The Undesired Princess (5 page)

5

At 6:00 a.m. by Hobart’s watch, his bedroom door flew open; the business end of a trumpet was thrust into the room and began a maddening
tah-taa-teh-tah-taa-teh-tah-taa-teh.
The impact of the sound almost made Hobart bounce out of bed with shock. When his racing heart slowed and his vision cleared enough to become aware of surroundings, he shouted: “Stop that racket!”

The racket stopped and the trumpeter’s face, red with blowing, appeared. “Your Dignity—”

“Get out!” yelled Hobart, reaching for a shoe to throw.

“The hunt, Your Dignity!”

“Oh,” yawned Hobart. “Excuse me.”

A phalanx of servants trooped in with breakfast. He was rushed through the meal, shaved, and dressed before he knew it, though he tried fuzzily to do as much for himself as possible.

The hunting party congregated at the mammoth main entrance to the palace. Hobart was just as glad to see that the sinister chancellor was not among the gaudy crowd of Logaians, though the burly black-bearded General Valangas was. The king slapped Hobart’s back, gripped his arm, and hauled him about introducing him to Counts and Sirs and Esquires whose names Hobart promptly forgot. A man on a horse trotted around from one side—Psambides, the Master of the Horse, the king explained—and after him came a swarm of grooms afoot towing horses. The king grinned fondly at his prospective son-in-law, and said: “I ordered Xenthops specially for you, son.”

“Who, your Altitude?”

“Call me Dad. Xenthops is my fierce barbarian stallion. It takes a real hero to ride him at all. Heh, heh.”

Hobart opened his mouth to protest that he was at best a mediocre rider, but as he did so he noted that all the Logaian gentlemen had swung into their saddles. There was one horse left, a large black creature with staring eyes. It would cause a lot of fuss to make a change now. Anyway, he’d be damned if he’d let a mere horse . . .

As he walked up to Xenthops, the horse bared a set of large white incisors and extended them tentatively toward him. Hobart reached out and cuffed the stallion’s muzzle, saying: “Behave yourself!” Xenthop’s eyes opened still wider as he jerked his head back and shifted his feet angrily. Hobart mounted without delay and took as firm a knee-grip as his unhardened thigh-muscles would allow. Xenthops fidgeted but did nothing otherwise untoward. Hobart reasoned that he could get away with it as long as he kept an attitude of confident superiority; but if he once showed hesitation or timidity, Xenthops would feel the difference, buck him off, and probably step on him.

The king’s mount now appeared: a spotted camel-like beast similar to the one Hobart had seen the day before in the streets of Oroloia. To Hobart’s question, Sir Somebody explained: “The king’s cameleopard.” Hobart had always thought a cameleopard was a giraffe; everything was so remorselessly literal in this world . . .

And more servants appeared carrying lances and muskets, which they handed out to the huntsmen. Hobart, given his choice, took a gun and the power horn and bullet bag that went with it.

They were all clattering out of the palace lot when a groaning made Hobart turn in his saddle to look back. Bringing up the tail of the procession was a wheeled, horse-drawn cannon manned by a squad of kilted soldiers commanded by General Valangas. Evidently the behemoth was no chipmunk.

Hobart would have liked to ask questions, but talking while trotting is not the easiest combination. Besides, he had to keep his eye peeled for chances to escape, and keep this fiery nag under both physical and psychological control.

After an hour’s riding, the agricultural checkerboard gave way with the usual abruptness to a rolling, roadless savannah. After another hour Psambides halted the crowd with upraised arm and began assigning them missions, as if this were a full-fledged military operation. Hobart found himself assigned to a squad of four who were to reconnoiter. The horses had to be kicked along a bit, as they wanted to crop the long swishing grass. Presently the troop halved. Hobart’s companion, a lean young Logaian named Sphindex, informed him: “We’re to scout along the bed of the Keio, and come back here to rendezvous in an hour.”

“Is that a river?” asked Hobart innocently.

“Of course.”

“What’s a behemoth like?”

Sphindex stared. “Mean to say you’ve never hunted one?”

“Right.”

“What have you hunted then?”

“Nothing, except a few targets.”

“But—but my dear Prince, how do you
exist?”

“I manage.” The subject of hunting did not seem promising. “Do you know an ascetic named Hoimon?”

