Beasts of Antares (17 page)

Money began to figure now. My store of gold, although mere handfuls, as I have said, was in these circumstances considerable wealth. All the same, it would not last for ever.

Unmok had been careful with his hired guards. They were mostly Fristles and Rapas. He had contracted to pay them five sinvers per sennight. Although, contrarily, I give the word sennight for a week of six days, it seems to me to fit. Across in the Dawn Lands I’d hired out for eight broad strebes a day, and even there a Fristle or Rapa could get the standard one silver coin per diem. Unmok, as I say, was shrewd.

There were no Pachaks or Chuliks in the bunch we hired. Ten of them, and one Khibil. His fox-like face drooped instead of bristling with the natural arrogance of a Khibil. He had been given a nasty — a very nasty — blow in the middle at some time and it had broken some spiritual spring deep within him. He was an archer; but his bow, although compound and reflex and an admirable weapon, pulled lightly. But, for all that, he remained a Khibil.

“I am a Khibil,” he said, as he stood before the table where Unmok sat with the leather bags of silver sinvers, some spilled casually out across the wood, glittering. “I hire out for nothing less than eight.”

Looking at this Khibil, Pondar the Iumfrey, I was forcibly reminded of the time I’d hired out over in the Dawn Lands, and of Pompino demanding more because he was a Khibil. The contrast between this Pondar before me now and my comrade Pompino could not have been more marked. And, by Zair, where was Pompino the Iarvin now?

“The Rapas and Fristles have settled for five,” pointed out Unmok. “But, yes, you are a Khibil. I will pay you one silver sinver a day. No more.”

“Done.”

Pondar the Iumfrey affixed his mark.

Men were not easy to find. Good men were scarce. But they still existed, carrying on in the old ways and refusing to be drawn into foreign wars. Hyrklana liked to be an island and cut off from the rest of Havilfar.

So we sailed up the Hyrklese Channel and kept our eyes skinned for renders. Pirates are a pain in the neck. When we saw our swordship, her single bank of oars driving deeply, surging on toward us, sheeted in spray like a half-submerged rock, the old wailing cry went up, filled with horror.

“Swordship! Swordship!”

We were, therefore, in for a fight.

I said to Unmok, “Is there a spare bow and a few shafts?”

He lifted his shrewd Och head up above the companionway coaming. He waited for no man on his descent below decks.

“Bows? Shafts? Jak, what are you dreaming of?”

“We have to fight them off—”

“
They
do, the hired mercenaries.
We
don’t!”

I didn’t blame him for scuttling below. He was better off out of the coming fight. It wasn’t even as though he had all his limbs, was it, now? But he shouted that there was a bow of sorts in his cabin and I was welcome to it.

The bow proved to be a compound job of wood and sinew, with a little horn, and the reflex curves made only a halfhearted stab at the double-reflex curves of the bows of Valka.

But I took it up and strung it and heaved on the string. The shafts were iron-tipped and fletched with the yellow feathers from hulfoo birds, a kind of Hyrklanian goose. They looked to be reasonably straight.

On deck, having seen Unmok stowed away safely below, I found the Khibil, Pondar, arguing with a heavyset Rapa, whose red wattles congested and whose dark eyes snapped anger.

They were arguing as to who was to be Jiktar of the mercenary guard. Of course, Jiktar was just a name, a kind of Kregan relative to saying the captain of the guard.

I said, “You know your posts. Take them. Pondar, take the stern. Randalar, take the bows.”

The swordship looked as though her captain meant to hit our port bow. The Rapa and the Khibil wanted to continue their argument, but I told them to get on with it, and they did.

We possessed but one varter. It looked as though it might fall to pieces the moment the windlass was wound, even before the missile was discharged. Captain Nath stood looking at it and pursing his lips.

“Well, I don’t know...”

Without a word I started to wind the windlass. The old wood creaked and groaned. But the plaited string inched back and the bow bent. I did it cautiously, I may add, out of respect for my own hide. A broken varter string can whip out your eye better than a diving blood-lance.

I won’t go into the details of the fight, mainly because there were so few. Even this antiquated and dangerous varter could out-range a bow. Before the two ships closed the range for archery I swung the varter on its swivel and lined up the ugly beak of the swordship. We were going up and down and the renders’ vessel was pitching like a maddened totrix.

