The Tritonian Ring and Other Pasudian Tales (24 page)

             
After a few more lashes
came
a pause. A voice said: "The wretch has swooned. What now, sir?"

             
"Wake him up," said the king.

             
The rope that held Vakar's wrists was let run so that he fell at full length on the blood-spattered deck. He continued to play dead, even when a heavy boot slammed into his ribs and when a gout of cold water splashed over his head.

             
The queen said: "Let us waste no more time on him; I am hungry. Sacrifice him now."

             
"Very well,"
came
the voice of the king. "Drag him over to the altar. You shall do the honors, Spaxas."

             
Vakar felt his wrists being untied. He was dragged across the deck to the small altar on which the lamb had been sacrificed for the wedding. Watching through slitted lids, Vakar saw the minister draw the broad knife and try the edge with his thumb, while the king stood nearby, leaning back against the rail.

             
Vakar relaxed as completely as possible, so that the Tritons had more trouble dragging him than they otherwise would have. When they got him to the altar they asked another of their number to help them hoist him across it, for by Tritonian
standards Vakar was
a big man.

             
Then came the moment when the grips on his arms were relaxed while the Tritons braced their feet and shifted their hands to lift him. In that second, Vakar came to life with the suddenness of a levinbolt.

             
With
a
mighty twist and jerk he broke the loose grips upon his arms, got his feet under him, and dealt the nearest Triton
a
punch in the belly that doubled the man up in a spasm of gasps and coughs. There was a shout from those watching:

             
"Watch out!
"

             
"
Seize him!
"

             
"
He is—"

             
Hands reached out from all sides, but before they could fasten on to his naked hide, slippery with sweat and blood, Vakar burst through them. He brushed past Sphaxas, standing open-mouthed with the sacrificial knife in his hand, and as he passed dealt the minister a buffet below the ear that stretched his length upon the deck.

             
Now one man stood between Vakar and the rail: King Xirnenon, three paces away. Vakar strained forward, leaning as if he were starting a hundred-yard sprint, and smote the back with the balls of his feet while the hands of the closing Tritons snatched at his bloody back. At the first break Xirnenon had reached for the silver-shafted palstave thrust through his girdle, and as Vakar bounded forward the bronze hatchet-head whipped up and back for a skull-shattering blow.

             
Vakar left the deck in a diving leap and, as the palstave started down, struck the upper part of the king's body head-first with outstretched arms. The stubble on the king's chin rasped his ear as he caught the king around the neck, and his momentum bore the king back against the crotch-high rail. Down and back went the king's torso and up flew his feet. In deadly embrace the two men tumbled over the rail into the dark water below.

             
The Lorskan let go as soon as they struck the water. With his eyes open under water he saw the cloud of bubbles that represented King Ximenon, the weedy bottom of the queen's ship
beyond, and the king's tomahawk gyrating down into the blackness beneath. As his head broke the water he was aware of a strangled shout from the floundering king through the bedlam that had broken out upon the deck a few feet over his head.

             
Vakar took a deep breath, dove, and seized a sandalled foot that lashed out from the swirl of robes. He pulled it downward. The king came with it, eyes popping and mouth emitting bubbles. Vakar remembered that Tritons could not swim. Even if Ximenon were an exception, the fact that he was fully clothed and weighted with gold and jewels, while Vakar was nude, gave the latter an advantage. As the king started to rise towards the surface, arms and legs jerking wildly, Vakar pulled him under again.

             
Then Vakar felt a movement of the water behind him: the fluid pushed sharply at him as if displaced by the passage of a large body. A glance over his shoulder saw an immense crocodile, a forty-footer, bearing down upon them from the murk.

             
Vakar let go the king to use his arms for swimming just as the crocodile arrived with a tigerish rush. The great jaws gaped and clomped on the still struggling king. A hide of horny leather brushed past Vakar, tumbling him over in the water and lacerating him with its projections. He had a brief impression of the great serrated tail undulating lazily as it propelled the monster past him.

             
Vakar came to the surface again. As he shook the water out of his eyes and ears he perceived that he was now somewhat further from the galley, on which people rushed about madly, some yelling for bows, some for spears, and some for oars.

             
A bowshot away
lay
the king's galley. Vakar struck out for it, simultaneously trying to think up some specious story.

             
He swam as he had never swum before, ears straining to hear the first splash of the oars of the queen's galley behind him. He was over halfway to the king's ship when he heard it. At the same time an arrow plunked into the water nearby.

             
He plowed on. Another arrow came closer. The king's ship was near now; a row of expectant faces
Lined
the rail. Someone called:

             
"What in Drax's name goes on over there?"

             
"A rope!" yelled Vakar.

