Of course, that was an old ethical poser.
“If they cannot be exchanged they will be ransomed. If not, you must talk to them and set them free and promise them if they come again they will surely be slain.”
“It seems to me you store up trouble against the future.”
“By Krun! I know whereof I speak!”
“Yes, master.”
I wasn’t going to apologize to him, for you know my views on that. Instead, I said: “Make sure you enlist a good force of flyers, mirvol men in preference to fluttrell riders. The old Amak had a fine mirvol aerial cavalry.”
“Aye, master.”
“I am going out now. Rustle out some fine fancy clothes, lots of lace and gewgaws. The Hamun ham Farthytu those ninnies of the sacred quarter know will walk among them again, in all his foppish finery, for the last time.”
I dressed in drippings of lace and bows, silken ribbons, fancy blue trousers, frilled white shirt, and a glaring green jacket with a scarlet cape thrown over all. I looked terrible. I wore one of these hard black Spanish hats, with a narrow black leather under the back of my head. My boots had been spat into a polished luster by Nulty. I waved a kerchief in my right hand and held a beribboned balass cane in my left. As I say, I looked a foppish fool.
But I buckled on one of those fine rapiers Delia had given me, and its matching left-hand dagger, the Jiktar and the Hikdar.
So I sallied forth to meet again Rees the lion-man, and dear chinless Chido, and all the others of my acquaintance among that raffish set of the sacred quarter.
Wersting versus manhound
The sacred quarter of Ruathytu is a twisting maze of alleys penned between the walls of the villas secluded in their grounds or balanced upon crags and heights within the city. There are boulevards intersecting with colonnades and lines of shops. There is a huge open square, a piazza with colonnades on three or four levels, drenched with flowers and greenery, laced with the tinkle of waterfalls, the great Kyro of the Vadvars. At the eastern end of the quarter on its V-shaped spit of land rises the three-domed Great Temple of Havil the Green. Under one of those domes is situated the Palace of Names. The name of ham Farthytu would be engraved in marble there before I left Ruathytu. The sacred quarter contains salles d’armes, the dueling halls, theaters, drinking dens, fighting arenas for the smaller but no less bloody encounters, tavern after tavern, and dopa dens. In short, the sacred quarter is a brawling, colorful, and vibrant section of a city, and just such a quarter is to be found in any great city of Kregen. Here in Hamalese Ruathytu, though, all the energy does not add up to a great shout of good living, of a zest for life. The Hamalians are a glum folk, as I have said, and they need perhaps a little too much of the stimulation of the Jikhorkdun, the great amphitheater, to bring a glow to their sallow faces.
I feel I do them an injustice, but give me the folk of Sanurkazz, or Vondium, or some of Zenicce, any time!
Looking back, I find it incredible in these accounts that I have not described in any detail the great city of Vondium, capital of Vallia, or, come to that, my own capital city of Valkanium in Valka.
By Zair! How we could sing in
The Fleeced Ponsho
in Sanurkazz, or in my high hall of Esser Rarioch in Valkanium!
As I walked through the labyrinthine ways of the sacred quarter, heading for roistering haunts, I felt the familiar pang that I had not seen for long and long my two rogues of oar-comrades, Nath and Zolta
.
They were far away in the Eye of the World. They must believe me dead. How I beseeched Zair, the puissant red-sun deity, that they should both still live and I would see them once again, and soon!
If you can picture me then as the very excrescence of a dandy, beribboned and frilled, mincing along with my bedecked cane, a pomander in my kerchief to my nose, then how would my two rascally oar-comrades, Zolta and Nath, see me? They would howl and the tears would come to their eyes and they would fall about holding their guts. “What, Pur Dray!” they’d yodel. “Is this the rig for hauling at the sweeps of a Zair-forgotten Magdaggian swifter, with those cramphs of Magdag overlords a-whipping your back?” And they’d be off after a drink and a wench, roaring their mirth. I felt hot as the memories gushed up. How we had fought and roved and drunk there as we reived across the inner sea! Truly, I missed much. I was still a Krozair of Zy, and this meant very much to me, as you know. I would trade the Kovs and the Stroms, aye, and the Prince Majisters, too, to be still a Krozair of Zy — and this my Delia knew, also.
