Far inland, low rolling hills showed that purple-bruise color of distance, and on the sandy plains between only straggling trees grew. A party would have to push some way before they found a tree that would yield timber suitable for a mast. The made-masts of my own old Terrestrial navy were known here on the inner sea; but usually a single stout tree trunk was employed in swifters.
We had stationed a lookout and he bellowed down.
“Swifters! Green! Six of ’em!”
The curve of the bay where we had beached concealed us from seaward observation — an elementary precaution — and the lookout could see without being seen. The nearer headland under which we sheltered contained a mass of ruins, ancient stones, time worn and weathered, tumbled columns and arches, shattered walls. Up there I had a good view. There were six swifters, medium-sized vessels plowing in line ahead with their oars rising and falling in that remorseless beat. They pulled into the wind, long, low lean craft, evil and formidable. We waited carefully until they were past.
Rukker said, “I will stand guard on the camp and the ships.”
“Very well,” I said. “It will be a nice task to select the proper tree for your mast”
So it was decided. If those six Green swifters returned or if we were beset by unexpected foes, then Rukker and his men would defend the camp with ferocious efficiency. I took my sailors and a gang of slaves to drag the timbers, and set off inland.
We spent the rest of the day as the suns declined searching for the right tree, and when we found it and cut it down and dragged it back, two of the lesser moons sped past above in their crazy whirling orbits, and She of the Veils smiled down in fuzzy pink radiance. We had seen no signs of life apart from the spoor of mortils and the bones of their prey, and the high circling of warvols, the vulture-like winged scavengers waiting for the mortils to finish. Once upon a time — or, as Kregans say, under a certain moon — this land had been lush and fertile, filled with the busy agriculture and commerce of the People of the Sunset. Now they had gone, and the land gleamed sere and empty under the moons.
The moment we arrived back in camp we were greeted by news that filled me with amusement and filled Vax and the others with heated fury.
Old Tamil told us — a cunning rascal, quick and sly, who had appointed himself Palinter in
Crimson Magodont.
As our Palinter, our purser, he could be relied on to wangle extra supplies for us in his accustomed tortuous dealings with the common resources; in looking out for himself he looked out for us.
“That cramph of a Kataki!” spluttered Tamil, his off-center nose more than ever like a moon-bloom in the pink radiance of She of the Veils. “Took the treasure and sailed off!”
Howls of execration broke out at this. But then those howls changed to jeers of derision as we looked where Tamil pointed.
Less than an ulm offshore
Vengeance Mortil
lay becalmed in the water. She was down by the head. She stuck there, solid and unmoving, clearly held fast by fangs of rock piercing her bow.
“So the rast took our treasure and sailed off and ran himself aground!” bellowed Fazhan. He looked as offended as any of them there. They were running down to the shore and waving their arms and brandishing weapons. It was a fitting sight for a madness. It was, also, somewhat humorous — at least, it seemed funny to me at the time.
The treasure meant nothing, of course. It did mean something to these ragged rascals with me, and so that made it important to me because of them. But, all the same, the idea of a great and ferocious Kataki lord sweeping up all the treasure and loading it into his ship and sailing grandly off, only to get stuck on a rock, struck me as ludicrous and something to raise a guffaw.
The old devil had cut down his own mast, of course, to get us ashore in this lonely spot and send us sailormen off on a wild-goose chase. When he had run aground — what must his thoughts have been? He had been thrown by his own varter, as the Kregans say. Boats were ferrying his men back. There was a sublime amount of confusion and argument; but no one came to blows. The first flush of anger dissipated in the sense of the ridiculousness of the Katakis.
I said to Fazhan, “I will wager Rukker’s words will be: ‘I do not wish to discuss this’ or ‘I will not speak of this again.’”
“No bet,” said Fazhan, being a wise man.
Pur Naghan was highly incensed, although seeing the humor of the situation, for he was bitterly annoyed by the evident lack of honor in Rukker’s actions. Honor — aye, the Krozairs set great store by that ephemeral commodity.
Rukker stormed ashore in high dudgeon. At least, that seems to me an evocative way of describing his malevolent scowls, the way his tail flicked irritably this way and that, the dark glitter of wrath in his evil eyes. He was on the verge of a killing mad.
