“Remberee!” I called back. “Remberee!”
Hamun ham Farthytu returns to Ruathytu
I, Dray Prescot, of Earth and of Kregen, Lord of Strombor and Krozair of Zy, trod once more the marble paving stones of the great city of Ruathytu, capital of the Empire of Hamal.
Once more I was Hamun ham Farthytu, Amak of Paline Valley.
Yes, I have borne many names, for good or ill, but I confess that this alias of Hamun ham Farthytu, despite the promise I had given to the dying Amak, old Naghan, weighed on me. For one thing, to act the part of a simpleton, a weakling, never came easily. I had to put on an imbecilic expression, and force my corrugated old features into smiles, and never once let that fierce dark passion surge to the extent even of laying my hand upon the hilt of thraxter or rapier. I went directly to my inn,
The Kyr Nath and the Fifi.
The Lamnian merchant, Lorgad Endo, had responded with a warm generosity, if an untypical merchant’s way, when I had applied for the loan of three deldys. He had passed over six of the golden coins of Havilfar at once, without demur. I had insisted on giving him a piece of cloth on which, with cuttlefish ink, I had scribbled a note to Delia, telling her to repay the six deldys and to reimburse Koter Endo for the sinvers he had expended in the Yuccamot village on our behalf. This she did.
So it was that I had been able to buy a decent gray shirt, a blue pair of trousers, a pair of somewhat cheap leather boots, and a flamboyant green jacket, with a scrap of dubious fur trimming, to sling like a hussar’s pelisse about my shoulders. My rapier and main-gauche were by now familiar weapons in the sacred quarter of Ruathytu, where the young bloods had taken up this foreign style with the same bungling enthusiasm they had taken up sleeth racing.
Well, you may imagine some of my mixed feelings when I turned into that narrow alleyway in the sacred quarter, the Alley of Cloves, and so walked up to the inn, where it leaned in a bower of trees below the scarped embankment above. That large tree by the balcony of my window had seen many surreptitious nighttime exits and entrances, when I had been spying in Ruathytu seeking the voller secrets.
The last time I had left here, discreetly clad, acting the part of Bagor ti Hemlad, I had not envisioned that before I returned to this lodging so much would come to pass: that I would find the secrets, be taken up as a thief, work as a slave, and then be taunted and tortured and made mock of by that she-leem, Queen Thyllis of Hamal. She was one queen who had opened an account with me for which the final reckoning remained still to be made.
I turned in at the door and went up to my room. As I pushed the door open I saw a pretty little Fristle fifi, her silvery fur electric with passion, her eyes blazing, her arms about a hairy, bulky, bulbous-nosed, shambling barrel of a man, writhing and tossing on the bed.
“Nulty!” I bellowed so that the drapes fluttered.
Absolute turmoil!
The Fristle girl flew off the bed, her long legs flashing, her blouse, of apple green, snapping even more buttons. She was remarkably pretty, as to their fame are so many of these young cat-girls, with their slanting eyes and pretty fur and delicate whiskers and delightful feline outlines. “Master!”
Nulty was beside himself, and prostrate on the floor, and shooing the fifi away, and dragging the bedclothes straight, and tidying the room, and dragging up a sturm-wood chair, and bringing out a brass tray with a bottle of Malab’s Blood and remembering I did not care for that deep purple wine and so rushing in with a fresh squat bottle of Yellow Unction and pouring a glass, and offering me a brass dish of palines, and—
“Stop!” I roared. “Nulty, you rascal! Stand and let me look at you!”
“Master!” said Nulty. He came up to my chest, was broad and bulky, with a nose so bulbous I had to restrain myself from seizing for a shonage, a great shambling fellow with shock hair — and yet with shrewd sharp eyes for all that. He knew I was not the Amak of Paline Valley, for he had served old Naghan, and his son, Hamun. Rather, he knew I was not Hamun ham Farthytu. He knew my name was Dray Prescot. But by the right of a dying bequest and a promise, he knew I was, in very truth, the Amak of Paline Valley.
“Your friend, Nulty,” I said. “I have no desire to stand in the way of a beautiful friendship. But I am hungry and thirsty for better fare than wine! Fetch a meal from the landlord. And, Nulty — tea! Tea!”