Up went Sphindex’s brows. “Me know an ascetic? Great Nois no! They don’t hunt.”

Hobart persisted: “Know anything about the cavepeople?”

“Fellas who live in the Conical Mountains, that’s all. Never seen one; Gordius won’t let us hunt them. Though I don’t know why; they’re not really human. Look, there’s the Keio ahead.”

He pointed with his lance toward a dark streak on the landscape. When they had topped a few more rises they overlooked the nearly dry bed of a small river, bordered by clumps of trees and brush.

Sphindex at once exhibited signs of excitement; he spurred his horse down the slope and ducked through the screen of blue vegetation for a closer look at the stream bed. Hobart, following at a more cautious pace, met him dashing back. “Come on!” cried the hunting enthusiast.

Xenthops banked for a turn without a signal on Hobart’s part and galloped after Sphindex’s horse. Hobart called: “Find your behemoth?”

“No,” Sphindex flung back, “but there’s one drinking upstream.”

“How do you know?”

“Don’t be absurd; what other game can drink a river dry?”

Hobart saved his breath till they rejoined the main army, which at once set out at a gallop in a direction at a small angle to the one the scouts had taken. The cannon bounded thunderously in the rear behind its team, followed by the ammunition-caisson.

“Your Dignity!” It was the Master of the Horse, speaking to Hobart. “You’re to join the troop covering the artillery.”

“Yes, but what am I supposed to
do?”

“Oh, stay with the king and do what he does.” And off went Psambides to complete his arrangements.

The party deployed on a wide front, with the gun in the middle. They stopped on the last rise before reaching the Keio; somewhat farther upstream, Hobart judged. The gun and caisson were trotted up to the crest, and the teams unhitched and led back. Hobart got his first good look at the cannon. It had a cylindrical barrel with no taper; Logaia must still lack an Admiral Dahlgren. Instead of an elevation screw it had a crude arrangement with a shiftable crossbar like that of a morris chair. The gunners were ramming in the powder, followed by the ball. Valangas himself filled the touch hole.

Hobart could not see anything through the trees bordering the river, though the sun flashed on the metal of huntsmen closing in from above and below on the section of stream in front of the cannon.

“Son!” called King Gordius from the back of his cameleopard, “over this way! You’re in the line of fire!”

Hobart had no more than started to trot to the group of Logaians, sitting in their saddles with lances and muskets around the king, when his ear caught a sucking, burbling sound from the river. There were loud, plopping reports as of something huge being pulled out of the mud. A slate-black back appeared over the treetops.

A wave of retrograde motion ran through the huntsmen nearest to this portent. The trees whipped; one of them came down crashing, and the behemoth appeared.

Hobart’s first reaction was: is
that
all? The behemoth combined an elephantine body, twice the dimensions of an elephant, however, with a long thick tail and a head like that of a magnified hippopotamus. From its nose grew a pair of lateral horns. The beast, which might have been classed with the titanotheres, was big enough to be alarming but too plausible to be very interesting to Rollin Hobart
per se.

The first members of the party to attract the behemoth’s attention were a group of riders picking their way among the bushes on the hither side of the trees. It lumbered toward them. There was a sharp
pop-pop-pop
of muskets, and the riders whirled and galloped off to the right, upstream, leaving white puffs of smoke hanging in the still air behind them like clouds of ink from a group of retreating squids.

The behemoth crashed after them, apparently unhurt, exposing its right flank to the cannon as it did so. One of the riders fell off his horse, scrambled up, and disappeared into the vegetation. A yell from Valangas made Hobart swing his regard 180 degrees.

“Ho!” roared the general. “You there, Something, get out of the way!”

Hobart got, his horse bounding toward the group around the king. Then, as the gunners hauled the trail still further around, the king and his party streamed clockwise in a big circle around the gun to get out of the line of fire.

“Here it comes,” said a voice.

Hobart looked around to see the behemoth head-on, trotting along the ridge on which the gun stood. It moved with deceptive speed, and was growing with panicking rapidity; it looked fifty feet tall though it was less than half that.

The cannon banged somewhere on Hobart’s left, and the cloud of smoke leaped into the tail of his eye. He heard the smack of the ball hitting hide, and got a glimpse of a receding black dot against the sky: the shot, high, had glanced from the creature’s back. The behemoth kept right on looming.