Froshak the Shine dumped a chunk of rock into the chute. I waited until
Pearl of Klanadun
rolled, and pulled the trigger. The rock flew.

Just what it did I do not know. But the swordship stuck her bows under the next wave and the sea washed back in an unbroken green tide and she didn’t right herself. She just went on and in, with all her oars driving lustily.

We sailed on, and it was as though the swordship had been just a bad dream.

We didn’t even stop to see. That would have been very difficult with a plunging, wide-beamed and unhandy argenter.

The outcome of that was that the men started calling me Jak the Shot. I’d given the name Jak, for obvious reasons. I made no demurral on the Shot business, just let it ride.

Swordships are cranky craft at best, and seem to spend as much of their time under the water as above it. “Now if that had been a Vallian galleon...” I said to Unmok.

“Oh, them!” He sniffed. “I’ve been married a couple of times and one of my sons went off to Vallia. Never got to be a paktun, got himself killed somewhere in Pandahem, so a comrade told me. My lad said the Vallese are a strange lot. Haven’t got a soldier among ’em. All pot-bellied money-grabbers. Then he laughed. “Like me — with pot-bellies!”

I forbore to bring Unmok up to date. But I warmed to his honesty. What he did he did because that was the way he made his living. Among his chatter he spoke often of buying a cage voller, of making his fortune and going into a new line of business. This varied with each recital of his dream.

Froshak the Shine came up. “Varter’s busted. We were lucky.”

We looked. That ballista would never loose again. One of the arms was cracked through, and the wood was black rotten for three-quarters of the crack, and pale yellow the rest.

“Lucky,” said Captain Nath the Bows. “I’ll have to replace her. Money, money, money...!”

“Praying again,” I said, and — refreshingly — we all laughed.

Huringa, capital of Hyrklana, stands on the south bank of the River of Leaping Fishes, some thirty dwaburs up from the mouth. The river is not navigable past about the halfway mark, so we had to hire quoffa carts to take us the remainder of the journey. Hyrklana is a civilized country. As civilized, that is, as any civilized country on Kregen.

“We ought to be in the city in good time, Jak,” said Unmok as
Pearl of Klanadun
and the coaster unloaded, the carts carrying the cages lumbering along, the men yelling and the whips cracking, we started. “But there is the Forest of the Departed to pass through.”

In these gloomy woods uncounted numbers of past inhabitants of Huringa and the surrounding country had been interred for centuries. The place was a forest, yes; it was also a giant mausoleum. Froshak picked his teeth, spat, and said nothing. I eyed Unmok.

“Maglo the Ears?”

“Him, and a score of drikingers almost as bad.”

Bandits are bad news anywhere.

Those drikingers I had employed in Vallia, clearing out aragorn and slavers and the iron legions of Hamal, had been driven to banditry against their foes. Your hardened, throat-cutting, purse-slitting bandit is a different matter.

Naturally, the mercenaries demanded extra pay. Unmok started to chitter-chatter, and I said, “Pay ’em,” and so we did. We were eating bread sliced thin already. No sense in throwing the loaf away because of that.

Our ten thomplods lumbered along, thomp, thomp, thomp, their twelve legs apiece shaking the ground. The carts groaned, the wild beasts screeched and yowled and spat. We walked on, weapons in hand, staring every which way. In the Forest of the Departed are many grassy rides and wide open spaces lined with long-abandoned tombs. The shadows dropped confusingly down. The leaves rustled, a tiny hot wind blew, the smell of the forest fought the stinks of the caravan. We plodded on.

Looking at Unmok the Nets as he limped along, occasionally agreeing to ride aboard a cart, I reflected that this was one way to earn a living that was not for me. But we neared Huringa and the Jikhorkdun and the reason for all this.

The bandits hit us just as we were thinking about making camp.

We were crossing a wide grassy expanse where there was no hope of our seeking shelter among the trees, and the drikingers came howling and yelling along a ride at right angles. They carried spears and swords and axes, and they urged their totrixes along with spurs. They would have cut us into little pieces, gone slap-bang through us and then turned, pirouetting, to finish us off at their leisure.

Instead, they went careering madly across our front, swerving away. Men struggled to stay in their saddles. Spears fell to the grass. Men fell, too, to be trampled in the stampede of maddened totrixes, their six hooves battering helmet and breastplate and pulping out the red ooze.