“Aye, master,” said Nulty, the manservant I had acquired as Amak of Paline Valley. He scuttled off, and I caught a few choice phrases about how Havil the Green ran this world and how someone else could run it a damned sight better; that someone, he let Havil the Green remain in no doubt whatever, being none other than Nulty himself. I felt my lips move, and realized I was smiling. Nulty, this shambling barrel of an apim, was my body-servant and my friend. Also he was a Hamalian and therefore, as I was Prince Majister of Vallia, a most powerful and dangerous potential enemy.
What rot these nationalities are, to be sure!
He brought in the tea — that glorious fragrant Kregan tea — and a plate of choice vosk rashers, and momolams, with taylynes, and a vast squish pie with thick cream. I set to, and bellowed to him to draw up a chair and tuck in as well, and so between mouthfuls he had the story I wished him to know.
“No, Nulty. I have not been back to Paline Valley.” And: “No, Nulty, I did not go to the place where I went after the duel.” And: “More tea, Nulty, you great fambly, for I’m parched!”
I told him I had been off on a holiday during which I had lost everything gambling. That was so eminently believable it answered all his queries. I had set the stolen flier onto a due eastern course and let her go free and by now she would be well out into the Ocean of Clouds if a storm did not bring her down, for she’d been of that variety of voller susceptible to wind pressure.
After that I’d walked and ridden partway in an amith-drawn tracked vehicle, and then walked. I had looked at the city of Ruathytu with its long-striding aqueducts bringing crystal-clear water from the hills to north and south, its many domed temples, its powerful walls, and its thronged bridges, the Bridge of Sicce with its towered houses crowded above the Black River. And, too, I had looked at the grim castle on its narrow crag just east of the junction of the two rivers, the castle of Hanitcha the Harrower that men called the Hanitchik. And, you may be sure, I had not failed to look most malevolently at the tall palace on its artificial lake island, the palace of Hammabi el Lamma, where the diabolical Queen Thyllis ruled with such evil and terrible power.
All Nulty said was: “When do we return to Paline Valley, Amak? For I am grown weary of this great city.”
“What? And where will you find a Fristle fifi there?”
“I can live without them. No wife, no children for me, Amak. I served Amak Naghan, and his son, faithfully. Now you are returned safely, may Havil the Green be praised—”
“Yes, well, as to that, there is nothing in Paline Valley to which to return, is there?”
“We can rebuild! We can find people willing to go to start a new life. I have made friends. There are many guls, aye, and clums, also, who would leap with joy at the chance to start a fresh life.”
That must be true. There were many slaves in Hamal’s Ruathytu, Zair knew. And one miserable step above them, different only in that they called themselves free men, were the oozing masses of clums. Above them, better off, as craftsmen, with rights under the laws, were the guls. All these working-class people groaned under oppressions and taxes and iniquities. If a gul by his daily work as, for instance, a cobbler, employing a clum or two and a few slaves, made a couple of sinvers a day, the strict government of Hamal would relieve him of one of them by way of taxes. Yet I, an Amak, a low rank of noble, paid only ten percent in income tax.
On upward through the ranks of nobility, the nobles paid less and less. An Elten paid nine and a Rango paid eight percent. A Strom paid five percent. A Trylon paid four percent. A Vad paid two percent. A Kov just did not pay at all. Truly, the rewards of nobility were very great in Hamal!
Despite that I lived on a world four hundred light-years from the planet of my birth, and was wont to swagger about clad in a scarlet breechclout, a sword in my fist — all these bright cities with their fountains and their aqueducts, their armies and their air fleets, had to be paid for. Nowhere in the whole universe, I judge, is a man free of income tax.
“There is a gul with a shop just off the Kyro of the Horters,” went on Nulty.
[5]
“An honest fellow, I think, by name of Lon the Honey. His brother keeps hives outside the city walls and Lon sells the honey. He would be useful in Paline Valley. And there is a blacksmith who was condemned to be flogged unjustly, master, unjustly. And two sisters, seamstresses, who can weave the most wonderful cloth and are tired of making dresses for Horteras. And—”
“Cease, Nulty!”
