Seg the Bowman (13 page)

The paktuns swiveled to stare at this unwelcome intrusion upon their conspicuous misery.

“Wolves?” said Norolger. “We are paktuns, not animal catchers.”

The wolves they were talking about, Seg decided, must really be werstings, and they were ferocious and vicious and yet could be tamed by man into hunting packs. Runaway criminals and fugitives of all kinds trembled when they heard the yeowling of the wersting pack upon their heels.

He scraped the platter clean and pushed it aside. Before he reached for the looshas pudding he took a swingeing draught of ale. It was probably correct for Milsi not to have accompanied him. But, then, had she done so he would have walked farther on and sought out a more respectable inn. He thought of Milsi, and found he was looking forward to meeting her daughter. For quite clearly her daughter was the real reason Milsi was so determined to go up to Mewsansmot where the werstings prowled.

Milsi, with her new handmaid Malindi and the charming dinka Bamba, found satisfaction at the warm welcome accorded them in the clothing arcade. The proprietor, a Lamnia called Orlan Felminyer, brushed up his pale yellow fur and smiled and spread his wares. His wife, Alenci, took the three into a back room where they could strip off their old clothes, thankfully, and then with many wriggles and sighs, and exclamations of delight, try on brand new clothes.

Bamba was determined not to wear her bark apron again. She declared that if she was to be a woman of the world then she must dress accordingly.

Milsi’s gold procured first-class service and sumptuous apparel. In the end, they bought a chestful.

“Have it taken down to horter Obolya’s boat, please, horter Felminyer.”

“It shall be done, my lady.”

The twin suns threw their twin shadows across the boardwalk as they emerged. The rains had broomed away and the sky was clearing. Out in the alley between arcade and wharfside a file of soldiers marched up, halted at a sharp word of command, grounded their spears.

Milsi realized that Kov Llipton did, indeed, run the kingdom tightly. An officer — he was a Hikdar —

walked up the few steps onto the boardwalk. He was apim, ruddy-featured, thrusting, wearing half-armor and carrying an arsenal of weapons in the Kregan way. He touched a forefinger to the peak of his helmet and spoke to Milsi.

“My lady. You are from Obolya Metromin’s boat?”

“That is correct, Hikdar.”

His ruddy features darkened. “My apologies, my lady. Llahal. I am Hikdar Northag ti Hovensmot. I seek information from you concerning your traveling companions.”

“Llahal Hikdar Northag. How may I assist you?”

She looked at him quite calmly. He wore an ornate plume of brown and white feathers in his helmet, and although they were not arbora feathers, they looked splendid. Even the swods in the ranks, the ordinary foot soldiers, wore a piling bunch of brown and white feathers in their bronze helmets.

“I have just asked you. Where are the people from Obolya’s boat?”

“Gone drinking in some tavern or other.”

His gaze bore down on her. At that moment Milsi felt cold. He did not look quite the same fine upright soldierly person her first impression had conveyed.

“Very well.”

He swung away, bellowed unpleasantly at the Deldar at the head of the file — it was an audo of ten men

— and jumped off the boardwalk. Milsi watched them until the last clump of brown and white feathers vanished past the end of a warehouse with a broken crane over the upper doors.

“What could that have been all about, my lady?” ventured Malindi in her simple way.

“I do not know,” snapped Milsi, crossly.

Bamba smoothed down her new green dress with the orange bows and the yellow lace. Milsi had been quite unable to part the dinka from the abomination.

“I did not like them at all,” said Bamba, with a spurt of fierceness. “Men like that have chased us in the forest.”

“Yes, and I daresay men like your Diomb have shot poisoned darts at them!”

“Milsi!”

“Oh, yes, very well. I didn’t mean to be so sharp. But I am worried. What, in the name of the foul Armipand, did they really want?”

The three women began slowly to walk back to the wharfside where Obolya’s boat was tied up. The smells of the river grew stronger, mingling with the brisk smells of the wharf, of which fish was the most prominent.

Milsi stopped so suddenly Malindi crashed into her.

“I am sorry, my lady—”

“Enough of that, Malindi! Of course! What a fool I am!”

“What is it?” cried Bamba.