The first person I met of my acquaintances as I paused outside the tavern with the two Fristle fifis as signboard,
The Two Fifis,
was Nath Tolfeyr. He saw me and there was a visible struggle in his face to retain that indolent, elegant posture of indifference that is the mark of the dandy of the sacred quarter.
“Why, Amak Hamun! By Havil! You are a stranger.”
“No longer a stranger, Nath. What fun is there to be had these days in the quarter?”
He looked offensively resigned to an ill fate. His long arms and legs moved with elegance as he paced by my side. He wore the rapier and dagger, as did most of the young bloods affecting the new ways, but he was skilled in their use.
“This devilish war, Hamun. It drains the fun out of life.”
I forbore to inquire why he was not with the army or the air service. I had no wish to pick a fight with him, for all that I knew he was secretly addicted to the ways of Lem the Silver Leem.
“Have you news of Rees, or Chido, or Casmas the Deldy?”
“You have not heard? No, if you have been away, then you would not have. Rees’s regiment was in a battle. I think we won, although to think otherwise is not healthy, I assure you.”
“Tell me, Nath, and quickly!”
He looked surprised at my tone.
“Rees has been sorely wounded.”
For all that Rees the lion-man was supposed to be an enemy, I felt a pang of sorrow.
“Is this wound serious?”
“Enough for him to be invalided at home. He will recover, so the doctors say. But he is pretty useless at present”
“I am most sorry to hear. And Chido?”
Nath Tolfeyr laughed. “Chido went off his zorca and fell head over heels into a swill bin. He broke a rib in the vosk swill, which is typical of Chido, as you must admit.”
The thought of chinless, goggle-eyed, good-natured Chido falling headfirst into a bucket of swill could not fail to amuse me. Chido ham Thafey, who held the courtesy rank of Amak, and who would become a Vad when his father died, was one of those addle-pated, good-natured, nincompoopish young men of the world who somehow, despite their incongruities, never fail to raise an affectionate chuckle.
“Typical of Chido, I admit. Is Rees at home on his estates of the Golden Wind, or—”
“He is here, in his villa, with Chido. They both lie there roaring at each other all day, cursing for their ills.”
Well, it made an amusing picture, although I knew that Rees should never have led his regiment of zorcamen off to war, for he had not been fully recovered at the time. I bid a polite farewell to Nath Tolfeyr as we turned into the Boulevard of the Goldsmiths.
“I am for the baths of the nine, and the Dancing Rostrum, Hamun. Will you not join me?”
“I thank you for your invitation, Nath. I am for Rees and Chido.”
“Fare you well with Havil, then.”
He made that a mocking parting. Had he said, “Lem go with you,” he would have been more sincere, but the cult of Lem flourished in secret here in Ruathytu, as did the religion of Opaz. The way was not far to Rees’s villa, and as I went I reflected that the state religion of Havil obsessed many people here, and yet the slighter religions of Werl-am-Nardith and Blessed Xerenike the Open-Handed were tolerated and had their own small temples in various quarters of the city. What the religions of the guls and the clums were, I did not then know with any coherent understanding, although they used the names of Kuerden the Merciless and Kaerlan the Merciful. And as for the slaves, they might practice what devil rites they chose, brought from their own country, provided they paid lip service to Havil the Green.
Rees’s small villa was as I last remembered it. I was announced and went in, and stopped short in the doorway, wanting to burst out laughing.
My two friends, Rees and Chido, occupied beds set side by side. The beds were equipped with wheels that they might be taken to the balcony for fresh air. Between the two beds a table had been erected and a Jikaida board occupied the table, with a sprawl of playing pieces. Rees was in the act of hurling a blue piece — it was a King’s Paktun — at Chido, who was drawing the sheets up over his bright chinless face, and crying out: “Mercy, Rees, mercy! I’ll not take your Pallan, then, but it isn’t fair, Rees, it deuced isn’t fair!”
And, being Chido, he made of his R’s all W’s, so that he called Rees “Wees.”
“Of course it ain’t fair, you great fambly! But you took my Pallan because I was looking at the nurse as she bent over, and you’ll ruin the game! And I’m not in the mood to start another. So finish this one.”
“But I did finish it with your captured Pallan!”
“You roaring great onker!” bellowed Rees, and he hurled the King’s Paktun, and Chido let out a yell and vanished completely beneath the bedclothes.
I said, “Is this how the returning heroes fight their battles all over again?”
“Hamun!” they both yelped, and Chido popped up for air.