I could see what he had been doing. He had been sure I was dead this time. He was a shrewd fellow, as I have said, and loyal. Now he must have conceived his loyalty as extending to Paline Valley itself in the absence of the Amak. That fine estate far over against the Mountains of the West had been raided and destroyed by the wild men from beyond those mountains in the eternal frontier fighting that went on, on those borders of Hamal. With a new people, free men and women who owed no slave-status to anyone, he could start anew. Suddenly I knew this was the right thing to do. I had promised to make the name of Hamun ham Farthytu renowned in Ruathytu, and I had not done so. I had acted the part of the foppish buffoon, too feeble to grasp a sword in earnest, even though I had wounded, as though by accident, a Strom in a duel. Duels were regulated by the laws, a part and parcel of the raffish, exciting, foppish, decadent life of the sacred quarter.
“Nulty,” I said. He looked up quickly at my tone. “You have done right. You will collect all the people you know. I am sure you have picked well. You will no longer be my body-servant, you will be Crebent of Paline Valley.” A Crebent stands rather in the light of a bailiff or castellan, a trusted man who commands and operates estates, castles, industries, for his master. He looked at me, and I did not know, at first, if joy or sorrow was the predominant emotion he felt.
Then: “I thank you, master. I shall be a loyal Crebent. I joy in that and in your trust in me.” He scowled. “But, by Havil the Green, I wish you were returning yourself!”
“That cannot be. You know, Nulty. But I fancy we have nowhere near enough money to finance a return.”
“No, Amak.”
“In that case, Nulty, I really think that Hamun ham Farthytu will have to forget what he told you at the shrine of Beng Salter.”
A fierce and unholy satisfaction lit Nulty’s hairy face then. He brushed his mop of hair back and glared with joy upon me. “And we will inscribe the name of ham Farthytu on a fine marble monument in the Palace of Names!”
“We will, Nulty.”
This we did, in all pomp and ceremony, after the events I am about to relate. In addition to Nulty’s clear excitement at recruiting people to go to Paline Valley, a long distance, and there put the estates back into order, I sensed that these people who would go with him, guls and clums, were also quite anxious — to pitch it no higher — to leave Ruathytu at this moment. The army would be out recruiting in full force, soon. There were many of the poorer folk who would be willingly admitted to the army, where previously that career would have been closed to them. Mind you, I was realistic enough to realize that no gul, let alone a clum, stood any chance of making promotion past the rank of so-Deldar, and that only after he was extraordinarily lucky and had survived battles enough to have made a more fortunately placed man an ord-Hikdar at the least.
“How much money do we have left, Nulty?”
He made a face and went and fetched the lenken chest with the brass hinges and locks. He took out four golden deldys, five silver sinvers, and a leather bag of obs.
“Is that all?”
“You took everything with you, Amak, when you went away.”
“So I did. And I sold the voller, too.”
Nulty was not to know that all that money had been used to bribe my way to the secrets of the vollers. I cleared my throat and lifted the cup and the tea was cold. I could use that fact to clear the moment, and I bellowed: “Nulty! Tea, Nulty, tea!”
“Yes, master!”
So that was what he thought of my gambling habits.
I quite agreed with him.
The plan, then, when it was formed, came out of necessity and vicissitude. It was not foolproof, but it was serviceable.
Unlike some men who would have jumped up right away and gone roaring off to find their friends of the sacred quarter and start the ball rolling, I sat and drank the tea Nulty brought. No tea, and especially Kregan tea, can be taken lightly or without due thought.
The fates of nations hung on my actions here in Hamal — this is true — and yet I spent time working a petty little gamble in order to send a pack of folk a bare step above slaves to a distant estate to renovate it. Truly, I wondered if I was quite sane, and fretted over just how I could explain my foolish actions to Delia.
Would she say that a true Vallian would consign all these cramphs of Hamalians to the Ice Floes of Sicce? Somehow, I thought my Delia would not say that, would understand what I was doing and applaud.
Thus with Delia uppermost in my mind — the most usual and loving place in my thoughts, in any case — I said to Nulty: “Listen and mark me well. You take these new people. They are free, you tell me. Well, there will be no slaves in Paline Valley. No slaves, ever again. You understand?”
“I hear you, master.” He rubbed his ear. “I cannot say I understand. Some work is hard for a man, and it is fitting that a slave should do this work.”
“However fitting it is, there will be no slaves in Paline Valley.”
“As you say, Amak.” Then he fixed his shrewd eyes on me. “And if we are raided again and we take some prisoners. Must we then not put them to slavery, but kill them all?”