on the obverse and resounding and inspiring slogans on the reverse, was regarded as fair and just. But, then, my men there in Vallia served their country and not for pay.

Even so, I did not think that the old Crimson Bowmen of Loh, who had formed the old emperor’s bodyguard, had received a silver stiver a day. Their Jiktars and Chuktar had taken away their golden talens; of that I was very sure.

When Pompino and I, having made our respects to the lady Yasuri and the hiring being completed, returned to the courtyard of the Green Attar we became immediately aware of an offensive abomination going on there. The sights and sounds were sickening. A number of nobles put up here, for the place was renowned, and one of the members of a noble’s entourage was being flogged.

The fellow had been triced up into the flogging triangle in a corner where sweet-scented flowers, brilliant and lovely, depended over the wall, forming a silent mockery of the obscenity going on in their shade. A thick leather gag had been forced between his teeth and secured by thongs around his head. He was flaxen-haired, strongly-built, and his tunic had been stripped down to his waist.

He hung in the leather thongs binding his wrists and ankles to the wood of the triangle. He hung limply, as though accepting what was happening, and then he would jerk, every muscle standing out ridged, and so collapse into that limp huddle again. So he hung and jerked, shuddering, and hung again, and then convulsed once more as the other lash slashed across his bloody wreck of a back.

A left-handed Brokelsh stood at his right side and a right-handed Rapa stood at his left. They took turns to slice the lashes down, black and whistling with stranded thongs.

“By Black Chunguj!” swore Pompino. “I never did like to see a man flogged jikaider.”

For the Rapa and the Brokelsh between them were dicing the man’s back up into a checkerboard of blood.

A Deldar, a heavy and thick-set man with the weight of years in the grade with no hope of ever making zan-Deldar and then Hikdar about him, spat and swore. “Hangi should have left the wine alone. It’s doing him no good, no, nor us, neither.”

The noble’s guards standing and looking on glumly as their comrade was flogged jikaider — a cruel and inhuman punishment, even to me who had seen men flogged round the Fleet — wore harness much studded with bronze bosses, and with pale blue and black favors. They looked a hard-bitten lot.

Pompino made some remark, and the Deldar hawked up again.

“The notor is strict — aye, may Havandua the Green Wonder mete him his just desserts — strict. You can say that again about the notor, Erclan the Critchoith. Keep at it!” He swung away to bellow at the Rapa and Brokelsh who had desisted in their efforts to flay Hangi’s back. “You know the score! Ten times six and six more! Stylor!” to the shaking Relt who stood with slate and chalk marking the strokes. “Keep a strict account!”

“Quidang, quidang,” stammered the Relt, his weak beaked face betraying by its frizzle of feathers the state he was in.

The lashes thwunked down again, and Hangi jerked, and was still. There is no real mystery why such a beastly practice should be given a name that associates it, however remotely, with the supreme board of Kregen. The contrast, it is said, explains the paradox.

“Stole Risslaca Ichor, did Hangi,” the Deldar told us, his face with the veins breaking around the nose sweating and empurpled. “A whole amphora. The notor’s favorite, is Risslaca Ichor, always keeps a special supply, and Hangi found it, and Hangi drank it, and there’s Hangi now, for all to see.”

“Risslaca Ichor.” Pompino sniffed. “A mere common rosé adulterated with dopa—”

“Fortified, dom, fortified!”

“So they say.”

Then a profound change overcame the Deldar. He grew, if it were possible, even bulkier and more purple. The sweat sprang out in great pearly drops. “Keep at it, you hulus! Hit hard!”

So we looked up to the flower-banked balcony, and there stood the notor, this Kov Erclan Rodiflor. Square and hard and ablaze with gems, he stood braced on wide-planted feet, his hands clamped on his hips, his chin with his strip of black beard upthrust, and his square lowering face brooded on the scene below. Returning to Jikaida City, was Kov Erclan. A man who exuded authority and power, he possessed a dark inner core that gave him the yrium he would have taken had he been a gang leader and not a kov.

Like his men, he wore the pale blue and black favors, arranged in checkerboard fashion. Well, he looked down and we looked up and he saw neither Pompino nor myself in the shadows; his dark eyes were all for the flogging. I thought merely that I had met many men like that, and so we walked on, stony-faced past the guards, and when I next met Kov Erclan — well, that you will hear, all in due time.

Pompino and I thus became, for each of us once more, paktuns, hired mercenaries, bodyguards, men who rented out their skill with arms and laid their lives at risk to earn their daily crust.

Events moved with speed after that. The life of a paktun is mostly boring, and shot through with sudden and brief flashes of scarlet action. Often they are the last things that happen to him. We were outfitted, for it was all found, and donned bronze-studded leather jerkins, with gray trousers and calf-high boots. The weapons were thraxter, the straight cut and thrust sword of Hamal, stuxes, oval shields and a dagger apiece. The green tunic I was handed bore a rusty stain low on the left side, and a rip neatly sewn together, a rip about the size to admit a spear-blade. The trousers had been laundered clean, however, for which I was grateful.