             
The oars of the king's ship moved too, gently so as not to run Vakar down. A rope slapped across his tortured back. He grabbed it but was too exhausted to climb. At last they dropped a bight for him to wriggle into and hauled him up. He gasped:

             
"They slew the king! It was all a plot to get him into their hands. They cut the throats of the king and Sphaxas and all the other Tritons, and would have cut mine had I not dived over the side."

             
Exclamations of horror and amazement burst from the Tritons crowing round. An officer of the galley said:

             
"How do we know you are not lying?"

             
"Look at my back! Does that look like a fake?"

             
The captain of the ga
ll
ey roared: "I knew there was some such trick in the offing! Bend the oars; we will sink them before they slip away in the darkness! Stroke!
Stroke!"

             
The galley moved with increasing speed in a path that curved towards the other ship. As the king's barge bore down, the oars of the queen's ship, which had been idle for some minutes, began to move again. But the king's ship was going too fast for the other to dodge. As the former neared its target, a chorus of screams burst from the queen's barge. In the dusk Vakar could see the Amazons running about, waving arms, and shrieking at the approaching ship.
Crash!

             
The ram of the king's ship crunched through the side of the other as if it had been papyrus. With a terrible clatter and roar of breaking timbers and a thin screaming of women, the queen's barge broke up into a floating tangle of boards, ropes, oars, gilded ornaments, bright hangings, and thrashing human limbs. The king's ship plowed through the mass and out the other side, ropes trailing from her ram.

             
As the king's galley turned and headed back towards
Menê,
Vakar caught sight of a couple of moving objects on the dark surface of Lake Tritonis: crocodiles swimming towards the wreck. He felt a little badly about having caused the deaths of all those Amazons of lesser degree, who might not have had anything to do with the attempt to murder him. Vakar disliked killing
women on grounds of waste not, want not
. But then, he consoled himself, they were probably all as perfidious as their queen. And what else could he have done?

             
Though his experience had been exhausting, Vakar Zhu turned his mind immediately to his next step. The Tritonian Ring was gone for good in the belly of a crocodile, but the thing from which it had been cut, the "fallen star" (whatever that was) lay to the south in the realm of Belem. And if one ring had been made from it, another could be.

             
He must persuade the Tritons to give him back his property and be on his way—quickly, before somebody suggested that the death of King Ximenon had been his fault and they dealt with him accordingly.

-

             
Drax said: "The wretch has departed from amongst the Tritonians and is now riding south, with his manservant, towards Belem. While I cannot foresee events to happen in the neighborhood of Niowat, for reasons you know, I fear that his journey concerns the Tahakh."

             
The gods all shuddered. Entigta gurgled: "Somebody must warn King Awoqqas and set him against this man, or it will be too late." The squid-god spoke to Immut, the god of death of Belem. "Cousin, will you see to the matter?"

             
Drax glared round the circle and hissed: "I think there has been too much warning—to the wrong party." He looked hard at the Pusadian gods. "Are you sure none of you has been dropping a quiet word here and there to forewarn this Vakar of the doom intended for him?"

             
Lyr and Okma and the rest looked innocent, and Vakar Lorska cantered across the parklands south of Lake Tritonis.

-

             
They crossed wide grassy plains seeing immense herds of gazelles, antelopes, buffalo, ostriches, zebras, elephants, and other game. They skirted Lake Tashorin where crocodiles lay in wait in the shallows and herds of hippopotami bellowed and splashed, and finally rode up the dark defiles that led into the rocky range of Belem.

             
For several days after the Tritons had released him, Vakar had been in his gloomiest mood, seldom speaking save to snarl at Fual, and brooding on his own insufficiencies. Besides the tenderness of his healing back there was the feeling of defilement and degradation at having been flogged
like
a mere slave.

             
Then as the scenery became more somber Vakar cheered up. He said: "We were lucky to get away from that treacherous crew so easily. You know, Fual, it occurs to me that it must hurt you to be flogged just as much as it does me!"

             
"And why shouldn't it, my lord?"

             
"No reason; I've simply never considered the matter. You must hate me for the times I've beaten you. Do you? Be honest."

             
"No-no, sir.
Save when you lose your lordly temper you're not a hard master to serve. Most slaves get far more beatings than I."

             
"Well, I apologize for any beatings I've given you in excess of your deserts." Then Vakar amused himself by singing an old Lorskan lay,
The Death of Zormi:

             
"Heaped up in hills
             
             
lay Bruthonian bodies

             
When a hailstorm of hits
             
felled the far-famed
one
...

There goes another!"

             
He pointed to where a goatherd bounded barefoot from rock to rock, his vermilion-dyed goatskin cloak flapping, until he disappeared. "Why should they all run from us as from a pair of fiends? We're not such fearsome fellows."