Chicks in Chainmail (15 page)

"I could teach you," Dennis volunteered.

"You would? Oh, that's…" I looked down at the little stack of green bills that Furo Fykrou had turned my challenge compensation zolkies into. Enough to keep Sally and me For two years… but not if I squandered it on wizardry teaching fees. "I can't afford it," I said sadly.

Dennis grinned. "Haven't you heard of free public education? I like teaching, Riva, You'd be a nice change of pace from those giggling little eighth-graders."

"You'd teach me for
nothing
?"

He took my hand for a moment. "I wouldn't exactly call
it
nothing," he said. He was blushing again. "Its a privilege to spend time with a lovely woman like you, Riva."

Really, the glasses weren't so bad, once you got used to them. On a man who'd hurled himself and his Al-Jibber between me and wizardry monsters, they looked pretty good As for Vordo… well, I'd learned

that
lesson. Mighty thews are nice to look at, but they're not so impressive when your last sight of them is the back view of the champion running away.

Jill Garner called me the day after the field trip. Fortunately I was still on Paper-Pushers, studying
Make Friends with Mr. Euclid
, so I didn't have to pay Furo Fykrou for Call Trans-Forwarding.

"What's this I hear about you taking the lads to Fiesta Texas instead of to work?" she demanded.

"I didn't take them to a theme park," I said. "I took them to my workplace."

"Well, one parent said it sounded like a science fiction convention to him. Except those are mostly on weekends. And it couldn't have been the Renaissance Faire, because that isn't until October. Riva, you were supposed to show them what the real world of work is like, not take them to a theme park and play games about purple monsters and wizards!"

"Believe me," I said, "they weren't games."

"Well, I want you to know that Vera Boatright is very upset about the whole thing."

"That's too bad," I said. "Sorry, but I have to go now. I'm working." Dennis was coming over at four o'clock to go over the first chapter of the geometry book with me, and I wanted to go through the problem sets before he got here.

A couple of years of Jomtrie and Al-Jibber and K'al-Kul, and I might even be able to take Furo Fykrou up on his offer of an apprenticeship. That is, if I go back to Dazau at all. Paper-Pushers Planet has its attractions.

Like I said, mighty thews aren't everything.

There are all sorts of armor… and if you don't believe me. there is a lovely museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, that has a few of these on display.

ARMOR/AMORE

David Vierling

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Sighing, Edaina twined her slender arms around Cromag's sinewy neck. The sun-bronzed warrior caught her in his massive, scarred arms and lifted the lush Princess easily, carrying her over the variously dismembered bodies of the twenty-seven temple guardsmen. Cromag's brown
eyes
smoldered as he noticed how the torn silk of the sacrificial robe showed more of her voluptuous figure than it concealed.

Kicking open the door at the end of the hallway, Cromag strode across the courtyard of the mountain-top temple to his horse, then tossed the raven-haired maiden unceremoniously across the saddlebow. Into his saddlebags he dropped the bag of gems he had looted from a secret niche behind the altar. Grinning, he prepared to swing his massive frame astride the horse and ride off into the dawn.

"Hold it!" barked Edaina, sliding down from the horse. "If you think you can just have your little fling, then conveniently dump me, you can forget it."

"Huh?" replied Cromag the Barbarian, dumbfounded.

"Girls talk—I know how it is with you macho barbarian types," said Edaina. "You ride off with the grateful, eager girl at the end of the adventure, but she always conveniently vanishes before the next one, left behind, no doubt, to explain to her family about the horned-helmeted baby she's carrying.

"Girls today want
relationships
," continued the Princess. "Commitment. Something lasting. We want to be wooed. You know, flowers, romance, that sort of thing. Dinner and drinks would be a good start."

Born in the midst of a mighty battle (well, really a cattle raid by a neighboring tribe), the first sounds Cromag ever heard were those of warfare: the ring of sword on shield boss, the crunch of axes splitting horned helmets, the bleating of captured sheep. He'd never heard much about relationships. "Ale and a joint of beef?" Cromag ventured hopefully.

Edaina snorted, wrinkling her pert nose. "Hardly. Someplace nice, with real atmosphere, like that new Kleshite place on the Street of the Tinkers."

"All right," agreed the Barbarian, grateful that a decision bad been made. lifting Edaina, he once more threw her across the saddle.

"No, no, NO!" she shouted as she. slipped again to the ground. "Style, that's your problem. You've got tons of charisma, but no
style
. At least Gag-Anun had style, in an evil sort of way.
He
wouldn't have thrown me across his saddlebow."

"He was sacrificing you to the demon snake-god Dadoo-Ronron!"