“It has to be so. That rast of a villain Ortyg the Undlefar. They must have questioned him. He told them

— oh, I can see it all!”

Bamba looked nervously unhappy; Malindi started to cry.

“We must warn Seg and the others!” said Milsi, and she straight away started to run swiftly along the alley. Gripping her skirts high, head up, she ran panting with passionate fury toward the city.

“We are a bedraggled-looking bunch,” observed Seg, feeling the food inside him and the ale cheerful in his blood. “Let us go along to the souks and buy ourselves some decent clothes.”

“Aye,” rumbled the Dorvenhork. “Clothes are all very well. But there is a greater need we lack.”

He had no need to place his broad yellow hand upon the fire-sharpened wooden stake at his side. In almost any location on Kregen a man needed a weapon, preferably a small arsenal of weapons. Kregans habitually carry enough weapons for the task ahead, not less, not more. If a blade breaks in your hands, and you have no other weapons to draw... Equally, no Kregan will willingly burden himself with junk he does not need.

“Agreed,” said Khardun.

They rose from the table, pushing the heavy wooden thing away with no difficulty. They stood up, stretching their legs. Only the Chulik belched.

“Weapons first,” he said, and there was no argument, not even from Seg.

“All the same,” pointed out Khardun. “We will be able to afford precious little.”

“A knife, maybe that is all we will need for a beginning. These wooden spears will serve, I judge. As for an axe—”

“Well,” observed Rafikhan, blowing out his feathers. “We will never afford a single sword between us.”

“You will pardon me, doms,” said Umtig. He stroked the spinlikl upon his breast. “I will return to the boat. I had an eye to Master Orlan Felminyer’s arcade.”

They watched him trot off without comment, merely calling the polite remberees.

Among the many different folk from all up and down the Kazzchun River they excited no particular interest. There were half-naked men and women seeking to earn their daily food, folk who slept under the piles of the sidewalks, folk who were as adept at stealing the copper ob as at carrying the burden from the wharfside.

Very very few men walked about without a weapon of some kind, even though very many of the poorer folk carried merely a heavy bludgeon.

The roadways steamed. The radiance of the suns beat down and very soon the gluey mud would return to its hard-baked consistency. Up ahead the walkways led into that part of the city where the souks and covered alleys ran in a confusing tangle. These areas of cities, known as the aracloins, harbored commerce, money and villainy.

These particular aracloins in Nalvinlad were not extensive and it was abundantly clear that Kov Llipton kept a close eye on them. Parties of soldiers wearing blue and white feathers in their helmets could be seen here and there ready to squelch the first incipient riot.

The party with Seg walked along very meekly when they passed the soldiers. Old-hand paktuns knew when to make themselves small. Particularly when they carried no weapons in their fists.

The odd thing was that while most of the party of ordinary folk whom Seg had rescued did not go first to the souks of weaponry, instead trotting off to find new clothes, the Relt, mild and gentle, Caphlander the Quill, went with the paktuns.

As he said, “While I am with you, whom I venture to call comrades, I feel safe. And I must buy a penknife.”

They guffawed, and jollied him along. But they all sensed the innate wholesomeness of Caphlander, with his innocent beaked face and the yellow feathers rounding his eyes into bright intelligence.

“This looks likely,” said Khardun, halting precipitately. They all looked at the entrance to the store, one of many lining the sides of the souk. The sign said that one Jezbellandur the Iarvin provided the best weapons in all Croxdrin. Seg noticed that the word Croxdrin in the ornately embellished hyr-Kregish, was recently painted and already some of the base paint was flaking away to reveal dimmer lettering beneath. That would be the word Nalvindrin, without a doubt.

An audo — only eight of them — of soldiers marched past with careful looks at Seg and his people.

These soldiers wore green and yellow feathers. Farther on, chasing a couple of idiots caught thieving, a group of soldiers wearing green and white feathers rushed on, hullabalooing.

Everyone stood back as the rout passed.

“How is it, horter Hundle,” Seg said to the boat-master, “that there are differently colored feathers?”

“Oh, each great lord of the land recruits his own forces and allocates a certain number under Kov Llipton to the proper policing of the city. The blue and whites, they are Kov Llipton’s men.”

“I see.”