He said in his surly hoarse voice, “I shall not speak of this in the future.”
At this a howl went up. And, thankfully, among those howls sounded many a guffawing belly-laugh. I felt relief. I watched carefully. But I think the sheer ludicrousness of it all saved an eruption, for plenty of men there would have chopped Rukker given half the chance. But the heat evaporated from the moment. Wine went around. We ate at the camp fires. We were, after all, a bunch of daredevil Renders, comrades in arms, for the time being. Tricks like this must be expected in such company.
The Maiden with the Many Smiles lifted and flooded down her golden light and we sat and drank and some of us sang. On the morrow we would fashion a new mast for Rukker and so sail off with the breeze toward Zandikar. We sang “The Swifter with the Kink,” of course, and “The Chuktar with the Glass Eye,” for they are fine carefree songs full of opportunities to expand the lungs and bellow. The firelight leaped upon our faces, on gleaming eyes and teeth, on mouths open and lustily bawling, on long bronzed necks open to the air. The red southern shore is populated by apims almost exclusively, and these apims, I had noticed, were contemptuous and intolerant of diffs. But it takes all kinds to make a world. Here some of the Zairian apims found that for all the tricks of the Katakis the other diffs of our company were human men, after all, and not mere menagerie men.
A little Och sang “The Cup Song of the Och Kings,” sending the plaintive notes welling out into the light of the moons, a yearning song telling of great days and great deeds, filled with the throbbing resonances of nostalgia. Then, as seemed always to happen when an Och sang that song, the moment he finished he pitched forward on his nose, out to the wide.
We all roared and cheered. At the other fires others of the Renders caterwauled to the skies. A Gon leaped up, his skull shaved clean of all that white hair of which Gons are so ashamed, to their misfortune, and started in to sing a wild, skirling farrago, filled with spittings and abrupt, deep reverberations, of hints of horror, all accompanied by dramatic gestures evident of extreme terror. This was the song sometimes called “Of the Abominations of Oidrictzhn.”
[3]
A man — an apim, a Zairian — leaped clear across the fire, singeing the hairs on his legs, and screaming. He tackled the Gon with a full body-cracking charge, smacked him in the mouth, and so knocked him down and sat on his head.
“You get onker!” screamed the apim, one Fazmarl the Beak — for, in truth, his nose was of prodigious proportions. “You wish to destroy us all!”
We hauled him off and the Gon, Leganion, sat up, highly indignant. “It is a good song and will make your flesh creep.”
“Yes, you rast! Do you not know where we are?” Fazmarl the Beak swung his hand violently to point at the moonlit ruins crowning the headland, frowning down above us. “You prate that name — here! Onker!”
One or two other men challenged Fazmarl, and he spluttered out a long rigmarole of weird doings and nightly spells and sorcery, there in the ruins of the Sunset People. He would not bring himself to repeat the name. But he made it very clear that the ruins harbored some malefic being in whom he believed and yet whose existence he must deny in the pure light of Zair.
“Superstitious nonsense!”
“Fairy tales for numbskulls!”
Oh, yes, those fierce Renders caterwauled bravely enough as the pink and golden moonlight flooded down and we sang and drank around the camp fires. But I saw more than a few of them cast up a quick and surreptitious glance at the pale stone-glimmer of the ancient ruins.
In the very nature of these men, for there were no women with us, fights broke out. These must be settled according to whatever code of honor and conduct was acceptable to both parties. I have not mentioned the detailed protocols involved in challenges and combats of Kregen, outside of a few remarks on the obi of my Clansmen, and the formal dueling of Hamal. But now, and with horrific suddenness, the finicky demands of honor and the protocol of fighting became of supreme importance to me.
It began with Vax, who had sworn off the dopa, swearing away, as was his wont, about his cramph of a father. One of the Katakis, no doubt as bored by Vax’s obsession as the rest of us, bellowed some remark and tossed back his wine. This Kataki was Athgar, called the Neemu, and it was whispered he chafed under the yoke of Rukker’s authority. Vax stood up, limber and lithe, and I caught the flare of madness in his eyes.
“You said, Athgar?”
No one had heard what Athgar had spoken; the moment could have been allowed to lie, and so dwindle and die.