Then the muskets around Hobart went off, one or two and then all the rest with a crash. Hobart had not had a chance to examine his gun closely. Now he learned to his dismay that it was some sort of matchlock, and that the little tarred string that was led from a spool on the left side of the stock to the swiveled clamp that substituted for a hammer was not even lit. Then the black-powder smoke stung his eyes shut, and he felt Xenthops under him begin to move, first with little nervous steps, then faster. He heard the earth-shaking thumps of the behemoth’s tread just about the time he could see again.

His first glance picked up gunners afoot and hunters on horseback, all making tracks, and then King Gordius of Logaia, down near the river, rolling over and over in the yellow grass like one who has fallen from an express train in motion. The riderless cameleopard was doing crazy buck-jumps; as Hobart watched, it disappeared into the trees. A back glance showed Hobart that the behemoth, too, was looking at the king; was in fact heading in that direction.

Hobart thought that if he could control Xenthops, he could get to his Altitude first. Of course if that fat old fool wanted to provoke a fifty-ton animal into squashing him like a strawberry, it served him right, and it was certainly none of his, Hobart’s business . . . but he had already headed the horse toward the king, who had ceased his dizzy roll and was getting up. Gordius put up a hand as Hobart approached; the engineer braced himself and reached out to haul the king up behind him. It did not work that way: Gordius got a good grip on Hobart’s wrist, heaved—and Hobart left the saddle and came down on top of the king.

The king yipped as the musket barrel got him over the ear; but with the behemoth towering over them they did not stop to feel for broken bones. They scrambled up and bolted into the timber like frantic rabbits. The monster crashed in after them. It blundered about for a bit, snapping tree trunks; then headed back for the deserted cannon.

Rollin Hobart and King Gordius, lying in a thicket, drew a pair of whews. The king said: “Can you see what he’s doing, son?”

Hobart raised his head to peer. “He’s trampling the gun.” A wooden crackle confirmed this statement, as the gun carriage was flattened. “Good lord, he’s eating the barrel!”

“Strange,” said the king; “I thought they ate nothing but grass. What now?”

“He seems to have some trouble swallowing it—it’s down now.” They heard a snort from the behemoth; it thumped off out of sight over the crest of the rise. There were a couple of distant musket shots and some thin shouts, and all was peaceful.

“We had better start looking for our mounts,” said the king, getting up with a grunt. As he did so, something went
whtht.

“What—” said the king.
Whuck!
An arrow stuck quivering in a tree trunk six inches from His Altitude’s nose.

Gordius turned to Hobart, mild blue eyes round. “Somebody,” he said in an awed voice, “is shooting at me!”

“Duck!” cried Hobart. The king did so, just as a third arrow whistled through the leaves.

“How do you work this thing?” said Hobart in a stage whisper, indicating the musket. “It is loaded?”

“It is unless you’ve fired it,” replied the king. “Let’s see—you have to light the match—this thing.” Hobart did so with his cigarette lighter. “And the powder was all shaken out of the firing pan when you fell off Xenthops. You put more in, like this, and smooth it down with your thumb. Then you close the pan cover, so. Blow your match now and then so it doesn’t go out. Ho, not so hard; you’ll blow a spark into the pan.”

Hobart extended the barrel cautiously toward the source point of the arrows, meantime moving his head to bring holes in the greenery—or rather bluery—into line. The gun weighed well over twenty pounds, but Hobart could manage it from his prone position. He whispered: “Got a sword or spear? I’m going to shoot and then go after the guy.”

“I lost them when I fell off,” said Gordius. “Use the musket butt.”

The firearm had a front sight—a knob—but no rear sight. Hobart lined the barrel up as best he could. His eye caught a suggestion of motion, and he pulled the trigger.

The gun roared; smoke blotted out the foliage; the butt came back like a mule’s kick; and Hobart’s right thumb, which he had injudiciously wrapped around the stock; hit his nose an agonizing blow. Though his vision was as full of stars as of woods, he jumped up and bounded over the bushes after his shot, reversing the musket as he did so.

But there was no lurking assassin for him to club. He hunted for some minutes without result; then he saw something dark lying on the blue moss, and picked it up. It was a wig of short black hair.