They all trooped into Master Jezbellandur’s bazaar, and gawped around at the splendid display of weaponry upon the walls and in open-fronted cases about the wooden floor.

Master Jezbellandur himself, nick-named the Iarvin, came forward rubbing his hands together. He clearly was a man of substance, a man who knew himself to be smart, clever, supreme master of his trade, and, at the same time, he managed to express a devoted attention to the wants of his clients.

He summed up this sorry band in no time at all. “Not a pair of copper obs to rub together between them,” he said to himself. But he bowed. If they did have a pair of copper obs, he’d have them off them, that he promised.

Khardun, like the other paktuns, had patronized places like this many times before. He was brisk.

“We need first quality knives, horter. And we would like to test them in your salle.”

“Knives. Well, I have the finest selection—”

“Good. That is settled. Lead on.”

So it was that they were ushered into the salle, a large, square, bare room at the rear of the premises.

The floor, although gleamingly clean, was not polished. Sand stood ready in buckets to be strewn. No one else at the moment was in the place. Khardun nodded at the targets, stuffed with grasses.

“Knives that cut, stab, and throw.”

“At once, horters.”

The cases were produced by a bent-backed Och who contrived to balance two cases at a time. The knives were duly inspected and then test-hurled at the targets.

Seg wandered across to a corner and sat on a chair. Business must be poor for the weapons-trader to concede so much time to men merely buying knives. The racks of swords and axes and spears, of armor and helmets, remained unopened.

The door crashed open and a madwoman rushed in, shrieking.

“The guards are coming! We must run, hide — quick, oh, quick!”

Seg leaped up. He stared. The woman wore a brand new dress hiked up to her knees, mud-splashed and stained. He choked.

“Milsi!”

“They think we are pirates! The guards are coming!”

Umtig the Lock, clasping his spinlikl, sidled in after Milsi. That, then, explained how she had found them.

The little Och thief would follow their trail with no trouble. Malindi and Bamba ran in, crying, and Diomb rushed across to them.

“Hurry!” Milsi called, agonized, and whirled, her eyes enormous, her hands leaving the hem of her dress and going in horror to her mouth.

The guards clumped in, hard, spears leveled, the brown and white feathers in their helmets lowering as they bent ready to thrust. Milsi exclaimed in despair that her attempt to warn Seg had proved futile. Seg put a brown hand up to his bow.

“Do not attempt to resist, rast!” The Hikdar, brave in his armor, stepped forward. Milsi could see that he had reinforced his original audo, and now a rank of bowmen bent their bows upon Seg and his comrades. “You are charged with being renders. Your heads will adorn the stakes at the city walls!”

Seg took his hand away. He stepped forward.

“There is a mistake, Hikdar. We are peaceable men, stranded in the river. We are not pirates—”

“Shastum! Silence, you yetch.”

“But we can explain it all!”

The bowmen were commanded by a second Hikdar, corpulent, sweating in his armor, his brown and white feathers far grander than the first Hikdar’s. He stepped up to the side of the first Hikdar and whispered in his ear.

Seg just stood, poised, alert, watching. He and the comrades with him were at a clear disadvantage.

They had no real weapons. These soldiers, despite the finery, were well-armed. He noticed that the bowmen had spurs fixed to their tall brown boots. This puzzled him. How would cavalry be employed along the river to make the expense of the arm worthwhile? Rafikhan had mentioned that there were swarths available for riders farther north. These were the so-called two-legged swarths of Pandahem.

The true swarth had four legs, a powerful, humped reptilian saddle animal with a heavy wedge-shaped head. The Pandahem two-legged variety possessed four limbs, of course; the forelimbs were nowhere as well developed as the afterlimbs, giving the swarths a faint resemblance to sleeths.

These silly fragile thoughts flowed through his head as he watched what went on.

The porcine Hikdar laughed. Seg did not care for that laugh.

“Well, Northag? What do you say?”

“I — you’re confident nothing would come out, Pafnut?”

“Of course not. A bit of fun. Then, afterwards, well — who’s going to ask questions? Trylon Muryan?”

“The Trylon? He wouldn’t care — no, you’re right.” This unpleasant Hikdar Northag licked his lips.

Then: “My swods. I’m not sure about them—”