But Athgar, wiping a hand across his face, bellowed out a curse to Targ the Untouchable. His low-browed, narrow-eyed face, as malignant and devilish as are all Katakis’ faces, even the dark face of Rukker, bore down on the slim erect figure of Vax.
“If your father was the rast you claim him to be, then your mother must be a stupid and unholy bitch to have married him in the first place and so give birth to—”
That was as far as he got.
There was no heroic posturing from Vax. He did not bellow out; he did not request Athgar to repeat his words. My son Vax, who was Jaidur of Valka, Prince of Vallia, simply lashed out with his fist and knocked Athgar the Kataki, called the Neemu, head over heels into the fire.
When the uproar subsided and Athgar was held by Rukker’s Katakis, and Vax was held by Duhrra and Nath the Slinger, the ritual challenges and responses were gone through, the lines drawn and the demarcations between edge and point, between death and maiming, the rules and observances were finalized with all due solemnity. The rules of Hyr Jikordur would apply. I stood still and silent, watching, for the matter was passed from the hands of mortal men and lay now with the gods. Honor and passion ruled all. Words had been spoken. A blow had been struck. Now the answer, in the whims of the gods, must be found in steel and blood.
Moon-mist lay over the camp and the fires flared strangely.
In the sand the lines were drawn out.
Men ran from the other fires to form a great circle of intent staring faces. A Jikordur happened every now and then and gave fuel for gossip for sennights thereafter. The matter was grave and full of a prestigious death-wish, filled with blood and death.
Instinctively, in the very moment a challenge had become inevitable, I had stepped forward to take Athgar the Neemu on and so shield my son. But that was impossible. Ideals and honor, however misplaced and distorted, now dictated all actions.
This was to be a Hyr Jikordur. I made an effort. I said, loudly, “Let no life be taken. Let the result be adjudged in the first blow.”
Athgar sneered back his thin Kataki lips. “If it be first blood, Dak the Tenderhearted, then I will take the cramph’s head off.”
And my son said in his ferocious way, which a calmness made all the more vulnerable and bitter, “Let it be to the death, for, by Zim-Zair, I do not care.”
At that Krozair oath all my defenses went down. I must stand and watch my son fight a predatory member of a feral and cruel race, vicious, fully armed and accoutered, equipped with a deadly bladed tail. I must stand and watch. To do anything else would impugn the strict codes of conduct, bring the Jikordur into disrepute, and as well as insuring my own death, bring my son humiliation and disgrace.
The Jikordur meant nothing to me. My own death little more. And I would so contrive my interference that Vax was spared that humiliation. . .
Rukker checked his man. He favored me with a slow glance that I felt meant more than he cared to say. I stood before Vax. I drew the great Krozair longsword. I tendered it hilt first. Vax looked up, and something got through to him, for his lips compressed. Then he smiled.
“I thank you, Dak.”
A sword-blade struck a helmet like a gong. The combat began.
Blood in the Hyr Jikordur
Pachaks have been blessed by nature — or the dark manipulations of genetic science — with quick and lethal tail hands. Katakis must strap their steel to their whip-tails. I am partial to Pachaks, as employed mercenaries, as friends. In long talks with them around the camp fires on the eve of battles I have learned much of the art of tail-fighting. There are tricks. As the gong note clanged with grim promise from the sword-struck helmet, I leaned down to Vax and said, “His tail may be numbed by—”
“I know,” said my son.
They always seem to know, these cocky youngsters. I stepped back. I did not waver from my resolution to court personal dishonor and destruction if they were necessary to save my son. The chances were he would know. Planath Pe-Na, my standard-bearer who carried Old Superb into action, must have known Vax as the lad grew up into manhood. Along with all my friends of Esser Rarioch — Balass the Hawk, Naghan the Gnat, Oby, Melow the Supple, the Djangs who were a regular part of the people there; all must have contributed their knowledge toward the education of Vax no less than they had to Drak and Segnik — no, I must call him Zeg now. And, of course, there were Seg and Inch and Turko the Shield. If Vax had taken in what they had to tell him then the combined knowledge should make him a formidable fighter — and he was, indeed, as I had seen, a bonny lad with a sword.