"I didn't say he was perfect, or even that I'd go out with him, just that he had
style
." Edaina shot back defensively.

"His style is kind of flat since I threw him off the parapet," said Cromag smugly.

"Yeah," agreed the Princess, a little too wistfully for Cromag's liking.

Cromag reversed the subject again. "Maybe you're right. Perhaps I
should
settle down."

"Go on, I'm intrigued."

"I'll make you my mate. You shall bear and raise strong sons for me in the wilds of the dusty, frozen North-East, and when they're old enough, the boys can join me on adventures…"

"Hold your iron-thewed horses—after I do all the work of carrying and bearing the children,
I'm
the one who'll need to go adventuring—unwind, lose weight—you know, fight postpartum depression." Cromag, who certainly did
not
know, nodded sagely.

He mulled it over for a moment. "This is getting too complicated for me," he said, leaping into the saddle. Edaina ducked under the stallion, jerked loose the saddle girth, and tipped Cromag sideways off the horse.

Before the Barbarian could recover, Edaina darted in cat-quick and snatched one of the half-dozen knives at his belt. "If you think you're getting out of this
that
easily, you're out of your sun-bronzed mind," she said, brandishing the poniard.

Rising, Cromag drew his sword. Edaina laughed. "You're bluffing, toots. Everybody knows your 'Barbarian Code' won't let you fight a woman."

Cromag scrunched up his almost nonexistent forehead, so that his single eyebrow briefly met his square-cut, black bangs. Then he brightened. "Wrong. The Barbarian Code says it's all right to fight a woman if I disarm her without hurting her. Then she always swoons into my arms, making my corded muscles stand out in stark relief." He stepped forward, swinging.

The longer reach and greater weight of Cromag's sword soon drove the Princess back through the door they had exited a moment earlier. A mighty blow from Cromag's sword knocked' the dagger from her numbed fingers. Raising the back of one hand to her forehead, eyes rolling upward, Edaina began to pitch forward toward the already-flexing arms of the eager victor. As soon as Cromag's sword clattered to the ground, she straightened and punched him with both small fists simultaneously, one to his bull-like Adam's apple, the other to the nerve cluster just above his xiphoid process. Cromag hit the floor like a ton of sun-bronzed bricks.

As she tossed Cromag's sword out a window overlooking a 400-foot precipice, Edaina commented, "All members of the royal family of Hyccupia-Zambonee are trained in the ancient art of Trackshu-Jitsu." Cromag heaved himself to his feet and lurcned toward her. "The first lesson of Trackshu-Jitsu is: 'Scared as Shit' runs faster than 'Madder than Hell,'" she finished, sprinting nimbly down the corridor, vaulting over slain guards. Over her shoulder she called, "That sword's pretty big—are you compensating for something?"

With an inarticulate roar he followed her fleeing form, thoughts of riding off without her forgotten. Rounding a corner, Cromag saw the Princess duck into the temple's library. The Barbarian stopped just inside the door, staring at the shelves packed with dusty books and ancient scrolls of arcane and evil knowledge.

He never saw what hit him: the largest, heaviest volume in the temple's collection, the pop-up, action
Kama Sutra
. The embossed leather cover left position LXIX imprinted on his cheek. Dropping the tome on Cromag's
foot
, Edaina said, "I know that's the closest you've ever been to a book, so I hope you learned something. At least it made an impression."

Before he could grab her, she was gone again, racing down a hallway and into the temple's kitchen. This time, Cromag came through the doorway more cautiously; hence the cast-iron frying pan caught him only a glancing blow before he tore it from Edaina's grasp and hurled it across the room- Cromag raised his fist.

Again Edaina laughed. "You won't hit me—your Barbarian Code won't permit it!"

It was Cromag's turn to laugh. "Hie Barbarian Code's very clear: I can cold-cock a woman 'for her own good,' usually to keep her out of danger. For you I'll make an exception." Then he unloaded a haymaker that would nave smashed her like a bug on a chariot's windscreen, if it had connected.

Ducking Cromag's ham-fisted swing, Edaina grabbed a cup of pepper from a table and hurled it in his face. As he clawed at his eyes, she kicked his feet from under him, dropping him flat onto his back.

Edaina knelt between his legs, yanking another knife from his belt. Eyes still tightly shut, Cromag felt a tickling sensation he identified as a knife point
there
. Sighing heavily, he said, "You win. I will marry you. This I swear by Chrome, my patron god who never listens to humans' prayers anyway." The dagger was tossed aside and Cromag rose to his knees. "Now you will reward me with your virtue." He pulled aside the tattered remains of her sacrificial robe, then snatched back his hands as if he'd been burned. "What sort of armor is this?" he cried, staring aghast.