Neither could get out of bed, and so I went across and we shook hands in the Hamalese way, and fell at once into animated conversation. We talked about the war and their experiences, whereat we laughed again at Chido’s misfortune with the swill bucket. I did not speak of the time I had employed swill buckets and vosks to good purpose in the Black Marble Quarries of Zenicce. So we prattled on and wine was brought and we talked and talked. None of it matters much, now; it was all trite inconsequential stuff. But, by Krun, it was good to see these two again!
Their hurts were mending. Chido was strapped up, and Rees, for all his bellowing and roaring in true lion-man fashion, would have been in great pain but for the forest of acupuncture needles stuck in him. Moxybustion was being used and fragrant herbs burned at the ends of the acupuncture needles.
They had been posted to the northern front, after all, and had sailed for the island of Pandahem where the forces of Hamal were pushing on eastward after crossing the central mountains at the most westerly point. Rees’s regiment of zorcas had been drawn up, and I could imagine their smart alignment and their glittering spears, for Rees had had them trained well. But, as I had told him in a roundabout way, his men were not sufficiently trained. And a zorca, that marvelous four-legged saddle-animal, so close-coupled, so filled with fire and spirit, is not the mount for a shoulder-to-shoulder, crunching charge in the heat of battle. Rees had put in his charge when ordered to do so by the Chuktar commanding. They had come to grief on the spears of the Pandaheem.
“Damned cullish knaves from Iyam,” growled Rees. “They wouldn’t stand. They drew us on and stuck their damned spears in my beautiful zorcas. And then a regiment of Havil-cursed totrixes — although they weren’t quite like totrixes, really — took us in flank and rear. We went over like bowling pins.” I sighed.
What he had encountered was a regiment of Pandaheem hersanys, heavy, ugly, six-legged brutes, with thick coats of chalky-white hair, hard of mouth and mean of eye.
“This is no time to talk of that, Rees,” I said briskly. “Or of Chido swimming in vosk-swill. You must get better, and quickly. Then, perhaps, you may look a little more kindly upon a regiment of totrixes, after all.”
I shouldn’t have been saying this to an enemy, Opaz knew. But Rees settled that treachery on my part by booming out: “No totrixes for me, Hamun, my Bladesman! I’ve spoken to old Kov Pereth. He’s agreed that I shall reform the regiment. Then, we shall see.”
Kov Pereth was the Pallan in charge of the Northern Front, commanding the Army of Pandahem, the Hamalian army, that is. I had brought a basket of fresh fruit with me, although I guessed Rees would not lack, and I covered any awkwardness by bringing this forward and myself taking up a heaping pile of palines on my palm.
We ate for a space, and then Rees said, “You will not ride with us, when we ride out again, Hamun?”
“Not while you use a regiment of zorcas.”
“Well, stick to your confounded totrixes, then!”
“It is not that I like the totrix. I do not. But the beast has his uses.”
A doctor bustled in, one Doctor Larghos the Needle — they bear that name so often, of course — and hustled me out with the fussy movements of a mother chicken.
I shouted over my shoulder that I would call the next day, and then I was pushed out, and an acupuncture needle, ready in Larghos the Needle’s hand, nearly took an eye out.
All this ribaldry was all very well. It was not only a duty I felt I owed friends, it was a human touch. But it would not set my scheme afoot. And, rickety though that was, and simple, for I tend to the simple although I can be devious if I have to, it was all I had to gain the money needed to set up the new people in Paline Valley.
Now you must remember that Rees and Chido both thought of me as just such a foolish nincompoop as Chido was, say, but without even his skill with the rapier and left-hand dagger. I had wounded an adversary in a duel, as they imagined by accident, but my stock as a duelist and Bladesman was nil. When I ran across other people I knew they were universally patronizing, or supercilious, or downright rude. I ignored them all. I was after just one man — and, of course, you who have listened to this story of mine will know just who that one man was:
Leotes ti Ponthieu.
The aristocrats of Ruathytu had taken up the rapier and in their fumbling ways they wished to learn the tricks of fighting with the Jiktar and the Hikdar, and so they imported sword-masters, mainly from Zenicce. This Leotes, as I knew, was a very great swordsman indeed, a true Bladesman, one who had earned his living as a bravo-fighter in Zenicce, and was now coining the money teaching the young bloods here in Ruathytu.