“The thomplods!” screamed Unmok. He danced in ecstasy. “I hope that’s Maglo the Ears, may his guts dissolve into green slime!”

The bandits could not control their mounts. The attack was a fiasco. Perking up, our guards loosed off a few shafts and this finished the business. Yelling and swearing, the drikingers vanished among the trees.

“If they come back,” I said loudly, “we will serve them steel stew!”

“Aye!” shouted the mercenaries. They were almighty puffed with the victory. But not one had the temerity or stupidity to mention a Jikai. There are limits...

Although our hired guards had not yet been offered the opportunity to display their quality as fighting men for us, they were not slow in behaving as any good paktun will and doubling across to loot the corpses. This is a mere part of life and death on Kregen, a facet of the economy.

The idea of perfectly good swords and armor being allowed to rust uselessly away goes against the grain.

Wandering across, I found myself a useful-looking thraxter, the straight cut and thrust sword of Halivar. The grip was plain, the hilt unadorned, and the blade not too heavy. One needs something a little more robust than a rapier in a nasty little fracas of this kind. As for armor, two kaxes I looked at were both pierced through by arrows. I retrieved the arrows from the corselets; one was broken and the other I stuffed back into the quiver I had kept after being dubbed Jak the Shot. In the end I found a leather jerkin with bronze studding. It clothed a dead apim and by letting the thongs out to their fullest extent I was able to get it around my shoulders. Had it been the slightest tight on me I’d have not touched it with a bargepole. But the dead man was of a goodly breadth across the shoulders. He had died of a totrix hoof in the head.

The mercenaries were busily hacking off fingers and ears to get at rings. I wasn’t particularly interested in
that.
In the normal course I wouldn’t have bothered any further, but Unmok and my partnership was a trifle strapped. A Rapa lay pitched onto his vulturine nose, and the gleam of a fine scarron necklace attracted me. I went across and turned him over and nodded. The gems were valuable, loot, no doubt, from some unfortunate woman trapped in a destroyed caravan. I started to unhook them.

A Fristle wanted to dispute my claim. I pointed to the arrow through the Rapa’s eye. The feathers were yellow from a Hulfoo bird, that Hyrklanian goose. “Mine, I think.”

The Fristle spat a little, ruffled up his fur and then went off farther into the trees after easier pickings.

Unmok was delighted with the scarron necklace.

“You could make a play about that,” I said, and I found my ugly old beak head itching, almost as though I smiled at a jest.

Shadows now cloaked the clearing and occasionally the last of the twin suns shafted a smoky twinkle between the trees. Myriad insects whirled and gyrated, chips of flickering light in the rays. We set about pitching camp and came alert again, quivering with fresh alarm, as the jingle of harness and the clip-clop of hooves heralded more jutmen. But they were zorcamen, a regiment out from Huringa and not caring overmuch for the duty of bandit-chasing. They’d be back inside the city long before midnight.

Unmok spoke to their Jiktar, graphically describing the bandits’ attack. The soldiers poked around among the remains. They took a few of the bodies with them, so as to look good on their report, I judged. I kept away from them. They were smart and could march with lances all aligned; but I didn’t trust them.

What had been going on in Hyrklana that bandits could exist, and with impunity so close to the capital city? Even in a dense and gloomy place like the Forest of the Departed?

The ominous growls from the big cats and that whiffling, snorting, bubbly hullabaloo from the thomplods cut short my theories of political upheavals. Dripping hunks of meat were served out, and the growls changed to grunts and snarls and digesting noises of pleasure. Thomplods eat a good deal, naturally, giving their size. Luckily they eat almost anything and we shepherded them under suitable trees where they quickly ripped and stuffed, ripped and stuffed, until the tree was as bare of leaves as high as the muzzles could reach. Then on to the next tree. As for grass, that went down by the mawful.

Unmok, like most folk standing in those parts of Kregen not so far converted, kept a slave or three. His camp chief, Nobi, was a little Och with a villainous face and no teeth. He kept a little mincer on a string around his neck. Now Nobi pushed and harassed the other two slaves into serving the evening meal. Fragrant scents wafted. The wine was poured. After a hard day we could relax.