"My, but you
are
provincial. It's called a 'chastity belt,' and it prevents…"

"I CAN SEE WHAT IT PREVENTS! But I can also see that I'll tear it off with my teeth if that's what it takes to…"

Edaina smiled, patting the Barbarian's head. "That's sweet, darling, but the belt's magical, and the only key is at my family's castle. I'll send a carrier pigeon asking my mom to bring the key when she comes to live with us."

"Your mother? live with us?" gasped Cromag. "But my reward… ?"

"It'll take a week for mom to get here. Think of it as foreplay."

"Foreplay?"

"A man with your looks and reputation doesn't know about foreplay?"

Cromag shrugged as she helped him to his feet. "Women usually just swoon into my heavily-muscled arms. I thought
that
was foreplay. Lots of swooning."

A thought struck him. "How do you know so much? You're supposed to be a virgin."

Gazing at his broad shoulders, deep chest, lean waist, sinewy arms, long legs, wide hands, powerful fingers, and adamantine fingernails, she breathed, "I am. But girls talk, and even virgins have ears… and imaginations."

Cromag nodded, pleased with the implications. "You are worth the wait. Never before have I met a woman who was my equal in battle."

"You still haven't met a woman who's your
equal
," Edaina corrected her fiancé.

Students of Chinese history will know I mean it when I say that something very like this really happened too. The rest of you: Enjoy it first and then… look it up!

THE STONE OF WAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE'S EGG

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

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If you ask me, a empire ought to act regal and not pretend to be his own jester. Jokes aren't proper or fitting for royalty—especially not when they're played on somebody smarter than the monarch.

And that Sun Zoo fellow, he was plenty smart. Never seen any smarter. It was because of him and his teachings that I was there to begin with—his last patron was a better pupil than my poor lady and with the help of Sun Zoo's teachings managed to conquer my people entirely, though we had Seen barons of the burren for some time.

Even I'd have to say we were always better at raw courage and combat than we were at cunning and treachery. Sun Zoo was the one who coined the phrase about all being fair in war—meaning he had no honor, which was practical of him, since honor is of very little use to the vanquished.

It's an out-and-out disability in a slave, which is why it's more a property of officers, who are ransom-able, than enlisted personnel, who are more likely to endure captivity of a more permanent nature, if they're not killed outright. Footsoldiers tend to be pragmatic, yours humbly, dishonorably, but viably included.

In some ways, harem life made a fine retirement for me. I was getting on in years for the rough stuff, toward the time when perhaps I ought to think about settling down and having what family it remained to me to have. Much past twenty-five and you start to lose your edge for battle.

I was lucky enough to be sold to the emperor himself, who was skeptical about the practice of keeping eunuchs to look after his ladies. And while it was true enough that the ladies had their jealousies and intrigues, I was used to being in an all-female outfit and catfights were nothing new to me. These women got to share one man among them, after all, whereas my comrades and I got none whatsoever until we were demobbed. The women among my people live and fight together in separate units from the men, you see, since we're bound to refrain from becoming mothers until we've ceased being warriors. Enemies have speculated that this practice is what made our warriors of both sexes so ferocious.

The emperor's newest concubine arrived the same day I did. We were both brought before the Tai-Tai, the number one wife. The concubine was a fourteen-year-old from the Caucasus, with delicate coloring, masses of hair, and a body of the pneumatic type common in the emperor's harem, by which I took it that Himself preferred it. I fit the type, as well, and had always required special adjustments in my armor to keep my bosom out of my bowstring.

"So," said Tai-Tai, "a barbarian child, a barbarian hag—no doubt you will be good company for each other. You, woman, have you a name?" she asked me.

"Madame, I do, madame." I pulled myself upright and at attention in more ways than one. You didn't want to be inattentive around this one. She had about her the look of a lazy leopardess with all the world as her prey. She was also the mother of the emperor's eldest daughter. So far he had no sons, but he hadn't been emperor very long.

"Well, then, what is it?" she asked.

"If it please you, madame, Boadecia."

"A stupid name, and ugly," she said, evidently never having heard of the queen for whom so many of my generation were named that we had to assign numbers and nicknames to keep ourselves straight. There was Big Boadecia and Blond Boadecia and Bloody Boadecia, who was our captain before her death. I myself was actually surnamed for those impediments to archery which had landed me my current position.

Tai-Tai seemed to be expecting an answer so I added, "As you say, madame." I tried to think of my captivity as just another change of command, you see, and her as just another officer.